Romans

No. 44 Romans 8:9-15
Romans 8 comes after seven chapters of hard argument about sin and law, including Paul's account of wanting to do good and finding himself doing otherwise. The chapter opens with there is now no condemnation,...
No. 106 Romans 9:1-5
Paul has just finished Romans 8, which ends with the claim that nothing in all creation can separate believers from the love of God. This passage is the very next sentence, and the change of tone is abrupt. He...
No. 131 Romans 8:31-39
This is the end of Romans 8, and it is written as a series of questions with no one able to answer them. Paul has spent eight chapters on sin, law, and the Spirit, and here he stops arguing and starts summing...
No. 240 Romans 8:16-25
Romans 8 is the summit of Paul's longest and most carefully built letter, and in this passage he opens the lens as wide as it goes. He starts with the believer, adopted as a child of God and made an heir along...
No. 365 Romans 4:9-15
Paul is doing something careful with the story of Abraham, and it hinges on a sequence most readers never think about. When was Abraham declared righteous, Paul asks: before he was circumcised, or after? And...
No. 515 Romans 6:12-18
Paul is answering a question people were evidently asking: if we are saved by grace and not by keeping the law, then does it matter how we live? Can we just keep sinning, since grace covers it? His answer is a...
No. 563 Romans 11:13-24
Paul is writing to Gentile Christians, and he reaches for an image from horticulture to keep them humble. Israel, he says, is a cultivated olive tree. Some of its natural branches were broken off through...
No. 655 Romans 1:18-25
Romans is Paul's fullest statement of his gospel, written to a church he had not yet visited. After the greeting he begins the argument, and it opens not with good news but with a diagnosis. The wrath of God...
No. 797 Romans 2:1-9
Paul has just finished a searing description of human corruption, the kind of catalog a religious reader would nod along to, condemning all those wicked people. And in the very next breath he wheels around and...
No. 939 Romans 3:27-31
Paul has just laid out the heart of the gospel, that all have sinned and are justified freely by grace through faith in Christ, apart from works of the law. Now he draws the conclusions in a rapid exchange of...
No. 977 Romans 15:22-33
Paul is writing to the Roman church he has never visited, and he lays out his plans. He has long wanted to come to them and hopes to, on his way to Spain, but first he must go to Jerusalem on an errand of...
No. 1030 Romans 13:1-7
Paul turns to how Christians relate to governing authority. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, he says, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been...
No. 1123 Romans 16:1-16
Paul ends his weighty letter to Rome with a long list of personal greetings. He commends Phoebe, a servant of the church and a helper of many, who likely carried the letter. He greets Prisca and Aquila, who...
No. 1235 Romans 3:9-18
Paul reaches the verdict of his long argument, and it is sweeping: all, both Jew and Greek, are under sin. He stacks up quotation after quotation from scripture to prove it: none is righteous, no, not one; no...
No. 1241 Romans 8:1-8
Paul opens one of the great chapters of the Bible with a thunderclap: there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. What the law could not do, being weakened by our flesh, God did...
No. 1337 Romans 13:8-14
Paul turns to the one obligation that is never discharged. Owe no one anything, he writes, except to love one another, for the one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. All the commandments, against...
No. 1474 Romans 9:19-26
Paul is wrestling with God's freedom in showing mercy, and he anticipates the objection: why does God still find fault, if no one can resist his will? He answers first with the image of the potter and the...
No. 1510 Romans 11:1-6
Paul asks whether God has rejected his people Israel, and answers emphatically, by no means. He points to himself, an Israelite, as evidence, and then recalls Elijah. The prophet, in despair, had complained to...
No. 1737 Romans 5:6-10
Paul lays out the astonishing character of God's love. While we were still weak, he writes, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. It is rare enough that anyone would die for a righteous person, though...
No. 1817 Romans 16:17-25
As Paul closes his letter, he warns the Romans to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in the way, contrary to the teaching they received; such people, he says, serve not Christ but their...
No. 1930 Romans 4:16-25
Paul holds up Abraham as the model of faith. Against hope, Abraham in hope believed that he would become the father of many nations, as God had promised. He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own...
No. 1939 Romans 6:1-11
Paul asks whether we should continue in sin so that grace may abound, and answers with force: may it never be. We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer? Through baptism we were united with Christ...
No. 1960 Romans 3:19-26
Paul brings the whole world under God's judgment: no one is justified by the works of the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin, and every mouth is stopped. But now, he says, apart from the law,...
No. 2022 Romans 12:1-8
Having spent eleven chapters on the mercies of God, Paul turns to how we should live in response. I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to...
No. 2031 Romans 12:14-21
Amid a string of instructions on how love actually behaves, Paul gives a brief command that reaches into the whole of our life with others: rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. It is a...
No. 2033 Romans 14:10-21
Paul addresses believers divided over matters like what foods to eat, some free in conscience, others scrupulous. He warns against judging or despising one another, since each will answer to God. But then he...
No. 2061 Romans 14:1-9
Paul addresses a church divided over matters of conscience: some felt free to eat all foods, others ate only vegetables; some regarded certain days as sacred, others regarded all days alike. These were not...
No. 2088 Romans 1:13-17
Paul, writing to the believers in Rome, the center of worldly power and culture, declares his readiness to preach the gospel there without embarrassment. For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, he...
No. 2292 Romans 5:1-5
Having declared that we are justified by faith and have peace with God, Paul says something surprising about suffering. Not only do we rejoice in the hope of glory, he writes, but we also rejoice in our...
No. 2307 Romans 4:1-8
Paul turns to Abraham to show how a person is made right with God. Was Abraham justified by his works? No, Paul says; for Scripture declares, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness....
No. 2342 Romans 7:7-12
Paul asks whether the law itself is sinful, and answers emphatically no. But he explains the law's role in relation to sin. I would not have known sin, he says, except through the law. I would not have known...
No. 2384 Romans 3:1-8
Paul raises a hard question. If Israel was entrusted with God's words and some proved faithless, does their faithlessness cancel God's faithfulness? His answer is emphatic: may it never be. Let God be found...
No. 2412 Romans 11:25-36
Paul has been wrestling with the hardest puzzle he knows, why so much of Israel has not received the Messiah while the Gentiles stream in, and he ends not with a solution but with worship. The gifts and...
No. 2438 Romans 15:1-6
Paul turns from doctrine to how the strong and the weak live together. Those who are strong, he says, ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not simply please themselves. Each of us should aim to...
No. 2457 Romans 14:22-26
Paul is closing a long discussion about disputable matters, foods and days that some believers scruple over and others do not. His counsel has two edges. The faith you have, keep between yourself and God;...
No. 2503 Romans 1:1-7
Paul opens his letter to Rome by naming what the gospel is about, and it is not first a system or a set of rules. It is, he says, the good news of God concerning his Son, promised beforehand in the Scriptures,...
No. 2585 Romans 1:8-12
Paul opens his letter to the Romans with warmth. He thanks God for their faith, which is spoken of everywhere, and tells them how constantly he prays for them and longs to visit. He wants to come, he says, to...
No. 2710 Romans 7:13-25
This is Paul at his most honest about the inner life. He describes a war he cannot win by willpower: I do not do the good I want, but the very evil I do not want is what I keep doing. In my inmost self I...
No. 2713 Romans 5:11-21
Paul sets two men side by side, Adam and Christ, and lets the whole human story hang between them. Through one man's disobedience sin entered the world, and death spread to everyone. Through one man's...
No. 2788 Romans 12:9-13
Paul fires off a rapid list of what real love looks like once you stop admiring it and start living it. Let love be genuine, without hypocrisy. Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. Be devoted to one...
No. 2795 Romans 2:10-16
Paul lays down a principle that levels everyone: there is no partiality with God. Glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, Jew first and also Greek. It is not the hearers of the law who are...
No. 3333 Romans 9:27-33
Paul wrestles with a painful puzzle: the Gentiles, who were not even pursuing righteousness, found it, while Israel, chasing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at it. Why? Not because the law was bad, but...
No. 3448 Romans 11:7-12
Paul wrestles with the mystery of Israel's partial hardening. Most of Israel did not obtain what they sought, yet Paul refuses to read this as the end of the story: did they stumble in order that they might...
No. 3526 Romans 6:19-23
Paul lays out a stark contrast between two masters and two outcomes. Once you were slaves of sin, he says, and what fruit did that bear? Things you are now ashamed of, and the end of them is death. But now,...
No. 3532 Romans 10:12-21
Paul makes a sweeping declaration of the gospel's reach: there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all, rich to all who call on him, and everyone who calls on the name of the Lord...
No. 3624 Romans 10:1-11
Paul grieves for his people, who have a zeal for God but not according to knowledge. Their problem was not a lack of earnestness but its direction: seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not...
No. 3877 Romans 7:1-6
Paul uses the picture of marriage to explain the believer's new relationship to the law. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if he dies, she is free from that bond and free to marry...
No. 3887 Romans 9:6-13
Paul wrestles with why not all of Israel had received the Messiah, and he answers with a principle that runs back through their own history: not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel; it is not...
No. 3906 Romans 15:7-11
Paul gives a simple but far-reaching command: welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. The measure of how we are to receive one another is nothing less than the way Christ received...
No. 3960 Romans 9:14-18
Paul faces a hard question head-on: is God unjust in his sovereign choices? His answer is emphatic, by no means, and he grounds it in God's own words to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I...
No. 4028 Romans 8:26-30
Paul offers deep comfort to believers who struggle. In the same way, he says, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with...
No. 4180 Romans 15:12-21
Paul, having spoken of Christ as the hope of the nations, breaks into a prayer that is itself a blessing: may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy...
No. 4241 Romans 2:17-29
Paul confronts a person who is confident in his religious standing, who bears the name, rests on the law, knows God's will, and sets himself up as a guide to others, a teacher of the ignorant. But then Paul...
No. 4293 Romans 1:26-32
Paul describes what happens when people refuse to acknowledge God: their minds are darkened, and they are given over to a long list of sins. And while the list begins with sexual disorder, it quickly widens...