This section of Romans has been described as one of the most difficult sections of the whole epistle. Paul is addressing questions that Jews of his day would have raised and they can seem very detached and abstract, but if we go a little deeper and analyze the questionings of our own hearts, we see that while circumstances may be different, we still ask the same questions out of the same motivations to cover up the same sinful nature today that the Jews in Rome asked nearly 2,000 years ago.

Everything we have from the air to breathe to our homes, cars, friends, and family is the kindness of God. God’s wrath is held back by immeasurable patience and grace despite all of our sin that builds up a store of wrath for ourselves. What’s our response? We look at the sin of others and judge them for it. We mock and despise the kindness that God grants to us when rather than recognizing the kindness we’ve received and repent of our sin, we deny the sin and the kindness and try play judge against others for doing exactly what we do.

When it comes to our health, one of the most dangerous things isn’t to not have a diagnosis, but to get the wrong diagnosis. The world has given us a faulty diagnosis of what the human condition is. We’re told that it isn’t that bad, but if we don’t see how dangerous our disease is, we won’t seek our only cure. The reality is that we aren’t just people who occasionally make some bad decisions, but we are people who have seen God’s glory and rejected it to glorify ourselves. We’ve seen our Creator and decided to worship created things. And God gives us up to these evils that we’ve invented for ourselves.

There are so many things that each one of us in our lives has been ashamed of, but Paul specifically says that he is not ashamed of the Gospel. Why is that? We are ashamed of things when we invest our identity and our hope in them and they fail us. The Gospel doesn’t fail us. We feel shame when we invest our hope in our own attempts to be good enough and inevitably fail. When we invest our identity and hope in the Gospel we are not put to shame because we are being given the finished, perfect righteousness of God.

Having just introduced himself to the church in Rome via the Gospel in the first 7 verses, Paul now goes on to tell the church why he’s writing. Paul writes that, despite never having the church in Rome, he writes these things to them because he both loves them and is indebted to them. He both longs to be with them, praying for them unceasingly, and eagerly desires to encourage them with the Gospel, all out of a deep, abiding understanding of the grace of God that has been given to him.

In order to grasp the transformational truths of Romans in the next year, we need to lay a strong foundation to hold everything together. Why was Romans written and what does it say? We’ll need to figure out why the Roman church needed to hear what Paul had to say and ask ourselves, “Is this our problem, too?” If so, knowing Paul’s message and hearing Paul’s answer 2,000 years later is still just as important as it was in 55 A.D.

We have been called to share in God’s ministry—to join in with the work that He is doing in our world to transform our world. We join in this ministry of reconciliation, of blessing our neighbors with the blessing of God’s presence, because we have first been reconciled to God, having taken on Christ and His inheritance. The blessing in the benediction isn’t a closing, it’s a commissioning.

Joy is a desire that God has created us with, but so often we find ourselves looking in all the wrong places and only coming away with stress and despair. The truth that we strive to believe in our minds, should be the same truth that stirs our hearts to joy. In our gatherings we have these three means of expressing that joy: singing, giving, and Communion. We sing about God’s love for us, recognizing that His everlasting and unconditional love is the only place to find lasting joy. We give of our money because in our sacrificial giving, we proclaim that the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified is worth more than our money. We celebrate Communion every week as a tangible reminder of the source of our joy.

We see in Psalm 119 the passion of David for the Word of God. He longs for it; he considers it sweeter than honey and more valuable than gold or silver. It is God revealing Himself and speaking directly to him, to us. This is higher view of the Word than most of us can confess to having and it is this Word that he speaks of that is the inspiration, founding, and driving force of all that we strive to preach at Veritas. How can we see this passion lived out in the way that we approach the preaching that we hear and the preaching that we do? It takes preparation.

Through Christ we have peace. On our own, we are in conflict with God, with the circumstances of our lives, and with each other, but Christ on the cross broke down the walls of hostility between us to give us full and lasting peace. It is in this peace, then, that we are sent. We are sent to each other as brothers and sisters to be reconciled to each other and sent to our world to bring the real, tangible peace that we have been given in the Gospel for both the present and the future.