Forgiven and Set Free (More Than - Week 1 - Shawn Green)

Have you ever felt like your life needed a fresh start? In Romans, Paul unveils the explosive power of the Gospel to transform lives—like spiritual dynamite in God's hands. Shawn shares how this ancient letter speaks directly to our modern struggles with identity, shame, and suffering. Through personal stories of his grandmother's quilting and family history with actual dynamite, he illuminates how God's grace doesn't just give us a second chance—it makes us entirely new. Don't miss this first message in an eight-week journey through Romans 8, where you'll discover how God's love can make you more than you ever imagined possible.

Transcript

For I am not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith, from first to last, just as it is written, the righteousness will live by faith.

Pardone.

And for Sean, Lord, there is no more important time to be unashamed of the Gospel. Prepare us boldly to live by faith and to share it with our community. And at this time, Lord, we ask you to give us hearts that are eager for the message that Sean will share today. We thank you for the blessing that Sean is to this church family and ask you to fill him with your spirit as he shares his message. And it's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

Well, hey, can we give Jeff a hand? First time doing the response and announcements and all of that. Thanks, bud. Listen, that is no easy task right there. I tell people I would rather preach 10 sermons than do what Jeff just did.

It's hard going through all of those details and everything like that. Good morning, everybody. It is so good to see you here this morning as we're kicking off this new series. My Grandma Green is one of the most special people in my life, has made an incredible influence both in terms of, of just who I am as a person, but also who I am as a follower of Jesus. I remember going to their home when I was younger, visit, stay in the weekend, staying sometimes for weeks at a time on the farm during the summers, and going to church with her and my grandpa.

It left an indelible mark in me and on my heart. And one of the things that my Grandma Green is most known for, and aside from her skill of cooking and gardening and all of these things, it is her ability to quilt. Grandma Green has quilted dozens, if not hundreds of quilts over her lifetime. Grandpa years ago made her a wooden quilt rack that has all of these pieces in it so that she could work on any size quilt. And growing up, every time I'd go into their house, there would be that quilt rack set up with some project that Grandma was working on.

And sometimes it was for a, sometimes it was to sell at a fair for the church, or sometimes it would be a project that somebody started working on and then for whatever reason, maybe they became ill, maybe they passed. Grandma took that quilt and finished it for the family. She used quilting as kind of her love language as a gift. All of us have received multiple quilts from Grandma Greene that are birth marriages. Our kids, great grandkids have them.

She has a closet full of quilts that she's made for her coming great grandkids that she hopes to see, but just wants to make sure that they get a quilt from her in case she doesn't get that chance. One of the quilts that Grandma gave me was for my college graduation. When I graduated from Bible college, Grandma gave me this quilt. And if you look at it, the patches of this quilt kind of tell the story of scripture. Starts at the garden with Adam and Eve, and it goes all the way through scripture to the empty tomb.

And this quilt is meaningful, not just to me, because of the work that it took to create and the gift that it was in that moment in my life, but I'm hoping that it's a quilt that will be passed down through generations. And as I was preparing for today's sermon and as we were preparing for this series that we're going into today, I thought in a lot of ways, the Book of Romans is like this quilt that Grandma made for me all these years ago. The Book of Romans was written by the apostle Paul Somewhere around 56, 57 A.D. and in this letter that Paul writes to the church in Rome, he kind of captures the entire story of scripture. In one letter, 16 chapters, Paul captures the entire message of not just the Bible, but of our Christian faith. One author that I read said that this letter is arguably the most influential book in Christian history, perhaps in the history of Western civilization.

This is a weighty letter that Paul writes. There is a lot for us to chew on. But even though this book is filled with rich theology that some scholars have spent entire lifetimes studying and writing about, filled with all of this theology, man, this book also speaks to the things that you and I are still facing even today. Questions that that people in this church in Rome were asking, that we continue to ask today. In the Book of Romans, Paul addresses things like identity.

And maybe you've asked question before about who am I? Like, if you start peeling off all of the layers, all of the masks, all of the things that I put on myself to project to others, what I want you to think, we all do it. If you start peeling those things off, a lot of us are left with the question, who am I? Do I matter? Am I loved?

Am I lovable? What defines me?

The Book of Romans answers questions about shame and regret, Questions that maybe you have found yourself asking, like, how do I get past my past? How do I get past the things that I have done that have been done to me? How do I get past those things? Or are they always going to define who I am? Can a person actually change?

The book of Romans talks about that. In fact, Romans chapter seven is like pulling a page out of Paul's diary. He talks about how he does the things that he doesn't want to do, and he doesn't do the things that he does want to do. And he ends by saying, what a wretched man am I. I mean, how many of us have felt that before in our life? We have said, I'm never going to do this again, or I'm always going to do this.

And we find ourselves in that place where we just don't get it. Again and again. We're like, ah, is there any hope? Paul addresses some of these things in this book. Romans has a lot to say about suffering, about pain, about evil in our world.

Why is life so hard sometimes? Where is God when our world just seems so, so unjust? Where is God when, when there is another school shooting? Why does God allow these evil things to. To happen?

If I can just take a. A moment and, and address the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It was an awful thing that happened on Wednesday. And personally, and this is just where I am on this, he and I would not have agreed on everything. There were a lot of his political positions, his politics that I wouldn't have agreed with, and even some of his theology that led him to some of those political conclusions.

As I study scripture, just be honest, I don't think that there's any place for Christian nationalism that we find in the words of this text.

But yet, of all the things that maybe we would have had, probably some healthy arguments and disagreements about, there were some foundational things that we did share that maybe we all would have shared. He clearly was fueled by his faith in Jesus. We would have agreed a lot about Jesus and about the gospel. But it doesn't matter if, if we agree with somebody on anything or not. There is no place for violence in our world.

There is no place for us to attack another human being with our words or with our actions. We are made. One of the foundational beliefs that we have as followers of Jesus is that each and every one of us, we are made in the image of God and we want to uphold that image in the way that we treat others. We don't want to tear that down. And so that comes to, yes, how we treat one another.

And obviously we hold the sanctity of life as valuable and important. So we don't want to Take the life of. Of another. But that also comes down to how we talk about and to one another online, in person. And this shooting shows how deeply divided we are as a country, but it also shows how much suffering and evil there is in our world.

And it wasn't just the shooting that was evil. It was the response on both sides. It was the response on the. On the side of people that celebrated this. And evil was seen in the response on the other side of people that were calling for retribution, that were calling to say, you took one of our guys, now we gotta go and take one of theirs.

Paul says In Romans chapter 12, do not repay anyone evil for evil. He goes on, he says, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

So it doesn't matter what the situation is in our world, in our life, celebrating evil, seeking retribution, inflicting pain and suffering on others, man, it only adds to the suffering in this world, and it does not solve anything. It only makes it worse. Which is why Paul closes chapter 12 of Romans by saying, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. The book of Romans is honest about the pain and suffering that we experience. Questions around these things that many of us have.

It is why this book is so much at the heart of the Bible and at the heart of Romans. This letter that Paul writes at the heart of that is Romans, chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is considered one of the most beautiful and complex chapters in all of Scripture. It weaves together the tapestry of biblical theology and how we put that into practice in ways that no other chapter in Scripture does. It.

It pulls together things from Genesis chapter one all the way through Revelation chapter 22. And it succinctly helps us understand how all of these come together in just 39 verses. And so over the next eight weeks, we are going to do a deep dive into Romans chapter eight. And we're going to discover how the Gospel redefines who we are and makes us more than we thought we could ever be. The Gospel redefines.

Thank you. Amen. Yes. It. I just.

Sometimes people are like, I wish I could talk a little bit more in church. Come on, give it. It's all right. It's all right. The Gospel redefines who we are, and it makes us more than we thought we could ever be.

Amen. And before we look at this one chapter, if you're. If you're here this morning, you're like, oh, my goodness, we are looking at one chapter over eight weeks. This is going to be the worst sermon series that Sherwood Oaks has ever done. I've got good news for you today.

Today we're going to be looking at seven chapters over one week. All right, so we are going to fly through an overview of Romans chapter chapter one through seven. And the reason why we need to start this way comes down to the first word that Paul uses in Romans 8, and it's the word therefore. Therefore. One of the very first Bible study techniques that I learned was that whenever you come across the word therefore, you need to find out what the therefore is there for the word therefore.

It is a transition word. And so it means that there is something that has happened, and therefore something is different. And so for us to understand everything that comes after this word In Romans chapter 8, we have to have a little bit of a working understanding of everything that comes.

So that's what we're going to try to do today. And chapter seven, or these seven chapters, excuse me, can really be captured in the passage that Jeff read for us earlier. It's the. It's not just our text for today. It's also kind of the thesis statement for Paul's letter.

I want to read it again. For I am not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. First to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. The rightness of God, his love, his justice, his grace, his mercy.

It is all revealed to us in the gospel, and it is a righteousness. We receive all of those things by faith from first to last, just as it is written. The righteous will live by faith. There's so much that we could unpack in this verse. I want to start with the word Gospel.

The Gospel is the good news that Jesus saves. But it's not just the good news that Jesus saves. It is the good news that Jesus is restoring the things that sin has broken in our life and in our world through the. The Gospel. God is restoring us back to who he created us to be.

And he's sending us out to take part in his mission of restoring this world back to the way that he created it to be. And Paul says that this gospel that we believe and that we have the hope in it, has the power to bring salvation to everyone who believes. And I love that word power. In fact, if you have your Bible open and a pen or a way to highlight, just circle that word power, because it is so important in these words that he writes. It's a.

It's a great word, too. The Greek word that Paul uses here is dynamis. What does that sound like? Sounds like dynamite. It's actually where we get our word.

You can trace that back to where we got our word for dynamite. Comes from this Greek Greek word that Paul uses here. And just think for a moment about the power of dynamite. My dad told me a story a handful of times about his Grandpa Green. So my great Grandpa Green had a bit of an obsession with dynamite, you might say he had a deep freeze that was in the chicken coop that he kept kind of, you know, covered up.

But if you open that up, it was filled with dynamite. Filled with dynamite. And he used it primarily as, like, his profession, people, farmers. You know, this is back in the early 1900s. We didn't have the equipment that we had today.

And so farmers would hire my Great Grandpa Green to come and blow stumps out of the ground. What an awesome job that would be. And I guess he was really good. And so he would go and he would find it and put that stick of dynamite in those sticks in, draw it, light it, and then, like, just clearing out farmland all day with that dynamite. But he didn't just use it for work.

Great Grandpa Green had a little bit of a mischievous side to him. Would pull a prank with it every now and then. My dad told me a story that ended with his grandma chasing him and Great Grandpa Green and one of his cousins around the yard with a broomstick because they had lit a stick of dynamite off by the house to scare everybody that was in it. And it almost rattled some of her precious plates off of the walls. And she wasn't too happy about it.

And that desire to blow things up, it could be a Green thing, but honestly, I mean, I think it's kind of a guy thing. Like, how many of us guys in here were like, I want that job. I want to play with that. And I don't know too many guys. Like, I've never played with dynamite, but I have played with bobcat fireworks.

And that's about as close as you can get to a little stick of dynamite, right? And I don't know how I know many guys my age who have not gone into their toy chest, brought out a GI Joe, stretched those arms as far as they could, put some bobcats in it, lit them, threw it up in the air to watch it explode. Explode. Anybody else? Okay, thank you.

And I also don't know many guys my age that don't know somebody who has been hurt by playing with these fireworks, these little sticks of Dynamite, or maybe one landing where it wasn't supposed to during a little fireworks show with some friends, like it happens from time to time. Dynamite in the wrong hands can be a little dangerous. It can cause some chaos. And I imagine that a lot of us feel in our life like a stick of dynamite has been thrown into it and just blown everything up. And we are left picking up the pieces because we know that we are up against a very real enemy who has a power to.

To steal and kill and destroy. But Paul is saying that there is another power that is at work. There is a power of the gospel, the dynamite, explosive power of the gospel that does not bring chaos, but actually brings peace. Because dynamite used in the right hands can blow through mountains so that roads can be paved, can clear landscape and transform an area and make it new.

What Paul is saying in this passage is that the Gospel is like dynamite in God's hands. It is God's transformative power to make us new. Like the old hymn says, there is power, power, wonder, working power in the precious blood of the Lamb. Tried to take that teaching technique from Matt. I think I'll leave it with him.

There's power, though, in the gospel. And it has the power to heal broken hearts. It has the power to forgive sin. It has the power to make us new. It has the power to make us right with ourselves, with others, and with God.

That's what Paul spends the rest of Romans 1 through 7 breaking down. And I just want to quickly outline it like this. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time in this overview. But the Gospel reveals some things. The Gospel reveals our need.

In chapter 118 through 3 20, Paul goes into this deep exploration about our need for salvation, our need for forgiveness. He goes into this explanation about why we don't need a second chance. We need a savior. And he recounts how we have been given second, third, fourth, fifth and more chances. And that is not going to heal what is broken inside of us.

We need a savior that can do that. We are all guilty of sin. We are all guilty of adding into the brokenness of our life and the lives of others. And Paul makes a case for why following a bunch of laws and commandments is not going to heal that brokenness inside of us. If anything, the law was given to reveal just how much we need something outside of ourselves to save us.

And so he goes on and he says that the Gospel reveals God's grace. Chapter 3:21 through 5:11. He gives this detailed description of how when God saw our need he did something about it. He shows us that we are not made right with God, made righteous by the good that we do or by following all of the rules. Yes, we should live good, holy, moral lives, but that's not what what saves us is Jesus.

What saves us is his life, death and resurrection and our faith in it. And knowing this about us. Paul says in chapter three, verse 21, but now a righteousness from God has been revealed. He says in 5, 8 that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God knew our need and so he did sin something about it.

And we are not made right with God by just being a good person. We are made right with God by being in Christ, by accepting him and following him and trusting him. And out of that, the Gospel reveals new life. Paul says that when we are baptized in Christ, we identify with his death, death, his burial, but we also identify with his resurrection. We are brought into new life in Christ and it is through this new life that the power of sin has been broken in us.

Now that doesn't mean that when we come out of the baptistery and we start following Jesus, we are perfect and we never sin anymore. No, it means that the power of sin, which is death, is not over us anymore. We are not bound or chained to it anymore. We have been released and freed. Those chains have been broken and now we live in the newness of life.

And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don't. But it doesn't change the new life that we have in Christ. And we are united with him and our struggles don't define us anymore. So from beginning to end, you could put it like this. The book of Romans is an invitation to trust, not try harder.

If your faith is all about trying harder, man, that can be an element of it. But that is not where it starts and it's not where it ends. It starts and ends with this invitation to trust and to allow Jesus to make us into his image. In these seven chapters, Paul shows us that the Gospel has the power to transform us from ashamed to accepted, from failure to forgiven, and transform us from not enough to more than we could ever imagine. And that is what the therefore is there for in Romans, chapter eight.

And over the next eight weeks, we are going to unpack all of what that means for us. And because this chapter is so central, not just in Romans, but the entire Bible and even our life as followers of Jesus, we're going to put out a little challenge to you over these next eight weeks to memorize Romans chapter eight. Memorize Romans, chapter eight. And there's some ways that you can do that, and we're going to help come along side of you with that. And if you feel like, hey, that sounds like a lot, I want you to know I've challenged myself to memorize Romans 8.

I've challenged our staff and our elders to do it. We have a little bit of a head start, so you've got to catch us. And if you want to take that challenge, Matt, we hope that you do. If you're like, oh, memorizing an entire chapter seems like a lot. We have broken it down to where each week we've just identified a key verse.

And so maybe you don't memorize all of the chapter, but you would take that challenge to memorize each week's key verse. So every week we'll have these cards that are sitting on the table outside as you leave. And it has the scripture that we're going to be looking at the first following week. So next week we're going to be looking at Romans, chapter eight, verses one through four. You could just slowly memorize those four verses, or you could just memorize the key verse.

And the key verse that we're going to be looking at next week is this. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Would you say that with me? Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Director of our Sherwood Kids Ministry, April Harper, a few years ago with some friends, developed this technique of memorizing scripture that if you were here a couple of Wednesday nights ago, we did.

It's pretty phenomenal. And she basically just takes the first letter of each of these words and puts it into a little form over here. And so if we can put that one up, this is the first letters of each of these words. And so let's repeat this again, and you can look over to the left or to the right, but let's just say it again. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8. 1. Now let's take away these words, and let's see if we can do it with just the initials. Ready? I believe in you.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. All right, let's go ahead and remove it and see if we still got it. You ready? Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Hey, give yourselves a round of applause.

You just memorized passage of scripture. You're already ahead for next week, which means you can memorize verses Two and through four. Come on, you got this. This idea of no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. It is.

It is the beginning of the rest of Paul's argument in chapter eight. It's the beginning of our lives when we follow Jesus, when we choose to embrace God's grace through Christ and follow him, surrender our life to Him. Man, this is who we become. Made new more than we thought we could ever be. No condemnation, not because we are perfect, but because his love for us is.

And Jesus sacrifice was. It starts there and for many of us, and we hold that truth and it has started to change us. But it's not just something that we say one and done. Okay, I choose to follow you. It is something that we.

This decision that we make over and over and over to live in the new life that we have found in Christ. But for some here today, I know that your very first step is to say, I'm going to choose to follow him, to surrender my life, to embrace Jesus and the freedom that he offers so that he can make me more than I am and more than I ever thought that I'd could be. If you're here today and you're ready to take that step, we'll have some people with lanyards around the room that would love to pray with you and help you do that. Today we're going to close with communion as we do every Sunday. Communion is a reminder that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And so as we take the bread and we drink the cup, we remember that Jesus gave his body on the cross and he shed his blood. And is through that, through that gift, that we have been reconciled that that purchase of his blood that bought us out of slavery to sin and bought us our freedom. So as you take communion this morning and just remember and celebrate the fact that through Christ you have been made in do. We've got some stations up here in the front, we've got them in the back. Let me pray for us and then we'll share in this moment.

God, thank you for the gift of your grace that was revealed through Jesus. And thank you for the gift of your word. These. These words, this letter that you inspired Paul to write to this church in Rome. Oh, it still has so much to say to us today.

And so may we hear it not just with our ears, but may we listen. Listen to it in our hearts and learn. Learn all of the beauty and everything that comes from following Jesus right now. We just want to sit with you, Lord, for a moment and Say thanks. Say thanks for seeing our need, for giving us grace and for leading us to new life.

In Jesus name, amen.