'grace' Tagged Posts
Daily Devotions
Romans 6:12-16…“No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.” vs. 132 As we live in this good and broken world, we will have daily encounters with brokenness, both in ourselves and in the world around us. Paul describes that brokenness as sin, a cancer that infects the whole creation, and says that…
Daily Devotions
Romans 6: 5-11…“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” vs. 11 Sometimes Paul comes across as a hectoring and scolding parent in his letters to the early believers in their little house churches. Like some pastors, he can turn the good news of the gospel into some new impossible commandment. We might even wonder why he makes the plain truth seem so complicated. But as he gives vent to his passions…
Daily Devotions
Romans 6:1b-4…“Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” vs. 4 Paul had all the details worked out. He could explain what happened in Jesus from a theological perspective and it all made sense to him. Jesus had died and had been raised from the dead; in baptism we are buried with…
Daily Devotions
Psalm 69:16-18…“Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me.” vs. 17 This psalmist seems to have run out of patience with the Lord. His passion for the temple has gotten him a boatload of enemies, and they never tire of tormenting him. Through it all the psalmist has continued to trust in the Lord as a source of mercy and steadfast love! But at this moment he’s just not feeling it!…
Daily Devotions
Romans 5:6-8…“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” vs. 8 Some folks struggle with the meaning of the cross, especially as it relates to a satisfaction theory of the atonement. We can’t get our heads around the notion that the death of one person could atone for the sins of all humanity. And that’s okay! All those theories were developed by early Christians as they tried to make sense…
Daily Devotions
Romans 5:1-5…“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand;” vss. 1-2a Probably the biggest blessing of faith for a follower of Jesus is peace. Of course that doesn’t mean that we will never worry or be anxious! Even the most faithful folks will have plenty of concerns in the course of a lifetime. No one is perfectly calm…
Daily Devotions
Romans 4:18-25…“It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.” vss. 24-25 For Paul, Abraham and Sarah’s faith experience wasn’t just a bit of Israel’s history, it actually demonstrated the nature of God’s gracious love. Paul told the Romans that the old story was for them too, and that it showed the blessings that came with…
Daily Devotions
1 Corinthians 12:12-14…“For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” vs. 13 Strange as it may seem, in recent years the word inclusive has fallen out of favor, along with related words like diversity and equity. All this would come as a surprise to the Apostle Paul who regularly used these concepts to describe what he called the Body of Christ. He…
Daily Devotions
1 Peter 3:18-22…“He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison…” vss. 18b-19a It’s not easy to know what Peter was referring to as he wrote to the suffering exiles in Asia Minor. He was obviously familiar with the basic message of the early church, that Jesus had suffered on the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of all the…
Daily Devotions
1 Peter 2:19-21…“If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval.” vs. 20 Slavery was firmly entrenched in the Roman Empire during the first and second centuries, and as the gospel was proclaimed many slaves were baptized and became part of faith community. Peter addresses them in this letter, advising them to accept the authority of their masters, even…
Daily Devotions
Romans 6:3-11…“Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” vs. 4 The disciples of Jesus were very familiar with the practice of baptism. The gospel of John hints that, like Jesus, at least a couple of them had been baptized by John the Baptist. That was a particular kind of baptism, a…
Daily Devotions
Romans 5:1-5… “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand;” vss. 1-2a Sometimes we believers get our slogans confused, and we wonder things like, are we “justified by grace through faith,” or is it “justified by faith through grace?” And really it doesn’t make any difference which phrase we’ve learned–both contain the same essential truth about our relationship to God. But…