Sunday Morning Greek Blog

December 21, 2022

SMGB Indices

Filed under: Greek — Scott Stocking @ 7:26 am
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2025 Summary

The year of our Lord 2025 was a great year for the Sunday Morning Greek Blog. Views continue to increase year over year, so I’m grateful for that. While my viral math post views have dropped significantly this year, readers more than compensated for that by viewing more Bible posts. My message “Jesus the Good Shepherd” from 2022 showed up repeatedly as source in some search engines’ AI summaries of the topic, which boosted views on that article enough to put it in the top 10 posts for 2025.

Toward the end of the year, I signed up for the Google Console to try to learn more about how you are finding my material. However, I also noticed a significant dip in traffic around the same time. I’m thinking that may have been a mistake. If anyone out there has experience with that, let me know. Ostensibly I did that so I could increase traffic, but I think it may be downgrading me on the searches, even though I think my SEO skills are pretty good. My church used my posts on John’s gospel for its church-wide small-group Bible studies this past fall. Romans is up next for this spring, and I’ve been invited to kick off that study to the small groups in February.

Peace to all and Happy New Year! Thank you for reading.

PS: Look for a couple posts in the near future about our family trip to Poland and Prague over the Christmas holiday.

Romans

Gospel of John

Top 10 Bible Posts 2025

  1. Speaking in Tongues (γλῶσσα glōssa, 1 Corinthians 12–14)
  2. “Bones” in the Bible: Why I Do NOT Want to Be Cremated at Death
  3. Helmet of Salvation (Isaiah 59:17, Ephesians 6:17)
  4. “Falling Away” (παραπίπτω parapiptō) in Hebrews 6:6
  5. The Temple of Artemis of the Ephesians as Background for Understanding 1 Timothy 2
  6. “Seer” in Old Testament: A Hebrew Word Study
  7. Indignant Jesus: The Variant Reading of Mark 1:41 (NIV & TNIV)
  8. “I Am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6)
  9. Take Heart! (θαρσέω tharseō, Matthew 9:2, 22)
  10. Jesus, the Good Shepherd (John 10:22–30)

Trending Up in 2025

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In late April 2023, I published a post on a non-Bible topic analyzing an oft-debated viral equation that is poorly understood. At the end of June of that year, the post went viral and has continued to dominate the top spot representing about half the views to my blog in the past two years. It is my most-viewed post of all time in the blog’s 14-year history. I have written several other blog posts on the subject and have made three videos for the Rumble platform. I list all the articles and videos here in reverse chronological order along with the dates they were published.

Top Non-Bible Topic Posts

  1. Stocking’s Order: 2(2 + 2) as a Singular Semantic Element July 5, 2025
  2. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: End the Ambiguity! Make a Rule!
  3. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: A Discussion with ChatGPT on the Implications of Juxtaposition in Mathematics March 23, 2025
  4. Stocking’s Order: Juxtapositional Grouping Is Foundational (Rumble Video) March 7, 2025
  5. Stocking’s Order: Implicit Constructions Correct the Misapplication of Order of Operations February 23, 2025
  6. Stocking’s Order; or Why 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1 (Rumble Video) Late December 2024
  7. The correct way to solve viral math expressions. (Rumble Video) Early December 2024.
  8. The PEMDAS Chronicles: Confronting Social Media Ignorance of PEMDAS’s Theoretical Foundation April 1, 2024
  9. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1, Part 2: A Defense of the Linguistic Argument March 16, 2024
  10. Toward an “Active” PEMDAS: Strengthening Its Theoretical Foundation May 29, 2023
  11. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: Why PEMDAS Alone Is Not Enough April 28, 2023

Other All-Time Top Posts

Baptism and Forgiveness

Intersection With Cultural Issues

August 23, 2026

Life as a “Living Sacrifice”: Finding Your Gifts (Romans 12:1–8)

Filed under: 1 Corinthians,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Immersion/Baptism,New Testament,Pneumatology,Prophet,Resurrection,Romans,Tongues — Scott Stocking @ 4:47 pm
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I preached this message on August 23, 2026, at Mount View Presbyterian Church in Omaha, NE, as part of a continuing series through the Romans passages indicated in the Lectionary for each Sunday. The congregation has received these messages quite well. I’ll tackle the last half of Romans 12 for the following Sunday. The last Romans passage in the Lectionary for this year is Romans 14 on September 13, but after August 30, I won’t preach there again until September 20.

Good morning! The Lord be with you!

Well, here we are. We’ve taken a closer look at the first 11 chapters of the Paul’s letter to the Romans and have heard much about faith and faithfulness, life in Christ through the Holy Spirit, and free gift of God’s grace that brings us salvation when we confess Christ as our Savior and Lord. Chapter 12 begins a very different section of Romans, one in which Paul starts to address unity among the house churches in Rome. But he’s not addressing unity just for the sake of unity. Paul wants the Roman believers, both Jews and Gentiles, to present a united front in the way they fellowship with each other and reach out to and evangelize their family, friends, and neighbors in Rome.

The first two verses of our passage today represent the application of all that Paul has just taught in the first 11 chapters. We’ll look closely at those two verses, then we’ll look at verses 3–8 to see just what Paul expects of believers with respect to living in unity (Psalm 133), especially when it comes to addressing the diversity in the Roman culture more broadly, and the differing worldviews that Jews and Gentiles bring to the (dinner) table.

Once again, in 12:1, we see the word “therefore.” This is our clue that Paul is referring to at least the previous three chapters of Romans that we touched on last week, but more likely, given some of the verbal parallels here, he’s referring to the entire eleven chapters up to this point.

One of the first things Paul says in vs. 1 is that he’s urging the Roman believers to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Now when it comes to being a living sacrifice, you’ve probably heard quotes similar to what John MacArthur cited recently in one of his daily devotions: “But as someone has rightly said, the problem with living sacrifices is they tend to crawl off the altar.”[1] But this quote has a couple problems in my mind.

First, no one seems to know who originated the quote. The closest Copilot AI can come to nailing it down seems to be the mid-20th century to a couple holiness preachers.[2] I have four respectable commentaries on Romans going back about 50 years among them, and none of them use this sentiment in reference to this passage, at least not in the main discussion of the passage.

Second, if God wants us to be “living sacrifices,” why in the world would we stay on the altar? Some of the commentators who have used the “crawl off the altar” statement suggest that implies we bail on God when the fire gets turned up. But the passage we’re looking at this morning seems to have a completely opposite view of that. Our passage this morning, as we’ll see shortly, calls us to go into the world and use our gifts for God.

So what is Paul talking about when he says “living sacrifice” if it means that the sacrificial rite, so to speak, isn’t going to lead to our death? We need to look back no farther than Romans 6:3–4 to see just what that is: “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”[3] Our baptism makes us a living sacrifice!

If you were baptized as an infant, your parents, family, and church dedicated themselves to raising you in the faith, and here you are today. I have many friends who did not get baptized until they became adults, but they also now are living sacrifices. Christ went to the cross for us so we wouldn’t have to. When we “offer” or “present” ourselves to God in this way, we’re not expected to climb up on the cross or jump up on a burning altar. The sacrifice has already been made; we participate in the result of that sacrifice by living our lives for Christ and his kingdom. God wants us out in the world sharing the good news of Jesus. That is where we’ll experience both the joys of salvation and in some cases the struggle of persecution and rejection. In other words, the world is our “altar.”

In the NIV, Paul calls this our “true and proper worship”; in the version we read this morning, the New Revised Standard Version, it’s translated “reasonable” worship. The word in the original language sounds like our English word “logical” (λογικός logikos) and is used to refer to the “pure spiritual milk” Peter says we should crave. [4] We worship in the world by living our lives for Christ. Worship isn’t just singing and gathering at church; it’s ministering to a lost world.

As we go out into the world, then, two things happen to us if we’re focused on Christ. First, we begin to see the futility of the way the world lives without God, without guidance from the Holy Spirit, and without an understanding of the sacrificial love Jesus demonstrated for us. As we witness that regularly, we begin to understand why Paul exhorts us: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world.” The pattern of this world is without hope; we begin to desire God more and more, because he is the only one who can fulfill the second part of that exhortation in verse 2: “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” so you can “test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. ”[5]

The exercise of our faith is no different than exercising our bodies or practicing a sport or skill. If you’re faithful in your exercise routine, you will begin to see results for your body. The more you practice a sport or skill, the more muscle memory you build so that your actions become more instinctive than forced or mimicked by rote. It is in those actions that we find out just how good God is, how effective God is, and how true his Word is.

In verses 3–8, Paul summarizes the gifts of the Spirit from chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which he had written a couple years earlier. Similarly, verses 9–21, which we’ll look at next week, parallel Paul’s “love” chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. Paul exhorts the Roman believers to exercise some humility by exercising “sober judgment” with yourself in accordance with your faith. What he’s saying here is not that everyone should be equally humble: certain gifts may be more prominent than others, and if you’ve got one of those gifts, don’t be afraid to use it. But also don’t look down on others who may have a different gift that may not be as popular or that may make us uncomfortable in a good way. We are unified as a body, and each gift has its purpose for the edification of the body. In that sense, we are all equal in the eyes of God, so let’s be sure to see each other through his eyes instead of our own.

Now in case it’s been a while since you’ve looked at these gifts of the Spirit, whether here or in 1 Corinthians, let me take a few minutes here to speak to those and just what those gifts entail. If you’re curious about what your gifts may be, spiritual or otherwise, there are some decent ones online. Some are longer than others, but if they’re thoughtfully prepared and have a robust rubric to analyze your responses, you should be able to get a pretty accurate reading for yourself. For example, this survey from churchgrowth.org has 108 questions covering the gifts mentioned in Scripture: Spiritual Gifts | FREE Spiritual Gifts Survey | Assessment, Analysis, Test.

Almost 16 years ago, after I had fully integrated into my current home church, I took the Gallup “Strengths” survey. Although the strengths are not necessarily defined as spiritual gifts in all cases, the survey does reveal how God wired you as an individual and may help you figure out areas of ministry that would be a good fit for you. My top gift was “intellection,” and one of the key actions it said I should follow through on to exercise that strength was to start a blog. Well little did that survey know I had indeed just started doing that about a month earlier, so when I got home after viewing my results, I immediately set up my current blog on WordPress.com, and it is still going strong to this day.

Now, about the gifts that Paul mentions. The first gift he mentions is prophesying. It may surprise you to learn that prophesying in Scripture is not necessarily about foretelling the future, but about forth-telling the Gospel, sometimes in ways that make people uncomfortable. There’s a difference between warning about possible or probable outcomes of sinful behavior, but that’s not the same as predicting a specific future event. By the same token, prophesy might also be about edifying the church as well, as seems to be the thought in 1 Corinthians 14:4: “Anyone who speaks in a tongue edifies themselves, but the one who prophesies edifies the church.”[6]

You don’t have to be a preacher to have the gift of prophesying, nor do you have to run out and quit your job if you discover you have the gift of prophesying and become a preacher. If you feel God is calling you in that direction, then that’s okay too. Exercise some “sober judgment” as Paul says, pray and ask for guidance, and speak to your family as well so you don’t shock them with a life-altering decision out of the blue. Paul also says in 1 Corinthians 14:32: “The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets.”[7] How you exercise that gift is in accordance with your faith. It’s important to exercise some due diligence to flesh out any implications.

The gift of serving, I think, is probably the easiest one to wrap our brains around. It’s a generic enough category that just about anyone can fit into depending on your gifts and talents. These gifts of service are typically those things that help improve peoples’ lives, whether it’s serving in a food line or caring for an elderly or disabled friend or family member who can’t afford to pay someone to help with activities of daily living.

Teaching is another obvious one, and this, I believe, is my strong suit as a spiritual gift. The first-ever spiritual gifts inventory I took tagged me as having the gift of teaching, which I thought was odd as a junior in college since I had never even considered teaching as a career. And yet here I am at 63 years old with over 30 years of college and primary education experience. I’d like to think God knew what he was doing way back then.

I’ve seen a lot of encouragement in this congregation in the five years (has it been that long?) that I’ve been an adjunct pulpit-filler here. That is one of the beauties here, especially as a small congregation. The support and care you show for one another and have shown for me and my family in some of our struggles has meant so much to each other and myself. I think that’s one of the gifts you have that can attract more people to walk through our doors.

The gift of giving, as you might imagine, is not one that depends on how much money you have in the bank or the size of your paycheck every payday. Being a giver reflects an attitude of the heart, one that is, I think, accompanied by a strong faith in God’s provision. You’re not afraid to give because you know and have experienced God’s provision in your own life.

Leadership is a tough one, I think. So much goes into the concept of leadership, and sometimes the skillset that accompanies that gift will look different depending on the setting in which God is calling you to leadership. Are you a visionary that can see the potential in an idea or a person? Are you a financial whiz that knows how to keep a company in the black? Do you have strong people skills that can help with conflict resolution? Leadership in the church doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know the Bible as well as the preacher. Sometimes you can lead in compassionate ministry or children’s ministry.

Finally, Paul addresses mercy. I’m not afraid to tell you that mercy is an area I need some work on, especially as I get older, crankier, and more set in my ways. I shared with some of you last week about the trials of trying to Jill and Becca’s luggage to them in Scandinavia. After the third time in 24 hours that the luggage headed west back to Chicago instead of east over the Atlantic, mercy was about the farthest thing from my mind. In my defense, and in defense of the rest of us who get angry from time to time, the Bible does say it’s okay to get angry, as long as we don’t sin with our actions that accompany that anger.

Those are the gifts Paul mentions in Romans. If you want to see other gifts, you can review 1 Corinthians 12–14 to get an idea about the gifts and some extended instruction on how to use them.

I do want to issue you a challenge this morning. Most of you know each other, so I don’t think this is going to be too weird for you. Look around the sanctuary from where you’re sitting, if it’s not too difficult to turn around for you. Yeah, make eye contact. During our fellowship time afterwards, I’d like you to consider encouraging one another by complimenting them on a gift you see in that person. It doesn’t have to be one that we’ve talked about, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a spiritual gift. We’re a family here, and one of our goals should be to edify each other. When you get home, do the same for someone significant in your life as well: a sibling, your spouse, a child or grandchild, etc. Let’s be living sacrifices for the growth of God’s kingdom. Amen.

[1] John MacArthur (July-09-2026) Daily Devotional: A Living Sacrifice. Accessed 08/22/26.

[2] Copilot returned this assessment on 08/22/26:

The quote appears in various forms in:

• Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895–1960)

Barnhouse used the line in his Romans radio expositions and later in print. He never claimed authorship; he also attributed it to “someone has said.”

This is the earliest reliably documented usage.

• Early Keswick / holiness preaching (1940s–1960s)

Several holiness and revivalist preachers used similar phrasing, often anonymously:

  • “The trouble with a living sacrifice is that it keeps trying to get off the altar.”
  • “Living sacrifices tend to crawl off the altar.”

These appear in sermon transcripts and devotional pamphlets, but without attribution.

[3] Romans 6:3–4. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. See also Edwards, James R. Romans. Understanding the Bible Commentary Series. 1992. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, p. 283, where he cites a similar statement from Romans 6:8.

[4] 1 Peter 2:2. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[5] Romans 1:2. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[6] 1 Corinthians 14:4. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[7] 1 Corinthians 14:32. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

August 19, 2026

“God’s Gifts and His Call Are Irrevocable”: Romans 9–11

Filed under: Christology,Deuteronomy,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Leviticus,Righteousness,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 10:58 pm
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I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE, on August 16, 2026. The preachers from the previous two weeks had not covered Romans 9 & 10 from the lectionary, so I did a brief overview of those two chapters before tackling chapter 11. Message was captured in audio (here) and video (Rumble) formats.I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE, on August 16, 2026. The preachers from the previous two weeks had not covered Romans 9 & 10 from the lectionary, so I did a brief overview of those two chapters before tackling chapter 11. Message was captured in audio (here) and video (Rumble) formats.

Good morning! The Lord be with you!

I’m continuing on through Romans today. While the first eight chapters were pretty heavy on doctrine, the nature and role of faith and faithfulness, and the “how” of life—both here and beyond—in the Spirit, Paul hasn’t really dealt with the social and cultural dynamics of the mix of Gentiles and Jews in the Roman churches. That’s where chapters 9 through 11 fit in.

Remember that the Roman church was a healthy mix of Jews and Gentiles, with Gentiles in the majority, especially after the banishment of Jews from Rome ended and the Jews had begun to return. There are hints later in Romans of some of the tensions that may have arisen when the Jews returned, most notably involving the diet restrictions that Jews followed but Gentiles did not. That would have caused no small kerfuffle at their fellowship meals, to be sure.

It would seem from Paul’s comments in chapters 9–10 especially that each group felt they had one-up on the other. The Gentiles, after all, had kept the churches alive and growing in the absence of the Jews, while the Jews had the rightful claim of being the religious and ethnic “home,” if you will, of the Messiah. Paul attempts to balance that tension by using the metaphor of the olive tree.

Sure, the Jews represent the original olive tree, the foundation from which Christianity arose through the Messiah. But Gentiles had some bragging rights as well, having been welcomed, or in Paul’s terms, “grafted,” into the new Christian “sect” of Judaism where they had previously been deemed as second-class humans, or worse, as dogs, by traditional Judaism. I’m sure it must have been difficult for life-long Jews who had converted to Christianity to get over some of these biases about Gentiles.

What Paul is doing in chapters 9–11 is trying to convince the Jews that their standing, as well as the Gentiles’ standing, with God isn’t based on their ethnicity alone. It is based on what they believe about God, their faithfulness to his commands, and the state of their hearts. The Jewish Christians aren’t more saved or more blessed than the Gentile Christians simply because of their ethnicity. By the same token, the Gentiles aren’t more saved because they are inherently free of the constraints of the law that was deeply etched in the Jewish mindset. That doesn’t mean the Gentiles aren’t responsible for the moral behaviors reflected in the law; they just don’t have the kind of bias against a Jew that a traditional Jew might have against Gentiles.

We see this in Chapter 9 with a couple notable passages. Verse 14–16 state:

14 What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,

and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” r

16 It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.[1]

In other words, God will bring about salvation for Jews and Gentiles in his own way.

Then in verses 27–28, Paul quotes Isaiah’s warning from chapter 10 of his prophecy:

27 Isaiah cries out concerning Israel:

“Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea,

only the remnant will be saved.

28 For the Lord will carry out

his sentence on earth with speed and finality.”[2]

God’s “sentence on earth” is like a reference to the warnings in the Torah about disobedience, especially Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. These warnings speak directly to why some of the Israelites were considered the branches cut out of the olive tree. What’s interesting about these warnings about disobedience are much longer than the promises for obedience that precede them in each of these chapters.

Here’s a sampling of Leviticus 28:14, 16–17.

14 “ ‘But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands… 16 then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.[3]

Leviticus goes on with a series of paragraphs that take us down the infamous slippery slope by introducing subsequent sections with the sentiment: “If you don’t listen to me and turn back after all this, here’s what else is coming” with list of even more painful and in some cases gruesome consequences.

Deuteronomy isn’t any more pleasant (28:15–19):

15 However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you:

16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.

17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.

18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.[4]

They can’t run and they can’t hide from the consequences. But it is because of God’s mercy that he didn’t wipe them out completely.

Chapter 10 (verses 8–10) makes it clear what our next step should be to escape this. I’m sure many of you have heard this before as part of the Romans Road:

8 But what does it say? “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” [Deuteronomy 30:14] that is, the message concerning faith that we proclaim: 9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.[5]

This brings us then to our passage this morning from Romans 11. We’ve only read the first and last part of the chapter, but they are the opening and closing summaries of the heart of the passage. Paul is proud of his Jewish heritage, just as he enumerated the blessings the Jews have from their history at the beginning of chapter 9. He speaks of “the remnant [of Israel] chosen by grace,” that is, those who reaped the rewards of obedience from the first verses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Their salvation is a completely free gift of God. There’s no application to fill out, no extensive background check, no references to check, because God already knows that. All he needs to see is that circumcised heart, represented by your confession that Jesus is Lord.

In 11:28, Paul calls the disobedient Jews “enemies” to the Gentiles when it comes to the gospel, but because the Jews are God’s chosen people, they are still considered “elect” and God’s love never fails for them. The promise of vs. 29, that “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable”[6] is as applicable to Israel as it is for the Gentiles. That promise to include the Gentiles goes all the way back to Isaiah, at least. Verse 32 about Jews and Gentiles being bound for disobedience comes across as a sticky wicket of sorts, until you realize Paul is just restating what he said way back in Romans 3:10–11: “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.”[7] We can never be saved by the works of the law; we can never be declared righteous by following any law. That only comes from the mercy and the declaration of God because of what Christ has done for us.

Paul realizes he’s laid on the theology and doctrine rather heavily in these first 11 chapters. But he ties it up in a neat little bundle here, at least by implication, by returning to his opening concept from chapter 1 of the “obedience of faithfulness” in contrast with all of us being bound over to disobedience. Romans 1–11 give us great promises of salvation: resurrection, new and eternal life, life in the Spirit, and even a corporate fellowship among those who used to be enemies. It is a beautiful picture of salvation based solely on grace and not on any ethnic connection. I’m looking forward to next week when I tackle Romans 12 and get into some of the real-life issues we face as believers, especially around the call to love our neighbors. The principles of the first 11 chapters show up often in the last 5 chapters of Romans, so we’ll see how all Paul’s theology and doctrine play out in real life.

The benediction at the end of 11 is as profound as it is encouraging, and I close with that:

33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgments,

and his paths beyond tracing out!

34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord?

Or who has been his counselor?” b

35 “Who has ever given to God,

that God should repay them?” c

36 For from him and through him and for him are all things.

To him be the glory forever! Amen.[8]

[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[2] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[4] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[5] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[6] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[7] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[8] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

My views are my own.

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

August 6, 2026

When God Remembers: A Communion Meditation

Filed under: Communion/Eucharist,Jeremiah,Lamentations — Scott Stocking @ 5:23 pm
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Consider this a “throwback Thursday” post. I found this is one of my old folders. I’m not sure I ever got to use it anywhere on a Sunday morning, at least not in this form, but the concept has stuck with me all these years.

I’ve been thinking much about remembrance lately, especially as it has to do with the Lord’s Table. I read an article about how the idea of remembrance not only relates to the past, but it has present and future implications as well. Originally, I had every intention of writing a communion meditation on that theme, but recently, the Holy Spirit reminded me about what the Bible means when an author says God “remembers.”

Three times in the flood story of Genesis, God says he remembers or will remember Noah and the covenant represented by the rainbow. Numerous other times in the OT, the biblical author says something similar about our heavenly Father. God just doesn’t say, “Oh yeah, I made a promise,” but rather when he remembers, he actively begins fulfilling that promise and the terms of the covenant. Remembering for God is not just a mental act but a practical act as well.

I want to challenge us this morning to take this same attitude when it comes to partaking of the bread and the cup in remembrance of Christ. Let this not just be a mental act of remembering that Jesus died for our sins but let us act on the pledge each of us made to Christ when we professed our trust in him. Let us wait on the Lord in all we do and pledge ourselves again to live and act faithfully in him. Let us act in accordance with his promise of salvation, knowing that God is faithful to bring us to that day of ultimate salvation in him.

Scripture: Lamentations 3:19–26

19 I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.

20 I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.

21 Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.

23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;

26 it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.[1]

For prayer: Jeremiah 14:20–21

20 O Lord, we acknowledge our wickedness
and the guilt of our fathers;
we have indeed sinned against you.

21 For the sake of your name do not despise us;
do not dishonor your glorious throne.
Remember your covenant with us and do not break it.[2]

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

[1]The Holy Bible : New International Version, electronic ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996, ©1984). La 3:19–26.

[2]The Holy Bible : New International Version, electronic ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996, ©1984). Je 14:20–21.

August 5, 2026

Podcast Episode: Life in the Spirit (Romans Podcast Part 5)

Filed under: Greek — Scott Stocking @ 9:38 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the Greek is real, the sermons are preached live, and Romans apparently has enough structure to keep a congregation busy all summer.

Mara: Scott Stocking has been working through Romans chapter by chapter, and the posts this episode covers land squarely in Romans 8 — the Spirit, the groaning of creation, and what it means to be more than conquerors. Let’s start with life in the Spirit and what Paul is actually building toward.

Romans 8 and the Life the Spirit Brings

Mara: The two sermons here both cover Romans 8, but they’re doing something bigger than a single chapter — they’re showing how Paul’s entire argument in chapters 5 through 8 is a unified case for what it means to be alive in Christ, not just saved from condemnation.

Pip: And the structural argument is the engine. The post on Romans 8:1–11 makes the case that Paul isn’t stringing memory verses together. He’s crafting something deliberate — chapters 1 through 4 are about faith, chapters 5 through 8 are about life.

Mara: The word count bears that out directly: “chapters 1 through 4 have over 25 occurrences of the word for faith and faithfulness and only two occurrences of the words that mean life or alive. But chapters 5 through 8 flip those numbers around with words for life and alive used about 25 times while faith and faithfulness are only used twice in the first two verses of chapter 5.”

Pip: So the shift isn’t just thematic — it’s built into the vocabulary of the letter itself. Paul is signaling the turn with his word choices.

Mara: Right, and chapter 8 is where that theme of life reaches its fullest expression through the Holy Spirit. The sermon walks through how the Spirit addresses the tension Paul sets up at the end of chapter 7 — the person who knows the right thing but keeps doing the wrong thing. The Spirit is the only resolution to that bind.

Pip: The mind-set material in verses 5 through 8 gets real attention here. Setting your mind on the flesh versus the Spirit isn’t abstract — it’s the difference between living on pure instinct, grabbing what you can, and a life oriented toward God and others.

Mara: And the post connects that to makrothymia — the fruit of the Spirit usually translated “patience,” though the NIV renders it “forbearance.” The Greek root actually contains the idea of anger held at a distance, which lands differently given the post’s observation about how many people today see violence as an acceptable answer.

Pip: Patience as disciplined, long-range anger. That reframe does some work.

Mara: The second sermon on Romans 8:22–39 picks up where the first leaves off and digs into the Spirit’s groaning. The Greek word for groaning in verse 22 carries a prefix meaning “together with” — creation isn’t just suffering in parallel with us, it’s suffering alongside us in a shared condition traced back to Genesis 3.

Mara: The upshot is that when the Spirit intercedes through wordless groans, Paul is describing something intimate and personal — the Spirit knows your heart so completely that your pain becomes the Spirit’s intercession before God.

Pip: Which reframes Romans 8:28 considerably. “All things work together for good” isn’t a cheerful bumper sticker — it’s the conclusion of an argument about present suffering, groaning, and God’s active response to it.

Mara: The sermon closes out chapters 5 through 8 by returning to the opening verse of chapter 8. It asks who can condemn, and the answer is no one — because justification, resurrection, and the Spirit’s intercession have already secured the verdict. The phrase from verse 37 lands as the culmination: “we are more than conquerors.”

Pip: That’s the arc from “no condemnation” to “more than conquerors” — and it turns out the distance between those two is the entire argument of four chapters.

Mara: Which sets up exactly the kind of question Paul will keep pressing as Romans moves toward chapters 9 through 11 — what does that victory look like for both Jews and Gentiles together.

Pip: Life, groaning, and the architecture of a letter most people read in fragments — there’s something to that.

Mara: The Spirit as the thread connecting baptism, daily struggle, and eternal assurance is the kind of argument that rewards a slow read. More of that next time.

August 4, 2026

Podcast Episode: Baptism And Christian Life (Romans Podcast Part 4)

Filed under: Christology,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,Repentance,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 9:45 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the footnotes go six layers deep and the baptismal theology is somehow more soaking wet than you’d expect.

Mara: Scott Stocking has been doing a deep dive into Romans, and what surfaces is a case that baptism and the call to be a living sacrifice are more tightly connected than most readings let on. That’s the territory we’re covering today.

Pip: Let’s start with that connection — baptism as theology, not ceremony.

Baptism as Living Sacrifice: Romans 6 and 12:1

Mara: The central claim here is that Romans 6 and Romans 12:1 are not two separate ideas — they are one continuous argument, and baptism is the hinge between them.

Pip: And the evidence for that hinge is a single Greek word that shows up five times in Romans 6 and then reappears exactly when Paul says what he means by a living sacrifice.

Mara: Right — the word is paristēmi, translated “offer.” It appears throughout Romans 6 as Paul urges believers to offer themselves to God and then surfaces again in 12:1: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.”

Pip: So the living sacrifice of chapter 12 is not a new instruction — it is a callback to what baptism already accomplished.

Mara: Exactly. And to understand why, you have to follow Paul’s logic from the earlier part of Romans 6. The setup is verses 3 through 5: “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

Mara: What that means in practice is that baptism is not primarily a public declaration — it is the moment of union with Christ’s death and resurrection. The believer does not merely symbolize something; they participate in it.

Pip: Which reframes the famous last verse of Romans 6 considerably. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” — usually read as a warning — is actually, on this reading, an affirmation for people who have already come through baptism.

Mara: That is precisely the argument. Because Christ paid the wages of sin on the cross, and because baptism unites the believer with that crucifixion, the verse functions as a confirmation of what has already happened, not a threat about what might.

Pip: The obedience Paul keeps returning to — his stated theme from Romans 1:5 all the way to 16:26 — is not a checklist. It is what life in Christ’s presence actually looks like after baptism.

Mara: And that reading is reinforced in the earlier post on the mystery of immersion, which makes a closely related case: that immersion is “the glue that ties the two pillars of the faith — Christ’s death and his subsequent resurrection — together.” That post works through the benefits linked to each pillar separately, from justification and reconciliation on the death side, to bearing fruit and victory over death on the resurrection side.

Pip: Both posts land in the same place — baptism is not peripheral, not merely a work of the flesh, not optional color commentary on the real theology happening elsewhere.

Mara: The phrase from the immersion post is worth sitting with: immersion is “a near-complete picture of who we are and what we have in Christ.”

Pip: Romans as a unified argument, baptism as the hinge, and the living sacrifice not as a new ask but as a return to the starting point.

Mara: There is more in Romans to surface. We will be back when the next posts land.

August 3, 2026

Podcast Episode: Faithfulness And Righteousness in Christ (Romans Podcast Part 3)

Filed under: Christology,Christology,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Matthew Gospel of,Righteousness,Romans — Scott Stocking @ 9:40 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the word “therefore” is never just a transition — it’s a theological event horizon.

Mara: Scott Stocking brings us two sermons this episode, both circling the same gravitational center: how Christ’s faithfulness, not just our own, is what justification actually rests on. We move from Romans 5 to the temptation in the desert and back again.

Pip: Let’s start with what Paul is actually arguing in Romans 5 and why the word “faith” might be doing double duty.

Justified by Christ’s Faithfulness

Mara: The post works through Romans 5:1–12 as part of a longer Romans study, and the central question it raises is whether “faith” in Paul’s letters refers only to our belief — or also to Christ’s own faithfulness to his mission.

Pip: And the answer, apparently, is both, which changes the weight of the whole argument considerably. The post frames it this way, reading from Romans 1:17: “For in the gospel the Righteousness of God is revealed — from faithfulness into faithfulness, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faithfulness.'”

Mara: What this means in practice is that the “Righteousness of God” Paul invokes isn’t an abstract moral standard — it refers to Jesus himself. Jesus is the Righteousness of God, and his faithfulness to the cross is what makes our justification possible in the first place.

Pip: So when Paul writes “justified through faith” in 5:1 and then pivots to “justified by his blood” in 5:9, he isn’t contradicting himself — he’s showing the two sides of one coin. Christ’s faithfulness is the foundation; our trust is the response.

Mara: The post also tracks a structural shift in Romans that’s easy to miss as a casual reader. In chapters 1 through 4, Paul uses words for faith or faithfulness 27 times and words for life only twice. In chapters 5 through 8, those numbers nearly reverse — 25 occurrences of life and live, and only 2 for faith.

Pip: That’s a deliberate rhetorical gear change, not an accident.

Mara: Exactly — and it lands hardest in verse 8, which the post calls “somewhat profound”: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” No prior cleanup required.

Pip: The historical context sharpens that. Paul is writing to a Roman congregation where Jewish believers had been expelled and were only now returning to find Gentile house churches still thriving — so the unity argument isn’t abstract theology, it’s pastoral triage.

Mara: And perseverance under that pressure is precisely what builds the character and hope Paul describes in verses 3 through 5. That thread connects directly to what Jesus himself modeled when his own faithfulness was put to the test.

Walking in Jesus’s Righteousness

Mara: The second sermon takes up Matthew 4:1–11 alongside Romans 5:12–19, and the framing question is pointed: where Adam failed under temptation, what did Jesus actually do differently, and what does that mean for everyone who comes after?

Pip: The post opens with a comparison most sermons wouldn’t lead with — that Satanism is an oxymoron — but it earns the setup, because the whole argument depends on understanding what Satan is actually after.

Mara: The key move comes in Romans 5:19, quoted directly: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

Pip: So the upshot is that Jesus’s obedience isn’t just a moral example — it’s the structural reversal of Adam’s failure. One act of faithful obedience undoes what one act of disobedience broke.

Mara: The post draws a careful parallel: Satan used the same three categories against Jesus in the desert — appetite, spectacle, and power — that he used against Eve in the garden. Jesus refused each one by knowing exactly what God had actually promised, not the distorted version Satan offered.

Pip: And the post makes the point that what made the crucifixion uniquely effective wasn’t only perfect legal obedience to the Law — it was love. Bulls and goats couldn’t love anyone. Jesus could and did.

Mara: Which is why the post lands where it does: believers are “in Christ” in a concrete sense, baptized into his death, freed from the law’s demands, and called to walk in the righteousness he earned and extends to them.

Pip: Two sermons, one through-line — Christ’s faithfulness is prior to ours, and that sequence matters for everything that follows.

Mara: Romans keeps pulling the thread. There’s still the second half of Romans 6 ahead, so this conversation isn’t finished.

Pip: Neither, apparently, is Paul’s.

August 2, 2026

Podcast Episode: Faithfulness In Romans (Part 2)

Filed under: Christology,Ecclesiology,Faith, Faithfulness,forgiveness,Grace,Greek,Righteousness,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 3:28 pm
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Part 1 of the Romans podcast series may be found here.

Pip: Welcome to Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the coffee is hot and the participles are passive — and sometimes that’s the whole point.

Mara: Scott Stocking is our guide this episode, working through Romans with a close eye on the Greek text — what words like pistis and dikaiosyne actually mean, and why the translation choices matter for how we understand salvation.

Pip: Let’s start with the Romans Road and what happens when you read it in the original language.

Romans 3:23–24 and the Faithfulness That Saves

Pip: The post on Romans 3:23–24 opens a question most readers skip right past: when Paul says we are justified by faith, whose faith is he actually talking about — ours, or Christ’s?

Mara: The post frames it this way: “For all who are being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Messiah Jesus sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” That rearrangement of word order is deliberate — the participle dikaioumenoi, meaning “who are being justified,” attaches directly to “all,” making justification an ongoing process, not a completed event.

Pip: So the grammar itself is doing theological work. Being justified is present tense, active right now, not a box you checked at conversion.

Mara: Exactly. And that present-tense framing connects to a comparison with Ephesians 2:8, where the parallel construction swaps “through the redemption in Christ Jesus” for “through faithfulness, and this not from yourselves.” The argument is that the faithfulness in view is Christ’s — his obedience to the cross — not a quantity of belief we have to produce on our own.

Pip: Which dissolves a question that has quietly tormented a lot of Christians: do I have enough faith to be saved? If the faithfulness is Christ’s, the answer is structurally irrelevant to us.

Mara: The post makes that point directly. If salvation rests on our faith, it becomes relative — how much is enough? But if it rests on Christ’s faithfulness, the statement becomes absolute. Our own trust in Jesus is, as the post puts it, “not so much for the purpose of being saved but the result of being saved.”

Pip: That’s a quiet but significant inversion of how the passage usually gets preached.

Mara: The companion piece on pistis across Romans 1–5 develops this at length. It argues that the phrase pisteos Iesou Christou — “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” — in Romans 3:22 is a subjective genitive: Christ is the one being faithful, not merely the object of our faith. The post traces that reading through the whole arc of Romans 1–5, from God’s wrath under the Law in chapters 1 through 3, to Abraham’s faithfulness in chapter 4, to the application in chapter 5.

Mara: The inclusio that brackets the entire letter is telling: the phrase eis hypakoēn pisteōs — “into obedience of faithfulness” — appears in both 1:5 and 16:26, the first and last occurrences of pistis in Romans. That structural frame suggests Paul’s whole argument is about faithful obedience, not faith as a discrete interior event.

Pip: So Romans is less a manual for how to believe and more a demonstration that Christ already did the believing on our behalf — and we walk in the wake of that.

Mara: With the caveat that our own faithfulness still matters — the post is careful to say this doesn’t imply universalism or unconditional security, but rather a call to trust more deeply because God has already demonstrated his reliability. Works, confession, and obedience all follow from that trust.

Pip: From the mechanics of justification to the question of who the righteous one actually is — that thread runs all the way back to Romans 1:17, which is where the deeper argument begins.

Mara: The thread connecting both posts is really one question: what kind of faithfulness is Romans built on, and does the Greek text change the answer?

Pip: Turns out the grammar has opinions. Next time, we’ll see where else those opinions show up.

August 1, 2026

Podcast Episode: Spiritual Warfare in Ephesians

Filed under: Ecclesiology,Ephesians,Eschatology,Greek,Pneumatology,Spiritual Warfare — Scott Stocking @ 6:46 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the armor of God comes with footnotes, a chiastic structure, and Walter Wink citations. Scott Stocking has been thinking hard about Ephesians, and the result is not a quiet devotional.

Mara: That’s right. Today we’re digging into Ephesians — its architecture, its theology of power, and what spiritual warfare actually looks like when you take the text seriously. Let’s start with what Paul was building.

Spiritual Warfare in Ephesians

Pip: Ephesians has a reputation as Paul’s most polished letter, but the post here argues it’s also one of his most structurally deliberate — a chiastic architecture with spiritual warfare running through it as a subtheme, not a footnote.

Mara: The phrase that anchors it all is “in the heavenly realms” — used five times in Ephesians. And chapter 6 makes the stakes plain: “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Pip: So the heavenly realms aren’t simply heaven. They span good and evil — which raises the obvious question of who exactly is living there.

Mara: That’s where Walter Wink comes in. His framework, drawn from his Powers trilogy and condensed in The Powers That Be, describes these entities as created by God to steward human institutions — families, corporations, governments — but subject to corruption by the people inside them.

Pip: Created good, fallen, and in need of redemption. Which is, frankly, a description that fits most institutions I’ve encountered.

Mara: The post works through concrete examples — Enron as a case of institutional corruption feeding on itself, Tylenol’s 1980s recall as a case of a corporation doing the right thing and sending a message that reverberated through the corporate world.

Pip: And then it turns personal. Westboro Baptist gets named as a case study in what spiritual warfare is not — protests that fuel the violence of the powers rather than redeeming them.

Mara: The alternative the post argues for is love as the primary instrument. Not tolerance of wrongdoing, but direct relational engagement — and prayer underneath all of it. Wink is quoted again: “Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible.”

Pip: So action without prayer is self-justifying good works. Prayer without action is incomplete. The post holds both together — and lands on love, not protest, as the mode.

Mara: Exactly. And that framing — what we do in visible institutions reflects and shapes invisible powers — is what makes the Ephesians structure matter beyond the outline.

Pip: The architecture of the letter and the theology of the powers turn out to be the same argument.

Mara: What stays with me is that “in the heavenly realms” doing so much work — from blessing in chapter one to spiritual combat in chapter six.

Pip: Same letter, same phrase, completely different register. That’s worth sitting with until next time.

July 31, 2026

Podcast Episode: The Meaning of Baptism

Filed under: 1 Peter,forgiveness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,John Gospel of,Luke Gospel of,Mark Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 8:23 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the Greek is original and the theology is anything but shallow.

Mara: Scott Stocking has been working through one of the more contested questions in New Testament theology: what immersion actually does, what Peter and Paul meant by it, and whether the word itself carries more weight than most translations let on.

Pip: Let’s start with the text that says it most plainly — 1 Peter 3.

Baptism as Event, Not Ritual

Mara: The question driving these posts is deceptively simple: does immersion save, and if so, how does it work — what gives the water any power at all?

Pip: First Peter 3:21 is the sharpest answer in the New Testament, and the post on that passage offers a translation that cuts through the usual hedging: “This immersion now saves you through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, not the body-dirt removal immersion, but the clear-conscience-pledge to God immersion.”

Mara: So the power is not in the water itself. The resurrection is the qualifier — it is what carries the person through immersion the way the floodwater carried the ark. Without that phrase at the end of the verse, the whole thing collapses into ritual.

Pip: And the Greek grammar backs that reading up. The relative pronoun at the start of verse 21 is neuter, which means it points back to water, not to the ark — Peter is saying the flood water corresponds to immersion, not that the ark does.

Mara: The post on The Mystery of Immersion picks up that thread and pushes it further, asking whether ascribing salvific power to immersion while calling the Lord’s Table a mere symbol is a theological inconsistency — either both carry mysterious power, or both are symbols.

Pip: That is a genuinely uncomfortable corner to be argued into.

Mara: Mystery of Immersion, Part Two lands the argument more firmly. It reads Romans 6 as the centerpiece of Paul’s entire theological argument in chapters 1 through 11, with immersion as the event that binds Christ’s death and resurrection together in a single act.

Pip: So immersion is not a footnote to salvation — it is, in Paul’s architecture, the load-bearing joint.

Mara: The Part Two post puts it this way: immersion is “the glue that ties the two pillars of the faith together.” United with Christ’s death, the believer receives justification, reconciliation, and a cleansed conscience. United with the resurrection, they bear fruit and share the victory over death.

Mara: And across all three posts, one consistent boundary holds: a purely outward act, the “dunk and ditch” version, accomplishes nothing — the pledge of a clear conscience is what makes the event real.

Pip: From water as typology to Romans as architecture — the question underneath all of it is what it means to be all-in for Christ.

Pip: Three posts, one through-line: immersion is not where the journey ends — it is where it starts in earnest.

Mara: The Greek keeps pulling that thread. More to come.

Podcast Episode: Romans And Faithful Obedience

Filed under: Christology,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,Righteousness,Romans,Soteriology,Textual Criticism — Scott Stocking @ 5:50 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog is back, and if you thought Paul’s letter to the Romans was just a greatest-hits playlist of salvation verses, Scott Stocking is here to walk you through the whole road — construction specs included.

Mara: Scott Stocking covers two connected territories this episode: what righteousness actually means in Romans, and how the phrase “obedience of faithfulness” functions as the letter’s spine from opening greeting to closing benediction.

Pip: Let’s start with righteousness — and what it costs to define it carefully.

Righteousness as Foundation

Mara: The central question in this segment is what Paul means by “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 — and whether it’s something God hands over to believers, or something embodied in a person.

Pip: The answer lands hard. The post sets up Romans 1:17 carefully, then offers this reading: “The righteousness of God then isn’t an object to be given. It is embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the righteousness of God.”

Mara: The upshot is that righteousness isn’t a transaction — it’s a participation. Because Jesus fulfilled every requirement of the law, he alone is called righteous, and believers share in that only by being “in Christ.”

Pip: Which reframes the familiar Romans Road considerably. The post uses a road-construction metaphor that actually earns its keep: righteousness is the substructure — the rebar, the compacted earth, the dowel bars — and Jesus’s faithfulness is the surface we walk on.

Mara: Romans 1:17 gets parsed as “from faithfulness into faithfulness” — Jesus’s perfect obedience to the law moving into his faithfulness unto death on the cross. The post ties that directly to Philippians 2:8: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross.”

Pip: So “obedience of faithfulness” in Romans 1:5 isn’t just a theological motto. It points, specifically, to the crucifixion.

Mara: Romans 2 extends this. Paul warns both Jews and Gentiles against hypocrisy — knowing the law isn’t the same as following it. The post notes that circumcision and baptism function as parallel initiation rites in Paul’s argument, and reads Romans 2:25–29 as groundwork for the baptism discussion coming in chapter 6.

Pip: The small-group kickoff context matters here — this is a congregation being asked to read Romans one chapter at a time, and the post is honest that chapters 1 and 2 alone carry enough freight to slow anyone down.

Mara: That honesty is part of the argument. The post closes the Romans 1 and 2 discussion with a summary worth quoting directly: if we remain faithful to living in the righteousness of Christ, then as Romans 2:13 says, “we’ll be declared righteous when we stand before our maker.”

Pip: Which brings us to the phrase that holds all of this together — and how it functions across the whole letter.

The Obedience of Faithfulness

Mara: The question the second post takes up is whether “obedience of faithfulness” is a throwaway greeting formula or the actual organizing theme of Romans — and the answer is the latter.

Pip: The post on “Obedience of Faithfulness: A Walk On the Romans Road” opens with personal testimony but arrives at a precise textual claim. Paul, it argues, “told us what he was going to say, he said it, and he told us he said it” — the phrase appears in Romans 1:5 and again, word for word, in the closing benediction of Romans 16.

Mara: That’s not a coincidence. The Greek is only two words, and the post explains that the structure implies the terms define each other: “obedience is faithfulness, and faithfulness is obedience.” Faith, in this reading, is never purely intellectual — it always carries action with it.

Pip: The post traces this through baptism in Romans 6, reading immersion as the believer’s own enactment of the pattern — buried with Christ, raised to new life. That’s the “obedience of faithfulness” made physical.

Mara: And Romans 12:1–2 closes the arc: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The post is careful to note these are promises for life now, not only for life after death.

Pip: Two posts, one through-line — the road Paul built was always meant to be walked.

Mara: Righteousness as foundation, faithfulness as the road you actually travel — that’s the frame Romans keeps returning to.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see where else on the blog that road leads.

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