JUSTIFICATION ENJOYED

January 21, 2024
“Justified,” or justification, is the theme of this section (3:21-5:21). Justification is your passport to salvation, which will also bring you through sanctification and take you on to glorification. It is your declaration of righteousness and a right standing with God.

JUSTIFICATION EXEMPLIFIED

January 14, 2024
The Apostle Paul is the primary preacher of New Testament Christianity. This is due to fact, among others, that He wrote roughly half of the New Testament, including this jewel that is the epistle to the Romans.

JUSTIFICATION EXPLAINED

January 7, 2024
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.

THE SIN OF BEING RELIGIOUS

November 5, 2023
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 SIN OF BEING GOOD

October 22, 2023
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.

WORST THINGS FIRST

October 15, 2023
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.