This past Sunday, Pastor Luke continued the sermon series on the book of Romans. We finished chapter 1 and will be moving to chapter 2 next week. This week, the focus was on the reality of our “ungodliness—the rejection of God and His knowledge,” our “unrighteousness—our wrongful interaction with others,” and how when we lose our consciousness of sin we have lost our consciousness of God. Luke also showed some of the ways these realities are expressed in our lives.
As we continue through this series, my prayer for us is that we will be unfamiliar with this gospel message, meaning that we will not pass it by with a cavalier attitude that exclaims, “I already know this and have experienced it.” Rather, we will approach this gospel with a renewed consciousness of our great sin and also a renewed consciousness of our great LORD and His great grace - the grace we receive through faith. Let us not only continue to preach the gospel to each other but let us also RECEIVE this gospel from each other.
I encourage all of us this week to do three things:
1.) Read the first chapter of Romans multiple times, quickly at first and then more slowly each time you read it allowing yourself to meditate on it.
2.) Let’s share our salvation testimony with each other and with someone outside of our congregation.
3.) Let’s allow ourselves to become conscious of the sin in our lives again and conscious of God’s presence as well. If you would like to, you can share your testimony here on this blog as well. Feel free to share the ways you are becoming conscious of sin or of God in your life this week. I will share my story about this tomorrow. You can also share your reflections on Romans 1 as well.
Grace and peace,
Paul
Paul said:
So this past Sunday I was in Books-A-Million (I love books) and I was looking around trying to kill some time. I came across this section in the front with several random books together. One of them was Chelsea Handler’s book “My Horizontal Life” which is a memoire that proudly tells of the couple of years she took to sleep with any and everybody she could (it is a best seller). Next to that was a book “HOw to Make the Bible Say Anything You Want” which shows all of the boscure verses that might be twisted in order to justify sin. On the other side was a book “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” another memoire from a guy whi is an incredibly manipulative and cold womanizer and it tells of his stories of exploiting women as objects for his pleasure. There were other books in this section that appaled me as well but I’ll stop here.
I sat down to journal my feelings about these horrible attrocities on our culture and how they are such reflections of the condition of our culture, a funny thing happened . As I began to write down my feelings about these things I began to become aware of certain feelings and desires in my own heart that are all too similar to the desires, philosophies and worldviews that are proudly put into action within those books. I began to feel how I imagine the Apostle Paul felt when he said, “for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do (Romans 7:15). I fetl like such a hypocrite and was so aware of my own sin at that point–I couldn’t finish writing my thoughts down.
It isn’t that I did something so terrible, I simply became re-awuainted with the sin Christ saved me from, how wretched I would be if left to my own ways and did not have His Holy Spirit in me and how thankful I am for His AMAZING grace. We truely are, as it says in Romans 1 “without excuse..”