Romans 1:16 captures a bold, surprising confidence: the good news isn’t something to tuck away or soften for comfort. It’s God’s living power at work—strong enough to save, steady enough to stand on, and personal enough to speak to your real life today.

Bold Confidence, Not Borrowed Courage

There’s a difference between being loud and being unashamed. Loudness can hide fear; unashamedness comes from knowing something is solid. Paul isn’t flexing personality—he’s resting in reality. The gospel isn’t a self-help concept or a private preference; it’s the message God uses to rescue sinners and remake lives. That means your faith isn’t fragile just because the culture is skeptical. The good news holds its own because God stands behind it.

Ask yourself: what keeps you quiet? Fear of being misunderstood, labeled, dismissed? Remember what Jesus said: “Everyone who acknowledges Me before men, I will also acknowledge him before My Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:32). That isn’t pressure; it’s invitation—into honesty, clarity, and loyalty. And when you feel weak, you’re not disqualified. “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Unashamed living starts with leaning on His strength, not performing your own.

Power That Reaches the Real You

God’s power in the gospel isn’t abstract; it meets you where you actually are. It confronts sin without crushing hope, and it offers forgiveness without minimizing holiness. The gospel doesn’t just improve behavior—it changes identity. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). That’s not motivational language; that’s the miracle of conversion and ongoing renewal.

And this power doesn’t run out after the moment you first believed. It keeps working—when temptation is loud, when shame resurfaces, when obedience feels costly. “For the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12). If you’re stuck, don’t merely try harder; come closer. Open the Scriptures, confess honestly, and ask the Spirit to apply what Christ has already purchased. The gospel power that saved you is the same power that sanctifies you.

A Righteousness You Can Stand On

Romans 1:16 points to salvation, but it’s rooted in something deeper: God’s righteousness given to those who believe. The gospel isn’t good advice about how to become acceptable; it’s good news that Christ has made a way for the unacceptable to be welcomed. “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). That changes how you approach God today—less like a defendant, more like a child.

So when accusations rise—either from others or from your own heart—don’t argue with feelings; answer with truth. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). This doesn’t produce laziness; it produces love-fueled obedience. You’re free to live openly because your standing is secure. Faith doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine; it means trusting that Jesus is enough—and then walking like it.

Father, thank You for the saving power of the gospel and for the righteousness You give in Christ. Make me unashamed today—help me speak and live with humble courage, and obey You wherever You lead. Amen.

A SHORT GENERATION AGO, or about the time of the first World War, there was a feeling among gospel Christians that the end of the age was near, and many were breathless with anticipation of a new world order about to emerge.

This new order was to be preceded by a silent return of Christ to earth, not to remain, but to raise the righteous dead to immortality and to glorify the living saints in the twinkling of an eye. These He would catch away to the marriage supper of the Lamb, while the earth meanwhile plunged into its baptism of fire and blood in the Great Tribulation. This would be relatively brief, ending dramatically with the battle of Armageddon and the triumphant return of Christ with His Bride to reign a thousand years.

Thus the hopes and dreams of Christians were directed toward an event to be followed by a new order in which they would have a leading part. This expectation for many was so real that it quite literally determined their world outlook and way of life. One well-known and highly respected Christian leader, when handed a sum of money to pay off the mortgage on the church building, refused to use it for that purpose. Instead he used it to help send missionaries to the heathen to hasten the Lord's return. This is probably an extreme example, but it does reveal the acute apocalyptic expectation that prevailed among Christians around the time of World War I and immediately following.

Before we condemn this as extravagant we should back off a bit and try to see the whole thing in perspective. We may be wiser now (though that is open to serious question), but those Christians had something very wonderful which we today lack. They had a unifying hope; we have none. Their activities were concentrated; ours are scattered, overlapping and often self-defeating. They fully expected to win; we are not even sure we know what win means. Our Christian hope has been subjected to so much examination, analysis and revision that we are embarrassed to admit that we have such a hope at all.

And those expectant believers were not wholly wrong. They were only wrong about the time. They saw Christ's triumph as being nearer than it was, and for that reason their timing was off; but their hope itself was valid. Many of us have had the experience of misjudging the distance of a mountain toward which we were traveling. The huge bulk that loomed against the sky seemed very near, and it was hard to persuade ourselves that it was not receding as we approached. So the City of God appears so large to the minds of the world-weary pilgrim that he is sometimes the innocent victim of an optical illusion; and he may be more than a little disappointed when the glory seems to move farther away as he approaches.

But the mountain is there; the traveler need only press on to reach it. And the Christian's hope is there too; his judgment is not always too sharp, but he is not mistaken in the long view; he will see the glory in God's own time.

We evangelicals have become sophisticated, blas. We have lost what someone called the millennial component from our Christian faith. To escape what we believe to be the slough of a mistaken hope we have detoured far out into the wilderness of complete hopelessness.

Christians now chatter learnedly about things simple believers have always taken for granted. They are on the defensive, trying to prove things that a previous generation never doubted. We have allowed unbelievers to get us in a corner and have given them the advantage by permitting them to choose the time and place of encounter. We smart under the attack of the quasi-Christian unbeliever, and the nervous, self-conscious defense we make is called the religious dialogue.

Under the scornful attack of the religious critic real Christians who ought to know better are now rethinking their faith. Scarcely anything has escaped the analysts. With a Freudian microscope they examine everything: foreign missions, the Book of Genesis. the inspiration of the Scriptures, morals, all tried and proven methods, polygamy, liquor, sex, prayer-all have come in for inquisition by those who engage in the contemporary dialogue. Adoration has given way to celebration in the holy place, if indeed any holy place remains to this generation of confused Christians. The causes of the decline of apocalyptic expectation are many, not the least being the affluent society in which we live. If the rich man with difficulty enters the kingdom of God, then it would be logical to conclude that a society having the highest percentage of well-to-do persons in it would have the lowest percentage of Christians, all things else being equal. If the deceitfulness of riches chokes the Word and makes it unfruitful, then this would be the day of near-fruitless preaching, at least in the opulent West. And if surfeiting and drunkenness and worldly cares tend to unfit the Christian for the coming of Christ, then this generation of Christians should be the least prepared for that event.

On the North American continent Christianity has become the religion of the prosperous middle and upper classes almost entirely, the very rich or the very poor rarely become practicing Christians. The touching picture of the poorly dressed, hungry saint, clutching his Bible under his arm and with the light of God shining in his face hobbling painfully toward the church, is chiefly imaginary. One of the biggest problems of even the most ardent Christian these days is to find a parking place for the shiny chariot that transports him effortlessly to the house of God where he hopes to prepare his soul for the world to come.

In the United States and Canada the middle class today possesses more earthly goods and lives in greater luxury than emperors and maharajas did a short century ago. And since the bulk of Christians comes from this class it is not difficult to see why the apocalyptic hope has all but disappeared from among us. It is hard to focus attention upon a better world to come when a more comfortable one than this can hardly be imagined. The best we can do is to look for heaven after we have revelled for a lifetime in the luxuries of a fabulously generous earth. As long as science can make us so cozy in this present world it is hard to work up much pleasurable anticipation of a new world order.

But affluence is only one cause of the decline of the apocalyptic hope. There are other and more important ones.

The whole problem is a big one, a theological one, a moral one. An inadequate view of Christ may be the chief trouble. Christ has been explained, humanized, demoted. Many professed Christians no longer expect Him to usher in a new order; they are not at all sure that He is able to do so; or if He does, it will be with the help of art, education, science and technology; that is, with the help of man. This revised expectation amounts to disillusionment for many. And of course no one can become too radiantly happy over a King of kings who has been stripped of His crown or a Lord of lords who has lost His sovereignty.

Another cause of the decline of expectation is hope deferred which, according to the proverb, maketh the heart sick. The modern civilized man is impatient; he takes the short-range view of things. He is surrounded by gadgets that get things done in a hurry. He was brought up on quick oats; he likes his instant coffee; he wears drip-dry shirts and takes one-minute Polaroid snapshots of his children. His wife shops for her spring hat before the leaves are down in the fall. His new car, if he buys it after June 1, is already an old model when he brings it home. He is almost always in a hurry and can't bear to wait for anything.

This breathless way of living naturally makes for a mentality impatient of delay, and when this man enters the kingdom of God he brings his short-range psychology with him. He finds prophecy too slow for him. His first radiant expectations soon lose their luster. He is likely to inquire, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? and when there is no immediate response he may conclude, My lord delayeth his coming. The faith of Christ offers no buttons to push for quick service. The new order must wait the Lord's own time, and that is too much for the man in a hurry. He just gives up and becomes interested in something else.

Another cause is eschatological confusion. The vitalizing hope of the emergence of a new world wherein dwelleth righteousness became an early casualty in the war of conflicting prophetic interpretations. Teachers of prophecy, who knew more than the prophets they claimed to teach, debated the fine points of Scripture ad infinitum while a discouraged and disillusioned Christian public shook their heads and wondered. A leader of one evangelical group told me that his denomination had recently been, in his words, split down the middle over a certain small point of prophetic teaching, one incidentally which had never been heard of among the children of God until about one hundred years ago.

Certain popular views of prophecy have been discredited by events within the lifetime of some of us; a new generation of Christians cannot be blamed if their Messianic expectations are somewhat confused. When the teachers are divided, what can the pupils do?

It should be noted that there is a vast difference between the doctrine of Christ's coming and the hope of His coming. The first we may hold without feeling a trace of the second. Indeed there are multitudes of Christians today who hold the doctrine of the second coming. What I have talked about here is that overwhelming sense of anticipation that lifts the life onto a new plane and fills the heart with rapturous optimism. This is what we today lack.

Frankly, I do not know whether or not it is possible to recapture the spirit of anticipation that animated the Early Church and cheered the hearts of gospel Christians only a few decades ago. Certainly scolding will not bring it back, nor arguing over prophecy, nor condemning those who do not agree with us. We may do all or any of these things without arousing the desired spirit of joyous expectation. That unifying, healing, purifying hope is for the childlike, the innocent-hearted, the unsophisticated.

Possibly nothing short of a world catastrophe that will destroy every false trust and turn our eyes once more upon the Man Christ Jesus will bring back the glorious hope to a generation that has lost it.

Choose you this day whom you will serve. - Joshua 24:15

You should deliberately decide whether or not Jesus Christ is to be your Saviour and your King. Deliberately decide! God has given us that awful gift of choice, and thereby has laid upon us a tremendous weight of responsibility which separates us from all the less endowed, and sometimes, because less endowed, more happy creatures round us. And what do men do with it for the most part? I wonder how many of us have drifted into our "opinions," as we are pleased to call them, by quite another process than that of an intelligent weighing of the force of evidence. I wonder how many of us have, what we say, with unconscious self-condemnation, fallen into ways and habits of action which we never consciously resolved should be our masters. I believe, for my part, that the most of the life of the bulk of men is lived without any adequate exercise of their own deliberate volition and determination. Sadly, too, many of us seem to think that Nansen’s way of getting to the North Pole is the best way of getting through the world - to put ourselves into a current and let it carry us. We drift. We do not decide, or, if we do, we let deliberate choice be coerced by inclination, and let wishes put their claws into the scale, and drag it down. Or we allow our environment to settle a large part of our beliefs and of our practices. It must settle a great deal of both for all of us; and none of us can get rid of the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. But we are meant to be hammers, and not anvils; to mould circumstances, not to be battered and molded by them; to exercise a deliberate choice, and not to be like dead fish in the river, who are carried by the stream - or like derelicts in the Atlantic, that go floating about for years, and never reach any port at all, but are caught by the currents, and are slaves of every wind that blows.

Youth is the time for hope. The world lies all before us, fair and untried. The past is too brief to occupy us long, and its farthest point too near to be clothed in the airy purple which draws the eye and stirs the heart. We are conscious of increasing powers which crave for occupation. It seems impossible but that success and joy shall be ours. So we live for a little while in a golden haze; we look down from our peak upon the virgin forests of a new world that roll away to the shining waters in the west; and then we plunge into their mazes to hew out a path for ourselves, to slay the wild beasts, and to find and conquer rich lands. But soon we discover what hard work the march is, and what monsters lurk in the leafy coverts, and diseases hover among the marshes, and how short a distance ahead we can see, and how far off it is to the treasure-cities we dreamed of; and if at last we gain some cleared spot whence we can look forward, our weary eyes are searching at most for a place of rest, and all our hopes have dwindled to hopes of safety and repose. If you have God for your " enduring substance," you can face all varieties of condition, and be calm, saying,

"Give what Thou canst, without Thee I am poor,

And with Thee rich; take what Thou wilt away."

The amulet that charms away disquiet lies here.