The Book Of ROMANS.....A Systematic Teaching

Romans 11:24............
"For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?"
Paul goes on with the picture of the olive tree as Israel with Abraham as the root.

Some of the branches were cut off. The nation, as such, was rejected! God "Grafted" in the Gentiles, but not by their becoming Jewish proselytes which would mean that they would have to adopt the Old Test. rituals.

Rather, He cut off Israel and grafted in the church, including both Jews and Gentile directly and immediately upon Abraham BY FAITH!

Paul seems to be eager for Gentile Christians to reach two goals.

#1. To understand that this re-grafting is possible.
#2. To look forward to it themselves.

After all, God could cut them from the wild olive tree—the unspiritual religions of the world—and graft them into His own cultivated tree through faith in Christ. Therefore, God can graft back into His tree the branches that grew there in the first place.

Grafting wild olive tree branches into cultivated trees is not the natural way to raise olive trees. Symbolically speaking, it was not "natural" for God to do this in order to offer salvation to the Gentiles, though it is exactly what He has done. Paul's point is to highlight the way a Gentile Christian ought to look at the potential salvation of the Jewish people. What could be more natural than for God to welcome the Jewish people back into His family, as they begin to trust in Christ for their salvation?
 
Romans 11:25...........
"For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in."
"The fullness of the Gentiles" started with the calling out of the church!

Acts 15:14..........
"Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name."

It will continue until the church is removed in 2 Thessalonians Rapture of believers.

The word "MYSTERY" needs a word of explanation. In the ancient world of Paul's day, there were many "mystery religions".
Today is applies in a popular way to a story that has an ending yet unrevealed. In the Scriptures it is neither of those things.

In the New Test. it is used to refer to that which had been CONCEALED but is now REVEALED.

So then the mystery here is the identification of the fullness of the Gentiles which was not a subject of revelation in the Old Test.
 
Romans 11:26 ...........
"And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob".
That does NOT mean that every person in Israel will be saved.

It is the nation that is in view here from Paul! In every age, only a remnant is saved.

Paul here uses Isaiah 59:20..........
" And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD."

The message to the individual is that they will have to "turn from transgression" to the Lord. There will be a remnant that will do just that. It is my opinion that ALL of that remnant will be saved.

Clearly, some Jewish people—as is the case in any culture—had thoroughly and totally rejected God. God is not extending salvation to those who actively hated Him, merely based on their ethnicity.

Some read this to be an account of specific events during the end times when Israel, under great persecution, will be saved from further earthly harm by the "Deliverer." "Salvation" and "deliverance," in an Old Testament sense, are closely related.

However, this interpretation does not take Paul to mean eternal salvation in this verse, though the context seems to be about salvation from sin. Paul likely refers to the end times, the last days of history, when Isaiah's prophecies about a Deliverer from Zion banishing Israel's ungodliness will be fulfilled hence Isaiah 59:20. Most Bible teachers understand Paul to be describing the second coming of Christ.

Another view is that by "all Israel," Paul means all who are in Christ, both Jews and Gentiles. This view understands the church to be a new Israel. However, this view is not in keeping with the full context of Scripture as it tends to lead to the belief that the Church has replaced Israe. Paul has written that everyone who comes to God by faith are the children of Abraham (Romans 4:16), but in this very chapter he has made a clear distinction between believing Gentiles and Israelites.

Many Bible teachers have concluded that by "all Israel," Paul means either all Israelites who trust in Christ (Romans 9:6–8) or the nation of Israel as a whole. In either view, the outcome would be the same: All Israelites will be saved who come to faith in Christ at some future time after God removes the hardening of their hearts. The sense of Paul's words conveys the idea that this will include enough Israelites to represent the nation as a whole, though it will not necessarily include every Israelite living at the time.

Not every verse of Scripture is crystal clear, and not every question we can ask about the Bible ends in a neat, clean answer. This statement is obscure enough that some translations title this section "The Mystery of Israel's Salvation." As is always the case, however, the Bible is only obscure on issues which don't affect our relationship with God, or the core doctrines of the faith.
 
Romans 11:27..........
"For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins."
Now Paul uses phrases from both Isaiah 59:21 and 27:9 to quote God as declaring, or renewing, His covenant with Israel at that time when He removes their sin. In the context of Romans 11, the sin of the Israelites will be removed when they obey the gospel and trust in Christ for their salvation.
 
Romans 11:28...........
"As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes."
Paul is addressing Gentile Christians here!

His words here clarify that anti-Jewish sentiments are not only foreign to the Bible's depiction of Jews, they are contradictory to the character of God.

Paul describes the Jewish people as "beloved," meaning that they are still loved and cherished by God. This is in regard to "election," Paul writes, meaning that God has destined that Israel will return to close relationship with Him as her people come to faith in Christ at some point in the future (Romans 11:25–27).

Why has God elected the people of Israel—meaning a representative number, not necessarily every single Israelite—to return to Him at this future time? It is for the sake of their forefathers, the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God's promises to Israel's founding fathers were unconditional and irrevocable, as the following verse will declare.
 
Romans 11:29............
"For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance."

"The gifts" here are the promises were God's made. God called the patriarchs to follow Him and He made an everlasting covenant with them that included their descendants.

Paul writes that these gifts and calling are irrevocable. Though God later made conditional covenants to bless Israel if they would keep the law, His promises to the patriarchs were mostly one-sided promises based only on His own goodness. Those promises will not be revoked no matter how deeply Israel sins in rejecting faith in Christ as the Messiah. He will always call Israel back into relationship with Himself, even bringing the people of the nation to faith in Christ in due time.
 
Romans 11:30.........
"For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief".

The church in Rome was largely Gentiles. By this time, many Gentiles were being saved. Here, Paul is drawing a contrast between the nation of Israel and the Gentiles.

God chose to apply His mercy to the Gentiles, in part, to encourage Israel to come back to God. Gentiles are no better than Jews, since both people have demonstrated disobedience to God.

Paul continues to urge the Gentile Christians to remain respectful of the Israelites; some of the Israelites will eventually share eternity with them as brothers and sisters in Christ. All who are saved are saved for the same reason: God's merciful and undeserved grace.
 
Romans 11:31...........
"Even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy."
Does that mean that the Gentile Christians should be done with Israel? Should they mock Israel? Paul insists that they do not.

Israel is in a season of disobedience to the gospel of Christ now, just as the Gentiles were—and for the most part still are—in a season of rejection of God. One day, however, Israel's people will see the mercy shown to the disobedient Gentiles, believe in Christ, and turn to receive mercy from God, as well.

Paul has described this as God making Israel jealous of His now special relationship with believing Gentiles in order to provoke some Jewish people to return to Him through faith in Christ and be included in that relationship (Romans 11:11–14).
 
Romans 11:32............
"For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all."
Both Jew and Gentile are in the stubborn state of rebellion and unbelief!

Because of this.....by grace are we saved, through faith!

Israel remains deeply loved by God because of His irrevocable promises and calling for the patriarchs.

In the end, God will show mercy to all Jews and Gentiles who come to Him through faith in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins.
 
************************REASON FOR RESTORING THE NATION OF ISRAEL*************************************

Romans 11:33..........
"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!"
Now Paul delivers a poem, structured much like a hymn, expressing his profound reaction both to God's ways and to His mercy to sinful human beings.

Paul starts by marveling at the depth of three of God's characteristics. He is stunningly rich or wealthy. Earlier in Romans, Paul has written about the riches of God's kindness and patience (Romans 2:4), the riches of His glory (Romans 9:23), and His riches—of mercy—for the world (Romans 11:12). In each case, God's riches are described as graciously shared and never-ending.

Next, Paul is awed by the depth of God's wisdom, likely in the expression of His love and power in making mercy available to all people through faith in Christ. This is followed by God's deep knowledge, perhaps a reference to His "foreknowledge" of all who will come to Him through faith in Christ (Romans 8:29; 11:2).

Paul's next two lines begins with "how." How unsearchable or unfathomable are God's judgments, Paul wonders. In other words, human beings simply lack the capacity to understand why God decides what He does. God's ways are said to be inscrutable, like a code we can't break.

One reason God retains the right to do as He will when it comes to showing mercy or not to human beings is that we do not have the capacity to understand His choices. His thoughts, His ways, His decisions are beyond us. We are left to simply yield to Him and to worship Him.
 
Romans 11:34............
"For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?"

NO ONE! It was Paul's ambition to know but he did not.

Also...NO ONE can counsel God. Both of those are redundant questions.

Have you ever noticed when you read the Bible that Jesus never asked anyone for any advice?????

Now in John 6:5-6, He did ask........"Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat"?
He did not need their advice because He knew what they would say........"Send them away".

His question to them was to PROVE them not to receive advice.
 
Romans 11:35...........
"Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?"

This is the third question asked, perhaps pulled from Job 41:11: "Who has given a gift to God that God needs to pay back? "

In other words, who could ever give to God anything valuable enough that God would be in their debt? Paul is underlining the hard truth that God simply does not need us. He needs nothing from us, and does not require our existence. He will exist in completeness for eternity no matter what we do or don't do in response to Him. He owes us nothing.

That's not necessarily a comforting thought. This, however, is reassuring: the God who owes us nothing has given to us every good thing (James 1:17). Even better, the God who owes us nothing has given Himself to us in the form of Christ Jesus. In the context of Romans 11, He has shown us baffling mercy instead of the punishment we deserve for our sin, based only on our faith in Christ.
 
Romans 11:36.............
"For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen."

Paul declares in no uncertain terms that the universe belongs to God, and we're simply living in it, and part of it.

Paul builds on the question he asked in the previous verse: ............
Who has given anything to God valuable enough that God owes him something back?

The answer is nobody.

Somehow over the years we have bought into the idea that God owes us something. My dear friends, God doesn't owe us anything.

In this verse, Paul explains why. Everything that is in the universe came from God to start with. He is the Creator and the source of all that is good. How could we ever give Him anything He doesn't already have?

Second, all things are through God. This means that not only is God the source of all things, He holds them together. He sustains everything that is. He is active and present in the work of keeping the universe running. All things that exist continue through Him.

Third, all things are to Him or for Him. In other words, everything that exists has been made for God's purposes. They all reflect glory back to Him. Nothing exists that doesn't serve His great plan and purpose for all things.

Paul finishes his hymn with statement of great worship: To God be glory forever. This is both a statement of fact and a prayer for its fulfillment. Glory will flow to God forever, and Paul affirms that is exactly as it should be in the form of a prayer. He ends this section of his letter with a formal "amen," meaning "so be it" or "let it be so."
 
Romans 12:1..................
"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."
Notice the "therefore". It ties it into everything said before to this point. It seems to me that Paul is gathering up the whole letter when he says "therefore"!

What does a living sacrifice look like in the practical sense?.........It looks like YOU!
We are a living sacrifice for God by not being conformed to this world. Remember, Paul is also "one of us." He is a sinful human being saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus. He calls God Father, as we do, making him our brother.

The hymn in the previous four verses made it clear that God owes us nothing. Instead of death, though, He has given us life and purpose in Christ. He has forgiven our sins and shared with us the riches of His glory. We deserved none of that. How should we respond? How have YOU responded in YOUR life???????

Paul writes that as the Jewish people offered killed animals as sacrifices to God, Christian should instead offer ourselves, our bodies, to Him as living sacrifices. In other words, the only rational response to God's mercy in giving us eternal life is to give Him our lives as a sacrifice to use for His purposes right now.

Animal sacrifices under the old covenant sacrificial system had to be set apart from the herd for that purpose and chosen with care to make sure they were acceptable—unmarked and unharmed. As living sacrifices, God has already set us apart for His purposes and declared us acceptable because He see us in our position in Christ. In other words, we do not have to wait to be better people before we offer our bodies and lives to God. As people in Christ, He will receive the sacrifice of our everyday lives right now.

This life of worship, then, is the appropriate response to the mercy God has already given to us.
 
Romans 12:2................
"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."

Paul is urging believers not to fashion their lives and conduct by those around them. How do you think that is working out today?????

To me, it is really hard to tell the church crowd from the world crowd!!!!

Our own sin nature rebels against the Spirit Who dwells within, and the Spirit lusts against our fallen fleshly desires, but Paul warns us not to be conformed to this world, but rather to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The enemy of our soul desires to shipwreck our faith and render our testimony impotent - either by stroking our ego or by causing us to become fearful. He is a deceiver and murderer and has been from the beginning, and we need to put on the armour of God, day by day, if we are to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The sin nature is programmed to be conformed to the world, but the transforming work of the indwelling Holy Spirit requires the continuous and ongoing renewing of our mind, so that our thoughts are influenced by the mind of Christ, as the desire of His heart becomes our own desire and delight, and His perfect will is translated into our will.

Day by day rededication of ourselves to His service is a lifelong program which we need to choose consciously. Transformation does not take place overnight, but is dependent on the hidden values of the heart being translated into the active practice of our thoughts and motives. It is a freewill choice to eschew that which is evil and to honour the Lord in beautiful thoughts, beautiful words, and beautiful deeds, by choosing to do what is right and holy.

The Holy Spirit alone is that One that implements our inner transformation. He is the One that causes us to be, "transformed by the renewing of your mind." He carries out this refining work in the inner recesses of our hearts, "so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."
 
Romans 12:3.............
"For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith."

I think that most all who read this will agree in that by nature, human beings inflate our perception of ourselves. We are ever at the center of our own mind's eye, always measuring everything we see and hear against the standard of our own perspective.

The problem is that we are never as good, or pretty or as effective as we think that we are!!!!

Paul writes that one of the ways our minds must be transformed is in developing the ability to see ourselves accurately. We must develop "sober judgment," or an objective eye. We need to be honest with ourselves about what we're good at and what we're not.

Paul does not say we must all learn to think of ourselves as terrible and worthless. Instead, he wants us to step away from the funhouse mirror that causes us to see ourselves as big and powerful and important. It takes faith to see ourselves objectively in this way, Paul writes. Why faith? He will go on to show that we must see ourselves truthfully so that we can trust God to do through us what He has gifted us for.

In other words, God has work for each of us to spend our lives doing in service to His church. An inflated view of ourselves will only get in the way of the truly powerful things God intends to do through us.
 
Romans 12:4-5...........
"For as in the body we have many members, and not all of the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another”.

The church as the body of Christ is to function as a body.

This means that the many members do not have the same gifts.

YOU may have a gift that I could never do and I may be able to do something that you can not do.

You see, the FOOT can not do what the EAR can do and the EAR can not do what the EYE can do. But they all work to together to allow the body to function.
 
Romans 12:6...........
"Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith".

Paul is building a metaphor to describe the first purpose of every Christian. He is showing what it looks like to sacrifice our bodies and minds in service to God as a response to His great mercy to us.

All Christians together are meant to operate as a single human body. Since we are all in Christ, by definition, we are Christ's body on earth. We are to function in the world as a single entity. That does not mean, however, that God intends for each of us to be exactly the same. We are not robotic. We serve wildly different functions just as all the different parts of a human body serve different functions.

Our job is to serve our function, in service to each other, in the power of God. Paul describes our differing functions in the body with the word "gifts." In the church, we usually call these the "spiritual gifts." These gifts are given to each believer through the Holy Spirit to use in our specific service to and in the church. We might describe each of these gifts as the supernatural ability to perform or fulfill a specific function that our fellow members in the church truly need.

Now, the problem comes when we WANT a gift that God does not "gift" us with. We want it so we make ourselves believe that we have that gift.

Beliefs differ about some of the spiritual gifts listed. Prophecy is one of those, sometimes referred to as the "sign gifts."
PROPHECY here as Paul sates it doe not refer to "prediction of future events". It is more about the proper teaching of the Scriptures.
 
Romans 12:7..........
"Or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching;"

"Ministering" is performing an act of service, referring to a manifold ministry with practical implications.

There are all kinds of service in the body of believers.

In our church we have four people who visit 6 nursing homes every week. They take several dozen bananas with them and give them out. They are easy for the elderly to eat.

We have one lady who wants to cook a meal every Wednesday for our prayer meeting members.

We have two men who visit the local jail in Daytona Beach every week. They take Bibles and phone cards for the inmates.

We have four people who drives church vans and pick up those who can not drive and also children.

If YOU have a desire to serve, there is a ministry for YOU!
 
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