While it may seem in our day and age that God has handed Israel a permanent red card knocking them out of the salvation game forever, we have to ask ourselves – is this Biblically true? Paul makes the case that it isn’t by speaking of God's sovereignty on behalf of the elect (chapter 9) and of man’s responsibility to respond to this election (chapter 10). Now, in chapter 11, he focuses on God’s plan (present and future) for Israel. But before we go any further, we could well ask – if this chapter is for Israel, what does it have to do with us?

While chapter 9 of Romans speaks of God’s sovereign electing grace, chapter 10 tells us of man’s responsibility in responding to that saving grace. Of course, Israel stumbled and failed to respond positively to God’s grace; they rejected the Messiah. Instead of placing their faith in the promised Messiah, they put their trust in their Abrahamic heritage and their own works of righteousness in keeping the law. So does that mean that today’s passage is only meant for the archives of Israel’s history with no relevance for our times?

Ask around and the Gospel of Christ Jesus is, at best, a blur to most people. It’s unfortunate, to say the least, given the plethora of resources available for learning the scriptures. But even then, knowing the true gospel in its entirety is one thing; declaring it with clarity, is quite another.

The true way of God’s righteousness versus Jewish self righteousness – that’s what Paul confronts his audience with in this passage. The learning for us today is that if we want to arrive at the truth, then we must trust the source of truth and not culture or our own gut instinct.

Paul anticipates questions regarding God’s integrity to the covenant He made with Israel. This issue is raised owing to the fact that Gentiles were being blessed with salvation outside the covenant made for ethnic Israel. Their blessing was through faith in Jesus Christ.

The question is always asked by some – “How can God be just in choosing some and not others?” People struggle as they try to reconcile God’s sovereignty in the salvation process with man’s responsibility to volitionally have faith in Him.

When we hear of some new idea or thinking that seems to undermine our traditions and belief system we tend to go all out and challenge this with defensive questions.

Chapters 9, 10, and 11 of Romans answer the big Jewish question, “But what about us?” They deal with the issue of whether God reneged on His historical promises to Israel.

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​God’s resolve in our salvation is stated in these few verses as one complete whole from eternity past to eternity future. This completeness is often known as the Five Golden Links in a divine chain of our eternal security.

Despite the complexities of life, which are seemingly incomprehensible to the extent that we don’t know what to pray for, as believers we can be sure of certain things. For instance, in this passage, Paul tells us that God doesn’t just save us to leave us to own devices. Rather, God saves us and sanctifies us, all the while weaving our circumstances into His ultimate plan.

In this passage, Paul refers to two realities – the present suffering that all humans undergo, and the future glory that is yet to be revealed. Geoff unpacks Paul’s flow of thought to reveal the yearnings of all God’s creation for full and complete redemption.

In this message Geoff delves into the culture of Paul’s time to understand what adoption meant to Paul and the people he was writing to. This is critical if we want to understand what Paul means by adoption into the family of God. Because to understand the implications of the adoption that Paul is talking about is to understand the great privilege we have of being adopted by God.

Until now, the Holy Spirit is only mentioned once. But in this chapter alone, Paul makes mention of Him twenty times! The reason is to highlight the solution for retrieving ourselves from any spiritual rut that we may find ourselves in – by activating and accessing the power of the Holy Spirit in us.

Every believer struggles with what Geoff refers to as ‘unredeemed body baggage’ i.e. sinful words and deeds of the past, plus the ongoing capacity to sin. Paul, too, mentions this struggle in the previous chapter and calls himself a helpless wretch. This spiritual tug-of-war can often weigh believers down, causing them to doubt the surety and reality of their salvation.

When it comes to personal beliefs and convictions, the acceptable norm in today’s culture seems to be that what you believe in doesn’t matter as much as how you feel about what you believe. And this practice of elevating subjective feelings over objective beliefs is permeating the thinking of many Christians as well.