I find it interesting that Paul goes through such great lengths to explain the Gospel and all that it entails, then as he’s wrapping things up, he starts to address matters of food and holidays. When I was younger, I thought it was a bit odd. Didn’t understand it. Felt like a waste of time and ink.

But as I’ve gotten older I totally see why he included it. People, especially Christians (aka people who are supposed to be following Jesus), get fired up about some of the most ridiculous things. Things, like holidays and food.

Some people love Christmas and think we have to keep Christ in Christmas, Jesus is the reason for the season, etc. Others refuse to celebrate Christmas because it doesn’t match up historically or because they think it’s too commercialized or they think we should celebrate Hanukkah instead. Some people hate Halloween and think it’s the devil’s holiday. Others get a ton of joy out of celebrating it and can do so with a clear conscience. And don’t even get me started on all the debates around Easter / Resurrection Sunday / whatever you decide to call it.

But it’s not just holidays, right? It’s food too. Some people eat any and all food with a clear conscience. Some are vegetarian, some are pescatarian, some are vegan, some are kosher only.

Paul sees all of this and says, “Each person is free to follow the convictions of conscience.”

He also says God’s kingdom isn’t a matter of what you put in your stomach, for goodness sake. It’s what God does with your life as he sets it right, put it together, and completes it with joy. Our task is to single-mindedly serve Christ. Basically, if the way you live isn’t consistent with what you believe, then it’s wrong.

Pretty simple, right? So I’ll eat kosher; you eat however you’d like. I’ll acknowledge a couple days I think are important; you acknowledge the ones you think are important, or treat them all as the same. I can respect that. We’re good. You good?

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.