Compared to all of the previous chapters, chapter 13 seems to be a quick, straight to the point message. As I read it, Paul was summarizing three things:

• Be a good citizen.
• Love other people as well as you do yourself.
• Be up and awake to what God is doing.

Do those three things well, and you should be set up for success as you live a life for God.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:

Take your everyday, ordinary life– your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life– and place it before God as an offering.

Isn’t that powerful? Can you imagine doing that every single day of your life?

For the past 17 years, I have. Not perfectly, but pretty consistently. And it’s worked wonders!

You begin to see every day little miracles. You begin to see your character change. You begin to see challenges and difficulties as opportunities to grow. You begin to see annoyances as chances to practice patience. You begin to see the world through a different light. You see God at the center of things, as the giver of all things good. Your kindness increases. Your patience increases. Your joy increases. Your gratitude increases. You’re more gentle, more faithful, more self-controlled.

There’s a lot more to chapter 12, but I wanted to take a post to get a little more personal, to share a bit of my story in the midst of these comments on Romans.

If you can wake up every day and make this a habit, like Paul says, trust me, you’ll be the better for it.

One morning this week, I took the dogs out to pee. As they were doing their business, I looked up at the dark, star-lit sky. There, in that moment, I saw one of the wildest sights.

It looked like stars moving in a perfect line, in total unison, at a steady speed. First, I rubbed my eyes and looked again just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. Sure enough, they were still there, at least a dozen from what I could see. My second thought was those aren’t stars, those are satellites, maybe even Starlink satellites sent up in orbit by SpaceX. When I went inside, I looked it up and sure enough that’s what I saw.

Now what’s this have to do with Romans 9-11?

Everything.

As I was reading that section this week, I was reminded of what a mind-bender this whole section is. As Paul is laying out the state of Israel and their place in the story of salvation and what God is doing at his moment in history, you can’t help but be amazed. Basically, Paul is saying that God was bringing salvation to and through the Jews until the time of Jesus, but as they were getting further from him and losing their way, God sent Jesus as a beacon of hope to all nations and races, not just the Jews. Now, Paul is preaching that good news first to Jews, then to all the rest. And what he sees happening is Jews closing their hearts to the message while non-Jews are more open to it than he’s ever seen. And he says God meant for it to be this way. Speaking of the Jews, Paul says:

If their falling out initiated this worldwide coming together, their recovery is going to set off something even better: mass homecoming! If the first thing the Jews did, even though it was wrong for them, turned out for your good, just think what’s going to happen when they get it right!

“Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out.”

Which takes me back to the satellites, looking like stars in a perfect line flying through the night sky. First, it reminded me that we’re the ones spinning, not that the stars are moving. And we’re spinning at a fairly steady clip of about 1000 miles per hour. We, us humans, are just a speck on this great planet. Just one of 7 billion people, sitting on 37 billion acres of land, surrounded by another 86 billion acres of water. Yet, we have this ability within us to innovate, to imagine, to work. We can fathom providing internet / wireless signal to the entire world. We can put our minds together and build the rockets necessary to send up the satellites to provide these signals. Using our knowledge of physics, gravity, and the rest of it, we can then get those rockets to release them in a perfect line, so that as our world spins, in God’s hands, we accomplish what we set out to do.

God has given us tremendous freedom and power. Yet, just as the child’s lullaby states, He has the whole world in His hands. And not just our world, but the entire universe. All of the life within it, from prairie grass to rain forests, from microscopic amoebas to the giants of the sea, all of life on this earth and if there’s any on other celestial masses, all of that life too, in its infinite variety. That’s why Paul concludes this section with:

In Paul’s discourse on the state of the Jews, he uses another line to describe them, which is really true of all of us at some point or another. He says, “After all these years of refusing to really deal with God on his terms, insisting instead on making their own deals, they have nothing to show for it.”

Ouch! Prior to God getting ahold of my life, that’s exactly how I approached God. Let me make a deal with him, fail. Let me make a new deal with him, fail. Let me make an extravagant promise to him, fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.

I can’t tell you how many promises I broke to God because I was trying to deal with him on my terms. I’m sure you can relate.

But as you keep reading chapter 10, you stumble across one of the most freeing and interesting things regarding this relationship with God. Paul says,

You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”

How simple is that?! It sounds like child-like faith. It sounds like it’s God’s work in me; it’s not my bartering with him. Furthermore, it sounds like we don’t just say “we believe,” then go on living our merry way, aloof to God; but when we call out, we say it and embrace it with our whole being.

If you’ve experienced it, you know exactly what Paul and I are talking about.

And with that, we’re going to tackle a mind-bender tomorrow…

As we roll into this section of Romans, it’s important to note that Chapters 9, 10, and 11 really go together. I’ve always seen them as a cohesive unit, and the reasons for that are many. Not something that we need to dive into here; instead, let’s dive into what’s being discussed.

In the previous chapters, Paul has just finished laying out the bad news, the good news, what the good news means in our lives ideally, how we struggle living into that reality in the present, but how we can start to experience it more and more. Now, he’s transitioning to the topic of Israel. Basically the question behind the text is:

If all of this goodness opened up for those outside of Israel (the gentiles, pagans, uncircumcised, foreigners, etc.), what’s the verdict on the Jews (the insiders, the circumcised, God’s chosen people, etc.)?

Paul has a lot to say on this topic, and starting in chapter 9, he basically says the reason we, the outsiders, are in is because the Jews missed it. It’s that simple. He has a few great rhetorical questions, like:

• Are you going to complain that God is unfair?
• How can God blame us for anything if he’s in charge of everything?
• Who do you think you are to second-guess God?
• Can the clay talk back to the fingers that mold it and say why did you shape me like this?

Which leads me to a few of his great analogies about Abraham and promises vs. genetics, about pottery and clay, about stones and stumbling. So many great illustrations in this chapter, as he defends his argument.

When he sums it all up in chapter 9, he says, “All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened out their lives. And Israel, who seemed interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing.”

Is it not the same today?! I’ll see you tomorrow.

Perhaps one of my favorite chapters in all of the Bible, if I’m allowed to have a favorite. 😉

I wouldn’t say Romans is my favorite book, but this is chapter is so powerful. Paul’s writing here is simultaneously logical and emotional, concrete and full of imagery, a sound argument and poetic. He must have been really inspired! Instead of adding any of my own thoughts, I’ll simply tell you what he says (in the Message paraphrase). If you remember, he ended chapter 7 with being at the end of his rope, throwing up his hands in exasperation and desperation. “Is there no one who can do anything for me?”

The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does.

Here it goes in chapter 8:

With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them–living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells– even though you still experience all the limitations of sin– you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us– an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

There is so much in here, I feel like we have to pause just to re-read it, digest, absorb. Chew the cud on these passages 🙂

We’ll pick up on the rest of chapter 8 tomorrow.