Our true identity revealed

What’s always amazed me is how we often create doctrines that get things backwards from what God is trying to tell us. A case in point: the epistle of Romans is often used to show how human nature is totally depraved, when Paul is brilliantly making the opposite argument. This is what struck me when reading chapter 7 this morning.

How God redeems our history

God not only redeems our lives from sin and death, He also redeems our history. He does this by bringing our past brokenness into the light and reveals truth where we have believed lies.

The “Great I Am” has come to free us from all of our “I am not’s!”

Here’s the way Paul said it:

Calling ourselves “Christians”

The reason people like me make distinctions about what it means to be “Christian” is because the term has been rendered meaningless by centuries of mind-numbing confusion, people behaving badly, and absolutely wrong ideas about it. And a lot of those wrong ideas have come from… Christians.

But this is also why I don’t let Christian despisers get away with the straw men they erect in order to dismiss our faith. As I like to quote G.K. Chesterton in this regard, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” 

The open door

What we see in Romans 5 is that there are two doors opened to us. The first one is the default: the door that Adam opened to the world—the door of sin and death and brokenness. The second door is the one Jesus opened to the world—the door to Jesus’ life in God imparted to us, defined by Scripture as eternal life. Here’s what Paul says about it in Romans:

Our faith is based in the miraculous

Our faith is based in the God of miracles, not in what we think is possible. I was struck by this truth as I was reading Romans 4 this morning. Paul goes to great lengths to say that, like Abraham, we’re made right with God by our faith in the miraculous. To put it more plainly, we are justified by God by believing in something that would be impossible by natural means.

God’s righteousness looks like Jesus

We don’t have to speculate about the nature of God’s righteousness any more, for it was made tangible in Jesus Christ. This is how we define righteousness; it looks like Jesus’ life and teachings. What this also means is, whatever looks like Jesus defines God’s righteousness, whatever doesn’t look like Jesus does not define God’s righteousness.

Our unbelief and His faithfulness

Our unfaithfulness or unbelief has absolutely no bearing on God’s faithfulness. When thinking about this we should also understand that we primarily live according to our perception of reality, not reality itself. It’s a bit like driving through fog. You and I have no way of seeing or knowing everything, which is why it’s always quite funny to me when people try to tell me they only live according to reality and evidence.