We're gonna wrap up this series that we've been in for the last few weeks called This Good News. We've been studying Romans chapter 1, verses 1 through 17, and the theme of that whole first section of Romans is this idea of the good news, this good news about Jesus. Romans is all about the good news of Jesus. And think for a second about how powerful good news can be. For example, if if news came out today that there has been discovered a cure for coronavirus, and this cure is readily available, and everyone who wants to can go and get the cure, that news would be so good that it would fundamentally change our entire world right now. I mean, literally, there would be parades in the streets and the stock market would explode because everyone would be so overjoyed, so excited about the good news that there's a cure for this virus that has interrupted our culture, really like nothing ever has before. Good news has the ability, if it's good enough, to change the world. And what we have to understand in church, what we often fail to understand because we take it for granted, we're so used to it, is that the good news of Jesus, the news that the God who created us loves us, and the God who created us came for us and gave everything for us so that we can have a restored relationship with him where we are forgiven of everything we ever have done or ever could do wrong, and we have complete and total unity and love between us and our God, that good news has changed the world. It has shaped history. And God wants us to live in response to this good news. This good news of Jesus is so incredible that we are intended by God to live in response to it. But we can't live in response to it if we don't grasp it, if we don't understand it to the best of our ability. So we spent the last few weeks exploring this good news about Jesus from a variety of different angles. Number one, we said that this good news is Jesus. That it's not about what, it's about who. At the end of the day, it's a person. It's a person that we can know. You can have a relationship with Jesus because he's alive, he's real, he's active. He's just as active today through the Holy Spirit as he ever was when he was on the earth. This good news is a relationship, it's Jesus. We talked about the fact that this good news is love. This good news is that God loves us in a way that is completely foreign to all the kinds of love that we see in this world. It's unconditional, it's unrelenting. Last week we said this good news is calling us. This good news is calling us into a whole new way of living. It's calling us out of the old and into the new. And today we're gonna wrap up this conversation with one more statement about this good news. And it's simply this. This good news is power. This good news is power. Something that I saw quite a bit as a kid growing up when I would be looking out the window of my mom's car were images like this. This is a picture of a road in the part of the world that I'm from, the part of America. I'm from southern Missouri, an area called the Ozark Mountains, or the Ozarks for short. And that's where I was born, that's where I lived until I was in middle school. And so I have so many memories as a little kid driving with my mom to go visit my grandparents, and this is what I would see when I would look out the window, to the point that I just thought that's what all roads looked like. It wasn't until I moved to other places and I didn't see anything like this that I realized how unique it was to that area. See, when they built roads through the Ozarks, they didn't go around the mountains and they didn't go over the mountains, they went through the mountains. And what they would do is they would cut holes in the earth and they would drop sticks of dynamite down there, and they would blow up the earth, and then they would send, uh they would send men down with jackhammers and all kinds of other tools into those holes, into those crevices, and those men would chisel out the limestone and all the rock that made up those mountains and carve out a path for the roads. And the reason I know about that is because my grandfather was one of those men. My mom always used to tell me as we drove that my grandfather was part of the crews that built these roads. So every time I drive, I drive by something like this, I would I would imagine my grandfather being there when it blew up and being one of the people lowered down to chisel the rock and make way for the roads. My grandfather was around, he was around a lot of powerful things doing that. He was around a lot of dynamite, for example. In fact, by the time I have any memories of my grandfather, he was legally deaf because the dynamite and the explosions and the jackhammers, all that noise, had done a number on his ears. And so I only remember my grandfather with very large hearing aids, and he could barely hear even with those. And occasionally I would even catch him uh turning them down when the grandkids were over, which is kind of nice, right? Like having a built-in mute button for the world. He had that, and he used it sometimes. But my grandfather was part of this. This took power to create. It took power to move those mountains. It took dynamite. In fact, it's interesting, the the word that we get dynamite from is actually a Greek word, and it's the word dunamis. Dunamis is what became dynamite. And that's the exact same word that Paul uses in Romans chapter 1, verses 16 through 17, when he talks about power. Let's look at that together. Paul wrote, For I'm not ashamed of this good news about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes, the Jew first and also the Gentile. He goes on to say in verse 17, this good news tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the scriptures say, it is through faith that a righteous person has life. Paul says, this good news about Jesus, it's power. And when he uses that word power, it's the word dunamis, the same word that we get dynamite from. You know, dynamite is powerful enough to move mountains. But so is faith. In fact, Jesus said that if you just have a mustard seed's worth of faith, and later on Google a mustard seed, see how small it is, that just a mustard seed's worth of faith is enough to move mountains. This good news about Jesus, it's it's power. I don't think it's very hard for us to think about the fact that God has power. I mean, if you believe in God, then clearly you believe that there is a being more powerful than you. If there's a God who created everything, if there's a God who holds all things together, surely he's powerful. And scripture speaks to the power of God very, very often. For example, let's let's look at a few scriptures. 1 Corinthians 2, 4 through 5. My message and my preaching were very plain. This is Paul talking. He says, Rather than using clever and persuasive speeches, I relied only on the power of the Holy Spirit. He said, I did this so that you would trust not in human wisdom, but in the power of God. There's such an emphasis on the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit. Colossians 1, 11 and 12. Paul again says, We also pray that you will be strengthened with all of God's glorious power, so you will have all the endurance and the patience that you need. May you be filled with joy, always thanking the Father. He has enabled you to share in the inheritance that belongs to his people who live in the light. And we can see this word, we can go back for one second. You can look at this word enabled, and you could also think of the word empowered. He has empowered us to be able to share in all the good things that he's done for us. Let's go ahead to Ephesians chapter 1, verse 19. He says, I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God's power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God's right hand in the heavenly realms. So we see all these examples of God's power, right? God has he has glorious power, he has mighty power, he has great power. And I don't think it's hard for us to picture God having that. We see that, by the way, in Jesus. One of the reasons that people follow Jesus is that he had power. It's that simple. Jesus was powerful. For example, John chapter 6, verse 2 says that a huge crowd kept following him everywhere he went. Why? Because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. In other words, because they saw the undeniable power of Jesus. That, by the way, is one of the things that makes Jesus so unique. When you study the history of the different faiths in the world, each faith has a founder. There's a man who passed away just a few weeks ago, actually, named Ravi Zacharias. And when I was in college, I watched a video of Ravi Zacharias talking with students about why Jesus reigns supreme. And I'll never forget it. This one student asked the question, he said, Mr. Zacharias, how can you say that Jesus stands above all of them? And Christianity, therefore, is the true way to know God when there have been so many abuses in Christianity and when there's all these other faiths in the world. And what Ravi said was absolutely, absolutely groundbreaking to me. He said, You know, here's the truth. You don't judge a faith based on its abuses, because every faith in the world, study them, every faith has been abused. When people find something powerful, someone's gonna come along and they're gonna twist it to their own ends. He said, but you judge a faith based on its founder. When he said next was very bold, he said, there's no faith that can claim to have a founder who could ever hold a candle next to Jesus. When you look at the the founders of faiths, you see uh you see people who are profound, who have really incredible insights. You see people who are purists, they have this purity in terms of who they are, in terms of the way that they live, that they really believed what they said and they lived it out, and you also hopefully see power. But you don't see all three of those things in one person other than Jesus. In Jesus, you see someone profound who said things that it's like, man, how in the world could a 30-year-old carpenter in the middle of nowhere know that? One of the pastors I've listened to for years said that one of the reasons he believes in Jesus is because Jesus has a way of speaking into the human condition like only the one who created us could know. How in the world could a 30-year-old carpenter who grew up in the Middle East in the middle of nowhere have that kind of insight into the human spirit? Jesus was profound, Jesus was pure. And by the way, that's not the case for all the founders of the religions in the world. You can study their lives and you find a lot of stuff that's that's pretty messy. Jesus, he's frankly unimpeachable. He lived his life with such a sincerity. He lived his life and he spent all of his time ministering to those that were on the outskirts, those who were oppressed, those who were pushed aside. Those are the people that Jesus spent his time with. You can't look at the life of Jesus and even find anything to hold against him. But it's not just his profound teaching, it's not just his purity, it's his power. Jesus did things. Jesus healed diseases that science has yet to find a cure for. Jesus brought people back to life. Jesus was able to turn water into wine, he was able to walk on water, Jesus was able to miraculously multiply food to feed hungry people. Jesus had undeniable power. Yes, he was profound. Yes, he was pure. And yes, he was profound. But make no mistake, Jesus had real power. Because Jesus is God. He is power incarnate. And when we follow Jesus, we are in the vicinity of power. There's an interesting thing, though, theologically, about the idea of the power that Jesus had in him. And it's this it's it's proof that the power of God can reside within a person. Jesus was a person. He is God, but he was a person. And he shows us that the power of God is not just some force that's out there. It's not just some force that exists in the world and yes, God has it, but no one else does. Jesus showed us that the very power of God can be at work in a person. Now I think it's really easy for us to hear that and go, yeah, yeah, in the person of Jesus, right? Yeah, he's Jesus. And so, of course, the power of God was at work in Jesus, but but what about us? What about us? I want us to look at a couple of scriptures. Um, let's take a look next at Romans chapter 8, verse 11. It says, the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead. Now, earlier we looked at a scripture that said the power that raised Jesus from the dead. This says the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by the same Spirit living within you. Jesus Christ had the Spirit of God in him. That's the power through which he did everything that he did. It wasn't his own strength. He set that strength aside. Read Philippians chapter 2. Jesus set his strength, his power aside when he came to earth to be born as a person. So the power that he used to do all the miracles that he did, that was the power of the Holy Spirit. That's the power that raised him from the dead. That's the same spirit, by the way, that lives in you. So, yes, Jesus shows us that the power of God can be active in a person, but this reminds us that it can also be active in us. Let's look at another scripture, Ephesians chapter 3, verse 20. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power, same phrase we saw elsewhere, describe the power of God, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Do you hear that? Does that hit you the way it's meant to hit you? I hope it does. This is saying that the power of God, the same power that Jesus used to do every miracle that he did, the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, that power is at work within you. This good news of Jesus, this good news is power. It's the good news that you have the power of God active in your life. Now, I want us to take a second and really ask ourselves the question: do I actually believe that? I mean, it sounds nice, it sounds good, it makes me kind of go, yeah, hopefully you're sitting on your couch going, yeah. Uh, but but do I actually believe that? That I have the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead active in my life? And if I really did believe that, would it change the way that I live? Would it change the way that I think? Would it change the way that I approach life? How often in life do we encounter a circumstance or a situation and we have a defeated attitude? I mean, come on, the last the last 15, 16 weeks when all of the craziness of the world has really hit ahead, how many of us have encountered situations that we've never been in before? I feel like I've been in uncharted water every single day. And it's so easy in those moments for us to come at it and just be defeated. Like, I don't know what to do, I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's gonna happen, I don't know what the future looks like, and it's so tempting for us to almost admit defeat. But here's the thing if you're a follower of Jesus, you don't ever have to admit defeat. That's why Scripture says that we are more than conquerors, that you have the power of God at work within you. And this power, we've got to understand this power that's at work within us. It's it's resurrection power, it's power that raised Jesus from the dead. And that's the funny thing about Jesus. When there were things around Jesus that happened to be dead, they didn't tend to stay dead. Jesus has this way of resurrecting dead things. And so if you have dead hope, guess what? Jesus can resurrect that hope through the power of the Holy Spirit that is at work within you right now. Right now, if you've given your life to Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit. You have the power of God at work within you. So if you have, if you had dead hope, dead confidence, if the relationship that you're in feels dead, if your ability to forgive feels dead, if your ability to love, if it feels dead, guess what? It's not dead because nothing that's dead stays dead around Jesus because he's the one who resurrects things. His power is resurrection power, so you can trust in that power that God has put inside of you, and you can look at whatever in your life feels dead and you can speak life over it. You can say, in the name of Jesus, come back to life. And have trust and belief. Again, it matters what we believe. If you're a believer, what you believe matters. That the power of God is at work within you. So if anything in your life isn't alive right now and it needs to be, if you've seen some things die a little bit, if you've seen your hope become cynicism, whatever it might be, pray and recognize that you have the power of God at work within you. That that's true. It's not just a saying, it's not just an expression, that it's absolute truth. You have the very power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead at work within you. It is working. Let it work. Trust it to do the work that it wants to do. Trust Jesus to finish what he starts. In fact, I want to go back to Romans chapter 1, verses 16 through 17. This is kind of what we we started on, and this is really the theme of this whole section of Romans. He says, I'm not ashamed of this good news about Christ. It's the power of God at work, it's saving everyone who believes, the Jew first and also the Gentile. And then it says this: this good news tells us how God makes us right in his sight. I mean, think about that for a second. You are right in the eyes of God. He looks at you and he goes, Yes, I approve. How does that happen? It says, This is accomplished. It happens from start to finish by faith. Start to finish by faith. Now, now, if we take this and we connect it to another scripture, Hebrews chapter 12, verse 2, I don't have it on the screen, but Hebrews 12, 2 says that Jesus is the initiator and the finisher of our faith. Some translations say he is the author and the perfecter. Okay, so it tells us that the work that God wants to do within us, this whole concept of us having the confidence that we've been made right in his sight, that that's happened, that this happens from start to finish through faith. Well, who's the one who starts our faith? Jesus. Hebrews 12, 2, who's the one who finishes our faith? Jesus. So if it's accomplished from start to finish by faith, then that means that Jesus is the one from start to finish making us into the people that we're meant to be. We've got to trust that the power of God that's at work within us is working and that it's going to continue to work. And so if right now, today you have issues and you have struggles and you have addictions and you have mindsets and you have all types of things that aren't the way they're supposed to be, that's because God's not done with you. That's because what he has started, he has yet to finish, but you have to have faith, you have to believe that he's going to finish it, that he's faithful to finish what he starts. And if you have that faith, if you just allow Jesus and the Holy Spirit to keep working on you bit by bit, piece by piece, you will absolutely experience the freedom and the power that you are meant to live with. Here's what you've got to hear. This is what you need to believe. Like at the end of the day, every message we give is ultimately a statement of belief. Because everything we do, every action we make, it comes out of what we truly believe. So you need to believe this: that you have been empowered by God to live a powerful life. You've been empowered by God to live a powerful life, that the Spirit of God lives in you. Now, whether you feel it right now or you don't, that doesn't change the fact that the Spirit of God lives in you. There are things inside of you right now that you can't feel. Like, like raise your hand, and I can't see you if you're doing this or not, but just go with it. Raise your hand if you can feel your liver right now. A lot of us are like, where is my liver? It's somewhere over here. No, you can't feel your liver, but it's it's at work inside of you right now. Right? There's all kinds of things at work inside of you right now that you can't feel. Sometimes we get so caught up in our emotions that if we don't feel God moving, we assume he's not. That's not true. God's work, his action, it's not dependent on your emotional state. So even if you don't feel like he's at work, he is at work. Why? Because he says he is, and he never lies. He is at work within you. His mighty power is at work within you. So let him work. Trust him. Every single day, surrender to him. I hope in this crazy season that we're all living in, I hope you've looked at the world and I've hoped you've realized that you shouldn't put your faith in the systems of this world. Whether those systems are political or governmental, which I guess is the same thing, whatever, whatever systems you're I'm talking about. I hope that you've looked at the world right now and said, I'm not going to put my faith in the systems of this world, I'm going to put my faith in Jesus. That every single day we should live and we should take a little bit more stock out of the world and put more and more of that stock in Jesus, to the point that we've put it all on Jesus. I'm not putting any of my hope in the things of this world. I'm taking all of my stock out of that and I'm putting all of my stock on Jesus because He's the one who started my faith, and He's the one who's going to finish it by the power of the Holy Spirit at work within me. I know it probably feels like I'm hammering the same nail over and over and over again, and that's because I am, but it's also because that same nail is a nail that we have a tendency of prying up because we just don't really believe that the power of God is ours. It lives in us. This good news is power. You've got to believe this. You've got to believe this. This good news is power, and it's power at work within you. He has empowered you to live a powerful life. So believe that and live that. And every day when you encounter some situation, some circumstance, some person that is meant to discourage you, you claim the truth. That greater is He that is in you than He that is in the world. That's scripture. The power at work within you is more powerful than anything that you will ever experience in this world. Trust it, believe it, and live empowered. Do not live defeated because you have not been defeated. You have been raised in victory through your faith in Jesus. Let's pray. Father God, thank you so much for the power that you give us. To be honest, God, it doesn't fully make sense. It really doesn't, Lord. In many ways, it doesn't make sense. And we don't always feel it. Lord, I don't always feel your power at work. I don't always feel like you're doing whatever you promise to do, but I've also lived enough life at this point to understand that your work that's happening within me doesn't require my feeling it to take place. It doesn't require me feeling it to know that it's doing what it's what it's meant to do. You are at work within me. You are at work within us. You're at work within all of us when we give our faith to you, when we put our trust in you. So, Jesus, I just pray in your name that you would give every person listening to this, watching this, whether it's live, whether it's years from now, whether it's video, whether it's audio, I don't care, Lord, I pray that you give every person listening or watching this the faith to trust that your power is real and it is at work within us right this very second. And that there will be a day where everything we struggle with is broken, where every addiction we have, every mindset, every attitude, every struggle we have are all in the past because your power has finished what it started. That day will come, we will experience it. Lord, give us the faith to trust in your power. We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.