Chapter 7 of Romans is all about the struggle. The struggle between law and faith, bondage and freedom, death and life. It’s about Paul answering their objections, then diving headlong into his own challenges. He says this:

For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! … I can will it, but I can’t do it.

He talks through his challenges and struggles a bit more, and its as if he’s describing the human condition in a single paragraph. You can feel him throwing his hands up in the air at the end, exasperated, exhausted. And as he asks if anyone can help, he answers his own question with this:

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

Which then becomes the perfect set-up for chapter 8…

Thinking about the difference between life and death today. It’s so simple, right?

But when you really start to think about it on a deeper level, it brings more power to the analogy Paul is using. Allow me to use a couple illustrations, and maybe some adjectives for good measure.

Someone I know just had a dear friend diagnosed with a terrible type of cancer. Someone I interviewed recently lost a loved one early to cancer. Someone I interviewed also lost a grandma recently. When you hear these things, the wind goes out of your sails a bit. You’re smiling, laughing, and having good conversation and then this type of news comes in to just completely change the tone of things. Death is a somber, serious, and difficult thing to encounter, whether you’re expecting it or not. There’s a reason people wear black and gray to funerals. Death brings that kind of mood.

Paul says sin is death in chapter 6 of Romans, and I couldn’t agree more.

But then, you contrast that with life, especially new life. A few people I know have become pregnant recently, and whenever someone shares the news, people get giddy with excitement. And when a new baby is actually born, people go bananas! The crowd goes wild! Everyone comes to visit (barring COVID), they bring gifts, they bring meals, they send cards and clothes, and all of the rest of it. Most of all, people want to hold that new baby. They want to snuggle it close, admire it, and the really crazy ones even want to smell it. They say babies have a fresh smell or something. Weird, but I get the new smell claims about other new things– new shoes, new cars, etc. New life and new things bring excitement, joy, exuberance!

So here’s another thing Paul says in Romans 6. He says you’re alive to God. New birth, new life, real life.

Sin leads to bondage and a dead end. Belief in Christ’s resurrection leads to life, and more and more of it.

Death vs. Life. The choice seems easy.

In Romans 5, Paul lays out a couple massive concepts. Simple enough to grasp, mind-bending to fully comprehend. Rather than dilute the beauty of the two ideas by explaining them, I’m simply going to quote them. Then, you can spend the rest of the day (or the rest of your life, if you prefer) stewing on them…

“Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life!”

“By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us… we find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand– out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.”

Just for good measure, I’ll throw in a third remark from Paul:

“If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life!”

Wowsers!

We’ll go anywhere looking for love.

But you know where we go looking the most?

To our peers in the lifeboat.

Instead, what if we looked to a connection and a validation that doesn’t come from within our species, from our fellow humans? What if, instead of looking to what everyone else said about us, we returned to our Maker to look for what he said about us,? That could change everything.

To be fair, God was human for a window of time, when he came as Jesus to earth. But on the other hand, he was outside of our species and outside of the lifeboat. In the words of Donald Miller, Jesus was the alien who came to earth, who looked at all of our lifeboat practices, and said something like, “Why are you comparing yourselves with yourselves? It isn’t wise. There’s a better way.”

Jesus points to that better way, demonstrates that better way, and lives that better way — that way of acceptance, of connection, of love. And his love for others is just as strong as his love for God, the Father. God, our Maker in heaven, is the source of that love, as is the Spirit.

And all of this ties right back to Romans 3, particularly verse 21. If you like big butts, this is where we find one of the biggest “buts” of the Bible. Chapters 1 thru 3 are all about how dark, how bad, how ugly our sin is and how we’re all guilty, right? Then comes vs. 21:

But in our time, something new has been added.

What was added? Do tell, Paul, please.

Paul says we’ve proven “we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, so God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity, he put us in right standing with himself.”

By means of Jesus, he rescued us from the lifeboat!

And then Paul starts to unpack all of the implications that go along with that, especially for the Jews.

It cancels their insider claims. It cancels their claim of having a corner on God. It even cancels their claim to Abraham as only their father of their religion and no one else.

Abraham wasn’t declared righteous by what he did for God, but because of what God did for him. He was declared the “father of the faith” simply by believing God’s promise and God’s word to him. God spoke, Abraham listened. He trusted and responded. That’s it. He held a fundamental maxim: God was going to be good to His word. I love this quote from chapter 4 of Romans, which I think puts a nice bow on this idea,

“When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do…. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what He had said.”

And Paul continues to unpack this, as we’ll see tomorrow…

I mentioned in a previous post how the Gospel is the great equalizer. But the Law is also the great equalizer. I mean, who hasn’t broken at least one of the ten commandments? Most of us, at some point, in some way, have broken all of them.

Reminder: I’m still on the bad news piece, but stick with this post because you’re going to learn a super interesting way to think about these things.

Paul says in Romans 3, “It’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we’re sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else?”

Let’s zoom in on that sinking boat.

Donald Miller, my favorite author, fleshes out this idea of a sinking boat in his book, Searching for God Knows What. He has a chapter called Lifeboat Theory. It’s based on the old ethics question, if there’s a lifeboat full of 6 different people, who do you kick off first? Or, for those who used to watch Survivor, who do you kick off the island?

The whole exercise is designed to make you think about who you value, why you value them, and ultimately, in a very sadistic way, who you’d prefer to see die first. What Miller mentions in his book is that we’re constantly living in this lifeboat, this sinking boat, day by day. We all have a death sentence, we’re all terminal. So now we’re fighting for who should get the most attention, the most likes, the most follows, the highest approval ratings. And somehow, we think that the more of those we get, the better off we’ll be.

The problem is those things will never fill us up. They’re like social crack. You need more and more likes for the same dopamine rush.

How we posture ourselves toward one another is fundamentally broken. As Miller illustrates, if I can dunk a basketball, if I’m more handsome, taller, thinner, smarter, wealthier than the next guy, somehow I’m better in the eyes of society (or at least that segment of society that places more value on that). Do you see the conundrum?

We’re all standing on the same level ground, lined up like little army figurines in the universe. We’re roughly the same height, give or take a couple feet. We’re wearing roughly the same clothes, some just have designer names and some have Walmart names. We’re doing roughly the same things, some posed holding a gun, some posed with their hands up or motioning to go here or there. In the light of the entire planet and the entire universe, our species is on level ground. So, the problem isn’t having more or less of something. The problem isn’t looks, money, IQ, or status.

The problem is a missing connection.

We’re like a dead phone separated from its charger.

A plant separated from the sun.

A puppy separated from its mom.

Our little army figurine hearts are all longing for this connection, this acceptance, this hope and love — most of all love. We’ll go anywhere looking for love.

After his introduction, Paul begins to lay it all out on the parchment. But instead of starting with the good news of “salvation,” he actually starts with the bad news. Why? Because good news doesn’t sound so good unless you hear the bad news first. Here’s the bad news:

People are and were refusing God. And in their refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either. Men to women, women to women, men to men, all hurting each other by committing sexual acts, abusive acts, destructive acts against one another. It was a terrible situation then, and it is still terrible today. When people destroy the image of God in one another, there’s no telling how far they’ll go. Well, I guess there is. They’ll go to murderous ends.

I was listening to Viktor Frankl quotes just the other morning. He’s the guy who survived a concentration camp in the Holocaust and came out with the book, Man in Search of Meaning. He has some powerful insights, and the quotes make me want to read the book in its fullness. The point of me bringing this up is that even when human beings are at their worst, God can still work. And not just that He can, but He does.

Paul tells the Romans, don’t be fooled: God is kind, but He’s not soft.

If we hear God’s message, we need to respond. And before you shut me off right there, allow me to explain myself.

Paul says doing, not hearing, is what makes the difference with God.

This is what worries me with modern day evangelicals and many professing Christians. We can hear God’s message more than ever. We can listen to podcasts, listen to sermons, catch clips on YouTube, read the Bible on our phones, read books, watch Bible studies and do online curriculums all about God’s message. But in the process, I think we grow dull of hearing. And we forget how to actually DO the right things–things like racial justice, mercy to the poor, and love to those who aren’t like us.

And I also think we lose the power of the message. It’s hard to hear the message that God is on the side of the oppressed and the poor and the broken hearted and the disenfranchised and the castaways, when we live in the most powerful military-industrial country of the world. The contrast is very stark. It’s hard to hear that God loves the prostitutes and the janitors and the cooks, when we’re in our comfortable suburbs and high-rise apartments and have no want. When I have everything I want, why do I need God? Especially “that God.”

Or maybe it’s hard to hear the message because we’ve been abused, guilted, hurt in the name of “that God” because the version of Christianity or Catholicism that we grew up with was terribly corrupt. So we hear the message of “that God” and respond, “If that’s what it is, I don’t want it.”

I get it. Trust me. I’ve walked away from the institutional church a few times myself.

But let me tell you, when you hear (or re-hear) the message of God, of Jesus, of His Spirit, as it truly is, you can’t help but respond in a positive and receptive way. Paul’s going to lay that out for us in Romans 3, and I’ll try to unpack it a bit, tomorrow…

Romans is arguably the best known letter of the New Testament. I’ve heard it takes some pastors years, almost decades to preach through it. I’ve seen commentaries on the letter that are bigger than the Bible itself. Why? Because some people are just crazy. But also because it’s the go-to letter for big doctrines, for the “road to salvation,” for Calvinist vs. Arminian debates, etc. It’s a very meaty letter. Sixteen chapters, chalked full of big ideas.

More importantly though, it’s a real letter from a real guy to real people. Paul desperately wanted to meet the Roman believers and invest in those relationships. How do I know? He spends the first couple paragraphs of the letter talking about it. [Speaking of Jesus, he says]

“Through him we received both the generous gift of his life and the urgent task of passing it on to others who receive it by entering into obedient trust in Jesus.”

That is why he wants to see the Roman believers and those who have yet to believe. He’s been sharing the message of Jesus with Jews and with non-Jews in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Asia, but he hasn’t yet been able to get to Rome. He’s been praying for it for years, but what’s wild, is eventually that prayer will be answered. But he won’t be going on his own terms, of his own volition. He’ll be going in shackles, as a convict. But more on that in another post.

It’s almost like Paul starts out saying, “I’m excited to come see. I can’t wait to share Jesus with you, hear your reports of people coming to faith, and experience your hospitality in the great city of Rome.” But then as he gets going, he’s like, “Well shoot, I’ll just start telling you everything I want to tell you. Can’t hurt!”

Here it goes…(next post)