I have been studying the book of Romans and it has been so much fun! I want to start sharing with you some of the treasure I’ve discovered while reading and studying the Bible, especially now that I see God as a loving and gracious Father and I read the Bible through the lens of God’s grace.

On my website I will simply title these blog posts as God’s Treasure Chest with the book and chapter that I am reading from. I won’t be commenting on every verse and I understand that revelation is accumulative and that in the future I will come back to the same chapter again and learn even more from studying it. It’s so cool how the Bible never gets old when we read it with our grace glasses on!

I hope these new God’s Treasure Chest posts bring you encouragement!

Romans 1:3a says,
The Good News is about His Son, Jesus. (NLT)

The first thing that stood out to me right away in verse 3 is that the Good News is about Jesus. This means if you are listening to or reading messages that are not centered around Jesus, but centered around self, that’s not the Good News. You can tell the difference because the Good News always focuses your eyes on Jesus and trusting in Jesus instead of yourself!

Romans 1:5 says, 
Through Christ, God has given us the privilege and authority as apostles to tell Gentiles everywhere what God has done for them, so that they will believe and obey Him, bringing glory to His name. (NLT)

This means a person has to believe correctly about God before they will obey Him consistently. Wrong believing leads to wrong living and right believing leads to right living! Right believing comes first. Right living comes second. This is why it’s so important for us to allow the Holy Spirit, our teacher, to renew our mind through reading and studying the Bible as well as reading books and listening to teaching that is full of the Gospel of Grace.

Romans 1:16 says,  
For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes the Jew first and also the Gentile. (NLT)

I really like Andrew Wommack’s Living Commentary notes on this verse:

“The Greek word EUAGGELION, which was translated gospel in this verse, was used seventy-seven times in the New Testament in seventy-four verses. It was translated gospel seventy-four times and gospel’s three times. It means good message or good news (Vine’s Expository Dictionary). But it actually means more than that. This Greek word was so seldom used that I only found two examples of its usage outside of the Bible. The reason for that was because it really means the nearly-too-good-to-be-true news. And there is precious little outside of the news of what Jesus did for us that is nearly-too-good-to-be-true news. But when Jesus took all of our sin and paid the debt we owed and then gave us new life, that was nearly too good to be true. So, this word became correctly associated with the salvation Jesus provided for us.
This Greek word, as used in the Bible, also stresses the means by which we appropriate the great benefits of our salvation. This all comes by faith in God’s grace. Galatians 1:6 and Acts 20:24 use the words grace and gospel interchangeably. This is very important. Any teaching that doesn’t emphasize grace as the way of receiving what Jesus provided isn’t the true Gospel. As Paul phrased it in Galatians 1:7, trying to receive from God by our own effort is a perversion of the Gospel.”

Romans 1:17 says, 
This Good News tells us how God makes us right in His sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, It is through faith that a righteous person has life. (NLT)

I love it! We are righteous in Christ because of what Christ did for us on the cross and all we have to do to receive this gift of righteousness is to have faith in Christ by choosing to receive Him as our Lord and Savior! 

Romans 1:18-20 say,
18 But God shows His anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.19 They know the truth about God because He has made it obvious to them. 20 For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see His invisible qualities His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.(NLT)

Check out these awesome commentary notes on these verses!

Andrew Wommack’s Living Commentary:

“Paul’s purpose in writing Romans 1:18-20 was to explain why the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The problem was that then, just as now, most people felt the way to get others to come to God was to condemn them and scare them out of hell. People doubted that Paul’s good news of the love of God would be enough to cause repentance.
Therefore, Paul began to prove that every person already has an instinctive knowledge of God’s wrath against their sin. We don’t need to prove God’s wrath; God has already done that. What people need to know is the good news that God placed His wrath for our sins upon His own Son so that we could be completely forgiven. This good news will draw people to God more than the bad news will ever drive people to God.”

Amen. I couldn’t agree more!

Next God’s Treasure Chest post will be on Romans 2

If you have not yet made Jesus your Savior and received the wonderful joy that His finished work on the cross has provided for you to live in, please visit my page here titled Jesus In The Driver’s Seat. On this page I explain the good news of the gospel and you will have the opportunity to pray a prayer of salvation, making Jesus your Savior! Jesus loves you and His arms are wide open!

Sandra McCollom

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