Romans ISample

The Famous Believers

For the next four days, we will explore the profound truths of Romans chapter 1. Paul says in verse 16 that the power of God brings salvation. We often think about salvation as a one-off, binary, heaven-and-hell issue.

Salvation means one thing is delivered from something else, like money saved from being spent, or a baseball game kept from a loss. There are lots of things we need to be delivered from—from hell to heaven, for sure—but that’s just one of many.

What is unique about Romans 1 is that Paul is writing to famous believers whose “faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” They have already received the kind of salvation we often think of as the ticket to heaven. 

A group of people whose faith is so great that it’s being spoken of throughout the world—why would they need to be saved? Paul will answer that throughout the book of Romans: we need to be saved from ourselves—from our flesh/sinful nature, hypocrisy, and deception; from the chains of slavery and sin. We were delivered from sin through Christ, but we must walk by faith daily to experience that deliverance.

The opposite of living by faith is living by self—by pride. It is self that we need to be saved from after we become believers. That is what the Romans who were “famous for their faith” needed to be rescued from—self. 

Where do we get the power for such deliverance? It is from the resurrected power of Jesus. The power that delivers us from hell to heaven is the same power that delivers us from self to walk in Jesus’ footsteps. As believers in Christ, we have this power, but we must first “disengage” from our own resources to tap into that vast power. 

The destination Paul desires for believers is “righteousness,” which means that we are living as God designed us to live.

Whose power are you walking in today, yours or Christ’s?