Day 199

Amos 6:1-7:17, Romans 4:16-5:11, Psalm 86:11-17

I said yesterday that we are not the first to have come across all the things that we are reading in the Bible. Today might be a case in point. John Wesley had the following thoughts (amongst many others):

“How a sinner may be justified before God, the Lord and Judge of all, … contains the foundation of all our hope, inasmuch as while we are at enmity with God, there can be no true peace, no solid joy, either in time or in eternity. What peace can there be”
                                         John Wesley – Justification by faith

Justification by faith (Rom 5:1) is one of those deep areas of theology that has occupied some of the greatest theological minds and has caused much debate.

It is about that point when we are somehow separated from God. When, primarily by our own actions, we are not one with God, where we feel as though something is lacking, where we feel that there is something in our lives that is missing. God made humanity to be in relationship with him, so when that relationship is damaged we feel it. We long to be made one with him once again.

What Paul is saying to the Romans here is that it is not by law through Abraham that we are saved but it is by faith through Christ. It is by the grace of God, his complete and utter free giving love, that when we were at our most powerless,  that he sent his son so we could be reconciled to Him. That is how God brought it all about, the challenge is how we respond.