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.

Notice the word Paul reaches for. He does not call the good news a useful principle, or a tip for a steadier life, or his considered opinion on religious matters. He calls it the power of God. That is a different category altogether. Advice hands you a task and then leaves you to manage it: try harder, think more clearly, sort yourself out. The gospel works the other way round. It announces what God has already done in Christ, and it brings the strength to make that real in someone who could never have managed it on their own. The robber by the fire was not handed a self-improvement scheme. He was met, and turned right around. This is also where my confidence is meant to sit. When I go quiet and edge a conversation away from Jesus, I am treating the message as my private opinion, something I have to make sound clever, rather than as power I am only asked to pass along. The strength was never mine to supply.

Then there is the reach of it. Salvation comes to everyone who believes, Paul says, to the Jew first and then, in the same breath, to the Greek. In Rome that pairing carried weight. Jew and Greek was not a gentle figure of speech but the great fault line of the ancient world, the divide between the covenant people and everyone outside it, between those with a claim and those with none. Paul drives the good news straight across that line. He keeps the order, Israel first, because God made promises and stays faithful to them. But the door swings open just as wide to the outsider, to anyone at all. The one condition is believing. Not pedigree, not nationality, not a respectable past. I find that both humbling and steadying. Humbling, because it means I never earned my place. Steadying, because it leaves no one I am allowed to write off as past saving. The church in Rome was itself this very mix, Jew and Gentile slowly learning to share one table.

Here is where the verse gets stretched further than it will go. Paul is telling the Roman church why he is glad to come and preach among them, which is what he has just said in the sentence before (Romans 1:15). What he offers is a confession about his own state, not a rota he is handing round. But I have heard it used as exactly that: pressed on someone who went quiet in a hard conversation, as though the silence proved they had never really believed. If you were not ashamed, you would have said something. That turns Paul’s testimony about himself into a verdict on somebody else’s Tuesday afternoon at work, and the sentence will not carry that weight.

The same stretch shows up dressed as courage. “Not ashamed” gets read as licence to be blunt, or to push a conversation nobody wanted, as though bluntness proved conviction. But Paul names what he is not ashamed of, the message, and says nothing at all about how loudly he is entitled to deliver it. Confidence in the good news and rudeness on God’s behalf are not the same virtue, whatever the borrowed use makes of them.

If I were building a talk on this verse, I would resist preaching it as a stand-alone slogan, because it is not doing stand-alone work where Paul puts it. It reads like a hinge, and its clauses keep pointing forward to arguments he has not made yet.

Take them in order, though I offer this as one reasonable way to see the letter’s shape rather than the only one. The power of God for salvation is the claim the very next verse begins to unpack, where righteousness by faith gets named (Romans 1:17), and the long stretch from Romans 1:18 to 3:20 sets out why anyone should need rescuing at all. “Everyone who believes” is what the middle chapters work through at length, faith rather than law as the way in. And “for the Jew first, and also for the Greek” is no passing courtesy: it is the question Paul wrestles with across Romans 9 to 11, what becomes of Israel’s promises now the door stands open to Gentiles. The ranges overlap, and I would not lean on them harder than they will bear.

So the spine of a talk here is really a promise to the room: this one sentence is the letter’s contents page. Preach it well and people leave knowing what the rest of Romans is for.

I would reach for this verse at a commissioning. Someone sent to a hard placement, licensed to preach, or stepping into a baptism their family will not be glad about. It fits a moment where a person is choosing, in front of witnesses, to be publicly identified with something costly, and a leader can say that out loud without straining the text.

I would not reach for it as a general verse for nerves, before an exam or a match or an interview, the way it often gets pulled loose from its subject. The confidence Paul names is confidence in a message, the good news of Christ, not confidence in general, and it is no charm against butterflies. If you are choosing a reading for a service, the test I use is blunt enough to apply in a minute: is anyone in this room paying a price for being seen with Jesus? If so, the verse belongs there and will do what Paul meant it to do. If not, there is a better one on the shelf.

Two verses before the sentence everyone quotes, Paul says something that gets stepped over on the way to the famous line. He calls himself a debtor, to Greeks and to those outside Greek culture, to the wise and to the foolish (Romans 1:14). That word does more work than it looks like it does. A debtor has no vote on whether he feels like paying. He owes because something was handed to him that was never his to keep back.

Which changes how I hear “I am not ashamed” in the very next breath. For years I read it as Paul reporting his mood, as though he had worked up enough nerve that particular morning. But debt does not run on nerve. A courier is not asked whether he feels confident about the parcel before he knocks; he is asked to deliver it, because it was never his to hold on to. That is oddly steadying on the days I feel nothing like bold. The obligation was not conditional on the courage arriving first. It is still owed on the flat, unremarkable Tuesday when I would honestly rather it were not.

Rome did not leave “good news” lying about unclaimed, waiting for Paul to pick it up off the street. The word behind it, euangelion, was the sort of word an empire used for its own announcements: a victory, an accession, the birthday of the man at the top. The example usually cited is an inscription from Priene, in what is now Turkey, which speaks of the birthday of Augustus as good news for the world.

Let me be straight about how I hold that. I am repeating what people who actually work with the inscriptions say, not something our small team has read off the stone itself, and you should weigh it accordingly. But even held loosely it does something to the verse. Paul was not minting a private religious vocabulary out of nothing. He reached for a word the empire was already using about itself.

The salvation half is subtler than it is often made to sound. The word here is sōtēria, rescue, and it shares a root with sōtēr, saviour, a title the ancient world handed out freely to rulers and emperors, men credited with bringing peace to the world at the point of a sword. So it is a family resemblance rather than Paul lifting Caesar’s exact title. That is enough. Post this sentence into the one city where that vocabulary was thickest on the ground, and it stops being a friendly greeting and starts being a quiet piece of treason against the empire’s favourite story about itself. What gets me is how unbothered it sounds. He is not shouting. He is a man who knows precisely which words he has just taken back, and from whom, and who is going to read the letter out loud.

By chapters 9 to 11 Paul has stopped talking about his own composure entirely and started grieving. So many of his own people, the ones he loves enough to say he could wish himself cursed for their sake (Romans 9:3), have not believed. And right in the thick of that grief he reaches back into Isaiah, twice, for the promise that whoever believes in him will not be disappointed (Romans 9:33, and again at Romans 10:11).

Now, go and look those up in the wording on this page and you will not see a shame word anywhere. That is the bit I want to be careful about, because it took me years to spot and I nearly talked myself out of it. The verb Paul uses there is built on the same shame root as the “ashamed” of 1:16, and our English simply cannot carry both senses at once, so it picks “disappointed” and the thread goes underground. No translator did anything wrong. The Greek word genuinely means both, and English makes you choose. But it does mean most of us read past a stitch Paul is pulling on purpose. The shame language of the opening line does not stay in the opening line. It surfaces again exactly where the argument hurts him most.

Which tells me what “ashamed” was doing all along. It was never a report on whether his face stayed steady in front of strangers. It is the question of whether trusting God turns out, in the end, to have been well placed. He stakes his reputation on that in his first proper sentence, cheerfully enough, and then spends the three hardest chapters he ever wrote working out the cost when the bet looks, from where he is standing, like it has not paid off for the very people God made the promise to first.

I would rather say the honest thing here than the tidy one. Paul calls the good news the power of God for salvation, and I believe him. But I have sat with people who believe it every bit as hard as I do and are still waiting. Waiting for the marriage to mend. Waiting for the son to come home, for the depression to lift after the prayer that was supposed to be the turning point. If this message carries the power Paul says it carries, why does so much stay exactly as broken as it was before anyone believed a word of it?

I do not have a clean answer, and I have learned to distrust anyone who produces one quickly, especially in a hospital corridor. What I can say is that Paul’s word is salvation, the rescue of a whole person into God’s own life, and not a guarantee that circumstances bend to order on request. That is true. It is also, I know perfectly well, the kind of true that can sound like a technicality to someone holding a chart with bad news on it in another person’s handwriting. So the power is real, and it does not always look like what we asked for, and some days that gap is just the place I have to stand without pretending it costs nothing to stand there. Better to admit that than to press this verse on a wound as a plaster. Paul himself, a few chapters on, says the whole creation is still groaning, still waiting to be set free (Romans 8:22). Whatever this power is doing, it has plainly not finished. Neither, most days, have I finished waiting on it.

Every child knows the exact heat that climbs the face when you are caught liking the wrong thing at the wrong moment: the toy still loved past the age it is supposed to be boxed up, a parent waving too enthusiastically at the school gate where everyone can see. That flush is shame in miniature, and it is the plainest door I know into this verse with a child, rather than over the top of their head. Ask what makes their face go red and the answer comes back specific and honest every time. Start there.

Then you can say, without varnish, that grown-ups get that same heat about Jesus. Not because he did anything embarrassing, but because saying his name in the wrong room feels uncomfortably close to admitting you still like the toy everybody else put away. Paul is a grown man writing to a church full of strangers, and he spends his first proper sentence to them saying he will not go red about it. I would not tell a child the feeling goes away when you are older, because it does not, and by the sound of it not for Paul either, or he would not have needed the sentence. I would tell them you can feel your face go hot and say the true thing anyway. That is harder than never feeling it, and a good deal better.

• 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.