Christian community is made up of lots of different people at different stages of Christian maturity. Throughout his writings Paul corrects and disciples those who are immature with regards their character and will. But for those who are simply weak in faith - those who struggle to believe everything that Jesus has done and it’s implications for them - there is grace and patience. Even for those who are misguided in their faith, those who are stronger in faith are called to be accepting and non-judgemental. The reason for this is that fundamentally, in God’s economy, love and truth are not of equal value. Love supersedes all else. It is the currency of the kingdom. By love the Spirit is given, and the Spirit it is who brings all of us to fullness of faith. So we can entrust everyone to the Spirit’s maturing. And as a result see his community grow and mature.

Paul’s closing chapters of Romans are about how Christian relationships should be defined. Chapter 13 answers the question how Spirit-filled people should relate to Government. Paul’s argument is that since God has all authority, and he allows earthly rulers to exercise some (even if God does not condone how it is used), Christians should obey all state laws (even those with which we might not agree) as an act of acknowledgment and worship of God’s supremacy and lordship. And yet of course, both Paul, the other apostles, and indeed Jesus himself disobeyed ruling authorities at times. So then, there is a line. And for Paul the line appears to be defined by the greatest commandments - to have no other God but Jesus, and to love our neighbor and do no harm to them. Any law which prevents us from doing either of these must, for the Christian, necessarily be rejected. Ultimately Paul’s concern is who is going to be Lord in our lives. The challenge for us is to allow Jesus to be Lord of it all - sometimes this will require active disobedience, probably most of the time it will require humble submission.

Chapter 12 marks a turning point Paul's letter. He moves his conflicting church readers to the how of the unity thing; how it works to be a body (different parts, all working together, belonging to one another) and what the love that fuels this will look like (the same kind of love for your friends, our church body members, and our enemies alike!) And he begins this instruction with one of the most poignant battle cries in all of scripture: what God wants from us is for us to offer our whole selves to him, and to not fall into worldly patterns of managing our human mess, but to let Him transform us.

The situation in the church in Rome was a stalemate, involving Jewish and Gentile Christians pointing fingers at each other over theological differences. Paul responds pastorally to their underlying question: who’s right and who needs to change? By Romans 8, Paul establishes that Jesus is right. He then makes the case that both groups (us included) need to change. Change comes by the Spirit. We are energized to live as the righteous people we already are. Righteousness is about how we relate to God and one another, it’s about how we share the table. The change that God wants to bring is an internal one that produces outward results most notable in our capacity to love and share. This kind of change is not just up to the Spirit; we are not passive in it, nor is obedience automatic – we participate. As we live by the Spirit, we’re reminded of our adoption into God’s family where we’re made new, all history, all curses, all regrets are done away with and we hear again God’s love for us. And nothing can separate us from his love.

Having established that all of humanity - Greek, Jewish, Pagan or otherwise - has at its heart the brokenness of sin. Paul then depicts the glorious act of God righting what was wrong. Sin is a cosmic, societal, but also particularly personal problem and it is far more than simply moral performance. In Jesus God becomes the lightening rod of all human sin, and in his body, he gives it what it deserves - annihilation. Jesus’ death is not a just death at the hands of God, it is an unjust death at the hands of sinful humanity. Jesus is what humanity was always supposed to be - innocent and perfect. And in his sinlessness he takes on humanity’s sin in his body to destroy it on the cross forever. God’s justice is then gloriously displayed in raising the innocent Jesus from the dead. Death cannot hold the guiltless God-Man. God makes a spectacle of all the powers of evil - personal, religious, societal, national and supernatural - exposing them for what they are and robbing them on the cross of their power. What this means to us is that God is not angry - he never was. God is love. And it means all our attempts to appease him through moral or religious performance are futile. None of us will be good enough, but he is. We can simply receive the gift of sin destroyed. And it means we can be changed. Jesus’ death is the defining emancipation of the whole universe. It sets us free from all the power of sin, death and the devil, and restores to us his image-bearing vocation - to be his people and do his work. 

For many people the opening chapter of Romans has appeared to be Paul having a judgmental screaming rant against the terrible disgusting immorality of people. And people have often written themselves into it as objects of his, and therefore God’s, disgust. But rather than Paul’s primary purpose being to beat up on pagan idolaters, ultimately his goal is to expose more pressing issues of judgmental attitudes amongst those he is writing to. Paul’s point is not to shame anyone. Rather he is simply but deftly exposing a universal truth: all of us have varying degrees of brokenness at our heart, and none of us is immune. Jesus, gloriously, wonderfully, kindly, lovingly, and powerfully has come to set us free from it all. He’s the only one who can do it. And he has done it. This is the extraordinary good news of the gospel.