Romans 3:21-22

Here we find the beloved apostle making a powerful statement; for if they who had received the Law were unable to attain to the righteousness of God, not only were they unable to attain it, but they were more heavily burdened by the knowledge of the Law; then how would those who were not given the Law ever to be able to attain to, not only a similar, but greater righteousness? Not only to escape punishment, but to actually attain to the degree that Paul had declare the Jews unfit for? See, we have to remember all of the indictments that Paul had already leveled against the Jews at this point, because it was the Jews who were declaring that only they, the elect of the Lord, were fit for salvation, that only they could ever attain to the righteousness of God, because only this elect group were in the favor of the Lord.

We must also remember that the Jews to whom he is speaking at this point know nothing of the close of what we know as the “Old Testament.” Rather, to them, the Law and the Prophets spoke of a Messiah who had not yet come, they had no faith in Jesus as our Lord. Based on the teachings of Leviticus, they conceived that righteousness could be obtained through the Law, and that the Law could be kept through obedience (Leviticus 18:5). In their belief, it was enough to “will” themselves into obedience to the Law, and thus they could obtain righteousness in absentia of faith. They believed, as many do even today, that they can be “good enough people” to obtain to the kingdom, regardless of their faith in the Lord. Yet, obedience without faith can never lead unto the righteousness of God, particularly considering the Lord’s command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” No, attempted obedience in absentia of faith is the equivalent of spiritual bribery, it’s a mystical “quid pro quo,” the equivalent of the prayer that each of us has prayed at least once in our lives, “God, please________ and I will ______.”

Yet, the biggest problem with that prayer is this; it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because God doesn’t work that way. It’s not a form of barter with the Lord. Will He reward us for the good things that we have done? Sure He will. Will He punish us for the wickedness that we commit? Of course He will. Yet, it will all be done on the basis of our obedience to Him based on our faith, not based on our heart’s desire to gain favor with Him. See, the biggest problem with that prayer, with that entire mindset, is that it creates a very “me” centered theology. It creates a theology where we attempt to seek divine favor using human willpower as collateral. And how reliable is human willpower? Go to a gym on January 3rd, and then return to that same gym on March 31st. You will see how reliable willpower is. Further, when we circumvent the necessity for faith in our faith, our prayer becomes very much centered on what I want, what I need, when I want what I want. Our prayers become, “Lord, please give me this, help me with this, help my brother with that, make the pain go away.” It becomes very pridefully us telling God how things need to be, or it becomes a very empty “Lord, please let Your will be done,” as though if we didn’t pray that, His will wouldn’t be done. When faith is present in our lives, true faith, then our prayers become worship, they become praying for the entire world, for the government (even if it isn’t the person we would’ve elected), they become praying for the poor and the homeless, for the needy, for the sick and suffering servants of the Lord. We become the last people that we pray for, and that usually for the wisdom and guidance to live a life that would glorify Him. It is no longer, “Lord, please heal my best friend’s cousin of his cancer,” but instead, “Lord, give me the wisdom to learn from these circumstances.”

See, Paul’s lesson here is that the Law will never be able to bring a man to righteousness in absentia of true faith. We can never “will” ourselves to righteousness. But, the inverse is possible. It is possible for those who have never received the Law to obtain to this righteousness through faith, because the Lord has written the Law on the hearts of all men (Hebrews 10:16), and those who have faith in Him will choose to obey that Law, not through their own willpower, but through seeking after the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Those who turn to Jesus in true faith are able to achieve this righteousness because Jesus Himself supercedes the Law, and the Holy Spirit will guide us to obedience to His Law.

And notice what Paul writes, not merely righteousness, but the “righteousness of God,” and not that it is given, but that it is revealed, that it is made manifest. The word here in the Greek is the word “phaneroo,” which literally translates “to make manifest or visible what is hidden.” This is of such importance to us considering the topic of this letter, because the Jews had taught that they alone were able to attain to righteousness and that the rest of mankind was wicked, and yet, Paul’s very wording here teaches us that this righteousness is not “given to us” through our faith, but rather that it is revealed to us through it. He is saying that this righteousness already exists within us all, but it is through our faith in Jesus that it is revealed to us, that our true nature is brought to light. We are not innately wicked, but rather we are innately good and righteous and have merely been led astray, led on the wrong path, by a world which stands opposed to all things righteous and holy. The world doesn’t hate Jesus because they don’t believe in Him, the world hates Jesus because He displays what they were created to be but choose not to be. And we, being born into the world and exposed to the world, adopt this “when in Rome” mentality and begin to slowly become more and more corrupted; so much so that it requires dying to ourselves to be freed from the bondage to sin that the world creates within us. The glory of God is eternal righteousness and eternal life. Our salvation is not merely entrance to the kingdom, it is also our ability to live while we are still here on the earth, free from bondage to sin. Our salvation, our Christian walk, is the ability to walk in this world free from the sickness of sin that plagues the world.

Our world is a sick world, and our Lord is the great Physician. Our sickness is not merely physical, but also spiritual. Our sickness is manifested in the temper that we can’t control, the lustful thoughts which haunt us, the greed which causes us to cheat and lie, the self-love that causes us to place our own comfort over someone else’s survival. And the Lord’s offer of salvation isn’t that we can continue to suffer through those ailments until the day that we fall asleep and then enter the kingdom, it is instead the offer of curing us of those sicknesses while we are still here. It is the cure to the sickness of sin. The Lord is the great Physician, and the Church, the one Church, is His hospital wherein He is able to heal us. Too many Sundays are spent in theaters, in lecture halls, in theology classrooms, in courtrooms; and not nearly enough are spent in the great halls of healing. Far too few believers on far too few Sundays spend their time in corporate prayer, in worshiping the One who alone is worthy; seeking after and praising the Physician who alone can heal our souls and bring us back into communion with Him.

My brothers and sisters, I ask you to consider this. Consider your Sunday services and ask this one question; what is the focal point of the service that you are in? Is it Jesus Christ glorified? Is the focal point a lecture? Is it a band playing? Is the focal point a lesson in theology and doctrine? Or is the focal point communion with the Lord? Each of those things is great, but if the focal point of Sunday worship isn’t worship, then is it truly the Church that we read about in the Book of Acts? We can listen to a band on our own, we can have small study groups for Bible studies. Outside of our service though, we can’t come together as one body in communion with the Lord. We can’t be involved in corporate prayer and worship alone. We can’t celebrate the Eucharist alone. Those other things are great, but those other things can be done outside of the Liturgy. When we look to Scripture, we see that even the Cherubim in the heavens fall down in corporate worship, singing the angelic hymn, “Holy holy holy, is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His Glory.” (Isaiah 6:3). If the angelic hosts fall down and worship in this fashion, shouldn’t we honor Him in the same manner?

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family. Christ is risen!

Romans 3:9-20

This is such a vital passage to this letter to the Church which is in Rome. Bearing in mind that Paul has been addressing the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of those who are called Jew, he here goes through a list of Old Testament indictments against Israel, quoting from Psalms, from Ecclesiastes, from Isaiah. In so doing, he removes from the Jews the very grounds of the self-righteousness that they had trumpeted and instead rightfully places the emphasis on the righteous that is of the Lord.

This passage,. with it’s many Old Testament indictments against a particular nation, in no way claims that our very nature is wicked, as so many teach that it does. In a bitter twist of irony, many who interpret away so many other passages, when they arrive to this, take it completely literally, and use it as the grounds to display the depravity of all of mankind. Whence we read passages like “deny yourselves, pick up your cross and follow Me,” or a passage like “whatever you have done to the least of these, so you do to Me,” or “you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,” we tend to interpret these very meanings to mean something completely different than what was stated, but when we read Paul’s quotes here, we take it to mean literally that “no one is good,” and that “no one seeks after God,” rather than recognizing in their context what these quotes would mean to the Jews that he is confronting through his epistle. God Himself creates nothing which is not inherently good, and since it is He who forms us in the womb, then we, by nature, must also be inherently good. We are merely born into a world which influences us to wickedness, and, in our own weakness, we can oftentimes surrender to this wickedness and seek to “gratify the pleasures of the flesh.” See, as Paul taught, while it is possible to attain to the “righteousness of God,” it is possible to do so only through the power of God, through His mercy and grace.

The Jews, however, claimed that through the Law and through their sheer physical lineage, they were made righteous. Paul however, evoking David, Solomon, and Isaiah as his witnesses, displays instead where the Jews had fallen short, not only in contemporary times, but all throughout history. In doing so, he displays to the Jews that they are no more righteous than the Gentiles, in fact, to the opposite, they are even more guilty because of their knowledge of the Law.

He goes on to explain that, through the Law, which is now given to all men (written on the hearts of all men), sin is revealed, and that because of this fact, all of the world is now accountable for their sin; not merely Jews, neither Gentiles, but rather, all are equally accountable. However, it is not merely for the sake of accusing that he does this, but rather, to pave the way for any to come to the faith. Both Jews and Gentiles are equally accountable, and both are equally able to be saved. There is no one elect group that the Lord favors over any other, but rather, any and all who are obedient to Him and have faith in Him. See, he recognized that not only would the Jews actually drive away others who may otherwise come to faith in our beloved Lord, but that they themselves would drink condemnation on themselves, regardless of any other sins that they had committed or not committed, because of the very pride and arrogance that they were guilty of. He will reiterate this fact later when he states that the Jews, “being arrogant of God’s righteousness and seeking their own righteousness, [they] have not submitted to the righteousness of God.” (Romans 10:3).

Thus here, he uses the very foundation of this self-righteousness, the prophets and the Law, to display to them that in trusting in the flesh (the Law), they could never attain to the righteousness that they boasted in. His desire was obviously to break them of their prideful self-righteousness that they might instead seek after the righteousness of God.

He ends this passage by stating that “by deeds of the law, no flesh will ever be justified in His sight.” See, the Law, rooted in the flesh, can never bring anyone into full communion with the Lord. The purpose of the Law was never to do this, neither did it have the power to do so. Rather, the purpose of the Law was to reveal to us the knowledge of sin, that we would flee from it in repentance. So many look upon the Holy Scripture as this rule book, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” and yet, the Bible is not the foundation of our faith. The foundation of our faith is the Lord Jesus. We see this displayed all throughout Church history. The purpose for which the Law was given to us was that our offenses would be revealed to us that we might turn to Him in repentance, to draw us closer to the Lord Himself. So many treat the Scriptures as though they are our faith, as though the Holy Trinity were “Father, Son, and Holy Bible.” And yet, the purpose for which the Bible was given to us was to draw us closer to the Lord, to give us His words that we might test that which we are taught to see if it is of God or not. To “test every spirit.” It was given to us that we might turn away from our ways and turn unto the Lord, seeking His continued guidance and the conviction of the Holy Spirit to turn fully away from the desires of the flesh, and through His wisdom and guidance, through His grace, to attain to the righteousness of God. To be “holy, as He is holy.” To be “perfect, as Your heavenly Father is perfect,” and to truly be “partakers of the divine nature.” Ultimately, the goal is to become through His grace what He is through His essence, through His divine nature. While we can never share in His nature through our essence, we, through His grace, are adopted to become sons and daughters of God.

My brothers and sisters, we must always be diligent to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” The call to be His disciples requires strict obedience to His law, but it is only through our faith in His grace and through the guidance of the Holy Spirit that we will ever experience this obedience. Only through His grace will we ever be able to obtain the righteousness that He promises, the freedom that He describes. Obedience to the Law in absentia of faith in Jesus breeds human legalism, with checklists to follow and rules to obey, but no spiritual growth. To mistake knowledge for maturity is such a common error in our way of thinking, I can know all of Scripture, but that knowledge means nothing without the experience of communion with the Lord. And that knowledge alone will never have the power unto salvation. Likewise, however, belief without obedience will also never lead to the kingdom. Numerous times throughout Scripture we are admonished to evaluate ourselves, to see that we are in the faith. How can we ever do that if we know not what the Scriptures do reveal, and how can we hope to attain to the kingdom if we are disobedient to the Master of the kingdom? The Lord, it is written, will “by no means clear the guilty.”

True faith, the faith whose cost we are admonished to count, is faith that is all encompassing, it is the faith that requires that we literally (not metaphorically) die to this image of who we consider ourselves to be and are reborn in the Spirit, the image of Christ within us. Through the sacrament of baptism we are buried with Christ in the tomb, and are reborn in His image when we emerge from the waters, and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the faith that causes us to choose to do the work of Christ, to choose obedience to Christ, to choose that it no longer be “I who live, but Christ who lives through me.” To become “co-workers with God;” through His grace. It is the faith that says, “your body is no longer yours, for you were bought with a price.”

There are two powers alone at work in the world, my beloved brothers and sisters. There is the power of Christ, and the power of Satan. And we, my dear family, must choose to which of the two we shall swear our allegiance. To obey the one is to deny the other, as Jesus told us, “you can not serve two masters, for you will love the one and hate the other.” To obey Christ is to stand in direct opposition to Satan, and to obey Satan is to directly oppose Christ. Whom shall we obey?

My brothers and sisters, I pray that each of us will receive the wisdom to discern this truth from the Holy Scripture. That each of us would fully turn away from the world and instead embrace the One who is truly able to heal us, to save us; to rescue us from the temptation of the flesh to attempt to distill the Holy Scriptures down to merely a “spiritual rule book,” and instead understand that the purpose for which we received the Scripture was to better understand what the Lord requires of us when we commit our lives fully unto Christ our Lord. Our calling is not “obey and you can be saved,” but rather, “be saved, and you can obey.” Our obedience is not the means to salvation, but rather the path that salvation leads us to. And my prayer is that each of us will follow that path, the “hard and narrow” path, unto the salvation that the Lord has prepared for us; the healing that He has promised, not only in the life to come, but the freedom from the bondage of this current life as well.

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family…Christ has risen!

Romans 3:5-8

Paul here broaches on a topic that, at first, seems ludicrous; and yet obviously was quite a cause for concern, as he mentions it various times throughout his epistles. “If God’s righteousness is revealed through our unrighteousness,” he begins. God loved the Jews, who in turn, very much wronged Him. This shows Him to be the victor, in that even in their disobedience and unrighteousness, He responded with grace, mercy and love. Thus, He displayed His faithfulness to their covenant even through their unrighteousness.

“Therefore,” Paul continues, “is God unjust to inflict wrath? (I speak as a man).” See, from a human perspective, a man may argue that since his unrighteousness was the instrument which was used of the Lord to display His own faithfulness, then the man should at the least not be punished for his unrighteousness; perhaps he should even be rewarded for it. See, in our warped, diseased sense of reality, we consider that since the Lord’s faithfulness is displayed through our unrighteousness, then the more unrighteous we are, the more strongly the Lord’s righteousness will be displayed. To put this into a more concrete sense; if I steal a hundred dollars from you, and you forgive me, then your forgiveness is displayed as a result of your response to my transgression. Thus, they reasoned, the larger and more numerous the transgressions, the more that forgiveness would be displayed. In fact, if I steal 100$ from you and you forgive me, then your forgiveness is recognized by those who know about the situation, so if I were to do so again and again and again, then that would give you multiple chances to display that forgiveness, right? In fact, they argued, not only should I not be punished for my transgression, I should actually be rewarded for it, since had I not stolen from you, no one would know how truly righteous and forgiving you are.

It’s absurd when we consider it in human terms, and yet, when we consider this concept in terms of God, we actually force it to make sense. We consider this concept that the Lord will be glorified all the more for His forgiveness and faithfulness to His covenant the more wicked that we are; thus we expect no punishment for our sins. We so often tend to forget the apostle’s admonishment that “the goodness of God leadeth us to repentance.” (Romans 2:4).

And Paul’s response to this? Should we be rewarded for the transgressions that allow the grace of the Lord to shine? Is God unjust for deigning that we deserve punishment for our sins? “Certainly not!” proclaims the apostle. “For then, how will God judge the world?” The exhaltation that the Jews offered would be, in fact, all the greater were it offered the world over. If through the disobedience and forgiveness of His Holy Nation His grace and forgiveness were displayed, how much more glory would He receive if He were to merely ignore and forgive the sins of all in the world?

And yet, how could a “just and righteous Judge” judge any if He allowed the sins of His very children to go unpunished? See, Jude warns us about just this, about those who would pervert the grace of the Lord into licentiousness. Paul here is offering a similar warning. The grace of the Lord is not given that we would have the freedom to continue in sin. His very salvation is a healing from this sin, and we must be willing to surrender those fleshly desires, those impulses to lust, to avarice, to anger, to self-loving, to pride; we must be willing to deny our flesh this desire to please itself and instead bring our bodies into submission. No, this thought that the Lord would neither change nor punish us for our sins doesn’t display the Lord’s grace, it rather paints this false image of the Lord as apathetic and impotent. It imagines Him as being powerless to free us from the bondage to our sin, and uncaring as to the detrimental effect that sin has on us.

I fear that this image of this impotent, uncaring God is the image that we in our generation present to the world. Consider that we preach the God is all loving, all caring, that the Lord wishes that none of us should perish; coupled with the teaching that there is no work that we should ever associate with our salvation, that there is no effort on our behalf, that salvation is nothing more than a one time decision to “accept Jesus into our hearts.” When you combine all of those thoughts, you end up with the image of a God who will save anyone who mentally acknowledge His position amongst the heavens. And then that person, in absentia of true faith, unwilling to work, and yet still “saved,” begins to tell the world that he is a “Christian” and yet his life in indistinguishable from the unsaved in the world. When we combine all of that, we image for the world a God who never seeks to change a person, who never seeks to save them, who allows them to remain in their sin. We image a God who has neither the desire, nor the power, to actually save anything; a God who has no power over our lives. I will admit, it is true that we paint that image of that God, because we create that God. But, the true God actually has the power to save us from our sin. Jesus has the love to rebuke us rather than leaving us to die in our transgressions. Consider this: consider that a loved one is become a drug addict. The least loving thing that you could do for that person is to leave them alone in their addiction. The absolute least loving thing that you can do is say, “it’s bad, but that’s just them, I’m going to leave them to be them.” No, the most loving thing that you could do at that point would be to do whatever you could to get them to quit, to help them to get help. See, our culture has confused tolerance and love. You can “tolerate” the behavior of any, but that doesn’t mean that you love them when you do so. To the contrary, when you “tolerate” the behavior of someone lost in sin, you are displaying apathy, not love. And that, not merely to their detriment, but to your own. James warns us that “whoever knows what is right to do and doesn’t not do it, to them it is a sin.” (James 4:17). The prophet warns us, “woe to those who call good evil and evil good.” (Isaiah 5:20). Our culture has done exactly that; it has taught us to care more about our friendships than our friends and more about our family ties than our families. It has taught us that to love someone is to accept them for whoever they are, and even encourage those very behaviors which are most hazardous to their health. To allow us to sin unpunished would display neither God’s compassion towards us, nor His power to save us; rather it would reduce Him to a benevolent, powerless, old man who has neither the desire nor the power to save us.

Paul ends this passage in quite a sarcastic manner. In response to the many who has already begun twisting the words of his teachings, Paul states, “Why not say, ‘Let us do evil that good may come?'” See, as early as his letter to the Romans, false teachers had already begun to twist his words, his teachings on grace, to state that we can, and in some cases should, abandon holiness so that grace could abound all the more. On the other side were the Jews, whom he is referencing here, who were saying the exact opposite. They were claiming that what he was teaching was that we should be allowed to, and encouraged to, continue in our sin, so that grace may abound. And this claim they made because he was teaching against the man-made traditions; he was teaching against the traditions of the Jews. What they neglected to notice, blinded by their own unwillingness, was that he was never teaching a form of anti-nomianism, but rather he was teaching in accordance with the laws of God, but rejecting the laws of man. He was teaching that we are to be obedient to the Lord, but that obedience can only be gained through faith in our Lord. That there is work to do, there are works that are required, but in absentia of faith in God, those works alone will never be complete. The power of the Law was the power to recognize sin and our need for our continued cooperation with the Lord to break free from the bonds of that sin. It requires us to be fully dependent on the Lord, but still willing and able to put forth the effort necessary to overcome our iniquity; all while fully relying on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to give us the strength, the guidance, the conviction to do so.

We must remember the same thing, my beloved brethern. Think not that through our own works that we can be made righteous; however, neither can we presume that the Lord will hand us our righteousness in absentia of our willingness to respond. The nation of Israel had been promised a land overflowing with milk and honey, led to the border of the land, and promised the victory in battle; however, the Lord still demanded that they take the step of faith of actually going into the land and fighting the victory. That is where each of us stand daily in our walk of faith. We stand at the threshold of righteousness; but we must be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to attain to it. “Whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin,” Peter admonishes us. And it’s true. To break free from these bonds will require work, and possibly suffering; but, like all of the promises of the Lord, we know that is we are willing to go into the battle in faith, He will guarantee our victory. “For He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”

May the grace of the Lord be with you all, my beloved family. Christ is risen!

There is a common trend that I have seen and have heard about concerning the faith that is become very popular amongst those of the faith. It is a trend that on the surface seems correct, Biblical even, but in the underlying, we find it to be very counter-Scripture.

I heard a story recently of a man who was involved in the Narcotics Anonymous program. Now, anyone who has ever experienced the NA program knows that it is highly touted as being a “spiritual, not religious” program, and as such, no member of the group is to look down upon others based on their personal faith. Well, this man constantly badgered and belittled all of the other members, arguing ad nauseum that Jesus was the only way that they would ever find the freedom and salvation that they sought after. And, while he’s not wrong on that fact, he was very wrong in his approach. And then I started thinking about the number of those in the faith that I have seen and read online arguing, debating, insulting those who didn’t believe. And, I started to question something, is that how we are supposed to conduct ourselves in dealing with non-believers? Does Jesus really need us to argue, to debate, to fight?

In Scripture, we read the words of Jesus, “I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20). When Jesus called each of the disciples, He never coerced them or argued with them, it was simply “follow Me.” In fact, to the contrary of how we conduct ourselves, Jesus normally argued against those who sought to be His disciples. He told one man that if he went to his father’s funeral, then he wasn’t fit for the kingdom. Another man He told that he had to sell everything that he had and give all of the money to the poor before he could be considered fit for the kingdom. We, on the other hand, stand before someone who claims that they don’t believe and waste ample amounts of time trying to argue with them against their beliefs, as though in our own piety and wisdom, we could coerce them into receiving the gift of salvation that is offered.

See, when we do this, we not only seek to infringe upon their free will; we actually break the traditions of the Church and the commandments of Holy Scripture. How often do we seek to convince someone of the truth of the faith by revealing the Holy mysteries to them? How often do we seek to influence someone by explaining the mysteries to them? In the age of the Apostles, the unbaptized weren’t even allowed to be present during the sacraments of the Church, as they were exactly that. In the Liturgy, before Communion, we state that “I will not speak of thy Mystery to thine enemies.” Consider that Moses himself did not open the meeting tent to everyone, else the mysteries would be revealed to the unclean, and yet, we parade around the hidden mysteries of the faith as though they were but so many signs to draw others to us. What of Jesus’ warning, “do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you into pieces.” (Matthew 7:6).

John Chrysostom says in his homilies on Genesis, “A Manichean comes and says matter is uncreated; say to him, ‘In the beginning, God made heaven and earth,’ and immediately you have overthrown his conceit. But he does not believe the statement of Scripture, you retort. On these grounds also then, shun and avoid him as a madman: anyone who does not believe in God who has manifested Himself, and instead represents truth as falsehood, how does he not patently demonstrate his madness? His unbelief?” It’s this idea that someone who is asking how God created all things obviously doesn’t believe that He did, thus why would you explain this mystery to him and give him something to mock about over a pint at the local tavern once you have departed.

See, our job isn’t to argue people into belief. It would never work anyway. They may relent to silence us, and then slander us once we have left; but our incessant rambling and arguing merely makes us at best annoying, as a gnat buzzing around a man’s ear, and at worst, it makes us appear to be the foolish madman, an image which could lead away from the faith someone who might otherwise have turned to it. No, our job isn’t to argue, to coerce, to convince; merely to offer. Considering the degree of dedication, the “cost that has been counted,” of being a disciple of Christ, how strong of a conviction would one have if they had to be convinced to be a part of the faith? No, rather, they must hunger for it, and if someone is hungering after something strongly enough and it is offered to them, there is no amount of persuasion that is required to get them to accept it. A man, starving and penniless, offered a decent portion of food would require little to no persuasion to accept that food; likewise a man seeking after the Lord will require little persuasion to accept the gift of salvation offered. A man who is not seeking after Him, however, will never be persuaded otherwise.

My brothers and sisters, let us not demean the Gospel of our beloved Lord by appearing desperate for numbers, by appearing as though we are the beggars of the Lord, pleading and compromising that He would have more followers. Let us not reveal the mysteries of the faith to those who mock it, giving them the very ammunition that they need when the war comes to fruition. Our job is to offer this gift to everyone, and those who receive it, we are able to fulfill the Great Commission. Those who “will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet.” (Matthew 10:14).

Our God is a mighty God. We seem to have reversed a simple fact; He doesn’t need us, we need Him. When we remember that, then His gift of salvation seems much greater, much grander. “Let the Lord be true and every man a liar.” If no one in the world believed He was the Lord, it wouldn’t change that He is the Lord, to whom “every knee will bow and every tongue confess.” The time that we spend online and in person arguing the truths of God to those who will not believe is time that would be better spent communing with the Lord in prayer, or creating disciples out of those who do believe, or working on our own personal holiness. Let us commend ourselves and one another unto Christ our Lord.

May the grace of the Lord be with you all, my beloved family. Christ is risen!

Romans 3:1-4

Here, Paul, having chastised the Jews by denouncing the hearing, the teaching, and even the name of Jew, plus removing the spiritual value of circumcision; begins to preemptively defend his position against the objection that he foresees is coming. See, in the last part, he had attacked each thing that the Jews had claimed gave them this divine honor, which he knew would lead to resistance in the form of questions such as pertains to what reason they were given the Law, for what reason did the prophets proclaim them as the chosen people of the Lord, why was the circumcision ever even given if it was to no avail. Did this new Gospel that he proclaimed remove the promises of the Covenant given to the Jews? In fact, in the year 144, there was a teacher named Marcion of Sinope who taught this exact thing, that the God of the Old Covenant was gone and that He had been replaced instead by Jesus; a teaching which Paul hoped to curtail in this passage.

So, did this new Gospel replace the old Covenant? By no means, declares Paul. The Jews, as he explains here, had the advantage of receiving the Law; they had the advantage of receiving the Circumcision. They had the advantage of being taught each of these things that the Lord had demanded of them, the advantage of knowing what the Lord expected of them. But, what they seemed to miss was that each of these things was to no avail if they were received in absentia of the grace of the Lord. Note that he never says that obedience to the Law is unprofitable in and of itself, but rather that knowing while not obeying was not only unprofitable, but detrimental. He never proclaims that the circumcision is useless, but that circumcision is valueless if not accompanied by further deeds that evidence this devotion. See, humans tend to lean towards doing the “bare necessities,” we tend to look for the absolute minimum we think that we can do to obtain something, and then selfishly we being to push that bar even further and further. Paul, recognizing this, attempts to cease this by pointing it out, calling attention to this spiritual lethargy that we tend to lean towards. He states that even circumcision is counted as uncircumcision if you are a breaker of the Law. If you claim the name of the Lord and yet walk in darkness, you lie and the truth is not in you (1 John 1:6).

Further, at this point, he goes on to disagree with the very assertion that he foresees. The Jews, he says, have received every advantage. They alone were entrusted with the Law, they alone were given the prophets. And yet, he pens this holding the Jews in a negative light; for though they were entrusted with these things, they used them not for the glory of the Lord but for their own glory. They used these provisions of the Lord as a bar by which they could place themselves as being above all other people. They boasted that, as only the Jews had received these things, the Law, the circumcision, etc; that they were the only ones who were the chosen of the Lord and thus the only ones who were worthy of salvation. They claimed that the Lord had chosen only a select few to receive His promises and that they, being a part of that group, were alone worthy of those promises. They received and spoke of the Law, and of the prophets, but by their very lives showed utter contempt and disrespect for the things of the Lord. While the Jews did, in fact, have an advantage, that advantage was pedagogical; they were taught the Law and the prophets much more intricately than any other group. However, that teaching itself made them no more righteous than any other group. In fact, to the contrary, it made them even more strongly accountable when they chose to disobey those commands.

Paul then continues to reiterate the point, “what if some don’t believe…would that make the faithfulness of God without effect?” It’s important to keep this verse in the right context when reading it. It is not a decree that anyone and everyone ever born will receive this salvation, as some have twisted it to mean. No, after having argued at length about the hypocrisy of the Jews in receiving but not obeying the commands of the Lord, he makes this statement. The Jews very lack of obedience in no way dissolves the faithfulness of the Lord to keep His promises. And yet, when you consider the word “Covenant,” it basically is a deal. Thus, when the Lord makes these promises and we fail to uphold our end of the bargain, it is not He who has broken His covenant, but we who have done so. Thus, what Paul is stating here is that it is not the Lord who has broken His promises based on their unfaithfulness, but rather they themselves who have done so. All of the promises of the Lord remain for any who are willing to obey Him, to “follow Him,” to become His disciples. And that regardless of any human ethnicity or labels. The disbelief of the Jews doesn’t remove the faithfulness of the Lord to His children, to the contrary, the grace and honor with which He still extends the offer of reconciliation displays that He remains in all things unceasingly faithful to His promises, for those who will “turn away from their wicked ways and return to Him.” In 2 Chronicles, we read, “He is good, for His mercy endures forever.” (2 Chronicles 7:3), and again, the word of the Lord to Solomon, “if my people, who are called by my name, humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will be merciful to their sins and heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14). We love to quote that, and yet so often fail to be attentive to the fact that there are four conditions in that passage; if My people 1. humble themselves, 2. pray, 3. seek My face, 4. turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear…” We also neglect to notice that He further states that “if you turn away and forsake My statutes and My commandments that I set before you and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will remove you from the land that I gave them and cast from My sight this house…” (2 Chronicles 7:19-20). It’s important to recognize that His faithfulness to fulfill His promises wasn’t made ineffective by their lack of faith, and that He always presented the same offer to all of His children, to the Jew and to the Gentile. However, each is to uphold their side of the Covenant, which here Paul warns the Jews that they are not doing.

“Let God be true but every man a liar.” With this statement, Paul is in no way insinuating that every man is a liar, but rather that God never is. Thus, if every man in the world (theoretically) were to agree on something, but that something was in contrast to the Lord, then every man would be wrong, as the Lord can never be wrong and never lies. I think about this passage frequently when the topic of “interpreting Scripture” comes up. It’s an unfortunate thought that the wisdom of the age has infected so many people that they feel as though their interpretations of the words of the Lord carry more weight than the words of the Lord themselves. So often, we read something in Scripture that we don’t like and, infected by this “wisdom” of the age, immediately begin to interpret it, ultimately changing what the Lord actually says into something that we like better. It’s the Pharisee saying, “You healed on the Sabbath, that’s work, thus you are in violation of the Sabbath.” It is the antinomian stating that “all of our deeds are as filthy rags” and declaring that to declare any deed as part of our salvation is heresy. It is the Calvinist stating that we are saved by faith, which is “a gift of God,” and that “He will have mercy on whom He has mercy,” and therefore declaring that only this elect group of people are saved, whom the Lord predestined, and all of the rest are doomed to eternal punishment. Every time I hear these distorted interpretations, I remember this verse, “Let God be true but every man a liar,” and I understand why Peter admonishes us so strongly that “no manner of prophecy ever came by personal interpretation, but holy men spoke by the Holy Spirit.” If Holy Scripture is bound by personal interpretation, then suddenly, every man who can read can begin his own denomination, and no one can fault him for what the Scripture “means to him.”

The greatest sin in all of Scripture is pride. It is the very sin which led Satan to be cast down from the heavens. We must be careful of this same sin, my brothers and sisters. Pride often comes to us in the form of arrogance. We become so assured that we have studied Scripture and found something that thousands of years of monastics and scholars have overlooked. Ultimately, we give our own interpretation of Scripture authority over the Scripture itself. We read a passage like “be holy, for I the Lord am holy” and begin to interpret away the meaning of what our Lord says, thinking instead that we, better than the authors of the Holy Scripture, know what the Lord actually means. In our arrogance, we have removed the authority of the words of our Lord and the traditions of the Church and instead reduced it to what we, in our own personal minds, consider it to mean. For me to consider my interpretation of a passage to be of higher esteem than St Basil or John Chrysostom, Augustine or his teacher Gregory of Nyssa, is the utmost of arrogance.

So often, I have both heard and said, I can find a passage, removed from context, to justify any sinful behavior you desire. If you want a passage that will justify polygamy, divorce, murder, avarice, materialism, homosexuality, drunkenness…any sin you wish; I can find a passage to support it. In our own personal interpretations, it’s easy to find what we are already looking for, based on our preconceived notions about what it says. You can argue for the presence of the literal body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, as Luther taught, or against it, as Zwingli taught. You can argue total depravity, as Calvin taught, or sinless perfection, as Wesley taught. Or, you can remove interpretations and read in it’s entirety the words of the Lord; and accept and obey them as they are written, as the fathers of the Church taught. This warning from Paul is simply this. It’s not to remove the commands of the Lord based on the doctrines of grace, neither is it to remove the doctrines of grace from the commands of the Lord; rather it is the intermingling of the two. It is the teaching to obey the commands of the Lord through the grace of the Lord, as they could only be obeyed. The grace of the Lord isn’t the right to disregard the commands of the Lord, it is the ability to obey them, freed from our bondage to sin. And yes, those commands do require work, but they require work with the Holy Spirit as our heavenly comforter, the Spirit of Truth who is in all things present. Only through faith can we receive this blessing, and only through this blessing can we obey all of the Lord’s commands; however, if we have received this blessing, then we must obey these commands. The rich young ruler didn’t walk away because he was unable to sell his possessions and leave his riches, he walked away because he loved them too much to be willing to part with them. I fear that is the way that many of us are with the things of this world. We may justify, twisting Scripture to suit our means, but the truth comes down to this, do we love the Lord or do we love this life? We can attain our “riches” here, or we can attain the riches promised in the kingdom to come.

We must always search the Scriptures, but we must do so free from our attachments to this world, else we run the risk of allowing what we are looking for to overrule what is actually there; as so often happens.

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved brothers and sisters. Christ is risen!

Romans 2:25-29

Paul here makes some very powerful claims against the Jews. Bearing in mind that the Jews were demanding that the Gentile believers be circumcised in accordance with the law, Paul challenges this outward showing of their faith, acknowledging that circumcision is only valuable inasmuch as it is accompanied by internal change and love of God. The Jews, who commanded that these external displays of faith, on the other hand, displayed none of the internal changes which would accompany true conversion to the Lord. Here, he begins this treatise against the power of the law, in general, and the power of circumcision, in particular, to effect salvation unto these adherents of the law.

“For circumcision is profitable if you keep the law…if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision.” Here, he condemns the Jews for demanding that the Gentiles be circumcised in accordance with the Law, whilst the Jews who themselves teach the Law are unable to keep it. The Jews were teaching that only through these displays of the Law could display that one was of the Lord, and yet Paul ventures forth here to condemn this blatant hypocrisy that the Jews were displaying.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the words of Jesus, “Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees…you cleanse the outside of the cup…but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence….you are like whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead man’s bones and uncleanness.” (Matthew 23:25,27). It is of the utmost importance that we read the words of Jesus here, this warning to the multitudes, when we read Paul’s admonition to the Jews. They demanded this circumcision; they taught to neither steal nor covet, to neither blaspheme, covet, nor murder, and yet sought after these very riches. They were taught the Law, and taught the same; yet because their faith was in the Law alone and not in our beloved Lord, they were never able to maintain that Law. the Lord, who looks beyond our physical actions and judges instead by the intentions of the heart, was never fooled by these outward shows.

And this broaches on the very question that Paul poses here; if you are circumcised, in accordance with the Law, and yet fail to keep the commandments of our Lord, and yet this man is uncircumcised, and yet keeps all of the commandments of the Lord; who is truly righteous? Is he truly righteous who keeps the letter of the Law, or he who keeps the spirit of the Law by their nature? Will not the man who, though uncircumcised, keeps keeps the nature of the Law judge he who is a student of the Law in letter only?

I think about this in terms of our generation, being as which it is the only experience that I have. See, it’s so easy to present this image of perfect piety in our generation. It’s so easy to post pious activity on social media, posting photos of your study chamber or your prayer corner, never forgetting this “selfie with Jesus” moment of the Holy Scripture open to a particular book with the ubiquitous photo of the Scripture and a cup of coffee. It’s so easy to open a Jonathan Edwards book and post a photo of your coffee table with that and the Scriptures next to it and hashtag it, “Holy moment.” Or, of course, to post about the latest musical release from your favorite Christian band and to be “interested” in their show nearby. It’s easy to present this image of perfect holiness and piety; and dangerously easy to become self-righteous when doing it. To buy only the latest shirts from the local Christian bookstore that presents itself as the “way of life” for Christians, to, of course, put the bumper stickers on your car. I have absolutely been there, and am not ashamed to admit it. I was the first one to wear whatever “not ashamed of the Gospel” T-shirt and consider that “witnessing” for the kingdom.

And yet, as I’ve grown, I’ve realized a very important fact. God wasn’t glorified by the 25$ T-shirts or the 70$ concert tickets that I’d spent. Posting those things on social media, wearing them in public, served one purpose and one purpose only. It fed my own pride. I reveled in it each time someone commented on the shirt I was wearing. Whenever someone asked me about the “Jerusalem cross” that I had on my car, I was about 80 percent vested in explaining it, and about 20% excited that they had to come to me for an explanation. What has become the hardest thing for me to do is to remove myself from me. To remove these outward displays of my faith, and instead focusing on the inward.

Paul closes this exhortation with a very powerful statement; “circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.”

You see, in Scripture, we find that many are the commands of the Lord, and obedience to these commandments is fully expected. However, and I believe that the rest of Paul’s statement is rooted here, we must evaluate our own motivation. It’s so easy to do things “for the glory of God,” while truly seeking our own glory in the stead. We must truly obey the commandments of the Lord, however doing so must be out of reverence to Him, not out of the desire for vain-glory in ourselves. I can only look to my own life, there are many who see what I attain from studies; there are, however, a select few who look to me for spiritual advice. Those few know my prayer time, my time spent with the word of God, my “quiet time” with God. When I fast, when I give alms, when I pray, those things are between God and I. While I am not ashamed of them, I would never trumpet them for all the world to see, lest I become overcome with the spirit of vainglory and those things become a source of sinful pride, rather than a source of what it should be, time alone with the Lord.

Jesus taught us that when we pray, it should be in secret, not displayed for all the world. Likewise, He taught us that when we give, it should be in secret. The biggest difference between the world and the Church when they help the hungry, the needy, the homeless, should be that the Church doesn’t use it for PR, they do it because they love their neighbor and wish to help. Nothing that we do should ever be motivated by pride or selfish ambition. I saw a meme on social media recently that said, “when you help the hungry, you help the hungry. The moment you post about it on social media, it is no longer the hungry you are feeding, but your own ego.” This is possibly the most Christian statement that I have ever heard. Glory to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit; but never to we who are His mere instruments in those causes.

And that is what the beloved apostle is here warning the Jews against. They had made a public showing of their piety, an image of their faith, and they condemned everyone who wouldn’t share in that image. Yet, when you looked at their lives, it screamed of many things, but the “chosen people of God” wasn’t one of those things. All that they did was for image, and none of it was out of reverence, fear, love of the Lord. These Jews were still lechers, thieves, liars, gamblers, drunken, extortioners; thus, while this outward showing of piety may have impressed men, it offered them no favor with God.

May we never, my beloved family, fall victim to this spirit of hypocrisy. Yes, by all means, cease from sin. Yes, remove idols, remove temptation; but never let us assume that we are more righteous than anyone else because of these things. If the teachings of the Church fathers, or of Holy Scripture itself, is to be believed, then we must learn one valuable lesson. Our goal as believers is to attain to the righteousness of God, and the closer we draw to that very mark, the more we realize how far removed from it we are. Let us focus on our own personal walk while building up others, caring for them and loving them, that the grace and love of Jesus may be revealed by our own lives. Teresa of Calcutta taught us that “if you judge someone, you don’t have time to love them.” This statement has been resonating throughout my life. Did Jesus discern an action to be sinful? Certainly; but rather than judging someone for it, He chose to help them, to heal them, and then asked that they sin no more. The very ones who placed Him upon a cross, He asked for their forgiveness; who are we to do otherwise? The love of Christ knows no limits, it knows no boundaries; and thank God for that, else where would we be? And that is the very love that we are to display to others; not the love that says, “I will support you regardless of your iniquities,” but the love that says, “I will help you regardless of anything else, because I love you and would never want to see you suffer.”

May we never emulate the words of the Pharisee who said, “I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this tax collector,” and instead may we always remember the words of the tax collector, who humbly prayed, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:11-14). May we always seek after the praises of our beloved Lord, not the praise of men, knowing that “if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10). Let us seek the praise of He who always was, and always shall be, from the beginning to the end. Our beloved Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. He who commands us, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” (John 14:15), neglecting the opinions of other men, and instead, focusing on the will of God.

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family. Christ is risen!

I recently spoke to someone the other day, and I just felt as though I had to share this conversation. It was amazingly inspirational. For obvious reasons, or at least, what will be obvious reasons, I won’t give any of the names of those involved, but I wanted to share this conversation and this man’s story, because there is so much that can be gleaned from it. It is a perfect image of the sovereignty of God and how He can work through the very things that we despise. See, far too often, we tend to allow our current circumstances to interfere with His far greater (larger) plan for our lives. So often, we neglect the admonishment from Scripture that “all things work together for good for them that love God.” (Romans 8:28). So often, we forget the words that Peter penned as a valuable lesson to all those who believe; “add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness love…for he who lacks these things is so short-sighted he becomes blind.” (2 Peter 1:5-9). So often, when our circumstances become unfavorable, that becomes us. We focus on what is directly in front of us, what is immediate in our lives, that we neglect what is awaiting on the horizon. When trials come, our prayers immediately become to be freed from the perils of the trial, rather than (as Solomon prayed) for the wisdom to learn from those trials.

This conversation that I am writing about. I spoke to a man whose mother had recently fallen asleep in the Lord. My own mother having just reposed last July, I could fully understand what he was going through. He told me that his mother had been struggling, fighting against cancer which was overtaking her, and eventually, she surrendered the fight and fell asleep. This man, he told me that none of his brothers were around, so it was basically just him and his family with her throughout this entire struggle. And I thought about the response that so many of us would have in this exact situation. So many of us would be given over to despair and despondency, anger. So many of us in this exact situation would be given to contend with God that “it’s not fair,” cursing and blaming God for the pain that we are enduring and the pain that she also had endured during this struggle.

Well, less than a year later, his 16 month old son was also diagnosed with cancer. As I spoke to this man, tears welling in his eyes, he spoke to me of the thankfulness that he felt in his heart for his mother’s struggles, as those struggles helped to prepare him for the battle that he and his family were about to endure for his son’s sake. He was telling me how he could see God’s hand in all of it. Rather than becoming jaded, as so oft so many of us would, he rather was thankful for his mother’s struggles, because it prepared him for the physical, emotional, and spiritual onslaught that he was going to face throughout his son’s fight; knowing that he would have to lead his family through this battle. He knew and recognized the symptoms because he had just been through all of it with his mother, and having added knowledge to virtue, he was fully forged and prepared for the trials that they were about to face.

It made me consider how often we face similar trials in our lives and how we respond. How often do we encounter a trial and respond in faith, knowing that the Lord has done what He has done for a reason, even one we may neither understand nor like. I think of the life of Job who, we read, having just lost his children, his possessions, his livelihood, “arose, tore his robe, and shaved the hair off of his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped.” (Job 1:20). See, I think how often we read passages like that in Scripture and somehow feel “disconnected” from them, distant, as though we are reading some pop culture fan-fiction. As though these stories were some great ideal to which we could never attain. And yet, here is this gentleman, right before my eyes, telling me about his current situation, and his response is exactly what I would expect to read about in the lives of the saints from the Scripture.

It was truly the best image of God’s sovereignty I’ve ever seen outside of the Holy Scripture. I look at it from the same viewpoints; did it hurt him to lose his mother? Of course it did, losing a parent is one of the single hardest things that any man will ever experience. But, how we respond to that loss makes all of the difference. When we’re in the midst of the trial, do we pray for that person’s healing? Do we vainly pray that the Lord’s will be done (vainly because His will will be done, and us praying it is redundant)? Or do we pray for the strength to endure and the wisdom to learn and grow from the experience? To, as this man did, add virtue to faith and knowledge to virtue.

It was the image of God’s plan for our lives in that, while it wasn’t the “wonderful plan” that so many love to use to lasso people into the faith, it was a plan that served a far greater purpose than he could have imagined when it began. In experiencing his mother’s illness, he allowed the experience to help him to grow in knowledge, to grow stronger in his faith. In doing this, he was better prepared to be able to handle the second trial, the illness of his son. Because he had avoided the pitfalls of despondency and bitter resentment through his mother’s illness, he was better prepared to handle the second trial of his son’s illness, better able to lead and support his family through this trial.

And what happens when that happens? He is able to provide support and comfort for others who are going through similar circumstances. He can use this experience of both his mother and his son fighting through cancer to be a comforter to others in similar situations. And ever just a surface reading of the Scriptures tell us who the Comforter is. Jesus tells us that “the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name…” (John 14:26); and again, “I will pray to the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever…” (John 14:16). A surface reading reveals that the Comforter is the Holy Spirit.

We see here that, through maintaining his faith through these trials, this gentleman is able to perfectly display the synergy of the Lord working through us. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “we are ‘laborers together’ (synergos) with God.” (1 Corinthians 3:9). And that is the finale of these trials, to be as one with the Lord. This man personifies this. Through his mother’s diagnosis, he persevered, learned, and was strengthened in his faith. When his son was diagnosed, he applied the knowledge that he had attained through his mother’s illness and was better prepared to deal with the trials, and to continue to grow in his faith. And now, through the strength of his perseverance, he is able to use those experiences to allow the Holy Spirit to work through him, to be the “comforter,” the Holy Spirit working through him. to become through the grace of the Lord what the Lord is through His very essence. To become a true “partaker of the divine nature,” having added to “godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.”

My beloved brothers and sisters, how do we respond when these trials come? How do we react when we learn that there is nothing that we can do? Do we remain steadfast, trusting in the Lord, when “tragedy” strikes? Or do we immediately surrender hope, cursing the name of our Lord, questioning how a “loving God can allow these tragedies to happen,” neglecting the lessons from the Scripture, the words of our Lord, who tells us that “My counsels are not your counsels, neither are your ways My ways, but as heaven is distant from the earth, so is My way distant from your ways, and your thoughts from My mind. For as rain comes down, or snow from heaven, and does not return until it saturates the earth, and it brings forth and produces, and gives seed to the sower and bread for food, so shall My word be, whatever proceeds from My mouth. It shall not return until it accomplishes whatever I willed, and I shall prosper your ways and My commandments.” (Isaiah 55:8-11). So often, when these trials occur, we forget the lesson of Job, of whom it is written, “In all these things that happened, Job did not sin against the Lord or charge God with folly.” (Job 1:22).

We must remember in all things to remain “patient,” and I love the way the older translations translate this word patience, “long-suffering.” (makrothumei). It literally means “long of soul and mind” as opposed to shortness of mind, irascibility, impatience, intolerance. It’s this idea that, no matter what the circumstances, we remain calm and rational, loving, tolerant, and accepting. When I think about the trials that life throws at us, I often wonder how we respond? Do we respond in irrationality, thinking that we know better than the Lord what we need for our lives? Or, do we respond with this long-suffering, trusting that the Lord has given us these trials to accomplish a greater purpose, and accept that purpose. Do we pray merely to be freed, to be “rescued,” from these trials, or to be granted the wisdom to learn from them; that we may perform the work of the Lord through the lessons which He has blessed us with?

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family. Christ is risen!

Romans 2:17-24

Here again we see the beloved apostle calling the Jews out for their hypocrisy, for their lack of practice of the faith, and this with such a scathing indictment. It’s important to notice first what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “you who are Jews,” but rather, “you who are called a Jew.” It’s important to note that because it isn’t the nationality of a person that either adds nor subtracts to their favor with the Lord. Had he said, “you who are Jews…” then this indictment would be against the entire nationality of the Jews, instead it is against these who are “called” Jews, who are such in name only. See, the name of Jew was a name much to be revered, the entire Old Testament referred to the nation of Israel, and thus to Jews, as God’s chosen people. Thus, to be called a Jew was a matter of prestige, much as being called Christian has become. He states, “you who are called a Jew…and boast in God;” that is to say that their boast was that they were Jews, and being Jews, they were the most beloved of the Lord, greater than other men and as such worthy of higher praise. Paul here says this very mockingly, since they used this position not to further their own salvation, but rather to look down upon and judge others who were not Jews. Paul’s tone here reminds me of the same tone that he used in his letter to the Corinthians, when he wrote, “You are already full! You are already rich! You have reigned as kings without us…we have been made a spectacle to the world…we are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise…we are weak, but you are strong…you are distinguished, but we are dishonored.” (1 Corinthians 4:8-10). It’s this whole idea that Paul is sarcastically stating that the Corinthians believers know better the teachings of the apostles than the apostles themselves; that they have discovered some formula in the Scripture that ascribes to this heaven on earth state that the Lord has determined, meanwhile the apostles suffer needlessly through persecution and asceticism because they don’t understand the teachings of the Lord.

All of this makes me contemplate things that I’ve heard in our church culture in this generation. I’ve heard, in deference to the former, someone, in response to a pop culture reference, make the statement, “well, I don’t watch that show, because I’m a Christian.” Similarly, Paul is chastising the Jews for making a very similar statement here, “well, I don’t walk more than 300 feet on the Sabbath, because I am of God.” They make these public showings of their piety and self-righteousness, boasting that because they are of God, that they have more right, more blessing, than those who aren’t Jews. To the latter, I’ve heard so many of those same self-righteous ones proclaim that we are supposed to live happy lives here on earth, awash in the blessings and abundance of the Lord, a showering of gifts to make our lives easy and comfortable while we are here. To be ascetic, they claim, is to deny our Lord the opportunity to spoil us while we are here. To be ascetic is to “add works to faith” and thereby detract from the grace of the very Lord who stated that any man who would come after Him must “deny themselves” and warns us not to “store up treasures for ourselves here on earth.” Their very arguments collapse upon themselves when held to the weight of Scripture.

“And know His will.” See, the Jews claimed that because they had received and understood the Law, they were more blessed than any other. And yet, we who have received the Law do have an advantage, but only inasmuch as we obey it, for “it is not hearers of the Law who are just in the Lord but doers of the Law.” See, it is to our advantage to know the Law because through receiving and knowing it, we learn the will of our beloved Lord and know the ways to walk with Him and to please Him. However, it is to our detriment to have received and understood the Law and still choose not to obey it. “And are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those trapped in darkness.” Again, notice his wording here. Not that they are a guide to the blind, but that they are confident that they are such. And because of this unjust confidence, they again boast. They boast that because they are God’s people and have received His Law, that they are able to become these teachers and guides. They elevated themselves, through their own self-righteousness, to this position of being above everyone else, looking down upon the other men. And any who disagreed with them, they considered them to be wrong, to be heretics. Again, I think of our culture here, where we are so confident that we have everything all figured out that anyone who disagrees with us must be wrong. Surely, we have found in Scripture all of these hidden teachings that for thousands of years was missed, and only in the last couple of centuries have we found them. I’ve had someone tell me that “the problem with reading the Church fathers is that their theology was still pretty naive.” Have we grown so wise as to know better how the Church should be than the very men who established it? Have we, two thousand years removed from the advent of our Lord come to understand His teachings better than those who were taught by the very apostles themselves? I believe that there is great wisdom to be gleaned from reading modern theologians, but I would never be so arrogant as to claim that they are more wise than Polycarp, a disciple of the apostle John, or Timothy, the disciple of the apostle Paul. I find it ironic and sad all at once that so many who will quickly cling to the principles and doctrines given us by Augustine have never yet heard of Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine’s teacher.

Paul then goes on to bring to light the very hypocrisy which impedes the teachings of the Jews. During His earthly ministry, our Lord taught us, “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what manner you judge, you will be judged.” (Matthew 7:1-2). Similarly, Paul here begins to list the things of the Law that these Jews are boasting in, and pointing out that they themselves are guilty of infractions against this law. “When you teach others, do you not teach yourselves,” he asks of them. Implying that they who claim to know the law, and teach this knowledge of the Law, themselves do not heed the very things that they are teaching.

And, all too often, so many of us allow this same hypocrisy to invade our own ideology. Far too often the one who screams profane and slanderous insults at others in work traffic will sit in self-appointed judgment of the one who views licentiousness on the television. So frequently, the man who is captivated by the physical attractiveness of a waitress at a restaurant will turn around and condemn a man for giving into drug addiction. How many times have we witnessed a poor, hungry, homeless man and forsaken the giving of alms, piously proclaiming that our job is to feed their soul and not body, and then unabashedly condemn a homosexual for their refusal to adhere to God’s Law?

“You have make your claim in the Law, do you dishonor God by breaking the Law?” asks the apostle. This is a twofold indictment against this horrible hypocrisy that the Jews, and so often, we, are guilty of. They who had boasted in their righteousness because of the Law, when they break the Law, dishonor both themselves, through their dishonor of the very Law that they boast in; and dishonor the giver of the Law. See, when we live hypocritically, it is not we ourselves whom we dishonor, it is the name of the Lord Himself. When I accuse someone of going against the words of Holy Scripture by cheating on their spouse, and then I break the very words of Scripture by which I condemn them, I display both my knowledge of the Scripture and my lack of regard for it. And, usually, it is under justification of statements such as, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” That one statement has lead to more hypocrisy and judgment than any other statement that Satan ever managed to sneak into our Church. We feel justified in our judgment of others because we know the Scripture, and thus stand on high gazing down upon these “lowly unbelievers” throwing stone after stone at them, meanwhile ignoring our own shortcomings in the name of grace. And yet, I ask you this; when we judge, based on God’s Law, those who are not of God, and yet we, being children of God, break the same Law, who are we truly dishonoring? Which is more dishonoring? The man having sex with a woman whom he doesn’t know is married, or the man who is married having sex with someone who is not his wife? While they may both be in the wrong, the greater dishonor lies on the man who knows his infidelity and still proceeds.

And the end result of this? Not of discernment, mind you, but of the hypocrisy? Paul sums it up in the most scathing of exhortations against the Jews. Allowing the prophets to bear witness against the Jews, considering their “strict adherence” to the words of the prophets, “The name of the Lord is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (Paul quoting from Isaiah 52:5 and Ezekiel 36:22). He points out to them that through their hypocrisy, they have become the very ones that the prophets warn so strongly against. That, not because of the Gentiles ignorance of the Law, but the Jews refusal to obey it, the name of the Lord Himself is become blasphemed. And how often do we see this in our life? If you ask two hundred non-believers what they think of the Church, one hundred and ninety of them will probably attack the hypocrisy that they see in the Church. They will mention that they constantly see the Church stand in judgment of the world and overlook the sins in the Church. Which is the exact opposite of what the apostle Paul teaches us in his letter to the Corinthians. To the contrary, he teaches us, “what have I to do with judging the world, the Lord will do that. Are we not to judge those in the Church?” (1 Corinthians 5:12). And again, “don’t you know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Corinthians 5:6). When we allow sin within the Church in the name of grace, but judge the world for it, we show the world that we don’t even believe the Holy Scripture, while demanding that they accept it. We display to them that our laws, given by God, apply to everyone but us, and then wonder why they won’t come to us.

We need to be very careful, my brothers and sisters. When we assume the name of Christian; when we are baptized into the family of Christ, we become “little Christ’s,” Christ formed in us. And thus, every action that we perform is done in His holy name. We love in His name, we help in His name, we give in His name. All that we do is to His glory and honor. Likewise, however, when we sin and perform wickedness, we do that also in His name, and in attaching His name to our sinful deeds, we blaspheme the name of the Lord ourselves. The apostle teaches us that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. Well did he speak when he tells us that we are “Christ’s ambassadors,” His “letter to the world.” While it is of the utmost importance that we be discerning, it is not we who are to judge, but He alone. Should we turn a blind eye to a brother or sister in sin? By no means. However, we must kindly and lovingly rebuke them, for we too may fall into sin, and “with what measure we judge, we too shall be judged.” Our “job” (if you will) is to nurture, to care for, to display the love, grace, and compassion of the Lord for all the world to see; allowing neither judgment nor partiality to interfere with obedience to our Lord’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” And, we must be fully vigilant to stray away from the wisdom of the world and the age; the wisdom which is not wisdom, but is rather the spirit of hypocrisy. The spirit which ranks sin as one worse than the other, which if you pay close attention, you will usually find that the ranking system there usually lines up pretty perfectly with your own personal preference. In our own wisdom, we may find that homosexuality is the worst sin, being an “abomination” before the Lord, but infidelity is a moderate sin, flirting a lighter sin, and divorce not a sin at all; and yet each is considered a great sin when we look to Scripture. We must be guarded against this self-righteous self-deceit which tells us that we are more righteous than another because we can say, “I don’t do (insert random sin), I’m a Christian.” This is the exact mindset that Paul is warning us against here with the Jews, the one that states, “I am a Jew, the Lord gave us the Law.”

Lastly, we must be very cautious over something that happens far too often. We must be extremely cautious of this mentality that knowing the commands of the Lord alone is sufficient. This mentality that learning all of the Laws and studying them is substitutionary for actually obeying them. As Paul has warned us, it is not those who know the Law who are made righteous, but those who obey it. Soteriology aside, Teresa of Calcutta knew the Lord’s commands, and spent her entire life obeying them. She spent her entire life dedicated to doing the will of God, to loving her neighbor, and to actively seeking those who needed help. Doubtless, there is in the world a theologian who has a better understanding of the Law of God, who knows more languages, who is more well versed in his understanding of the Law than she could ever have been. Now, I want you to strongly consider this question, meditate on it. In the Gospel account, we learn the story of the good Samaritan. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion. So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.’ So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” And he said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.'” (Luke 10:30-37). Now, consider again, Teresa of Calcutta, who spent the majority of her life in the slums feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, providing for the needy. Then, consider our advanced theologian, sitting in a room contriving formulae and cross references to figure out the meaning of Scripture. Which of these two are living the Gospel and obeying the words of Jesus? Which of the two of them is “loving their neighbor as themselves?” To whom is Jesus more likely to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant?” She who spent her life living the Gospel, or he who has studied the law, but never actually put it into practice? The “hearer of the Law” or the “doer of the Law?”

May the grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family.

Romans 2:14-16

Paul here continues to show that the Gentile is counted as one of God’s people when his conscience leads him to obedience towards the Lord. See, as we have already noted, the Jews had received the Law, and because they had chosen their faith in the Law over their faith in Grace, they would be judged, not by one or the other, but by each. The Gentiles, however, having never received the Law, were to be judged by their conscience alone. It’s important to note that when Paul speaks of the Gentiles being judged, it is exactly that. As he later expounds, in the example of food; to eat meat is not a sin, however, to believe in your heart that to eat meat is a sin, it becomes a sin, because you believe that it is an offense against the Lord and yet you still choose it over the Lord. In your belief, you have created it to be a sin against the Lord, and that because of your conscience.

It’s important to notice how Paul phrases this exactly, as well. The Gentiles whom Paul is referencing believe, they trust in the Lord, and then they do the good that is in their nature as a display of that obedience. At various points in the Old Testament, we see examples of Gentiles being judged to be righteous because their deeds displayed their faith in, and fear of, the Lord. Through their own decisions, these people who are not of the Lord are made to be righteous by the Lord because they consciously choose to obey the Lord. See, it’s important to recognize this because when we are conceived, when we are freshly formed in the womb, we are inherently good. And then, at a particular point, sin begins to creep in. And, once that happens, we grow accustomed to that sin, we embrace the pleasures, the fleeting moments of happiness that are brought about it, but all of that doesn’t change one thing. In our nature, we are still good. We are created in His image, and no sin is powerful enough to destroy that image. Those who claim that we are evil in nature are claiming that sin is more powerful than the One who created us. Some, from their own love of self and pride, choose to reject that voice, while he who hears His voice and chooses to obey understands. As the Psalmist says, “You make me wiser than my enemies with Your commandment, for it is mine forever.” (Psalm 118:98). But, it is just that, a conscious decision that we make based on our love of self and sin, or our love of Him who formed us.

If each of us is truly, utterly, lost and depraved, as so many claim, then Paul’s statement here makes no sense. If our nature is depraved, then none of us would ever choose righteousness; and if that were the case then the “unsaved” Gentiles would never, “by nature do the things of the Law.” No, rather, it is our nature to love, to obey, to worship and glorify the Lord, and it is sin which distorts that. By nature, we are inspired by and cooperate with God. It is once sin steps in that we turn away from His grace. We are not wicked by nature, but rather learn wickedness. Young children neither hate nor judge anyone, until they are taught to do so by someone that they look up to. Our children are mirrors of our own behavior; usually if there is a trait in your child that you don’t like, it is pretty easy to find that same trait in yourself. Albeit an exaggerated version of that trait, it is still there. The child who fights has a parent or role model with anger in their hearts; think of a child in the car. They never grow impatient until their parent displays “road rage” in front of them, and then seeing that, they mimic it. A child who spend too much time focusing on name brands and such usually has a parent who is very vain, one who spends hours preening in front of a mirror, because that parent has taught them the importance of other’s impressions of them. I stress this because so often, children are used as an example of this “total depravity” that so many reference, and yet, when pay closer attention, you find that they are not totally depraved, but rather depraved in the same manners that they’ve learned from their parent’s indiscretions and iniquity. When I think of Paul’s letters to Titus and to Timothy, the “criteria” for eldership in the Church, I consider that in terms of parenting as well. A parent with a bad temper will have a violent son, a parent with a penchant for alcohol will have a child who has the same preference. A parent who disrespects their spouse will have a child who will disrespect that same spouse, and then eventually their own. We must watch our behavior, and not merely in their presence, but in our own hearts, as children are so naive as to be wise. They don’t look at an upset person and begin to rationalize why they’re upset, they just see an upset person; and that affects them more than we could ever recognize.

Then, Paul goes on to make a very important statement. One which we would do well to pay careful attention to. He states that the Gentiles “show the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness.” See, when we do something wrong, our conscience bears witness against us. Someone in junior high school taking a test comes to a question that they don’t know. They look over and get the answer from someone else, and their conscience immediately bears witness against them. Without being caught or being told otherwise, we innately know it’s wrong to do it. It accuses them of iniquity. And yet, so often in our generation, we train ourselves to ignore that very conscience, which is truly the will of God written in our hearts. And yet, we train ourselves and find that the more often we do it, the easier it becomes, until it eventually becomes a “second nature.”

And that leads us to the danger of teaching that we are depraved by nature, that our hearts are wicked. The danger of that teaching lies in the end of this verse. If we are good by nature, then when we slide into iniquity, our conscience accuses us of that sinful act. Again, the boy who cheated on the test; if he knows that he is good and to do wrong is wicked, his conscience tells him immediately what is wrong and he can either heed that warning or choose to ignore it. However, if we teach someone that they are wicked by nature, then we have already given them the opportunity to train their conscience to excuse any wickedness that they perform. See, if our natural state is obedience and holiness, then our conscience will stand on our side and help us to maintain that standard. If, however, our natural state is depravity, then our conscience will again stand on our side, this time, however, excusing any wickedness of which we are guilty. Holiness becomes the anomaly. Our conscience immediately excuses our sinfulness by convincing us that we can never be truly righteous, so “why bother trying?” Rather than warning us of sinfulness, it teaches us that it is our nature to be sinful and accepts those shortcomings, destroying any work that would lead us to the “holiness of God.”

Our generation has completely turned everything around. We live in a generation, in the Church, where people proclaim that someone such as Mother Teresa, who spent her entire life doing God’s work, will never achieve the kingdom, meanwhile someone who was baptized once in their life and didn’t even truly repent is “assured” of that salvation. Saint Teresa would never attain the kingdom based on her work, however, her work was the “work of the Law.” What Protestants call “mercy ministry,” or as I like to call it, “loving your neighbor,” alone will not merit salvation, however, it is a fruit of the work of the Spirit in the life of someone who is truly walking in the faith. To simplify this claim, feeding the poor will not “earn you salvation,” however, faith will; and that faith must be accompanied by these works that display the “work of the Law” written in the heart, otherwise, we must remember Jesus’ warning; “Well did the prophet say when he spoke of them, ‘these people worship Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.'” (Matthew 15:8).

Works will not save you, lest every Hollywood celebrity be assured of a seat at the Lord’s table, however, the faith that will save must be accompanied by those works. By this obedience to the Law of the Lord, not the laws of men, lest we become legalists and Pharisees. A growing number of believers have adopted this ideology that we are wicked in our nature, that we are totally depraved, and yet, when we teach that, we free people from the accountability of that wickedness. If we have no choice in the matter and are naturally wicked, then God’s judgment is unjust when He “renders to each man according to their deeds.” However, if our nature is good and we, through our own self-love and deceit, choose to do wicked, then His judgment is fully just. And that is the danger of this ideology that we must be careful not to allow to corrupt our thoughts. We are, by nature, created in the image of God, and though sin can corrupt our vision and our actions, it can never corrupt our nature. We must, through the power of the Holy Spirit, fight and struggle through the temptations of the world, through the trials, through the suffering, and seek to attain that holiness that the Lord created us for; to become “partakers of the Divine nature,” (2 Peter 1:4), to become truly “Sons of the Most High.” (Psalm 81:6); never once proclaiming that the spirit of the world or the spirit of the age is more powerful than our beloved Lord, for “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” (1 John 4:4). Our nature is not sinful, it cannot be, for we were created by the Lord, in the image of the Lord; and to claim otherwise is to allow our conscience to excuse, rather than, accuse us, of our iniquities. Through our conscience, we can know the Law of the Lord, let us not train ourselves to ignore or reject that revelation.

May the grace of the Lord be with you all, my beloved family.

Romans 2:12-13

In this passage, Paul turns around on the Jews what they had determined would bring them greater favor, and instead explains that the very favoritism that they proclaimed placed them instead at a great disadvantage. See, the Jews had claimed that they had no need for the grace of the Lord since they had the Law. Paul turns that around on them and explains that since they had the Law, they were in even greater need of grace, since the Gentiles would be judged without the Law, whereas the Jews would be judged by the Law. See, it’s this idea that the Gentiles would be judged by nature alone, whereas the Jews would be judged by nature as well as by the Law.

This is such a scathing statement to the Jews, who felt as though they, because of their lineage, were blessed, the righteous, the elect of the Lord. They considered this lineage to be a great blessing that put them above the unrighteous, the filthy, the non-elect Gentiles. And Paul turns this very concept around on them, stating that not only have they sinned, but, having received the Law, they, more than any other group, have no excuse for their transgressions. Thus, they, more than any other group, must flee to the Lord seeking grace. More than any other group, the “chosen of God,” must abandon their ways and their fleshly desires and run to the warm, saving embrace, of our Lord. And this awakening must have been a slap in the face to these believers, who thought that because they were, in fact, the “elect of the Lord,” that they would be forgiven their transgressions without seeking that forgiveness. Even moreso, this would have been doubly upsetting to the Jews who, as we read in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, wished to enforce these rules and laws against the Gentiles that they themselves were unable to keep (Acts 15:10).

Paul continues this scathing exhortation of the Jews by stating that, “it is not the hearers of the Law who are just in the sight of the Lord, but the doers of the Law who are justified.” See, building on the foundation that had already been lain, he continues to go further. To read, to know, to study the words of the Scripture, the Laws of the Lord, is to no avail if you do not put into practice that which you have already discerned. Knowing the Law of the Lord means nothing if you do not obey the same Law that you have spent hours and days, weeks, even years, learning and studying. It seems unnecessary to even state, however, knowing the speed limit will not prevent the ticket if I am caught speeding. We understand and even apply this to our lives in temporal terms, and yet, in the light of eternity, we ignore this admonition. We do our Bible studies, we learn the words and commands of our Beloved Lord in English, even in Greek, and yet, we do everything that we can to not have to apply them to our very lives. We claim to believe the words of Scripture, the words of our Lord, but never quite enough to turn our belief into action. We learn Jesus commands and then immediately turn our sights towards verses like Ephesians 2:8-9 (ignoring verse 10) to explain away the command of our Lord to commit ourselves to the work that the Lord has called us to. We attempt to use Scripture to explain why we don’t obey Scripture and then call it “Scripture alone,” neglecting the fact that Scripture demands those very actions. We do everything that we can to attempt to walk away from the words of Scripture, from the very words of our Lord, and justify it by claiming that it “isn’t what He meant when He said…”

Mere study of the words of Scripture alone will never save us. We have somewhere along the lines mistaken knowledge for maturity. St Mark the Ascetic teaches us to “read the words of Scripture by putting them into practice.” James teaches us that “faith without works is dead.” Jesus Himself taught us that “whoever loves Me will obey My commandments.” And, Paul here is warning us that merely knowing the Laws of God, merely knowing His words, isn’t enough. It is not those who are “hearers of the word” who are justified in the sight of God, but rather those who are “doers of the Law.” This is ever so important in a generation where those who are considered to be “walking in the faith” strongly are those who are willing to read the words of Scripture, to take time away from their families to study the words of Scripture, those who are willing to sacrifice whatever in the name of studying Scripture. However, we must be mindfully guarded that in learning the words of Scripture we don’t busy ourselves to the point of being unable to obey it, to abide in it, to live it. It’s so easy to walk past the hungry beggar on the way to a Bible study that we don’t even notice that they are there. It’s so easy to overlook a “minor sin” when we are focused on the sacrifice of our beloved Lord. It’s so easy to become so encompassed with learning the Gospel that we forget that it is supposed to be an active part of our lives. The commandment to love our neighbor isn’t just a theory, it’s a fact that we must be living. The commandment to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, and might must be something that we actively seek, not something that we think will passively happen. The word of the Lord, the Holy Scripture, is transforming, but only inasmuch as we allow it to transform us. Only as much as we willing allow it to change us into being “doers of the law,” not hearers only.

May the Grace of the Lord be with you, my beloved family.