So last Sunday, I felt the need for us to go through what’s been going on since the start of the year. We started with doubling down on the theme of this year – the first quarter of 2024 was focused on our trusting in the Lord, to be precise.
Off the bat I’m remembering that we emphasized on Romans 10:11 – where it says that everyone who places their trust in (thought most other translations say ‘believe’) the Lord shall never be put to shame. I also remember throwing in a quick perspective for our folks to consider – that is, while we are emphasizing on how we ought to be trusting in Christ, let’s remember that Christ placed His trust in us and in God first, when He basically lay everything down on the cross.
We needed to trust in the Lord. And we said this – or, rather, I said this in the first quarter of the year, back when things haven’t escalated as much as I’ve been pointing out recently. I mean, back then we had more than enough cause to really trust – and really, cry out to the Lord for all that’s been going on in and around us.
We shifted to talking about how, in our trusting in Him, it’s inevitable for us to behold His faithfulness. And, indeed, we explored how He is faithful to us even when we are faithless.
We appreciated how He stays faithful to us by way of never leaving us or forsaking us. He stays faithful to us through Christ, who guaranteed that nothing could ever separate us from Him, no matter what happens by us or to us.
And sure as His mercies are new every morning, so we naturally behold His faithfulness, proclaiming how He is great, as His faithfulness is great. Considering how we’ve tackled this during the second quarter of the year, we’ve also inadvertently discovered other ways to see God’s faithfulness: Faithful, as we see in our Fathers and Mothers, and faithful, as we celebrated three years as a congregation.
Now if I was supposed to introduce some sort of transition from this theme of God’s faithfulness, to what we see before us for the third quarter of the year, I guess I could – well, I HAVE said that just as we see God’s faithfulness as His core nature, so we’re also brought, from faithfulness, to discussing our core. Our foundation. Our fundamentals.
Not really much of a transition there, but considering how I’ve been making too many stops along the way while reading the book of Romans, and how even the more seasoned of our brethren in the congregation suggested the same book as a topic for our recently launched Bible studies… well, that was a major factor, too.
So in the little time I had left after this ‘calibration’ session, I kept our discussions on Romans 1 short and sweet, targeting the middle portion of the chapter:
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.”
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.
Romans 1:16-20
Without looking at my previous notes, I’ll point out the following:
- Righteousness is attributed to us, and is part of us (‘The righteous’, as an adjective), but unrighteousness is ‘of men’, slightly implying that it’s in the actions. I shared this to indicate that, though we have been proclaimed absolutely righteous, we are not immune from doing unrighteousness.
- I reason behind this further by saying that though we have been redeemed by Christ and reconciled to God forever, we are still in this sin-infected, death-ridden world.
- Righteousness is living by faith, and unrighteousness is therefore NOT living by faith / living in unbelief.
- Unrighteousness ultimately suppresses the truth, and righteousness therefore incites / encourages the truth (yes, I looked at Google’s handy-dandy thesaurus)
- Furthermore, God has shown men (that’s all of us, righteous and unrighteous) what can be known about Him. God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in ALL His creation (or, ‘the things that have been made’); so, indeed, we are without excuse.
So, not only are we constantly convicted by the Holy Spirit of sin, righteousness and judgment (John 16), but ‘the things that have been made’ are also a constant testimony to the Maker.
The Gospel (that is, the good news of Christ and His finished work) is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes – that is, everyone who yields to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and everyone who perceives God’s eternal power and divine nature; everyone who is brought to honor and thank Him.
Unrighteousness intentionally suppresses and denies God’s power and nature, and consistently refuses to believe in the conviction of the Holy Spirit…
And, reading through it now, I think we can go through the rest of the chapter. I didn’t have time back then, but I’d like to go through it now… with the intention of drawing out just how eternally superior of a life we have through Christ:
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.
Let’s go through this really quick. Through Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have come to know God, and are naturally honoring Him, and giving thanks to Him in everything.
Before we had anything to do with Christ, we were sinners. Or, more to the point, unrighteous. And in unrighteousness, our thinking was futile… but by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been given the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) which, through this verse, may very well mean that we have been given access, no longer to futile thinking, but also to fruitful thoughts (yes, we’re definitely cracking the thesaurus WAY open on this one).
But check out the rest of the passage; in unrighteousness, we suppress the truth – that is, we may have known God but we did not honor Him or give thanks to Him, and in so doing, our hearts were not only made foolish (denying God all together, Psalm 14:1, etc.), but darkened.
I’m led to remember that other verse brought to my personal attention, regarding the clever steward in Luke 16: The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. Luke 16:8
For the longest time I’ve been saying that the ‘sons of this world’ are ‘sons of darkness’ in other translations, but a quick visit to BibleHub really points out that they are, primarily, ‘of this world’, or ‘of this age’.
But no matter; they have still been differentiated from ‘the sons of light’, and therefore there is the implication that they are not merely ‘of this world/age’, but technically NOT ‘of light’.
With all that said, they may be more shrewd in their dealings, compared to those of us who have been made sons of light, brought from darkness into His light (1 Peter 2:9)… but the darkness they’re in all started from the foolishness of their hearts, their intentional and active suppression of the truth (as it applies to themselves, and the world).
In the darkness, our thoughts are futile – But thanks be to God, for His Holy Spirit, poured out upon us through Christ – the same Holy Spirit who reminds us, convicts us of our righteousness; but, more importantly, of our affinity, our presence in the light, as the light is always with us.
We are sons of light in the futile darkness.
Gosh, I’m sorry, this was supposed to be a short introduction leading to Romans 2 and 3, but look at all this I’ve brought myself into – I still think it’s necessary, though.
Let’s keep going.
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.
So far we see that unrighteousness is suppression of the Truth, resulting in foolish hearts darkened. Here, we see a little into what it means to be foolish… or, rather, how it used to be for us: We were foolish as it is, but it wasn’t enough to deny it, but we needed to assert that we were wise… and in the process, we were made to look twice the fool.
And it wasn’t enough to suppress the Truth, and to deny the glory God deserves. I strongly believe in the adage that we all worship something… So, naturally, when we deny giving the Creator the glory He deserves, we turn to creation – making images of creation, or worshipping creation itself.
Here’s another thing: I mentioned earlier that unrighteousness is be associated to action. This means that, sure, those of us who are in the body of Christ have been declared absolutely righteous… but while we are still in this world, we are still capable to do unrighteousness.
However, we probably should also draw the line and mention that, sadly, there are those who are quite intentional in their unrighteousness. We who are in Christ may be caught in unrighteousness but by the grace of God, we aren’t staying there…
We’re reminded here that there are such people, who do choose to just stay unrighteous. And as mentioned earlier, they do not stop at suppressing the truth, but they attribute the glory God deserves, to idols: 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.
If one persists in unrighteousness, we see that their hearts (rendered foolish) are not only darkened, but also turned to impurity… and worse:
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 heeeere we go. I didn’t really go at this while on the pulpit, but in our more intimate Bible Studies, these verses were quite the hit.
But instead of me ripping into the sin of homosexuality, I will go ahead and point out what lies beneath. These folk whom Paul points out here are merely the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole bunch of other things that follow.
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.
In closing our going a little more in-depth here in Romans 1, let me point out that we shouldn’t be encouraging each other to be in a sort of ‘unrighteousness’-hunt of sorts, pointing out the men with passion for one another, the gossips, the slanderers, and so on.
Let’s take a huge step back, and see a picture of impurity and unrighteousness beneath the surface. I did a bit of extraction and rearranging and came up with the following:
They are consumed with passion and filled with all manner of unrighteousness, they commit shameless acts contrary to nature; they possess a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
They practice such things, knowing God’s righteous decree – the due penalty for their error (to die). They not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Now from here I was supposed to take all this and take a look at the other side of the coin – that is, if we’re seeing the path of unrighteousness, we could ‘flip’ it and make assumptions as to what righteousness entails.
And I suppose I could pull something up.
Through Christ and His finished work, we behold the grace of God, and we experience the power of the Holy Spirit. We live by faith, meaning we don’t merely support, or promote the Truth – we LIVE the Truth.
We do know God, but we are more in awe of the fact that He knows us and loves us, and for this, we honor Him, and we thank Him. In our meditating in this Truth, our thoughts are made fruitful, and our hearts bask in Christ – In Him is Life, and this Life is the Light of men.
In awe of our God, we do not resort to self-abasement, calling ourselves foolish – but we do realize that only our God is wise. We give our Creator glory above all else.
In place of lust in our hearts, and in place of dishonorable passions, we have the Holy Spirit alive in us – constantly convicting us of our righteousness, and reminding us that those who do not believe in Him are convicted of sin, and he who has not yet been judged, is convicted of judgment.
We are not consumed with passion, but we are filled with the Spirit.
We do not have a debased mind, but we have the mind of Christ.
Seeing as my brain is pretty exhausted in approaching this first Chapter of Romans, I employed ClaudeAI to help me, once again, with an appropriate conclusion to this article:
As we reflect on Romans 1, we see the stark contrast between a life lived in unrighteousness and one lived in faith and righteousness through Christ. While we may still struggle with sin in this world, we have been given the mind of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to guide us. Let us continually turn to God, trusting in His faithfulness and love, even as we navigate the challenges of living as ‘sons of light’ in a darkened world. As we move forward in our study of Romans, we’ll see how Paul further develops these themes, always pointing us back to the transformative power of the Gospel and God’s unfailing grace.
Let’s keep on going.
Until the next post, God bless us all.
JB's Personal Brain Defragmenter 
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