We look at our lives and, if we’re honest, we see very little glory. We see struggle and hardship and failure. We wonder what happened to the dreams we once had. We have been beaten up and cast aside. But the gospel offers us something new

f we're not resting in God's free gift of grace, we will hold others to a different standard, and it will a standard that we ourselves set but that we attribute to God.

Paul’s Judaism led him to persecute the church of God. What Paul was doing was an attack on the people he thought he was protecting: God’s elect. His desire for the purity of God’s word drove him to approve the killing of God’s people because he believed they were redefining the boundaries of Israel by following Jesus. He had no idea that Jesus had redefined the boundaries for them. It wasn’t their message. It was God’s. Paul just hadn’t heard it yet. When Paul did hear the gospel, he experienced a complete life change.

Paul closes his letter to the Romans with a list of greetings. In our Bible study with my brothers of Refuge Church a few weeks ago, we looked at this passage and fought to mine some usefulness out of it. What do you make of a list of names, most of which we know very little about outside of Paul's brief comments?

Paul puts the burden of building and maintaining gospel culture on the shoulders of the strong. He is not excusing the weak. He’s simply telling the strong that they set the tone.

As J.B. Lightfoot says, “The gospel is a rescue, and emancipation from a state of bondage.”

Many churches never go beyond Romans 1.

Fred is a true hero, like all veterans who served and gave and sacrificed. He will be 94 in September and he can recall vivid details of the war, of D-Day, and the cost of it all, with tears in his eyes.

We want to be sure the God we think of is the real God of the Bible, not the false god of our imagination. We want to relate to him rightly, and that happens when we get to know him. 

Foregoing judgment on non-primary issues is serving Christ because in doing so you are serving his people. We all have so many stumbling blocks in coming to the gospel. We trip over our own feet as we approach the altar. The more hindrances others place in front of us along the way, the harder it will be to get to Jesus.