What is it about us that we have so much trouble minding our own business? Isn’t managing your own life a full time job? How is it then that you can give so much time to managing the life of other people?

Which do you spend more time analyzing, your own life, or the lives of other people? To whom do you give the most advice, to yourself, or to other people?

At one level, this is not a big deal, but at another level it can be very damaging. Paul addresses this in the 14th chapter of his letter to the Roman churches.

Since Religion and Faith are the very core and purpose of life. Since there is nothing that is more important, nothing else that is eternal, why are they so mysterious? Why doesn’t God just come right out and state plainly what he intends to do? Why the mystery?

I also know that it is no simple matter to explain spiritual things to a physical mind. We live in a one-way universe. It had a beginning and it is headed toward an inexorable end. So are we.

So how do we get our mind around a God who had no beginning and has no end? This was the mystery that Paul was struggling with in his letter to the Romans.

Why can't we have a “Truth in Political Advertising” law. You can use the same principles for evaluation and enforcement. Could you get it through congress? I doubt it. Congress will want to maintain the right to lie. It seems to be a fundamental right of elected officials, although it is certainly not in the bill of rights.

Compare that to a corporation; what kind of evidence must a company have to support the claims in its ads? Before a company runs an ad, it has to have a "reasonable basis" for the claims. A "reasonable basis" means objective evidence that supports the claim. The kind of evidence depends on the claim. At a minimum, an advertiser must have the level of evidence that it says it has. For example, the statement "Two out of three doctors recommend ABC Pain Reliever" must be supported by a reliable survey to that effect. This, of course, is too reasonable, too sensible to ever get past congress.

The FTC can require corrective advertising, disclosures and other informational remedies. Advertisers have been required to take out new ads to correct the misinformation conveyed in the original ad, notify purchasers about deceptive claims in ads, include specific disclosures in future ads, or provide other information to consumers.

That would work in politics. Make them come back and tell the truth. A federal watchdog could require immediate ads retracting the misleading ad. Or the offender should have to pay for a competitors ad to set the record straight. The media should help with this, but they are like a watchdog that has an affection for a burglar. They have long since taken sides. What's funny about that is that both political extremes think the media are in the pocket of the other side. And the media have only themselves to blame.

The republic is in serious danger because our watchdogs are asleep at the switch, or they have taken sides. Politicians fear the loss of power more than anything. And the people to blame are those who grant power to politicians who won't talk straight. And the media should, but probably never will, hold the political class to account for telling the truth. Is this situation really new, or is there a parallel in history—even in ancient times?

What is the state of the billions of people who have lived and died who have never heard the name of Jesus? The apostle Paul was wrestling with this question in chapter 10 of his great letter to the Roman churches. It was deeply troubling to Paul because of all the Jews who were turning the gospel down even when they heard it. And I dare say it troubles not a few of you.

Many years ago, I posed the question to a man who had challenged me on the issue. We had made our way through his belief in an eternal hell fire, and I was pressing him about the state of all those who had never heard. I talked about the peoples of Africa and Southeast Asia who lived in areas never penetrated by any missionary. I talked about Filipino children in the high country who had never heard of Jesus.

I wanted to know: Are all these people, who have never had a chance to be saved, going to burn in hell forever?

As you read through the book of Acts, one thing is abundantly clear. Paul was persistent in taking the gospel to the Jews first, everywhere he went, and the Jews were nearly as persistent in rejecting it.

I am not particularly surprised that the Jews rejected the gospel. People believe or don’t believe based on their own prejudices. But what is a little surprising is that the Jew’s rejection of the Gospel was prophesied. And according to Paul, it was necessary. That is a little harder to understand.

How on Earth could the rejection of the Gospel by the Jews be of any value in saving the Gentiles? Paul tries to answer this puzzling question in the tenth chapter of Romans.

I don’t know what Paul expected when he set out on his first missionary journey, but I don’t think it was what he got. He does not seem to be prepared for the rejection he keeps on encountering. Time after time, he hits a brick wall in the synagogue. There may be a few who believe him, but sometimes no one does. And sometimes there is outright hostility, even attempted murder.

At the same time, the Gentiles come to him in droves to learn more. They are converted in their hundreds.

It really is a puzzle sometimes when you can take people the best news in the world and have them throw it back in your face and tell you to get lost. In Romans 9, we find that it sorely troubled Paul.

Do you believe in predestination? And if you do, what sort of predestination? Does a man really have a choice in all this, or has God long ago decided who should be saved and who should be lost?

I think there are people who believe this, but when you start reading their papers on the topic, it isn’t long before you get lost in all the theological jargon. I believe it is okay to bring common sense to table to talk about this, and I believe it is okay to talk about it in simple terms.

Paul is the culprit that posed us this problem in Romans 8, and it is highly doubtful he meant what a lot of people take him to mean.

If you are a Christian, and a member of a church, your church probably has some set of beliefs that it expects all of its members to hold. That’s probably not as big a deal in some community churches as it might have been in generations past, but don’t imagine for a moment that it’s gone away. Birds of a feather flock together, and that it nowhere more evident than in Christian churches. It isn’t just beliefs, either. Cultural differences can be important as well. We can say that everyone is welcome and we should, but our culture may say otherwise.

None of this has to be a very big deal, and I think churches of different stripes are more respectful of one another than they might have been, say, 50 years ago. Generally, though, people group according to their comfort level, and that’s just fine. But toss a dispute over dogma into the mix, and all that can change very quickly.

Your church or your denomination probably ascribes to a creed, defined as a brief, authoritative formula of religious belief. Probably the oldest and best known is what is called The Apostle’s Creed, which the apostles themselves never saw. It would be a rare Christian who could not find some way to confess this creed. It might require a little interpretation here and there, but it holds across a broad spectrum. But, creeds don’t stop there, and there’s the rub.

I don’t know what it is, but preachers of every stripe, myself included, are prone to lay a guilt trip on people from time to time. It is almost as though we were your mother.

Human nature being what it is, something like the projection of guilt was hanging around the edges of the early Christian church. It was often a legalism issue, and in the Roman churches, it was a Jew/Gentile concern.

So Paul spent an inordinate amount of time in his letter to the Romans dealing with the question of forgiveness, justification, legalism, and guilt. And after chewing the question over thoroughly, he summarizes in chapter 8…

Imagine for a moment that you are a highly successful cat burglar. Then one rainy night, you discover that you are not as good a driver as you are a cat burglar, and you are killed—graveyard dead.

They bury you, and word spreads to a dozen police agencies that your miserable career has finally ended the hard way and they put your files where the files of dead people go and forget about you. In the words of the Apostle Paul, you have become dead to the law.

Now let’s change the story just a little. You didn’t really die. That was someone else’s body in the car, and you were able to stand in the bushes and watch your own funeral. You are dead to the law in the body of the other man.

You can get a new identity, and start a new life. Paul writes of this opportunity and this state of being in Romans 7.