The Power of the Gospel

There is also irony here: when Christ sets us free from slavery to the flesh, He calls us to the royal liberty of slavery to Him. That is why we call Him Master. We acknowledge that it is from Him that we get our marching orders. He is the Lord of our lives. We are not our own. We are not autonomous or independent. Unless people understand their re

Luther was an expert in the law of God, and every day he was in terror as he looked in the mirror of the law and examined his life against God’s righteousness. We are not in terror, because we have blocked out the view of God’s righteousness. We judge ourselves on a curve, measuring ourselves against others. We never judge ourselves according to th

In the New Testament, the title “lord” or kurios is used in three ways. There is a simple, common usage, where calling someone kurios is like addressing him as “sir,” a polite form of address. The supreme use of kurios refers to the sovereign God, who rules all things.

Sigmund Freud asked why it is that people are so incurably religious. He claimed that we have invented God to deal with things in nature that we find frightening. This is where Freud missed the point. If people are going to invent religion to protect them from the fear of nature, why would they invent a god who is more terrifying than nature itself

Obviously, Freud was not on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus rebuked the wind and the waves (see Mark 4:35–41). Instead of experiencing the same calm that overcame the sea, the disciples experienced an escalation of fear because the holiness of Christ was made manifest. But it’s precisely the holiness of Christ that we need to stand before a holy God

Consider the significance of what it means to have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Is this peace something that you experience even when confessing your sin to our loving heavenly Father? Just as Paul extended his greeting of “grace and peace” to the Romans, may our experience of this grace and peace create in us a longing for it to b

As we will see later in Romans 1, Paul labors the point that God has manifested Himself so clearly to every human being that nobody has an excuse for denying Him. When Jesus is declared to be God’s Son through the power of the resurrection, that declaration may be all that we ever get. We might be like Thomas and say, “Unless I see in His hands the

God has given you specific gifts for the work of ministry in the church. Paul was compelled to serve Christ with all his life. We are called to do the same. Feeling this eager compulsion to serve our Lord is one of the signs that the Spirit is at work in us. Pray that God would only strengthen this desire in you, even if it is already strong but es

Before Paul develops the theme of the gospel, he says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men (v. 18a). It is perfectly appropriate for a holy and righteous God to be moved to anger against evil. A judge with no distaste for evil would not be a good judge. God is angry with two distinct thing