If you understand,

understand wrath and you understand sin and ungodliness and unrighteousness,

you will desperately look for the gospel.

So how desperately do we need the gospel? John Piper turns to Romans 118 to answer that all important question

in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on August 30th 1998.

Father, I ask for your help as I undertake to open verse 18 for our hearts and minds and

lives and church and city and the nations.

I ask that this not be a wasted half hour

and that you would come by your spirit and continue to give a kneeling posture to

our hearts that we would bow before your authority and be changed by your holy revelation.

So draw near now and give me an anointing for this work of preaching, I pray, and a special blessing of hearing upon your people.

And should there be some here as I am sure there are who are unbelieving?

I ask that they would be given the gift of careful listening and true understanding and right judgment

and humble consideration and be drawn by the beauty of Christ and his gospel into saving faith.

In Jesus, name I pray, Amen.

We're going to take a major turn now in our exposition of the Book of Romans.

The theme of the letter, we've been on for six weeks in verses 16 and 17 of chapter one

namely the power of God which saves believers

by revealing to them month after month and year after year what they so

desperately need every day namely the gift of righteousness offered freely to faith.

And in verse 18 he begins a section about sin and judgment and wrath that will take him all the way to chapter 3 verse 21

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