Bible Guys Classics: Romans 1 Part 1

Hey, Jeff, I have some really good news today. Oh great. Yeah. The good news is it's another day of us on podcasts. Hey, and we're talking about the good news. Yeah, Paul shares the good news. We're kicking off talk about the Book of Romans. So he's Chris and I'm Jeff, and we're the Bible guys. So, Jeff, today we are handed a segment that we have not done actually in quite a while. Yeah, called this or that. These are fun, Yeah, they are fun because it's all it is is just your opinions and your choices. And we have plenty of those, yes, of course. So it says this or that, which one would you rather either do, have or be? Okay, so here's the first one. Okay, would you rather have unlimited tacos or unlimited ice cream? No, no brainer, unlimited tacos. Yeah, so for me, it's actually, well it's the wrong choice, but it's unlimited ice cream. Really yeah. I love love tacos, like the universe. The universe loves tacos. However, ice cream is the one thing that is my downfall. Wow, Like I could eat ice cream all the time, wow, all the time. Yeah, And there's so many choices, just like tacos. I love ice cream, but I have like limited Like I can go once a month with ice cream and I'm perfectly fine. Oh like a taste of ice cream. Oh I could do ice cream if it wasn't like the thing that is super sugary and fat. I could probably drink a shake a day. Oh wow, yeah, wow, yeah, I see you have a shake problem. You have an ice cream problem. So yeah, I like good gelato, like a nice, creamy chocolate gelato. I love that, all right. Question number two, would you rather wear a tux to work every day or have to wear pajamas to work every day? Oh? Tucks, I'd rather wear a tux to work every day rather than pajamas. You are insane? Really, Why why would you be formal? So fancy? Well, who cares about how you look? Well, you dressed for success. How about dress for comfort? You know what. The older you get, but with the rest of the world too. Yeah, the older we get, the more we realize the comfort becomes the priority, right right, right, So you know, I think that's the reason why people the order you get. It's just it's just all about cushing. All the other shoes to new balance right, right, right, all the men start finding like stretchy pants, right yeah yeah, yeah yeah, comfort? Well I can see that. Yeah. So let me ask you a question. When you get home from work, and let's just say you're in jeans and a button down shirt, do you not immediately change into something more comfortable? No? Nothing, no? Never. Do you have a set of pajamas? No, not a whole set. Do you realize how many sets of pajamas I have? Oh, I'd imagine a bunch. I would say, thirty? What Yeah, you collect pajamas? No, it's just what I have. Well, you have to thirty of anything? Seems like a collection to me. I wear pajamas every day. Wow. Yeah, so no, I'm sorry that's hilarious. Well, okay, I think you sounds sophisticated. I think talking pajamas, a button up and a collar in the whole nine yards, like, mister cleaver. Well, it's probably not what you're thinking. It's not like silk proper pajama set. Because I'm envisioning you now, like in a smoking jacket at night, sitting in dim light, and you're you know, you paneled. Guys, Pajamas are just the bottoms and then you sho wear a T shirt with it. Okay, that's the popular thing. Okay, I have a pair of pajama bottoms, I guess. Okay, all right, but I do have several sets. Though, Okay I do apparently thirty Yeah. There's a lot. Okay, okay about this? Well, that's amazing. Sorry, we spent so much time on that. I'm just blown away. That's all right. Would you rather watch all your movies and TV shows and half speed or double speed? Oh? Double speed? Yeah? No, no brainer? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Who want to go half speed? I don't know. You're a movie bove. Maybe you'd enjoy it twice as much. It reminds me of it reminds me of what's that one show with the fox in the in the sloth and the sloth is there? Okay? How about this number four? Would you rather have a burnt tongue or for a week or have a brain freeze for a week? Oh? Neither neither? Can I can? I vote neither on that one, No doubt. Yea man, if you if you have to choose one, what would you choose? I'd have to. I have to go with the burn tongue because I could deal with it. But brain freeze is like, it's like the debilitating. What am I starting to just have a brain freeze? Yeah? Just debilitating? Right, yeah, so it really is right. You can't do anything with the burn tongue. It's just really so bad brain freeze. I mean you got to turn the lights off in the room kind of thing. Yeah, just yeah, yeah, yeah, debilitating. And then number five, would you rather, Oh, my goodness, would you rather win every game you play? Or lose every game you play? Oh? Win when every so winning is fun and everything else is not winning? Right, But I don't know. Why anybody would choose losing. Oh I love to lose. Losing is the best right to which somebody that was taught to be a good loser, Well I was a good. Loser or just a loser? Yeah, I remember on one of my coaches when I was a kid told us to be good losers, right, because we were all mad after losing game wet as in a baseball team, and we went mostly undefeated deep into the season. We were still undefeated and we lost the game we shouldn't lose, so we were kind of mad. One of the kids through a bat. You know, we were all angry, hitting the fence, whatever, and just bad attitudes is our first loss. The coach comes in gives us whole speech about being a good loser. On the way home, my dad said, Jeff, you know that I look up to your coach. I think your coach is good coach. My dad always would encourage me to look up to my coaches. I say, yes, he said, so, I just want to clarify something. We never want to be good losers. We want to be gracious losers. We never want to get good at losing. Just be gracious when you do. And he said, is difference. He said, sometimes I know it sounds like semantics, but words matter, right, right, What are you good at? I'm good at losing? You know what? That right? So well, today, a lot of people don't like winning or losing. A lot of people don't. It feels like a measurement thing. It feels like a really Oh yeah yeah. I think they just feel like everybody should just enjoy participating. Oh like trophies, I guess wow. Yeah. Yeah, we're a couple of old guys. We like winning, so. Well, today we actually are, you know, just remind everybody we're going through the Book of Acts and chronologically since Paul wrote almost new half half the New Testament. Uh, what we're doing is we're sort of breaking chronologically from the Book of Acts and we're sort of going to the letters that that he has written. Well today, actually, last podcast, we just finished up Second Corinthians, right, he was on his third is on his third missionary journey, and and today is going to take a surprising jump directly from Second Corinthians to Romans. Well, I don't think we're gonna put on the screen, but there is two halves of verse that says, then he traveled down to Greece where he straight stayed for three months. That's in the Book of Acts. And then we're moving on during that time, the three months that he was in Greece, he wrote the Book of Romans, as far as we know. And this is interesting too because number one Romans doesn't read like a typical letter. And then number two this is actually a church that he has never been to. Right, That's why that's why I think the other ones are so personal. Yeah, and this one's pretty academic. Yeah, And because this church most likely was started by the Jews that came up from Acts chapter two, the Pentecost, and actually it was mostly Jewish, although there were some you know, Greeks in the church, and Paul was writing to introduce himself. He was writing in hopes to visit them, which he did eventually. This was written around fifty seven AD according to my little notes over here on my Life Application Study Bible, and about three years later after this letter of introduction he actually gets to visit them. Okay, good, So we're just going to pick up and Paul wastes no time. Yep. Within just a few verses he gets into some really big stuff and from there on this is a heavy hitting book, one of the most theological books in the Bible, really defining for us what the meaning of what we talk about as the Gospel, what that is. He kind of provides the framework of it, but he also deals with a lot of other social issues and behavioral issues. So this is a hard hitting book. The other ones were correction, stop doing this, stop doing this. This book is more just emphatic statements of this is what real Christianity is, right, So no corrections in here, just making statements, all right. So let's jump in. We're reading from the New Living Translation. If you're following along Romans Chapter one, and we'll read through what verse eighteen seventeen seventeen. This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ. Jesus chose chosen by God to be an apostle and sent out to preach his good news. God promised this good news long ago through his prophets and the Holy scriptures. The good news is about his son and in his earthly life, he was born into King David's family line, and he was shown to be the son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. He is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Through Christ, God has given us the privilege and authority as apostles to tell gentiles everywhere what God has done for them, so that they will believe and obey Him, bringing glory to His name. And you are included among those gentiles who have been called to belong to Jesus Christ. I am writing to all of you in Rome who are loved by God and are called to be his own holy people. May God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. Let me say first that I thank my God through Jesus Christ, for all of you, because your faith in Him is being talked about all over the world. God knows how often I pray for you day and night. I bring you and your needs and prayer to God, whom I s with all my heart by spreading the good news about his son. One of the things I always pray for is the opportunity God willing to come at last to see you. For I long to visit you so I can bring you some spiritual gift that will help you grow strong in the Lord. When we get together, I want to encourage you in your faith, but I also want to be encouraged by yours. I want you to know, dear brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to visit you, but I was prevented until now. I want to work among you and see spiritual fruit, just as I have seen among other gentiles. For I have a great sense of obligation to people in both the civilized world and the rest of the world, to the educated and uneducated alike. So I am eager to come to you in Rome too to preach the good news. For I am not ashamed of this good news about Christ. It is the power of God at work saving everyone who believes the Jew first, and also the gentile. This good news tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith, As the scriptures say, it is through faith that a righteous person has life. You know. Always cracks me up. Is that verse that says the jew first, then the gentile? Yeah? Yeah, But we have to understand that he's not saying that the Jewish person has priority of salvation over another person. What he's saying is is that in the Old Testament that the Jewish people were God's chosen people, and actually God was actually associated with the Jewish people, and that actually when people talked about God, it was the God of the Jewish people, right, or God of Israel. Right. Well, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, right, So Jesus came to the Jews, and it emanated from the idea of Christianity, emanated from the Jewish religion. I think that that's what it's talking about. It came to them first, but now it's spreading everywhere. Right, that's what he's talking about. As a matter of fact, some translations would say in verse fourteen, where it talks about, you know, in the civilized world, and the rest of the world. He's saying also to the Greeks and the Barbarians, is what it was saying. So you know, you got to remember in this time in the Western world, so this is everything maybe on the west end of the Silk Road, all the way to Spain, that whole region up into Gaul, which would be you know, modern day France and Germany. Now maybe even pushing towards by this point, not quite pushed towards I don't think towards Germany or towards England yet, but it's most of the Mediterranean, that whole thing. To them, that was the whole world. They thought when you went past the Rock of Gibraltar out into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere out there, you just fell off the planet, right, that's what they thought. So they thought that they had dominated almost the whole world, and on the edges of the rest of the world were those barbarians. So it's pretty much Romans, Greeks, some Africans along the bottom of the Mediterranean, and then those Barbarians to the north. And so what he's saying is basically in his mind, it's available to everybody. That's what he's talking about. But it's kind of a funny way for him to say it that way, right, So it's just trying to include all the peoples. Well, you know, you said something last night at dinner. We were at dinner, had a meeting, and you were explaining that when the Great Commission was given at the time, there was a half of a billion people on the planet. That's right, So think about that just in terms of population. Yeah, that's according to the I think it's a UN census thing, and then also the US Census Bureau. They both kind of combined all of their projected research and go back. We didn't cross a billion people on the planet until about the same time that the printing press was invented in the fifteen hundreds. Wow, isn't it amazing? Yeah, until then, that first fifteen hundred years of Christianity, it was roughly a billion half a billion people. Wow, isn't it amazing? And now we have twenty seven billion people in the. We have eight eight billion here in January of twenty twenty three. They're saying this eight billion. We just crossed that line. By the way, just recently, so some people are saying we crossed eight billion in November others are saying it's going to happen here in January, but right here it's eight billion, and by twenty fifty. It will be ten billions twenty yees, yeah, okay. But by twenty fifty it'll be ten billion people on the planet. So our responsibility with the good News of the Gospel is going to be in our lifetime if we live to twenty fifty, is going to be twenty times the scale of Paul's responsibility with the Gospel. And Paul was willing to risk everything to go tell everybody, and there's only half a billion people on the total whole planet, and he only knew about maybe half of them, right, And here you and I are sitting here and now all of our listeners that are Christians with responsibility reaching ten billion people in our lifetime. God's mandate hasn't changed. The responsibility is much greater. But he's also given us unbelievable resources Paul couldn't have imagined back then. He couldn't imagine I'm going to on Saturday and this podcast. Yeah, yeah, the ability just to speak literally around the world. We're what in eighty something countries on the podcast or whatever, and almost every state in the Union just by talking, and people can choose to tune in the ability to communicate like that through the Internet. I'm going to get out an airplane on Saturday. I'm flying to Egypt, and then after Egypt, I'm flying onto India. And the idea that I'll be in Egypt in less a day, less than twenty four hours, I can be in Egypt, Right, that's unbelievable. Yeah, Paul, couldn't. It would take you months, and we can do it in twenty four hours. And so with this great responsibility, God's also given us great opportunity and ability. And so this idea of him saying, hey, I'm planning. He basically this letter is an introduction to himself saying I want to come and visit you. And here's why I think we're going to have a meaningful ministry together. Yeah, and he definitely talks about Jesus here, introducing Jesus as the foundation. And as he speaks about Jesus, he talks about the verse that stuck out to me was he said he was born into King David's family line, right, and he was shown to be the son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. He's Jesus Christ, our Lord. And so that immediately thought made me think of the two genealogies in the Gospels. Yeah, so you know, when you're reading the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke and John, which i'll talk about the story of Jesus. In Matthew, there's a genealogy and it was written to uh it is written from Abraham right with Abraham to Joseph, and really he was writing to a Jewish audience and establishing the claim that Joseph had through David, King David. And then the other genealogy is in a couple chapters into the book of Luke, and it actually goes backwards from Joseph all the way to Adam for Adam and of course through David of course, right, and so just you know, just sort of showing the uh, you know, the humanity of it, and and just the you know, again proving that he's from King David. Yeah, both of them, showing that both Mary and Joseph were in the royal lineage of King David, right right, right, It's pretty incredible. So this idea, then, you know, Paul is starting off and introducing himself to strangers. But they're not strangers. They're godly people who have a famous reputation for godly people. He just hasn't met them yet, and so he's reminding them. The commonality for all Christians is not a political affinity. The commonality of all Christians is not that we have the exact same social views or anything. The commonality for all Christians is that Jesus Christ is the son of God and he rose from the dead for salvation right of all humanity. That's the common thing. So we can have common fellowship with others that are different from us in Christ. And that's what he's trying to point out. You know. I remember the first time I took a massive missions trip over to Africa and I realized that as different as that culture is and those people are to me, I thought, man, this is going to be so different. And then I realized how alike we are. You know, there's a lot of you know things that we share, you know, family trades and loving our kids, you know, so it's like, wow, these guys are really not that much different. But honestly, it was the commonality of Jesus. It was like it was like we they accepted me, and I accepted them, and just we felt immediately like we are brothers in Christ, in Christ. So it was just it was really interesting to me how I felt what you just said. I felt it, yeah, and I actually thought like, WHOA, that is amazing. That's an amazing feeling. Yeah. So you know, there's times when I've gone into places where normally it might be dangerous or for outsiders, or it would be extremely uncomfortable, but immediately those walls are torn down because of our commonality in Christ. Right. And this is the universal I believe universal appeal of Jesus is that in Galatians, Paul says that there's no more Jew or gentile, there's no more slave or free, there's no more male or female. We're all want in Christ. And this is kind of what he's appealing to to the Romans here. Now we know that the Gospel came to Rome through those earliest Christians out of the Acts, chapter two. That's the tradition. But he's clearly referring here that it looks like the majority of them now are gentiles, because in verse eight, there's verse sixty says and you're included among those gentiles who have been to belong to Christ. So it seems like this is a majority gentile. So basically, you know Romans, these are Romans, and so he's appealing to them from that standpoint. Also, the way he writes this book is very logical, right, it's not emotional or philosophical. He starts at A and goes to Z is pretty much how he writes this book, and that would appeal to Romans in a way that maybe it wouldn't have appealed to some of the people from Syria or Turkey that he was writing to before. So he adapts his style a little bit to who he's writing to. They're also going to be much more highly educated in the power center of the entire universe at that time. They're going to be more educated. So he comes at from some point, which is really impressive that he can choose to be who his listeners need him to be. He's not a chameleon, like he's faking it. It's just that he has the ability to simplify things when he needs to simplify it, or he has ability in this book to step up to the plate and go all right, let me lay it out there on a you know, pretty advanced level, and I know you guys can keep up. Yeah, And Paul had the unique privilege of actually being a Pharisee and a Roman citizen. So being a Roman citizen, you know, he has credibility right from the start. And when he's writing, he's actually, you know, sort of introducing the fact that, you know, God is not just for the Jewish people, for the gentiles. And the reason why is because we have to understand and keep in mind that the reason why he writes this is he's setting the stage because the word apostle, we call him the apostle Paul, the word apostle means one who is sent right, and so he's actually given a mission by God to reach specifically those people who are non Jewish, so that that's the definition of the word gentile. So just keeping in mind that when he's writing about Jews and gentiles, he is the he is the leading expert in the world about about telling everybody, Hey, listen, Jesus died on the cross and his gospel, his good news is not just for the Jewish people anymore, is for everybody, barbarians, pagans, right, for you know, gentiles, anybody. And so I love the fact that he's setting the stage that way, and everything who he is, everything about who he is, supports this letter. So what we do, what we see is at the very beginning, his very first sentence is shocking, I'm a slave of Christ for a Roman citizen to embrace the idea of being a slave. What he's doing is he's recognizing Jesus bought me with his blood, and now I serve him unquestionably. So he starts off very humble, but by the end of this verse seventeen verses, he's saying, but I'm not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ because it's the power of God to salvation. And so then that sets the stage humble serving. I want to humbly serve you, but we're not ashamed of this power of God that brings us to salvation. It's available to everybody through faith. And the whole rest of the book unpacks that idea. Yeah, and what a great verse to memorize Romans one sixteen, For I am not ashamed of this good news about Christ is the power of God at work saving everyone who believes. And so it's just a it's just a great reminder that when it comes down to you know, bringing up conversations about God or talking about your faith, even though that a lot of people like to keep it private. You know, we're supposed to not be ashamed. You know. It's interesting why people want to keep their faith private, because you know, sometimes the church has getten a bad rap over the years, and we deserve most of that bad rap. But for the majority, for the majority of people, they don't have a bad church experience. But I think that a lot of us in this culture, we listen to culture and cultures like keep your religion private, keep your faith private, you know, and that's sort of that's sort of the narrative, right. But but you know, as long as you're doing it, you know, not with you know, spiritual manipulation, you know, or being you know, all all those different negative things. You know, just just be not ashamed of your faith, share your faith, be proud that you believe in God and the son Jesus Christ, and tell people without a doubt that's the reason for your happiness, your joy and everything else. The only power to save people from their sins and to change their lives is the power of God unto salvation, and so that comes from the fact that we're not. That's why we shouldn't be ashamed of this good news. Well, it looks like we're right at that time, so we're excited to pick up tomorrow and we'll hopefully see you in on the Bible guys,