Early on in this letter to the young church in Rome Paul is wading into some really confusing stuff. He starts off by saying everyone has sinned and needs Jesus, and the salvation Jesus offers is NOT based on our behavior. If that's true, do we need to be even concerned with our behavior? This new worldview is proving to be much more confusing, especially in a culture that glorifies and encourages hedonistic attitudes. When Paul warns that being too concerned with one's behavior can actually be problematic this is where most of us would just throw our hands in the air and yet Paul continues to unpack something hidden and incredibly good when it comes to considering our behavior in light of what Jesus offers for all people.

As Paul unpacks how this new bourgeoning church should approach their view of life and Roman culture he asserts that everyone has always had some sort of innate awareness that a divine being must exist and there must also be a moral standard this divinity must desire and steps into addressing the underlying cause of why this knowledge seems to have all but disappeared from the modern world (2,000 years ago) and it just might have connections to our modern world in 2023.   We talk about Romans chapter 1 and the start of chapter 2 through a Dumb Christian approach just looking at what Paul meant and what the original readers would have understood him to mean.

Instead of approaching Romans like a sermon, we're going to just take a cultural look at what society was like in the place where this young Roman church of believers lived. We can easily misunderstand what Paul meant as he wrote this book when we try to look at it through any other lens than that of its original audience.

Season Two is coming January 16th and we're starting with the highly divisive book of Romans. 

To wrap up 2022 I'm sitting down with my mom to talk about what it might have been like to be Jesus' mother and a mother to a whole slew of siblings to Jesus who would have been nothing like him.

Israel (Jacob) finds it hard to believe that his son, Joseph, is still alive and finally makes his way to Egypt when he learns his son is now second in command over all of Egypt. As the family of Israel settles into the land of Goshen, an Egpytian suburb, tensions grow between this growing tribe and the nation of Egypt.

When Joseph's brothers find themselves in Egypt during the global famine they come face to face with the one they sold into slavery and he now has unlimited power at his disposal. This is how Joseph responds to being reunited with his brothers. He can play rough too.

Joseph goes on this wild rollercoaster of a ride as he's sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, imprisoned with the worst offenders in Egypt then somehow becomes... well basically Pharoh.

When we first meet Joseph he is a real piece of work and his brothers can't stand him. They hate him so much that they end up selling him to a random caravan passing by. Then the author interrupts the Joseph story to tell us about twins that have nothing to do with any of his other stories... why?

Moses is tying up some loose ends before diving head first into the story of Joseph, Jacob's favorite son. We also get a glimpse into some family trees that don't seem to have any immediate impact of the story but the author is setting the stage for how Jacob's extended family is going to play a role in the story later on.