Understanding God’s Wrath and Grace: A Deep Dive into Romans 1

Christopher Ash explores the themes of God’s righteousness and human sinfulness as outlined in the first chapter of Romans. He emphasizes the gospel’s power to save and the importance of faith. Ash also discusses the consequences of humanity’s rejection of God, leading to moral and spiritual decay, and underscores the need for repentance and belief in the gospel.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

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Thank you very much. Thank you for your welcome. Thank you for coming. There’s a handout in two sheets, two tiny little sheets. You need sharp eyes. The original idea was to have the handout a bit bigger than that, but on one of the sheets I’ve printed the passage. I thought it would be helpful for us all to have the same translation. It’s a very literal translation that I’ve made for you there on one sheet. And on the other sheet I’ve put the headings.

I have to say that you’ve given me a very serious and sobering passage. Last time I came, you gave me a very difficult passage in Hebrews chapter 5 and 6, and I thought when I got the letter, I thought that’s a tough passage. This time you’ve given me another one. If I ever get invited again, I’m hoping I might get given an easier one.

It is, however, an immensely important passage because in it, the Bible teaches something which, if it is true, means that now here tonight God is actively, personally and fairly angry with a very great many people. He’s actively, personally and fairly angry, very angry indeed, with anybody who tonight is not repenting and trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now that’s an extraordinarily politically incorrect statement and it’s one that we certainly need God’s help really to grasp. If you’re here this evening and you’re not a Christian believer, may I say how very welcome you are.

I want to ask your patience tonight to listen to the arguments that the Apostle Paul gives in the New Testament, because they’re tremendously important. And as I say, if they are true, they are very important indeed. Let me start with a little illustration. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been offended by a safety campaign.

I don’t know whether sometimes a drink-driving safety campaign has had images on posters or images on television which are so shocking that you’ve been offended by them, or whether sometimes the anti-smoking campaigns have had posters or things on television which have been so horrible and disgusting that you’ve been offended by them. It’s quite possible. Sometimes, in the desire to keep people or make people safe, those who run safety campaigns have to run the risk that they’re going to cause offence.

It’s a little bit like when a farmer wants to get his sheep in a place of safety, and the sheepdogs round up the sheep. Some of you will know this if you’ve brought up in the country. The sheepdogs round up the sheep and they snap at the sheep’s heels and bark at them, and sometimes seem a bit rough with the sheep. But the reason they have to do that is that the farmer knows that there’s only one place where the sheep are going to be safe.

And I want to explain to you before we get into this evening’s very sobering passage what it is that Paul is doing. Let me first of all say a word about what was going on in Rome and why Paul writes. The Letter to the Romans, as some of you may know, is arguably the most wonderful letter in the whole of the New Testament. It is a magnificent letter. But it’s written to a real church, the Christians in Rome at the time when Paul was writing in the first century.

And I want to tell you just a little bit about what was going on. I want to tell you two things that really help in understanding the letter. The first is that the church in Rome consisted of Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, that is, people who weren’t Jews, who’d come to trust in Christ, and people who were Jews and had come to trust in Christ. And that distinction was a really big one in the church in Rome. And one of the big things that it did in the church was this.

The Jewish Christians, in our terms, they knew their Bibles, because they’d been brought up with them. They were brought up to think that they belonged to the people of God. In our terms, they went to church and always had. In our terms, perhaps they’d come from a Christian family. In our terms, probably they were morally, on average, more upright than the Gentiles, the outsiders.

And so one of the things that happened in Rome, and this runs right through the letter to the Romans, is that the church in Rome was in danger of becoming a two-tier church. But on the one hand, there were the Gentiles who’d just come out of paganism. On the other hand, there were some better people who knew their Bibles better and who’d lived morally upright lives, and who thanked God, perhaps, that they weren’t quite as bad as those rotten people who’d come out of paganism. And they looked down their moral noses at those other people.

And so one of the big reasons Paul writes the letter to the Romans is to humble everybody under grace. And it’s just as relevant today. One of the biggest things that divides a church, or for that matter, a Christian union, any gathering of Christians, is when one group of people begin to think that they’re on a higher level than the others.

And the doctrine we’re going to look at this evening, which is part of a longer argument, is a doctrine, a truth, that humbles us all under the grace of God and puts us all down to floor level. So if we understand this doctrine, we’ll understand that the only way to be right with God is to be on floor level and not the moment we start putting ourselves at a higher level, we’re in trouble. So that’s one reason Paul wants the church in Rome to be united under grace. The second reason is this, and it’s related.

Paul says in chapter 15 of the letter, you can look it up later, that he’s hoping to visit them, and when he’s visited them, he wants to go on to Spain, which in those days was a sort of wild west. He says, “I want to go on to Spain where there are kind of wild people, and I want you to send me there.”

And he knows that they won’t send him to Spain, they won’t support him and encourage him and help him on his way to Spain, unless they are deeply convinced that the message of Jesus Christ is not just for anyone in group or in crowd, they’ve got to be convinced that the message of Jesus Christ is for everybody, for all, Jew and Greek, anybody, doesn’t matter who they are, and they’ll only understand that if they understand that it’s a message of grace that puts everybody equally on ground level.

So he preaches the doctrines of the grace of God, the free forgiveness of God through Christ, partly to unite the church and partly to help them to understand that they need to reach out because the good news of Jesus is for everybody.

Now, let’s step back from our passage. On the handout, I put what’s the main argument from Chapter 1:16, just before this evening’s passage, right through to Chapter 3:27. you’ve got your Bible open; you might like to have a look. Well, on the handout, I put verses 16 and 17. If you were here last week for a quick, you will have had these verses.

These verses are Paul’s manifesto, and he says in them that he’s eager to preach the gospel to them because, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel, for it’s the power of God for salvation, for rescue to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also the Greek, it’s for everybody. It’s one of the things that came out in that DVD for the Christian Union, it is for everybody. Because in it the righteousness of God, that is the rescuing righteousness of God, how God reaches out to put people right with him, is revealed from faithful faith, which is a way of saying the only way anybody ever gets right with God is by faith, and he means faith in Jesus Christ.

¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17, ESV)

And then he quotes from the Old Testament, the righteous shall live by faith. So in his manifesto in 16 and 17 he says, as a kind of headline, right early on in the letter, he says, I want you guys in Rome to grasp that there is only one way to be in right relationship with the God who’s made the world, and that is by faith in Christ, and there is no other way. That’s what he says in 16 and 17. Now that’s a big claim.

And of course, if you go around the campus here, or the campuses here, and you make that claim that Paul makes there, most people would just think that’s nonsense, because most people think that what they think of as faith is just a lifestyle choice. It’s just an option. You choose that, I choose this, who cares, we’ll get along together. Paul says there is only one way to be right with God, and that’s by faith. He comes right back to that in chapter 3 verses 21 to 26, and he develops it a little bit more.

But in between saying it, and saying it again, he argues it negatively, because what he’s got to do is he’s got to persuade people that there is no other way, because most people think there is another way. Most of our friends, if they’re not Christians, a number of you here I’m sure, in your heart of hearts, you think there is another way. You think Christianity might be quite a valuable lifestyle choice, but you’re probably not deeply convinced that there is actually no other way to be right with God at all.

Now what Paul does is, he does the argument in two parts. Phase one, as I’ve called it, which we’re doing this evening, he addresses the argument, he says, what about the guys who didn’t know? What about the people who’d never had a Bible? They’d never had the Scriptures. What about them? He says, let me persuade you, let me show you that God is angry with them.

And then in the passage that you’ve got next week, all of chapter two, and actually quite a lot of chapter three, he addresses the objection of the respectable people in the church, you know, the Jewish Christians, who say, yeah, I can see that that rotten lot out there are bad, and God’s rightly angry with them because they’re a rotten lot, but I’m not sure that he’s angry with me because I’m not so bad as them.

I don’t want to steal that argument from next week, but it’s really important; in some ways, it’s more important for us here, who are here at a Christian Union meeting. So we’re going to focus on phase one, where he addresses what I call, “I didn’t know righteousness.” That’s the argument, “I didn’t know, so you can’t blame me. Nobody had given me a Bible, nobody told me, so I’m alright.” Let’s look at this carefully. First of all, Paul begins in verse 18 with a very dark but important statement.

For, if you’ve got the NIV, it doesn’t translate for, but it’s an important word that follows on from the last two verses. I’m convinced it’s just faith because the wrath of God, that is the heart-settled personal anger of God, is revealed, that is to say, becoming visible in some way, and we’ll see how in a minute, from heaven, that is with the authority of God, against all ungodliness, that is wrong behaviour and attitudes towards God, and unrighteousness, which is wrong behaviour towards other people, amongst people, who by their unrighteousness and ungodliness, their wrong behaviour and wrong attitudes and wrong hearts, suppress the truth.

So Paul says in verse 18, God is very angry with people, and he’s right to be angry, because the people he’s angry with have been given the truth and have suppressed it. So that’s the argument. Now, he then gives evidence for that argument. I want us to look at the evidence. Let’s take verses 19 and 20.

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰ For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20, ESV)

For what can be known about God, and he means what can be known about God without a Bible, what can be known about God by anybody, by any human being, even if they’ve never come anywhere near a Bible, never met a Christian, what can be known about God is plain to them, is clear to them, because God has made it plain to them.

So the question is, what’s he made plain and how’s he made it plain to someone who’s never had a Bible and never met a Christian in our terms?

So Paul goes on to explain what he means in verse 20: his invisible attributes. God is invisible; God is spirit. We cannot see God. But his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, that is the greatness and the godness of God.

Not everything about God, but the greatness and the Godness of God has been made visible even though God is invisible. This about God has been made visible ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. Let me pause on that.

Paul is saying that if you look at the world, you and I ought to know in our hearts and minds that there is a great God. There’ll be a great deal we don’t know about him, but we ought in our hearts and minds to know that there’s a great God and we ought to seek him and we ought to bow down to him.

That is to say, when you watch programs like the Blue Planet, the reaction of a human being ought to be a sense of wonder that there’s a great God who’s made a world like that. When we look at a world in which there is physical order, anybody who’s doing science, there’s no reason for doing science unless the world is an ordered place physically, materially, because a scientist is not inventing order. Scientists don’t scratch their heads and think, I’ll invent a law. Scientists discern an order that’s already there.

That’s one of the wonderful things about doing science, that you do that. I mean, some of you probably don’t think doing science is wonderful at all. Some of you are probably bored to tears by the science you’re doing. Who’s reading science subjects? Anybody read science subjects in Nottingham? Yeah, quite a few. Okay. I don’t know if you’re a real scientist, but if you’re a real scientist, if you’re a real scientist, one of the things that will thrill you is this being part of an enterprise that is discovering order that’s been put there already.

A very good friend of mine is a geophysicist. He’s a professor of geophysics in university. He’s a fellow of the Royal Society. He’s a real scientist, just loves it, and sometimes he’s almost sort of boyish with it. You know, he’s a clever guy and we’ve got lots of initials and all that kind of things, but he just loves it because he’s a Christian believer. But when he’s doing his science, he sees that he’s discovering more about the order that God’s put in the world.

But it’s not just material order in the world, it’s also moral order in the world and this is really important for this passage. Paul is saying, you look at the world and if you’ve got any kind of eyes in your head as all of us have, you see that there are such things as right and wrong, that there are ways of behaving that are destructive and ways of behaving that are creative. You see that, that the world is a place which has moral order to it.

And therefore, says Paul, every human being, even if they’ve never gone anywhere near a Bible, every human being knows that there is a God, a great God and something of the Godness of God. Now his deduction from that in the end of verse 20 is this, so he says, they are without excuse. He’s not saying that without a Bible you can know everything there is to know about God, but he’s saying that just by looking at the world, you and I know enough about the Godness of God to be guilty for not seeking him.

So somebody who’s never come near a Bible, if their heart doesn’t turn and seek the God, the great God who made this world, then you and I aren’t guilty and without excuse. Now what Paul is saying is something very serious indeed because of course if we say this to somebody, they’ll deny it. Of course people won’t admit that.

What Paul is saying, and you see this when you get to chapter 3:19-20, is that at the end of human history there’s going to be a judgment day, and when that judgment day comes, those who’ve not turned and trusted Christ are going to be speechless with guilt. I don’t know if some of you have had that awful experience of being found guilty and speechless. You probably won’t want to admit it because it’s generally something shameful.

I remember when I was about 13, I was involved with some others in school in some shameful bullying, and I remember we were caught. I remember coming up in front of the headteacher and we were speechless. We had nothing to say because we knew we were guilty. So there was no referee, that’s not fair. We knew we were guilty and we were very ashamed.

And Paul is saying that at the end of time, every human being, whether or not they come near a Bible, if they haven’t sought the God who is God, will be speechless with shame because they’ll know they’re guilty. That’s what he’s saying there.

Now he goes on to develop this in verse 21, because he says, although they knew God, and he’s not talking about the personal knowledge of God that a Christian believer is given, although they knew the Godness of God, they knew what he’s just been speaking about, they didn’t honour him as God, that is, bow down and worship him, value him, or give thanks to him. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this. I don’t know if you’ve realised, it’s very interesting, it was real eye-opener to me when I realised this, how central thanksgiving is.

I used to think that thanksgiving was a kind of bolt-on extra. If you were a believer, you believed, and then if you were a good believer, you were thankful. Did you come across that sort of idea? Maybe some of you think that. Thanksgiving is absolutely fundamental, and grumbling reveals that I don’t worship God. If I understand the Godness of God, I’ll understand that every good gift in human life comes from Him and therefore I will thank Him for them. And even if I haven’t got a Bible, I’m guilty if I don’t do that.

But he goes on, he says, they didn’t honour Him as God or give thanks to Him but they became futile in their thinking. In other words, human thinking goes, the reason human beings can’t think straight is that we don’t worship right. And their foolish hearts were darkened. So it’s not just the mind, it’s the heart, the place of decision making, the place of the affections and desires were darkened. Claiming to be wise, and of course in a university there’s no shortage of people who claim to be wise. I’m sure you’re taught by some of them.

Don’t tell them I said that. But claiming to be wise, says Paul, if their worship is misdirected, they became fools and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals and reptiles.

²¹ For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:21-23, ESV)

Let me say a word about that. Human beings were made with two directions. We were made to worship the God who made us, the great God who is God. And we were made in his image to rule and govern and steward and look after the creation that he has, as it were, put at our feet.

That’s how he’s made us, with those two directions. That’s what it is to be a human being. And because human beings were created in the image of God, it means that human beings ought to have shone with the glory of God, which is religious jargon and let me explain it. What it means is, when anybody looks at you or looks at me, they ought to say, Ah, now I can see what God is like. That’s what it means to have the glory of the immortal God.

Now, I don’t know whether anybody has said that to you recently. Has any of your friends said to you, now that I can be friends with you, I can see what God is like? I think it’s unlikely. If they do say that, they’re either madly in love or they don’t know you very well. But the point Paul is making is this, and it’s really fundamental to human existence.

He’s saying, by nature what we do is, instead of worshipping the great God, the immortal God, the creator, and therefore ruling the world with the glory of God, being God-like creatures in our character, instead of that we do a terrible exchange. We reject the God who’s made us, and we worship the creation that we’re supposed to be ruling. Now, of course, the literal meaning of verse 23 is literal physical images, idols.

But the New Testament teaches that it’s much broader than that, and that when I worship created creatures, it means that I’m devoting what matters most to me in life. The projects that I devote myself to, where my affections are directed, are humanly created projects that I choose, or we choose, or people choose, rather than the worship of the one true God. And when that exchange happens, misdirected worship, instead of worshipping up, I worship down, which is the default human condition now, what happens is that I become like what I worship. Here’s a fundamental spiritual law.

You and I, and all of our friends, gradually become like what we worship. It’s a bit like dogs and their owners, although that seems to work the other way around. But we become like what we worship. If we worship humanly created things, humanly created projects, my career, my family, what I choose, we are worshipping things that aren’t God’s. They have no independent, objective existence as God’s. And the more we worship them, the emptier we will become, until finally we’ll just be blown away like chaff at harvest time.

And the only way to be solid and substantial as a human being is to worship the one true God. So Paul says, human beings, whether or not they’ve got a Bible, by nature they don’t worship the God who is God, who they ought to seek. We ought to seek by nature, but we ought to thank him, we ought to turn to him. But we exchange that worship for the worship of humanly created projects and things, and therefore we lose the glory that we ought to have as human beings.

Our glory gets spoiled; we are messed up people. And he goes on in verses 24 onwards, in these terrible, terrible verses, to talk about the consequences. And the big point is here, he says, you start with misdirected worship and the result is you’re going to have misdirected affections. Disordered worship, disordered affections. And so he says in this threefold, “God gave them up,” you see verse 24, 26, 28. What God has done, and this is how God shows his anger in the present time, is he gives human beings up to the outcome of their misdirected worship.

If my heart is directed to worshipping Tao, then all my affections and desires are going to be messed up. So he says, “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”

²⁴ Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, (Romans 1:24, ESV)

And then he expands with this terrible, painful example. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, and he takes the two cases of homosexual practice, first of all lesbianism, and then male homosexual practice, and he says, these misdirected affections which afflict some people and which are so painful. I just want to say on these verses that these are sensitive verses, aren’t they? Some of us here will be affected by these kinds of desires.

Many of us here will have people in our families or friends who are either affected by these desires or who are part of that lifestyle. And I’ll talk in a moment about why Paul chooses this example, but I do want to say this is a terribly painful example, and I think certainly when people who define themselves in this way have spoken with me, I come away with a strong feeling of the pain of their experience.

So although Paul does say this is wrong, he does say it’s wrong, he says this is a misdirected affection, he doesn’t do so without sympathy.

One of the best titles for a book that I’ve come across was by a man who was in the homosexual lifestyle, very active in the homosexual lifestyle, and he came to faith in Christ. Gradually, over time, very painfully, he’s been wonderfully brought out of that, brought out of that lifestyle, and he wrote a book which is his. And he gave it a terrific title; it was called “Setting Love in Order.” He got that idea from Augustine, one of the great Christian theologians of the early centuries, setting love in order.

He said, “I recognise that this was an example of a disordered love, a love that’s not as it ought to be. Now, I think the first reason that Paul chooses this is that it is, I suppose, a clearly demonstrable and painful example of a disordered love. But I think the second reason is probably more important, which I’ll come to, because Paul makes it clear that it’s not his main focus. This passage is not about homosexuality. It’s true that Paul leads with it, but it’s not about that.”

And he makes that clear in verse 28, 29, 30, 31, because he gives a whole lot more examples of disordered affections, all sorts of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, and this whole terrible list of disordered affections where I love what I ought not to love and I’m apathetic towards what I ought to love. So my affections are disordered, and they’re disordered because of my disordered worship. And then in verse 32 he comes to his punchline.

And his punchline is this, though they know God’s decree, he’s not talking about a decree in the Bible, he’s just saying they know, they have a sense of conscience and right and wrong, they know that those who practice these kinds of things like disobedience to parents and gossip and slander and insolence and pride and breaking your word and all these examples, they know that these things make us guilty. They not only do them, he says, but they give approval to those who practice them.

That is to say they don’t just do them with shame. The time comes when they do them brazenly and openly, and they want affirmation. And of course, it’s like that, isn’t it? That if I do something wrong, I really want you to say it’s okay. I want you to say, yeah, that’s fine, it’s not a very big deal. Because the more you say that’s fine, the more easy it is for me to hold my head up high while I’m doing these things. So if I behave covetously with my money, I want you to say, yeah, that’s fine.

I want us to make a culture in which covetousness with money is fine, and then we’ll all feel good about it, and we won’t be convicted of sin. And that’s Paul’s punchline. Now, I want to say at this point why I think Paul picks homosexual practice as his leading example. And it’s this, and it’s very relevant in the gathering of people, many of whom, perhaps most of whom, we call ourselves Christians. When Paul gives verse 32, how did you feel? They, not only do these things, but to give approval to those who practice them.

³² Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:32, ESV)

They do that, don’t they? How many of us, in our hearts at that point in the argument, thought, “Yes, they do, don’t they? That rotten old lot out there that I read about in the tabloids do those things. But I don’t.” Does that thought cross your mind? “I don’t. I don’t approve at all. Indeed, I disapprove. I think it’s very wrong.” And I’m thinking of writing to Paul to thank him so much for Romans 1 because I couldn’t agree with him more.

And I think the reason he takes homosexual practice is because if you were a Jewish Christian in Paul’s day, one of the things, you didn’t, by and large, you didn’t have homosexual practice amongst the Jews. And if you were a Jew and you looked out at that rotten old Gentile world outside, one of the examples you would often take, and it’s there in all the literature, if you wanted a prime example of why they’re rotten and we’re not, you would take the degradation. of homosexual practice in the Roman world.

That’s the prime example of why they’re bad and we’re not. We’re good. And I think that’s why Paul takes it, because by the end of Chapter 1, the self-righteous person will be cheering. The self-righteous person will be saying, here, here, preach it, pastor. Maybe you don’t go to churches where they react like that, but I do. Sometimes I wish I did. You know, I think by the end of Chapter 1, they’d be saying, preach it, pastor. Sock it to them. Give them their sin stuff, because they’re a rotten old lot out there.

And it’s a pity I can’t go on to Chapter 2, because in Chapter 2, he pulls the rug out of the feet of anybody who’s thinking that. So as I finish, I want to say two things by way of how we respond or ought to respond to this, because we ought not to be cheering. We ought to be deeply saddened. In our attitude to our fellow Christians, we ought to understand that what Paul has described, disordered worship, worshipping what I choose and what I create, leads to disordered desires and a messed up world.

And I see that in my heart. And as I’m part of a Christian church, I look at my fellow Christians, and I realize that the only reason we’re in right relationship with God is entirely by His grace. We have not been picked because we’re good. And as Paul’s going to go on to say in Chapter 2, the fact that we knew our Bibles just made it worse, the indifference it made. So it humbles us.

And every one of us ought to be moved by this sobering chapter to repentance and to trust in Christ and to understand that none of us is better off than anybody else. The person sitting next to you may not know anything about their Bible, and you may not know a lot about your Bible. It doesn’t matter. By nature, we get our worship wrong, we get our desires wrong. And by nature, God is out. angry with us. And if it weren’t for repentance and faith in Christ, he would still be very angry with us.

The second implication is this. When we look out at our friends who are not or not yet Christians, and we pray that they’ll become Christians, we need to understand that God is angry with them, and God is right to be angry with them, as God was right to be angry with us before he reached out to us in grace and brought us to trust in Christ.

We need to understand that our friends, however delightful they are, however fun they are, however handsome or beautiful they are, however clever they are, however talented they are, however moral they are, are under the wrath of God. And the only way in which God’s saving righteousness can reach out to them is by grace through faith in Christ.

So it’s a sobering passage this, but my prayer, and I was feeling quite weighed down as I came up on the train thinking I need to speak from this passage, because I guess like a number of us, I’m very conscious of the messed up world that we live in, and the pain of a messed up world.

And I look at a messed up world and I think that messed up world is a sign that God is angry, and it’s a sign that he’s right to be angry, and it’s a reminder to me, a painful reminder, that only faith in Jesus Christ who died for our sins can take us out of his anger. There is no other way. Now my friends, you get laughed at and caught in many circles in the university for saying that, but it’s what the Bible teaches and I believe that it’s true.

And I want to encourage you to be humbled yourselves under grace, and to be courageous in bringing this message to others. Not to feel self-righteous towards them, not to think they’re a rotten old lot, but to think, that’s what I am by nature, and it’s only the grace of God in Christ that’s begun to change me, and that’s brought me out of the rotten ground. So I hope and pray that God will take this home to our hearts. Just be quiet for a moment, and then I’ll pray. The gospel is the power of God to rescue everyone who believes, because the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness.

Lord God, we recognise and we feel the shame of our guilt, that we are without excuse, even if we didn’t have a Bible we would be without excuse, and you were rightly angry with us. We praise and thank you for the wonder of grace in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we pray that we might be those who live unitedly with our fellow Christians under grace, and reaching out to those outside with that wonderful grace to learn and to say the gospel for Jesus Christ.