Simmons TPT The Book of Romans

12-Lesson Study Guide
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4245-6162-9
Verlag: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reihe: The Passionate Life Bible Study Series

The book of Romans was written to communicate God's message of grace and glory to all of his believers. Live in the truths found in Romans and discover the heavenly treasures of faith, grace, righteousness, and power. This 12-lesson study guide on the book of Romans provides a unique and welcoming opportunity to immerse yourself in God's precious Word as expressed in The Passion Translation®. Begin your journey with a thorough introduction that details the authorship of Romans, date of composition, first recipients, setting, purpose, central message, and key themes. Each lesson then walks you through a portion from the book and includes features such as notable verses, historical and cultural background information, definitions of words and language, cross references to other books of the Bible, maps, and character portraits of figures from the Bible and church history. Enrich your biblical understanding of the book of Romans, experience God's love for you, and share his heart with others.  

DR. BRIAN SIMMONS is a passionate lover of God. After a dramatic conversion to Christ, Brian knew that God was calling him to go to the unreached people of the world and present the gospel of God's grace to all who would listen. With his wife, Candice, and their three children, he spent eight years in the tropical rain forest of the Darien Province of Panama as a church planter, translator, and consultant. Having been trained in linguistics and Bible translation principles, Brian assisted in the Paya-Kuna New Testament translation project. After his ministry overseas, Brian was instrumental in planting a thriving church in New England (U.S.) and currently travels full time as a speaker and Bible teacher. He is the lead translator of The Passion Translation®.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Simmons, Brian

Leseproben

LESSON 1

The Apostle Paul, Romans, and the Fullness of the Gospel

Welcome to the book of Romans, one of the most challenging and rewarding of the New Testament epistles—letters written by the leaders of the early church to encourage believers in Jesus and establish them in their faith.

The book of Romans immediately follows the four Gospels and the book of Acts in the New Testament. Romans explains and provides good reasons to believe the good news of the passionate God who loved each of us so much that he sent his only Son to bring us back to himself. Romans is, in fact, the gospel of grace and glory.

God’s grace is available to each of us. It is his free gift, and when we receive it, it births righteousness in our hearts. Through this outpouring of grace, we are able to enter the glory of God. His kindness and compassion toward us empower us to embrace the holiness he requires—not through our own good works but because of the relationship that is now possible for us to have with the Father because of the work of his Son.

In Christ, we are now God’s children, and he woos us to himself, offering us freedom—freedom from sin’s penalty and power and eventually from its presence. Embracing the gospel frees us from trying to “be good” so God will accept us. God’s amazing love is greater than our sin—a fact and gift that Paul explains, and he also details how we should receive it and show its reality in our lives.

Authorship

The book of Romans was written by the apostle Paul (Romans 1:1), arguably the greatest missionary-theologian of the early church. Paul was not one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples, and he never met the Lord during Jesus’ earthly life—although he had an encounter with the Savior that changed his life forever (1 Corinthians 15:8–9; Galatians 1:1, 11–24).

Read Acts 9:1–31 with the understanding that the persecutor of Christians, Saul, became the apostle Paul and changed his name later in his ministry.

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Recipients of the Letter

Somewhere between 56 and 58 CE, Paul wrote this letter to the group of Christians in Rome—the political power center of the known world at that time. He had not yet visited the imperial city despite nearly twenty years of missionary work throughout the Roman Empire, but he was writing to share with them the important teaching he longed to impart to them in person. Paul wrote this letter most likely from Cenchrea or Corinth. Cenchrea was just six miles away from Corinth, and it served as Corinth’s eastern harbor. The apostle was on his third missionary journey, and he had an intense desire to reach Rome, minister there, and then move on to Spain, which was also part of the Roman Empire during that time period (Romans 1:10–15; 15:22–24).

The Roman Christians were a mixture of gentile and Jew and a variety of ethnic backgrounds since Rome was a central city of trade and commerce in the ancient Mediterranean world, drawing people from all over the known world to do business there. Most of the believers in Rome were gentiles (non-Jews), with the others of Jewish background.

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THE BACKSTORY

In Paul’s day, the city of Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire. At its height, this empire covered about 2.5 million square miles, built and maintained more than fifty thousand miles of roads, and at its peak may have reached a population as high as one hundred million people. The Romans believed the gods had given them a mission to rule other nations and peoples, and this they did through military conquest and political control. To the north and west of Rome, the empire covered all of Europe west of the Danube River. It included modern-day France, Spain, and the southern half of Britain as well as much of Germany. The southern extent of the empire included northern Africa, Egypt, and the Sudan, and the eastern boundary included the entire southwestern continent of Asia west of the Euphrates River. Trade reached far beyond the confines of the empire’s borders, going as far east as China and Vietnam, as far north as Scandinavia, as far west as Britain, and as far south as the Indian Ocean. And thanks to the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean Sea, which had been plagued by pirates for many centuries, was virtually pirate-free before Paul’s day, making it a natural and relatively safe haven for trade and travel.2

The diverse people in the Roman Empire lived together under the the peace of Rome. The empire’s large military, extensive political administration, religious tolerance (at least for the most part), and application of civil law all worked together to achieve and maintain the peace and protection of the empire. The political leadership included an emperor, a senate, an assembly, and a host of lesser officials, including magistrates, governors, and even occasional client kings.3

The capital city, Rome, was the home of the emperor, the senate, the assembly, and a population of about one million, consisting of at least forty thousand Jews, two hundred thousand poor men (so with wives and children, the number was greater), and even more slaves. From inscriptions within catacombs discovered around Rome, we have archaeological evidence of eleven Roman synagogues, indicating that a large number of Jews lived in and around Rome.4

The wealthy were quite rich, and a middle class thrived. Historian W. G. Hardy details “the immense volume of trade and the great prosperity which obtained in the Roman empire in the first two centuries. … The luxury was equal to anything the world has seen since. … Banking and credit capitalism were well advanced. Cheques were used, letters of credit were common, and Roman currency was valid anywhere. … The Romans had managed to weld their whole empire into one unit.” It “was an Eden for the banker, the capitalist, and the ordinary businessman. … Everywhere a man was judged not by what he was but by what he owned.”5

This is just a taste of the world that Paul wanted to reach by writing his letter to the Christians in Rome.

Key Themes

The apostle Paul works a number of themes into his letter, which is packed full of theological lessons important to all of us. His central focus is the gospel—the good news of our salvation through Jesus’ work on the cross. Paul’s themes encompass God’s love, the fullness of salvation, justification, righteousness, the law, walking in the Spirit rather than the flesh, and the destiny of Israel.

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DIGGING DEEPER

Throughout history, the book of Romans has inspired great men of faith toward a deeper experience of God’s grace and glory and his plan for humankind. The great sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin wrote, “If a man understands [the book of Romans], he has a sure road opened for him to the understanding of the whole Scripture.”6 And the nineteenth-century theologian William G. T. Shedd said, “[Romans] is in reality The object of the writer was to give to the Roman congregation, and ultimately to Christendom, a complete statement of religious truth.”7 The impact of Paul’s letter has had a ripple effect leading to tidal waves during various times of history.

Earlier in church history, during the late fourth century, a young man named Augustine was found weeping in the garden of a friend. He was struggling to break free from the old patterns in his life to pursue the new life that Jesus offers all who turn to him. As he labored in sorrow, he picked up the book of Romans and read the words, “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences” (Romans 13:13–14). Augustine wrote of the experience later: “I had no wish to read further, and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away.”8 He later became one of the greatest theologians of the church.

Martin Luther had a similar experience more than a thousand years later. The German theologian was teaching the book of Romans to some of his students in 1515 when he had an encounter with the Lord. He wrote:

Night and day I pondered until … I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “righteousness of God” had filled me with hate, now it...