On January 27, AD 417, a heretofore church leader name Pelagius was excommunicated and branded a heretic. His sin was denying sin, or at least original sin, total depravity, in the human race. Pelagius taught people are born good, could hypothetically choose to never sin, and were capable by their own free will and energy to earn or at least initiate their own salvation.
“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.
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.
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 truth is there will be no real, lasting peace on earth until the Prince of Peace, the Lord Jesus Christ, appears at His second coming.
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.
