'I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is
the power of God unto salvation to every one that
believeth.'--ROMANS i. 16.
To preach the Gospel in Rome had long been the goal of Paul's hopes.
He wished to do in the centre of power what he had done in Athens,
the home of wisdom; and with superb confidence, not in himself, but
in his message, to try conclusions with the strongest thing in the
world. He knew its power well, and was not appalled. The danger was
an attraction to his chivalrous spirit. He believed in flying at
the head when you are fighting with a serpent, and he knew that
influence exerted in Rome would thrill through the Empire. If we
would understand the magnificent audacity of these words of my text
we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman. Here was a
poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his countrymen down
in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some fantastic nonsense
about a young visionary whom the procurator of Syria had very wisely
put an end to a while ago in order to quiet down the turbulent
province; and he was going into Rome with the notion that his word
would shake the throne of the Cæsars. What proud contempt would have
curled their lips if they had been told that the travel-stained
prisoner, trudging wearily up the Appian Way, had the mightiest thing
in the world entrusted to his care! Romans did not believe much in
ideas. Their notion of power was sharp swords and iron yokes on the
necks of subject peoples. But the history of Christianity, whatever
else it has been, has been the history of the supremacy and the
revolutionary force of ideas. Thought is mightier than all visible
forces. Thought dissolves and reconstructs. Empires and institutions
melt before it like the carbon rods in an electric lamp; and the
little hillock of Calvary is higher than the Palatine with its regal
homes and the Capitoline with its temples: 'I am not ashamed of the
Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.'
Now, dear friends, I have ventured to take these great words for my
text, though I know, better than any of you can tell me, how sure my
treatment of them is to enfeeble rather than enforce them, because I,
for my poor part, feel that there are few things which we, all of us,
people and ministers, need more than to catch some of the infection
of this courageous confidence, and to be fired with some spark of
Paul's enthusiasm for, and glorying in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I ask you, then, to consider three things: (1) what Paul thought was
the Gospel? (2) what Paul thought the Gospel was? and (3) what he
felt about the Gospel?