Misc. Romans sermons
A real Protestant Dark Ages gets named here, traced to the collapse of the older doctrine of man’s fourfold estate. Romans 8:28’s promise of ‘all things working together for good’ gets rescued from a popular misuse that reduces it to earthly blessings. The actual goal is glorification, this sermon insists: possessing God himself, whatever the earthly cost along the way.
Paul has a habit of ‘Christologizing’ his own language, visible in Galatians 2:20 and Philippians 1:21, and even ‘Trinitizing’ it, as 1 Corinthians 4-5 shows. That habit runs throughout his letters rather than surfacing in a few famous verses alone. Union with Christ, on this reading, means Christ genuinely meets Christ. The indwelling Christ recognizes the Christ already at work in another believer.
Paul’s own thanksgiving for believers he has never personally met becomes an example this sermon holds up directly: pray for saints in foreign lands as readily as for those close at hand. Romans 1:8 shows something genuinely new in how Paul prays, a habit this sermon distinguishes from mere piety inherited from before. Prayer’s reach was never meant to stop at personal acquaintance.
Romans 11 deliberately sets up chapter 12: God’s grace in salvation, spelled out in 11:25-26, becomes the ground for the appeal that follows. What 12:1-21 actually asks for is a life lived consistently with that grace, already given, rather than a life meant to earn it. The sacrificial and eschatological language opening the chapter rules out reading this appeal as generic moral advice.