Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

This is What We Need

One day in the early 60's Bob Dylan was walking down a street in New York City. He noticed a stray piece of paper, just a bit of litter, being blown along by the wind. He saw in it a parable of truth being crumpled up and thrown away as trash here in this world. He lamented it in a song called "Blowin' in the Wind."

2000 years ago a man named Paul wrote a letter in runny ink on flimsy sheets of papyrus and sent it to some people in Rome, most of whom he didn't even know. It did not end up “blowin' in the wind.” It started changing people. It's been changing people ever since. In A.D. 386 a man named Augustine was struggling with slavery to lust. But God spoke to Augustine one day through Romans. And Augustine got up out of the gutter a changed man. Around the year 1515 Martin Luther was struggling with hatred toward God, because it seemed impossible to satisfy God. But God spoke to him through the book of Romans about grace. Luther later said it was like walking through a doorway into paradise. In 1738 John Wesley was trying hard to make the grade with God. He formed the Holy Club at Oxford for spiritual self-improvement. But he was failing, and he knew it. Then God spoke to him one evening in a small group Bible study as someone was reading out loud Luther's commentary on Romans, and Wesley changed. The man who'd tried to work for God's approval learned how to work with God's approval. It sent him on a journey for Christ, including 250,000 miles on horseback, 42,000 sermons preached and 50 books written.

Whenever the Book of Romans is proclaimed from the pulpit, studied and revered by God’s people, God brings reformation. Why is it that? One reason stands above all others. The book of Romans speaks with clarity and power about the gospel. This is what we need. We need reformation. We need the power of the gospel to continually transform us.

Here is my challenge. Let's be new Christians again. Let's start over. Let's re-learn the gospel from scratch. Every generation must rediscover the gospel afresh for themselves. Let's do that. Let's see God in a new way. Let's be revived in our hearts. Let's change. If we aren't changing, what's the point? Let's build a gospel-centered church where anyone can change. This is why we need to go through the book of Romans together. No book of the Bible has effected more life-change than this book.

God wants to show us more of himself than we've ever seen before. He wants to take us further with him than we've ever gone before. The message of Romans is basically simple. "You're worse than you think, God is better than you think, and that discovery will change you in a wonderful way."