CCC Livestream - It's All About The Gospel - Romans 10:14-21
Live Worship Gathering: 9/21/2025
Preaching: Jason Purdy
Sent To Preach The Good News
Jason Purdy
It’s All About The Gospel / Romans 10:14–21
I invite you to turn with me to Romans 10.
We will look at verses 14-21 today.
Kids, I hope you are making it a habit of picking up a sermon activity sheet to help you engage during the sermon.
I remember when I was finishing my seminary degree and working as an intern at a church in Maryland, I also had a job teaching mommy and me exercise classes to kids and their moms.
It’s okay. You can laugh.
People like me who go straight from high school to Bible school have weird jobs since we don’t have a background in anything.
Anyway, as I got to know people through that job, people would often ask me what my goals were, and I would tell them I was studying to be a pastor.
And in that context, most people would immediately ask, “Why in the world would you want to do that?”
And my simple answer was that I believe the Bible is true, Jesus rose from the dead, and I desire to serve Him and His church with my life.
But, our culture is very skeptical of faith and Jesus.
We constantly deal with challenges and questions about Christianity in a culture like ours.
As we dive back into Romans today, Paul has been seeking to answer a question and a challenge to the gospel in his own day.
The question was: if the gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and Jesus was an ethnic Jew, and the Jews were the chosen people of God in the Old Testament, then why is it that so many more Gentiles are believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ than Jews are?
In other words: how can it be that so many who did not grow up with the Word of God and the law of God are now believing the gospel of Jesus Christ, while so many who did grow up learning the word of God and the law of God are now rejecting the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Paul’s answer began in Romans 9, where he showed that God never promised to save every single Jew, but He would save a remnant of them as well as a remnant from all other peoples of the earth.
He then explained that so many Jews have failed to accept the gospel that God offers his righteousness to us as a gift, because they had spent their life believing that they were establishing their own righteousness with God by obeying God’s law.
Then, last week, we saw that Jesus Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes meaning that anyone who confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised him from the dead will be gifted the very righteousness of God for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Now in our passage today, we are going to see how God accomplishes getting the message of the gospel to others, and how the Jewish people by and large missed being saved not because they had not heard the gospel proclaimed, but because they stubbornly refused to obey the gospel.
And the same way God got the message of the gospel to people in that day is the same way He gets it to people today.
Follow along with me as a read:
Romans 10:14–21 ESV
14 How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” 17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
18 But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for
“Their voice has gone out to all the earth,
and their words to the ends of the world.”
19 But I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says,
“I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation;
with a foolish nation I will make you angry.”
20 Then Isaiah is so bold as to say,
“I have been found by those who did not seek me;
I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”
21 But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”
1. God Sends His People To Preach The Gospel To Others
Verse 13 summed up last week’s passage by proclaiming that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Now, verse 14 begins a series of questions Paul asks in order to show us how it is that people come to the point of calling on the name of the Lord for salvation.
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
We said last week that it is out of the heart that the mouth speaks, so one must first believe that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead before they can call on the name of the Lord for salvation.
And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?
No one can believe in Jesus if they have never heard of him, because like I said last week, salvation does not come from just having positive thoughts about God, it only comes from a right understanding and surrender to Jesus as Savior and Lord.
And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
It’s interesting to me that when we hear about a person coming to faith in Jesus from a muslim context that has very little gospel witness, many times God gives them a dream, but in every testimony I have heard, the dream always leads them on a journey to find a Christian and to find a Bible.
I have never heard a testimony of a person learning about the full knowledge of Jesus Christ in a dream and coming to faith.
Why? Because God has chosen that his people sharing His word is the avenue by which others learn the gospel.
And how are they to preach unless they are sent?
It is the power of the Spirit of God through conviction of the Word of God by agreement of the people of God that we are sent to preach the gospel.
In other words, the Spirit of God convinces your heart that His word is true.
His Word says that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
So you go with the backing and encouragement of the people of God to preach the gospel of God to others.
Now, let’s turn the order around and look at it from the other way to make sure we are extremely clear on what these questions are teaching.
Starting in verse 15 and going backwards:
Those who are sent go and preach the gospel.
When the sent one preaches the gospel, the lost hear it.
When the lost hear the gospel, some believe it.
Those who believe the gospel call on the name of the Lord and are saved.
Now, make no mistake, the context for living out this call can look different, but the foundation of the call is given to every follower of Jesus.
I’ve heard it said that the gospel is like a spiritual tornado.
It never pulls you in without then sending you back out to share it with others.
Now, for someone like me, I sensed in high school that God was calling me to preach the gospel as my full time vocation.
So, I began a journey of learning the Bible better, intentionally serving the church and looking for opportunities, going to Bible college, until other believers saw enough that they could affirm my call and send me to preach the gospel first as an overseas missionary and now as a local church pastor.
And I want to challenge you, no matter who you are or how old you are in this room, God may be calling you to a radical direction change for your life where He wants you to give the rest of your life to be sent and preach the gospel full time as your vocation.
Listen, God doesn’t just call High Schoolers to do this.
He also calls grown men of God out of their current professions to go and preach the gospel full time.
So, God may call you to do just that, and He would then lead us as a church to evaluate and affirm that call in you, because its not just the question of if you think you are called to preach, it is also the questions of if anyone else thinks they are called to listen to you.
Yet, in saying that, I want to make abundantly clear that it is not just those called by God to full time preaching assignments that are sent to preach the gospel.
Every genuinely saved follower of Jesus has been given the commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel.
This why at the end of every Sunday service, after the benediction passage has been read, we always end service by saying, “Church, be sent.”
Because if you have confessed with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believed in your heart God raised him from the dead, the Holy Spirit of God empowers and equips you to share his gospel with all those He places in your life.
Because here is the truth of these verses, the opposite is also true.
We talk about wanting our nation and the world to turn to God, well, if we are not sent, there will not be someone to preach.
And if there is not someone to preach, the lost will not believe.
And if they do not believe, they will not call on him in order to be saved.
Now, some Christians read Scriptures like this one and respond that they just don’t have the gift of evangelism, as if that is a good reason for not sharing the gospel with others.
But, let me remind you that Ephesians says that God gives evangelists to the church in order to train the whole church to do the work of the ministry just like He gives pastor teachers to the church to train the whole church for ministry.
Now, of course, some people are going to be more skilled at sharing the gospel than others, but there is someone more skilled than you in everything that you do, but that should never keep you from doing it.
This is why we go.
It is why we have a covenant member living in Central Asia full time.
It’s not ultimately because she likes other cultures, she likes adventure, or she likes living a world away from her family.
No, she does it because Jesus is Lord and He has called and sent her to preach the gospel, because they must hear in order to believe and be saved from the wrath to come!
It’s why we give so much time, energy, and money to support other churches both here in America and overseas, and why we go in mission trips.
It’s not ultimately so that we can have new experiences or bring back good photos, we sacrifice to give and to go because every person on the planet must hear the message of the gospel of Jesus in order to have the opportunity to believe in him and call on Him for salvation from the sure wrath to come due our sin!
In verse 15, Paul quotes a verse from Isaiah that says: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”
Think about it: if Jesus is Lord, so He is the one who establishes the priorities for our lives and the values for our lives, this passage is telling us that a life of following Jesus is a life sees going and preaching the gospel as one of the most precious, valuable, and beautiful things that we can do.
We cannot be a church that glorifies God, if we are not a church that is consistently preaching the gospel to the lost, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our recreation places.
Churches that are not consistently sharing the gospel with the lost are churches that will be closed in the near future.
Now remember, Paul is not simply telling us how people get saved, though he is doing that.
He is also arguing for why the gospel of Christ is true and powerful to save even though so many Jewish people reject it though Jesus was a Jew and Jews were God’s chosen people.
Look at verse 16: But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?”
You see, Paul is using the Old Testament time and time again to show that God is not surprised by the majority Jewish rejection of the gospel.
He told us in the Old Testament that it would happen.
I find it instructive for us that Paul uses the language that not all obeyed the gospel.
It is the same language he used to introduce his purpose in chapter 1.
Romans 1:5–6 ESV
5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, 6 including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,
It highlights once again that being saved by the gospel does not come by simply an intellectual assent.
Jesus rose from the grave: fine!
No.
Being saved by the gospel mean you obey the call of the gospel to surrender to Jesus as Lord and trust from your heart that his death and resurrection save you from the wrath to come.
You obey the call to repent and believe.
You read the book of Acts, Paul spent a lot of time going to the Jews and preaching the gospel, but most of them did not obey the gospel, which is exactly what God prophesied through Isaiah would happen.
But make no mistake, verse 17:
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ.
This is the summary statement for all the questions he laid out in verses 14 and 15.
Faith comes through hearing the word of Christ.
We see throughout church history and in our own day that humans naturally get tired of preaching.
They get more interested in what a church is doing.
What are you doing to help the poor? What are you doing to invest in the community? What are you doing to provide fun alternatives for my family?
Listen, we should do some of those things, but may we never allow anything to diminish the centrality of the preaching of God’s word and the proclamation of God’s gospel.
For faith comes through hearing and hearing through the word of Christ, and faith is the only thing that is going to matter the day you die or Jesus comes again.
That’s why it is so valuable, that’s why God calls beautiful the feet of those who share the gospel with others.
God sends his people to preach the gospel to others.
2. There Is No Excuse For Those Who Reject The Gospel
Verse 18: But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”
Now what is going on here?
I’m not 100% sure, but we know what Paul cannot mean, and what he could mean.
Paul cannot mean that everyone in the world has already heard the gospel, so we don’t need anyone to go preach it anymore.
That would make no sense given we still have peoples today who have never heard the name Jesus and given all the other Scriptures that would contradict that idea.
Instead, Paul could mean that all people throughout all time are without excuse because God has revealed himself clearly enough through his natural creation in order for us to determine that there is a moral God, yet we all reject that natural revelation.
For one, Paul has already said that back in
Romans 1:20 ESV
20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
Also, the Scripture that Paul cites in our verse is Psalm 19 which begins with:
Psalm 19:1 ESV
1 The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
So, that too would lead us to believe Paul is saying that we have all perceived enough from observing God’s creation in order to be left without excuse as we have all rejected that knowledge.
Which is true.
But, I think there is something else going on here as well.
Paul writes, “I ask, have they not heard?”
When you read the book of Acts, you see that Paul spent a lot of time and energy preaching the gospel to the Jews.
In every city Paul went to, he would always go find the Jews first and preach the gospel to them, and only when the majority of Jews rejected the gospel and drove Paul out of the synagogue, he would then go and preach the gospel to the Gentiles.
He really practiced what he preached when he wrote that the gospel is the power of God to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.
In every town he went to, he took the gospel to the Jews first, then the Gentiles.
And yes, a few Jews would believe most places, but the gospel received a much greater positive response from the Gentiles.
So, verse 18 again:
But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”
I believe Paul is saying, “The Jews have heard the gospel, because I have preached it to them!”
If we skip ahead to chapter 15:19, Paul states that he has shared the gospel from Jerusalem all the way to Illyricum which really spanned the Roman world of the time.
So, to Romans of the time, Paul had taken the gospel to the ends of the Roman world.
Now, Paul does not mean that he preached to every single person, but he goes on to explain that he saw himself as having no more work to be done because he helped establish gospel churches in each place he went, churches that would continue to proclaim the gospel to that community.
So, Paul is saying, through his ministry in his day, the Jews had heard the message of the gospel.
Verse 19 - But I ask, did Israel not understand?
In context, Paul is not asking if Israel did not understand the gospel message.
He is asking, did Israel not understand what was written in the Old Testament Scriptures.
Back at verse 19 - First Moses says, “I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation I will make you angry.”
Paul is quoting from Deuteronomy where Moses wrote that because Israel had provoked God to anger by worshipping idols, he was going to make them jealous with those who are not a people and who the Jews would have considered foolish.
In other words, God had promised way back then that He would create a people out of the Gentiles in order to make the Jewish people jealous.
Verse 20 - Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”
So, as the Jews are challenging Paul by saying: if the gospel of Jesus Christ is true, and Jesus was an ethnic Jew, and the Jews were the chosen people of God in the Old Testament, then why is it that so many more Gentiles are believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ than Jews are?
And Paul is saying, “Because this is exactly what the law and the prophets told you would happen if you turned away from God.”
God promised from the Old Testament that he was going to make a people for himself out of the Gentiles; a people who previously did not seek after him.
Verse 21 - But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”
Now, while it is true that God is sovereign and that God brought history to this place of more Gentiles coming to faith than Jews by His sovereign hand and purposes that were written in the OT hundreds of years before it came to pass,
In no way does that mean that there is no personal responsibility in having to call out to the name of the Lord for salvation.
God says, “All day long I have held out my hands to you.”
Read the Old Testament, God offered grace and mercy and calls for repentance time and time again.
Yet, the vast majority of Jews absolutely refused to cry out to him and to surrender to Him as Lord.
Remember the heart felt cry of Jesus:
Matthew 23:37 ESV
37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
And this spirit continued on in Paul’s day as he preached the gospel.
I can only imagine the Jews thinking, “We’ve come so far in establishing our own righteousness through the law. We’ve gained position and standing from it. It’s our whole life and our culture.
How dare you tell us to throw it all away, How dare you tell us our righteousness can never be enough, How dare you tell us that the Jesus we crucified is our only hope!
Well, that’s exactly what Paul did.
Philippians 3:8–9 ESV
8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—
Most Jews would not obey the call of God to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
To them, there was too much to lose.
And while it is a mystery of how God can be completely sovereign over salvation and yet we are truly responsible to call upon the name of the Lord, I would not want a God that I could understand completely, because I need a God who understands and reconciles things that I can’t.
But I know for sure that the Bible teaches that God held his hands of grace and mercy out to his chosen Old Testament people time and time and time again, and if they would have admitted their need and called out to the Lord, he would have saved them.
But the vast vast majority were unwilling.
They were disobedient and stubborn, and God turned his plan of salvation to vastly be accomplished in the Gentile world.
Now, does this mean God has rejected his original chosen people? By no means!
But you will have to read ahead and come back next week to find out why.
But the response to today’s passage is twofold:
The first response is: have you admitted your sinfulness before God and cried out to God to save you?
The word of Christ is while you were a sinner, God sent His Son Jesus, fully man and fully God, to live a perfectly righteous life, to take the punishment of your sin in his death, and to rise again to defeat sin and death on your behalf.
I have been sent to preach, now you have heard, will you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and call out to him to save you?
If you refuse to surrender to the Lord Jesus because you are unwilling to lose whatever it is you are holding on to, you will have no one to blame but yourself when you stand before your Creator and Judge on the final day.
God is holding his grace and mercy out to you and has left you without excuse.
The second response is for the church.
Do you value the great beauty of going to take the gospel to your neighbor, your coworker, across the street, or around the world like God does?
Do you see evangelism as beautiful and a privilege?
Are you committed to be sent to go and share the word of Christ?
For faith comes by hearing, aned hearing through the word of Christ.
Let’s pray.
(Invitation)