God is eternal, God is infinite, God is glorious, God is the reality in the universe.

And He has a son who has always existed, who has never come into being, but has always been

eternally begotten by the Father's imaging forth of Himself. These magnificent, unspeakably great,

weighty realities are in the gospel. How has this gospel with weighty realities come to us?

That's the question that John Piper answers from Romans 1-4 in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on May 3, 1998.

Last week we began a series of messages on the book of Romans and we saw in verse 1,

as you can see there in the very first phrases, that Paul, the author, is a servant of Christ Jesus,

and I argued that that meant, among other things, He was bought by Christ, He was owned by Christ,

and He was ruled by Christ. And as we saw in Galatians 1, He pleases Christ alone, He tries to

please Christ and not people. I want to qualify something less at the very outset here,

we skew the whole meaning of the book of Romans with a misunderstanding about the nature of

Apostolic Servanthood or Christian Servanthood.

One of the great advantages to preaching through the book of Romans when you're 52 and you've been a

Christian for 46 years is that you've read it before and you know what's at the end,

which helps you understand the beginning. The author has a great advantage over the reader

in that the author knows where he's going when he writes the first sentence and so there's meaning

in it that comes later and we have to wait until we get later then back up, reread the first verse

and learn a little more. So we go in circles and he goes in a straight line and that's okay.

So I've read verse 18 of chapter 15. I'll read it to you. Paul says,

I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me

resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles by word and deed.

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