Matt Chandler - Gospel Power

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those; that will be our primary passage. Albeit, I’ve got English—that’s the extent of my skills, uh, and so I’ll just be reading phrase by phrase through it. I really do want to walk through this with you in a fairly simple way. I think I’ll be up here maybe 20 minutes, maybe 25; don’t hold me to it; I could get excited; that happens sometimes. But, um, I had the opportunity this week—I was in Naples, Florida, from Tuesday to Thursday. On, um, Wednesday night at the event I was at, the Holy Spirit kind of fell on this ballroom where there were about 250 or 300 people, and man, just a giant group of grown men gave their lives to Jesus. They found an inflatable pool and filled it with water, and then these giant men were getting baptized—water was sloshing all over this ballroom, and I just felt like I was caught up in something. I was just so blown away and grateful, uh, to Jesus. Then I got on a plane and came home Thursday afternoon, had dinner with the family, went to volleyball practice, and then I got up very early Friday morning and flew to Nashville, where Think, which is an organization based out of Nashville, was having what they call a NextGen Leader Summit. I got to stand in front of a thousand NextGen leaders—a gaggle of Gen Z and Alpha, all leaders in industry. It wasn’t just a church thing; I mean, there were designers for Nike there, people in the arts, DJs, and all sorts of influencers, which I don’t fully understand, but it was just a thousand Gen Z and Alphas and some Millennials, all on fire for Jesus and the kingdom of God. The church just keeps moving on in each generation. There’s panic, and in each generation, the church keeps moving forward. So I flew home Friday night, got here, hung out with the family, came up for the 4:00 service here yesterday, and at 4 yesterday—unplanned by us—there were four languages spoken from this stage; only two of them we had planned. There were baptisms last night that we had planned in two different languages. One was signed; a woman in our deaf community had come to faith, and so she signed, and we got to cheer like this, right? Because she wouldn’t be able to hear us lose our minds like we normally do, so we learned that this is how you cheer—not Spirit sprinkles; that’s something different. The hands go like this, not like this, and we got to cheer. Then, uh, a man baptized his grown daughter, and they were from South Africa, and he spoke Afrikaans. It was just another one of those nights where we were like, «We’re commissioning to the ends of the Earth. We’re planting churches; the gospel’s moving forward, and we’re caught up in this thing that isn’t boring, and it’s not moralistic. It’s the power of God.» I’m preaching to end our gospel series on this passage, which shows how the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. It struck me last night, then again in the, I mean, we baptized several people in the, and then it overflowed in the space between that service and this service—somebody who came to faith in the last service got baptized. It’s just like we’re in this thing that doesn’t feel aspirational to me, even as we have so far to go, and so I’ve just found my heart really glad to be with you in this moment and in this place, and so eager for what God has next for us. But with that said, let’s look at this passage in Romans 1; this is Pauline theology when it comes to the gospel. What’s interesting to note is that the Bible actually says that Paul is hard to understand. I don’t know if you know that or not, but Peter, writing to the church, says they twist the scriptures that Paul writes because he can kind of be hard to understand. Even the Bible says sometimes Paul is tough to get a mind around. I just always found that to be humorous, but this is pretty straightforward; this is not confusing at all. So I just want to, like I said, in 20 minutes of this, let’s start in verse 16: «For I am not ashamed of the gospel, ” and I just want to stop there. If you’re like, „Oh, you’re going longer than 20, ” trust me, this is quick. If anyone should be embarrassed—if anyone had the right to be a little ashamed of the gospel—it might have been the Apostle Paul. The gospel did not bring him comfort, and it certainly did not bring him a life of ease. There was no life of comfort, no life of ease for the Apostle Paul. He had been imprisoned in Philippi, chased out of Thessalonica, smuggled out of another city, beaten, thrown in prison—ultimately murdered. At every point, he was slandered, pestered, pursued, torn down, and robbed, and at one time took such a beating that they thought he was dead and left him. And he got back; like, he woke back up from being knocked down.