Straight to the Heart of Romans

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780857210579
• eBook ISBN: 9780857211842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Paul's letter to the Romans is not just the longest surviving letter from the ancient world. It was also the most dangerous. Paul sent it into Nero's backyard to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and that his readers needed to surrender. Whatever the world may have told us and whatever false gospels we may have believed, it's time for all of us to wake up to Paul's message that there is a new King in town.

A series of devotional commentaries, which allow people to get to grips with each book of the Bible one bite at a time. Phil Moore will not cover the whole of each book, but rather focuses on key sections which together form a useful introduction. There will be 25 volumes in all: each contains about 60 readings, but this may vary from book to book.





Although the tone is light, the text is full of useful application and backed by substantial scholarship.

Romans 1–8:

The New King Saves

It’s Personal (1:1–7)

…the gospel of God…regarding his Son.

(Romans 1:1, 3)

Romans may be brilliant, but it isn’t easy reading. It is the sixth of Paul’s thirteen New Testament letters and the only one he wrote to a church he had neither planted nor visited,¹ which often makes it feel more like a lecture than a letter. Paul livens up his monologue by heckling himself with questions, and he tries to build bridges by naming lots of mutual friends in chapter 16, but none of this can stop Romans from feeling like a theological essay. It lacks the intimacy of 1 Thessalonians or the tailor-made teaching of 1 Corinthians. But don’t let that fool you that this letter isn’t personal.

Romans isn’t primarily about sin or righteousness or justification or the role of Israel. It is about “the gospel of God…regarding his Son”. In case we miss that Paul’s message is primarily about a person, he also urges Timothy in another letter to “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel.”²

We need to note this as we start Romans, because so many people read the letter as a Gospel formula that sin plus the cross plus repentance equals justification. Unless we grasp that the Gospel is about a Jewish man, descended from King David, who was revealed as God’s Son when he raised him from the dead, then we will misunderstand Paul’s teaching in 10:9.³ We will treat it as a call to respond to the Gospel by following a formula, when in fact it is a call to respond to the Lord Jesus as a person.

Paul was not saying anything new to the Romans. This was, after all, how the Roman church began. Its earliest members had been there on the Day of Pentecost to hear the first Gospel sermon in Acts 2. After eight verses that responded to the crowd’s immediate question, Peter launched into a message that began with “Jesus of Nazareth…” and which ended fifteen verses later with “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

Other church members had been there when Peter preached a Gospel sermon to a crowded room of Romans in Acts 10. Cornelius gave him carte blanche to preach anything he wanted – “We are all here in the presence of God to listen to everything the Lord has commanded you to tell us”– and Peter chose to give a ten-verse biography of Jesus, which recounted his baptism, his experience of the Holy Spirit, his healing ministry, his death and resurrection, and his post-resurrection appearances. He told them Jesus was Lord and that unless they received his forgiveness they would face his judgment.

So when Paul tells the Roman Christians that the Gospel is personal, he is not telling them anything particularly new. What is new is that he clarifies for them why conversion means more than assenting to certain Christian doctrines. When the Gospel is presented as a series of propositions by which listeners can escape God’s judgment and go to heaven when they die, it creates stillborn, self-centred “converts” who are very different from the ones Paul describes in these first seven verses.

The Gospel we share affects how converts see themselves. The essence of sin is to act as if the world revolves around us, so an impersonal gospel fails to deal with the root of the problem. It tells us that we are so precious that God sacrificed his Son because he couldn’t bear to see people like us die. It pleads with us to accept God’s salvation with a promise that he will improve our lives if we ask him to come into our lives. Those who respond to this “gospel” rise from their knees thinking that God just made a transaction with them, so they sit back and see whether he makes good on his promise to make their lives better. In contrast, those who respond to Paul’s Gospel that Jesus is Lord rise from their knees understanding that they just made a transaction with God. They repent of acting as if the world revolves around themselves and accept nothing short of a Copernican Revolution in their thinking: they confess they are mere planets which must now revolve around God’s Son.

To stress this, Paul begins his letter with a Greek phrase that was very offensive in Roman culture: “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus”. When Tacitus, the great historian of Nero’s reign, insults people he tells his readers they have “the mind of a slave”,⁴ but Paul says that this is the essence of what it means to follow Christ. Praying a prayer cannot help us unless we accept that we now “belong to Jesus Christ” and authenticate our prayer with “the obedience that comes from faith”.⁵ Responding to the Gospel means surrendering to King Jesus.

The Gospel we share also affects how converts see their mission. If they respond to a message that God wants to meet their needs, they become Christian consumers. They share testimonies that focus on what caused them to cry out to God and on what their decision has saved them from. They do not echo Paul’s humility when he says three times in these seven verses that it is God who calls us, or his excitement over what this means he has been set apart for.⁶

The Gospel we share also affects how converts expect God to use them to fulfil his purposes. If they are told that the Gospel is a message all about them, their involvement in mission will lead to either pride or despair because they will assume that success depends on their own hard work. They don’t grasp that it is “the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets” countless centuries before they were even born, or that Jesus makes us successful “through him and for his name’s sake”. They cannot understand Paul’s confidence in verse 13 that he will always be fruitful wherever he goes. They forget that when Paul finally made it to Rome he simply “taught about the Lord Jesus Christ”⁷ Luke also summarizes Paul’s message in Rome as “the kingdom of God”. They think the Gospel is a set of propositions, but Paul insists it is a person.

John Piper puts it this way:

When we ask about God’s design we are too prone to describe it with ourselves at the centre of God’s affections. We may say, for example, his design is to redeem the world. Or to save sinners. Or to restore creation. Or the like. But God’s saving designs are penultimate, not ultimate. Redemption, salvation, and restoration are not God’s ultimate goal. These he performs for the sake of something greater.⁸

He does it for his own glory through King Jesus, our Lord, as Paul tells us in this deeply personal letter about God’s Gospel regarding his Son.

You’ve Got Mail (1:8–15)

I am bound both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish.

(Romans 1:14)

Nero’s surname was Ahenobarbus, meaning Bronze-Beard, because his legendary ancestor had played postman to the gods. The twin gods Castor and Pollux had made him their evangelist in 496 BC when they ordered him to preach the gospel that the Romans had defeated the Latins at Lake Regillus. He hesitated because no word had yet arrived from the battlefield, but when they touched his black beard and turned it to bronze he evangelized Rome by faith and was rewarded when its army returned in victory. He was invited to lead their triumph and served as consul seven times. Now Paul tells the Romans that this is nothing compared to what King Jesus has in store for them.¹

Paul has already described himself as Jesus’ slave in verse 1, and now he also describes himself in verse 14 literally as his debtor. The myth of Ahenobarbus was day-to-day reality for Paul, since God had entrusted him with the Gospel of his Son. He must come to the city where Nero used death threats to stay in power and declare that one of Caesar’s crucified victims had broken death as a weapon through a miracle far greater than turning a black beard to bronze. Paul was God’s postman and carried a message that Jesus was the new King in town.

Paul is not merely saying that he is a debtor to the Greek-speaking wise men of Rome. Remember, Paul wrote Romans in Greek instead of Latin because this was the language of an empire that prided itself on its high-cultured wisdom. Paul tells them that he is also a debtor to barbarians and to the foolish, which means that they have a role to play in taking the Gospel to the rest of the world. He is preparing the Romans for his shock revelation in 15:28 that he actually plans to “go to Spain and visit you on the way”. They expected that they would be his final destination since everyone knew that all roads led to Rome, but Paul needed to teach them that they were as much in debt as he was, and that they needed to team with him in taking the Gospel to Spain and the rest of the Western Mediterranean.² They must not prove less obedient to the real God than the legendary Ahenobarbus had been to his idols.

There are two ways that we can fall into debt. We can borrow money for ourselves or be entrusted with delivering an item from one person to another. Either way, reneging on our debt is a serious matter. A few years ago, one of my local postmen started emptying his sack of letters in people’s dustbins so he could go back to his depot with an empty sack after spending the morning relaxing at home. Someone saw him dumping letters in the dustbin to the rear of our church, and telephoned the police who identified the guilty postman from the postcodes on the letters. He was sentenced to jail for “interfering with Her Majesty’s mail”, but let’s not be too shocked. We do it ourselves all the time.

Paul encourages us that a simple way to discharge our debt is to proclaim the Gospel by enjoying it ourselves. He tells the Romans in verse 8 that due to their wholehearted response to Jesus as Lord, “your faith is being reported all over the world.” Another way is to pray for opportunities to share it, as Paul says he does constantly and at all times in verses 9 and 10. He tells the Romans that he prays to come to the mother-city Rome, of which he himself was a citizen by birth.³ Prayer would pave the way for him to make an evangelistic visit.

Paul also encourages us to discharge our debt by helping one another to understand the Gospel ever more deeply. He warns us not to treat the Gospel as an elementary message for non-Christians while we graduate to something meatier. He tells the Romans in verse 15 that “I am so eager to preach the Gospel also to you”, because he knows in verses 11 and 12 that it is only through discovering new depths to the Gospel that “you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” Lifestyle, prayer and sharing with one another form the prelude to discharging our larger debt of sharing the Gospel verbally with the millions of non-Christians to whom it is addressed.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of letters the postman must have thrown into our bin. Were cheques, tax rebates, job offers, love letters or other life-changing pieces of news left undelivered? Would it matter if most of the letters were only junk mail? The j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: There’s a New King in Town
• ROMANS 1–8: THE NEW KING SAVES
• ROMANS 9–11: THE NEW KING HAS A PLAN
• ROMANS 12:1–15:13: THE NEW KING IS LORD
• ROMANS 15:14–16:27: THE NEW KING IS ADVANCING
• Conclusion: There’s a New King in Town