Wake Up, Put On Christ
By being receivers of God’s grace, we now owe it to others to reflect God’s love and grace to them. So now is the time to wake up and put on Christ, knowing the time that we are living in—where God’s kingdom has come but not yet come in fullness.
The Power of Submission
Paul writes to the church in Rome to be submissive to the governing authorities. When we hear that, we seem to immediately question when it’s acceptable for us to not be submissive. Although there is a time to be disobedient, Paul calls us to submit to our nations leaders because God has placed them in their positions. God is the one who gives our leaders their authority and Paul even goes so far to say that they are God’s servants—even the ones that we disagree with.
Love Friends and Bless Enemies
Paul has given us 11 chapters of deep theology. The only reasonable, worshipful response is offering ourselves as worship and to be transformed by God. Then, he tells us that this transformation is displayed in our humble living together as a body in love. Now we get to see what that love looks like. It’s genuine. It’s sincere. It’s without hypocrisy. It hates anything that threatens the beloved. It makes no caveats. It makes no distinction between worthy and unworthy of its affection. It makes no distinction between insiders and outsiders. This is a love that we can’t make on our own. This is a love that we can only live and display having seen it and experienced it. This is the love that we see in a Father sacrificing His Son and a Son dying willingly for rebels.
Gifts of Grace
This passage is all about showing us the people and the church that we have been longing to be: a church unified and diverse. We are unified as one body in our humility, deferring to others and thinking of Christ and the freedom He gives us to live rather than looking to ourselves and the pride and despair our comparisons bring. We are diverse as a body with many members in the vast giftings that God has bestowed to each of us to serve and uplift our body and our city, knowing that humility frees us from needing to serve ourselves or to judge ourselves based on which gifts we have or don’t have.
Transformation
After 11 chapters of Romans we have a transition. “Therefore” … that word changes everything! We so often live our lives as if all that Paul has preached in Romans 1-11 is followed by “But…” “You’re saved by grace and faith as a work of God, but be transformed and don’t conform. But it says “Therefore”! Because all of what is said in Romans 1-11 is true, we can be transformed! Present our bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice? We never could! But the message of Romans thus far is that Jesus’ sacrifice is sufficient for us. We can offer ourselves to God because our identity is in Christ and Christ’s sacrifice is acceptable to God.
Restored in Grace
One question at this point for the Roman church had to be: “So what about the Israel?” Gentiles were suddenly being welcomed into God’s family and the language was shifting away from talking about the Jews as God’s covenant people, the heirs of His blessing and promises. Had Israel merely been replaced? Were they now hopeless? By no means! Salvation was always intended to be for everyone, both in the Old Covenant and in the New. The severing of their branches by their disobedience made it possible for everyone to be grafted in by faith and the fact that God grafted in the Gentiles proved not that the Jews were lost without hope, but that God could just as easily graft them back in. God had shown mercy to the Gentiles and by consigning the Jews to disobedience, He now can show them the same mercy.
Remnant of Grace
God has not rejected His people. Israel had the Law and Covenant, but chose to worship Baal. God saved a remnant. Israel had the Messiah, but killed and rejected Christ. God saved His church. If God did not reject Israel throughout Scripture, He will not reject that church that He has saved and grafted into His Son, the true Israel. And that means that we can rest. Because God has not rejected His people, our rebelliousness cannot separate us from Him or make us too far gone to be saved and we can rest in His grace. Because God has not rejected His people, we cannot earn our place with Him and we can rest in His grace. If it was any other way, it wouldn’t be grace and we could never rest.
Gospel Essentials: Proclamation
God sovereignly sends pastors and paid staff and missionaries to preach the Gospel to the world, but He also sovereignly sends us to preach to our neighbors and coworkers. Would our lives look any different if we believed that we are sent just like overseas missionaries? Because if we don’t preach to those we already spend so much time with, then how will they hear? If they don’t hear, then how will they believe? If they don’t believe, then how will they call on Jesus to save them?
Protesting Our Purpose
God is sovereign, but is He just? Romans 9 doesn’t just tell us that God is just in His sovereignty, but that His sovereignty is good news. Not only is it okay that God is in control of everything, but that is really and truly what we long for and what is best for us. God doesn’t merely will in His sovereignty that some be saved and some be condemned, but He wills that His glory and name would be revealed. He wills what is best for us because what is best for us is Himself and the perfect plan of His own revelation in the Word and in Christ. Is God sovereign? Yes. Do we have free choices? Yes. Do we understand perfectly how that works? Maybe not, but we can still rest knowing definitively that God, in His sovereignty, is enacting His plan in and for us for what is best.
God’s Purpose
Grace means that God has free will. Grace means that God can save anyone. Israel’s unfaithfulness can’t prevent God from calling them back to life. Our sinfulness and our brokenness can’t hinder God from redeeming us. The doctrine of election tells us that God’s choosing whom He will save leaves us with nothing to boast in but Christ and nothing to wallow in because of Christ. It’s not through our family that we are called. It’s not through our good works that we are called. It’s not through our church attendance that we are called. We are called from death to life solely because God has chosen to love us…and that is a very good thing.