It’s been in my heart for us to come together and to consolidate all we believe in, and not merely to share all that’s in my mind and expect you guys to sort of roll with it. You could imagine the humbling I’ve had to go through just so I could say something like that.
But it is important that we aren’t just in the same page, but we’re also of the same mind. And I’m just thankful to the Lord for how He just works in all things, to bring us to where we can go as a congregation.
Ever since the start of this year, I’ve been following the ‘Bible In One Year’ project of the famous annual, Our Daily Bread. It has us go through two chapters of the Old Testament, and then one chapter in the New Testament on average, on a daily basis.
My experience so far is that I’ve breezed through most of the chapters, refreshing myself with the little details of the lives of icons in the faith (David, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, etc.), and also the accounts of the Apostles regarding Jesus Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and ascension.
At this point I’d also like to share that I’ve been subjecting myself to another challenge – that is, to write a thousand words a day for every day this year. I was pretty successful last 2022, I didn’t hit 365000 words last year, but I’m more or less ahead of things, as of June 2024.
I mentioned that because it’s been pretty tempting for me to feature what I’ve been reading from the Bible each day, as the content for my 1000 words a day – and, oftentimes, that’s been the case.
Unfortunately, the more I try to stay consistent, the more I find myself burning out. I mean at my age you’d think that I’d have some sort of grasp in my routine and in my personal time and thought management… but the ideal of writing 1000 words about what you’ve read from the Bible every single day for – oh, more than 160 days now – at the very worst, it remains to be an ideal.
Sometimes you find yourself drawing too much from a half or a third of what you’ve written, and you’re forced to ditch other things you’d like to write about if only to ensure that the current point you’re piecing together is complete.
Sometimes, it’s the complete opposite – you find yourself at a loss for what to share, and you couldn’t go back, because you’ve already squeezed all you could from your previous readings.
Sometimes, you feel a whole less theological; coincidentally, you have a lot of rant in you that you’d like to unload, instead.
So I ditched the idea of connecting the two. I mean, I still read the Bible every day, but the words I’m to be writing and posting on a daily basis aren’t necessarily based on what I’ve read that particular day.
…that is, until I hit the Book of Romans, oh, running on more than a couple weeks now. I more or less burned through the Gospels and Acts, and I was doing the same thing for Romans, until around Chapter 7, where I felt I needed to stop and sort of ‘reflect’ and ‘analyze’ the difficult verses in this said chapter to make sense of it for myself – and, surprise surprise, that had me resorting to writing about all of it again.
If you’ve seen in my more recent posts, I have been writing a good deal per chapter – Even writing in parts, especially for one of the more foundational chapters for me personally, Chapter 12… and writing about Romans 8, one of my favoritest (?) chapters in the entire Bible, that was a joy.
I just finished Chapter 13… and part of me was thinking, shouldn’t I be going back to Chapter 1, instead of jumping to Chapter 14?
Well, last Sunday, while we were discussing how our congregation was going to be shifting from a prayer meeting (which wasn’t really growing) to separate Bible studies for men and women, one of our more experienced consultants suggested that we go through the Book of Romans, ourselves – and, mind you, she mentioned we should start at Chapter 1.
You could imagine how I needed no further confirmation. In this week’s Bible Studies, which I was privileged to facilitate, we went through Romans 1, and I’d love to bring all we’ve talked about together…
…but first, a bit of background, and then I approach this the same way I approached the other chapters in Romans – verse by verse. THEN we bring it all together.
Let’s go.
I feel it necessary for us to read through the entire Chapter:
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 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, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,
To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Longing to Go to Rome
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you— that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
The Righteous Shall Live by Faith
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 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. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
…But due to lack of time, this is all I covered:
The pinnacle of unrighteousness is not found in the latter parts of this chapter. Instead, you see it smack in the middle – The source of all unrighteousness can be traced to the moves of the serpent in the garden of Eden… in the words, ‘You shall not surely die’.
Friends, the serpent suppressed the truth… and by this disobedience, sin and death entered the world.
Christ was born, died, rose again and ascended into heaven, that we would be reconciled, and more to the point, declared righteous before God, much so that we could call Him our Father. We have been made righteous – it is what we’ve become, an adjective, an attribute.
Contrast this to where Paul says, that by the unrighteousness of men, they suppress the truth. Unrighteousness is not an adjective, but a verb – an action, one any man can do in this fallen world.
For I believe, with myself as an example – that any man, whether they believe they are declared righteous or not; any man is capable of unrighteousness and suppressing the Truth. However, our privilege as part of the body of Christ, our capability by the power of the Holy Spirit, is not merely to bound forward from said suppression – we have been re-created to support, to stand, to share the Truth.
And that’s one critical perspective which explains how we, who have been proclaimed righteous, are able to live by faith.
Once again: We live by faith by not remaining in suppression of the Truth, for the Truth abounds in us, just as God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – naturally abounds and overflows in us.
Just as the Gospel convicts Paul to testify to his people in Rome, in the great capital of the civilized world, and not only to the Jews, but to ‘the Greeks and the barbarians’ as well, so we are also, so naturally in tune with the Gospel – That is, the Way, the Truth, and the Life in us, Jesus Christ Himself – that it is more our nature to proclaim the same thing:
…It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
May we be constantly captured and absolutely empowered by the Truth, even in the moments when we are tempted by this world to suppress it.
Until the next post, God bless us all.
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