The New Testament begins with four Gospels. Then comes the chronicle of Acts, detailing how the gospel spread from Jew to Gentile, from Jerusalem to Judea to the uttermost parts of the known world. Then comes the greatest explanation of the gospel ever written, Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
Love is the last theme of our four Sundays of Advent. It is the last candle lit before the Christ candle is crowned. Love is the theme of the first coming of Christ, of course, as the Bible’s most familiar verse, John 3:16, attests.
Hope, in the Bible, means confident expectation. It is a bedrock belief that what God has promised in His word, He will do. Hope is a wonderful, and a terrible, thing.
The book of Romans systematically answers life’s greatest questions, assuages death’s greatest threats, and tells us how to be right with God.
The wrath of a holy God hovers over unredeemed sinners. Some flaunt conventional or biblical morality (1:18-31). Others hope their innate goodness, a myth to be destroyed later in Romans, will overcome their bad sins (2:1-11). Now we get to a text that deals with the sin of being religious (2:12-29).
The Apostle Paul has just argued in his epistle to the Romans that it is bad to be bad (ref. 1:18-32). Now he is going to tell us that good can be bad, too. That is, until we are transformed from bad to good. Then, good is what the good do. Let’s break that down.
Paul in Romans has already mentioned the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, by way of introduction. Later in this letter he will plumb the depths of the love, grace, and mercy of God which takes the gospel and makes a person right with God. But in order to receive salvation and all the wonderful things that go with it, we have to face the worst things first.
The gospel is for God’s people. It is what brings us to God. It motivates us to pray for and present the gospel to others. And every time we gather for worship, the gospel should be preached, to grant salvation, to give assurance, and to motivate us to follow Christ in every other aspect of our lives.
Confessing Christians today do not seem to appreciate the great treasure we have in the word of God, the Holy Scriptures, the Bible. In Germany, the land of the Reformation, regular Bible reading is practiced by less than 2% of the population.
Once the Holy Spirit is in you, you become a holy and spiritual person. What do holy and spiritual people do?
