When Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, he was called the first fruits for the dead. The first fruits are the beginning of a harvest. As great as the resurrection of Jesus Christ is—and it means everything—it’s only the first installment on somet…
Read MoreWe’re tracing the single story of the Bible. We look now to the very end of the book of Revelation because all well-told stories tie up all the plot lines. And in the book of Revelation, all the plot lines of the history of the human race and all the…
Read MoreIn Romans 3 and 4 the Bible tells us exactly what God has done to put things right in Jesus Christ. You can put it in a phrase: we’re justified by faith through the blood of Christ.
We look now at one of those terms: faith. What is this saving faith…
In Romans 3, we have the heart of Paul’s message about what God has done to put the world right in Jesus Christ.
Christianity alone says that God prepares a perfect righteous record through Jesus Christ and gives it freely to you. So you’re saved no…
In Romans 1 through 4, Paul summarizes the story of the Bible. And here, in the last half of chapter 3 and into chapter 4, we have Paul’s most essential summary of what God has done to put the world right.
Three phrases are repeated and brought into…
Romans 1 through 4 gives Paul’s version of the entire biblical story, also called the gospel. In this passage, we come to the end of Paul’s analysis of what’s wrong with the human race.
When I was a new believer, this was a tough passage for me. It …
We’re tracing the storyline of the entire Bible. We started in Genesis, where we learn what’s wrong with the human race, and we’ve come to Romans, where we learn what God has done about it through Jesus Christ.
Here at the beginning of Romans 2, Pau…
We’re in a series tracing the storyline of the Bible: what’s wrong with the human race, what God has done about it, and how it’s all going to turn out. We’ve begun to look at Romans 1 through 4, where Paul gives us perhaps the single most comprehensi…
Read MoreWe’re tracing the storyline of the Bible, and we looked first at what it says went wrong with the human race. Now we look at Romans 1 through 4, at perhaps the single most comprehensive place where we learn what God has done to make things right.
Sch…
We’re in a series tracing the single storyline of the Bible—the single story that tells us what’s wrong with the human race, what God has done about it, and how history is going to turn out in the end.
We’ve started by looking at the beginning of th…