I really like the chapter Romans 8. Most people find that this scripture in particular packs a wallop of a punch, and I think that's true. There's a ton of good stuff to dig into in these few paragraphs by the apostle Paul.
With that said, I looked up a passage from Romans 8 in The Message version. Read people, read!!
3-4 God
went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the
problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he
personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of
struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law
code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never
have done that.
The law
always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep
healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t
deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts,
simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8 Those
who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring
their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real
life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in
them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a
dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious,
free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God.
Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more
about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is
doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11 But
if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be
thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not
welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ,
won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in
whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of
sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason,
doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the
dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in
Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in
you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from
that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as
alive as Christ’s!
Ahhh...truth. Every bit of it.
---God, how are you so cool?
1 comment:
love this. :)
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