For I Am Not Ashamed Of The Gospel

What strikes me first about Romans is that Paul is writing to believers he has never sat with. He had planted churches across the eastern Mediterranean, but the Christians in Rome were not his doing. He is introducing himself on paper, hoping to call in on his way to Spain (he says as much in Romans 15:24), and this one sentence is where he nails his colours to the mast. So when he tells these strangers in the imperial capital that he is not ashamed of the good news, he is announcing who he is and what he lives for before they have had any chance to weigh him up.

The setting gives the words their edge. Rome was the city of power and reputation, the last place a crucified Jewish teacher would sound anything but absurd. Paul knows this perfectly well. He is not naive about how his message would land among people who respected strength and despised weakness. Yet his opening move is to refuse the shame the city would happily press on him. I find that quietly bold. He leads with the very thing the world would expect him to hide.

There is something worth noticing in the phrasing. Paul does not say he is proud of the message, or that he loves it, though both would be true. He says he is not ashamed of it. That is a defensive word turned into a banner, and it tells me he knows the tug of embarrassment from the inside. You only deny a feeling you have actually met.

The sentence then runs like a chain of reasons. He is not ashamed because it is the power of God. It is power because it is God’s chosen means of salvation. And that salvation reaches “everyone who believes”. Each link carries the weight of the one before it. The Greek behind “power” carries the sense of effective, working strength, the kind that actually rescues rather than merely impresses. What is easy to miss is the order at the close: “for the Jew first, and also for the Greek.” Paul holds God’s faithfulness to Israel together with the open door for everyone else. Nobody is shut out, and nobody is forgotten.

This refusal to be ashamed only makes sense against the wider story. Crucifixion was the death Rome kept for slaves and rebels, a punishment designed to humiliate as much as to kill. The Scriptures of Israel went further still and spoke of a hanged man as cursed, a tension Paul works through in Galatians 3:13. To preach a crucified Messiah as the saving power of God was, on the face of it, to invite contempt. He admits as much in 1 Corinthians 1:18, where the message of the cross looks like foolishness to those who are perishing.

That is the heart of it for me. The gospel takes the most shameful thing in the empire and names it the power of God. The cross is not made respectable. It becomes the very place where the rescue happens. And the way in is not achievement but trust, which is why Paul ties salvation so tightly to believing and confessing in Romans 10:9. The One he refuses to be ashamed of in Caesar’s city is the same Jesus who warned, in Mark 8:38, that to be ashamed of him now is to find that shame returned.

Years later, writing from prison, Paul would ask Timothy not to be ashamed of the testimony, nor of him in his chains (2 Timothy 1:8). I find that pairing telling. It was one thing for Timothy to believe the message. It was another to be linked, in public, to an old man the empire had locked up for it. The shame Paul keeps naming is rarely about the truth of the gospel in the abstract. It is about being seen with it, and with the people who carry it.

That is where it bites for me. I can hold the message firmly in private and still go quiet when believing it might make me look credulous, or out of step, or simply awkward in front of someone whose opinion I value. Paul is not asking me to win an argument. He is asking me to stop treating the best news I know as something to be managed and minimised, as though God’s reputation depended on me keeping it tasteful. The strength, after all, is in the message. My job is mostly to stop apologising for it.

• Where, honestly, does the embarrassment land hardest for me: a particular person, a particular room, a particular subject I steer around?
• Do I really believe the message itself is powerful, or do I quietly act as though its success rests on how well I explain it?
• When I write someone off as too far gone to be reached, am I forgetting the “everyone who believes” in this verse?
• What might actually change this week if I trusted the message more than I feared the reaction?

If you would like to keep going, you could sit with a few more passages on courage and faith over on our topic pages, or read on through Paul’s letter to the Romans.