1208PODCAST

In today's service we take a look at the themes of Romans 10, including the simplicity of the gospel, salvation by faith, the inclusion of the Gentiles, and how the gospel has somehow been declared to all people.

Romans 9 is a difficult passage to process. Is there free will or is everything predestined? How does judgment work? Jamin starts with the story of Pharoah in Exodus and then moves into Romans 9 to continue the conversation.

As Paul gets excited about our identity in Christ, he begins throwing out important adjectives that define our identity as Christians before exploding into an epic poem about Jesus' love for us.

In one of Paul's most beautiful passages on resurrection, he paints the whole of creation groaning alongside Christians as the Holy Spirit groans within us.

In this message Jamin breaks from preaching on Romans to talk about making sure we hear the tone of Jesus correctly. Then we spend the rest of service in a time of worship.

In this message we take a look at the four main characters of Romans 7: The Law, Sin, Humans, and Jesus. How the four interact have a lot to say about salvation and resurrection.

In Romans 5, Paul contrasts the old sinful humanity of Adam with the new resurrected humanity of Jesus. In this message we imagine other worlds where humanity never sinned and then face our actual reality, which ends up being both stranger than fiction and immensely beautiful.

We in the West tend to look at suffering and persecution as a negative thing, but people like Paul see it as a positive. For in our suffering is the cross, which is the crux of Jesus, who is the crux of everything.

When Paul tries to convince the Romans that the Gentiles can be brought into the covenant family of God without first being circumcised or being subjected to the law, he uses Abraham as his example why. By Paul's reasoning, Abraham was the original Gentile that God brought into the covenant and God considered him righteous not for his works or his circumcision or his following of the law (Abraham didn't yet know about such things), but for his faith. Therefore, faith is the definition of salvation for Paul and Abraham is the earliest example of proof. Though the law is good and upheld by the Christian (for it has not been abolished), obedience of the law is now found in the obedience of the law's ultimate interpreter, Jesus Christ, who has become the fulfillment of the law.

Therefore, we are saved by the same formula that God's people have always been saved by throughout history: God's grace given to sinners on behalf of their faith/faithfulness/belief/commitment/believing loyalty/allegiance to God. What has changed in this formula in the New Testament, however, is the crux upon which all of our faith now hangs: King Jesus Himself, who is the fulfillment of the original covenant made to Abraham, the forgiveness of sins, and the one who has paved the way for us to enter into the resurrection life of the new heavens and new earth, where we will live with new resurrected immortal bodies. We have been given evidence of all of this through the downpayment of the Holy Spirit, through which full resurrection will one day come, and has also already begun now inside of us. We can only receive these promises by our faithful allegiance to Jesus, for to be faithful to Jesus, is to be faithful to God—for Jesus is God-in-flesh.

Romans 3 is a monumental verse in the Bible that shifts the way we understand the law under the New Covenant. In this message Jamin takes a look at how the law was distributed in the Old Testament and what the law becomes in the New Testament.