Romans 1 & 2

So I've wanted to go through Romans for about 6 months now, so I decided to buckle down and take on the book. I was planning on only doing one chapter a day but when I finished chapter one it left on a cliffhanger, so I went on to chapter two -- so who knows how the rest will work out.
First of all, I'd like to say... holy crap Paul makes me feel SO convicted! haha. I guess technically it's God that's making me convicting, but Paul meant business.

Chapter 1:

After Paul's greeting in the beginning the subtitle is "Paul's Longing to Visit Rome". In verse 11 & 12 he says "I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith". This definitley reminded me that I need to encourage and be encouraged by other people's faith -- Paul longed to see these people so that they could feed off of each other. A lot of my friends that I've emailed or talked to since the end of the semester seem to be in spiritual ruts, mostly because the fellowship is gone that we all because so used to during the school year. I know it's been especially hard on me because I'm stuck in Mt. Pleasant, where there are not a whole lot of people I know around and even when I do go back to Mayville, I don't really have a lot of fellowship opportunities outside of the church because I'm basically the only college aged one there. I can't wait for Australia because it will be Jesus 24/7 and I'll be living with 17 other believers that seemed pretty fired up for Christ.

Moving on... the second thing that caught my eye in this sections was verse 17 "For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith." The last 6 words really hit me for some reason... the righteous live by faith. That little statement is loaded with all kind of ideas, the main one for me being that this walk on the straight and narrow is hard... so hard that we have to live/walk by faith. We aren't always going to see where we are going and we have to let God lead us at His pace otherwise we might get lost.

The next section is labeled God's Wrath Against Mankind. Going into this section I knew it was going to be intense. I was fairly familiar with it because I wrote a paper this past semester on homosexuality and verse 26 & 27 deal with that.

The first passage that jumped out at me was verses 20-21: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened". Holy crap is that convicting or what? We are without excuse... sometimes even though we know God will don't glorify him, we don't give thanks to Him for all that He has done (the cross is kinda a big deal and I think we all take that for granted more than we'd like to admit) and our thoughts are so bad at times I know I wouldn't want people being able to read mine. How scary is that? We have no excuse and we deliberately spit in God's face.

The context of this scripture was obviously to the Romans during a time of very illicit behaviors around 60 a.d. (or pretty close to that). I think this section still applies today even though this is address to people a little under 2,000 years ago. Verse 24 & 25 say: "Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen". I read that last sentence and tears started to fall. We still see this happening and as Christians do this... we take the easier road at times and do things our way and when we do that we buy into a lie. We exchange the TRUTH OF GOD for a pitiful lie and worship things that do not even matter! Paul goes on to describe how God gave them over to these things... God gives us free will and can only control so much. We choose so many things that lead to unnecessary pain and set-backs. I am by no stretch of the imagination saying that the Christian walk is easy and painless, but God lets things happen for a reason. When we "take control" and run things into the ground, it makes everything worse. "(28)Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he [God] gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. (29)They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, (30) slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; (31) they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (32) Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." I do not think we are better off than they were on this one. I know we have all done something that we knew God wasn't going to like but we did it anyways. And since all sin is equal, that doesn't make us much different than the people of 60 a.d.

Chapter 2

So after Paul unload all of this on us, he tells us that we have no excuse to judge people because when we judge them, we are condemning ourselves as well. It's that whole "when you point a finger at someone you have three pointing right back at you" idea. Basically to sum up what I got from Chapter two: Repent. Do not judge others. God knows you hearts, so you can't fool him. It's all about what is on the inside. I didn't get as much out of Chapter 2 as I did in chapter 1, but it was good basic stuff that was nice to review.

That is all. :-)