So I begin my outpouring of what God is teaching me through Romans. It is a LOT to wade through so i thought it would be good to do it a small section at a time! Although Romans is a hard book to study, it is chock FULL of incredible stuff. God inspired Paul to write deep things for us to search out, just as much as he inspired the simple books of the Bible. One thing our sunday school teacher said today stuck out to me and it was this: A scripture that is hard to understand or grasp should lead us to 4 things.
1) Desperation to read Gods word and understand his truth
2) Supplication (aka:prayer): desperately asking God to help us understand
3)Cogitation (basically to think hard about it and mull over it over and over in desperation to understand)
4) Education: once God has finally reavealed his truth to us, it would be SELFISH to NOT SHARE IT!!
I heard someone say that Romans could be the gospel to America. Rome at the time of this letter was a very powerful entity. They had it all. Power. Money. HUGE Army. I could go on, but their position at the time parallels the position of America today. It not only parallels the position of America, but also the attitude of the American people.
So begins Romans 1........
vs 1-6
1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5 Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake. 6 And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
The very first thing I noticed was that Paul references Christ MANY times while introducing himself to the Romans. Self check...When I introduce myself to people, does my introduction point them to Christ immediately? Ummm.......
The second thing i noticed is that he uses the word apostle twice in these verses. He calls himself an apostle in vs 1. An apostle is defined in scripture in Acts 1:21-22 when they are choosing a 12th disciple as some one who has seen the RISEN Christ. Paul counts himself an Apostle because he literally SAW Jesus on the road to Damascus where he began his follow-ship of Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 it talks about how the risen Christ appeared to over 500 people, but not all of those people were apostles. Not all people who saw the risen Christ were apostles, but ALL apostles saw the risen Christ. So...now we have established that Paul was an apostle and why.
BUT....later her says "Through Him (Christ) we received grace and apostleship....". Wait a min....so that confused me at first because he was telling the Roman church they had received apostleship...but...they had not seen the risen Jesus..??? NO....this word apostleship is a different word than the first apostleship in vs 1. The apostleship in vs 5 is talking about being a messenger. "Through him we received grace and apostleship (the ability to be a messenger of that grace) to call people from among the Gentiles to the obedience that comes through faith." WHew! That was a lot to chew on at first.
That is all for now. That is a lot. Later posts to come! To who ever is reading this, verse 6 is for you. "And YOU also are among the Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ!"
No comments:
Post a Comment