Author: Ryan Hale

It sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Yes, I live in a debt of love… It almost sounds like poetry that some French painter thought up and would mindlessly recite to passersby.

Except it is anything but that. Paul tells the Roman church that they shouldn’t have a debt of anything to anyone, except a debt of love.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

What in the world is he talking about? Paul is saying that as followers of Christ, we should love one another just as God first loved us. In Christ, God came to give himself for us. In Christ, God sacrificed himself so that we could live. In Christ, God purchased us into his kingdom so that we would be his people – forever.

What a payment that has been made for us! It is a payment that can never be repaid. We never deserved that kind of love. We were rebels, actively working against the kingdom of God. In our sin, we protested God. Yet God came in the form of Christ to give himself for us.

So we have a debt that is ongoing, a debt that will continue forever. But it isn’t a debt like other debts. Other debts weigh us down, but this debt of love back to Christ is one that we should love to continue to pay back. Yet our payment for this isn’t just back to Christ, it is a payment that moves forward to others. We pay the debt by giving ourselves to other people so that they too may know the love of Christ. Even if they are not believers – maybe especially if they are not believers, so that they may also believe – we show love to them because even while we were God’s enemies, he came for us. In the same way, we show love for others while they are our enemies, or in reality, while they also are God’s enemies.

If we do this, we not only fulfill the law, but we continue to pay the ongoing debt of love to Christ.

I think it is common to most people that we struggle to know what God wants us to do. Sometimes it seems difficult to understand which direction we should go. Sometimes it seems like it would just be better if God were to appear and say do this or do that.

Except… He did.

In fact, this is exactly what he did. He didn’t show up in front of me necessarily, but God did show up here on the earth and he did tell us what he wanted us to do.

Now we need to do it.

Except something gets in the way. My own self. And now we have arrived at the real problem. The issue isn’t that I can’t know what it is that God wants me to do. The issue isn’t that I don’t know how I can know his will. No, instead, the issue is that I don’t actually want to do what he wants me to do. I want another instruction. I want the instruction that I want. It isn’t God’s will that I’m looking to receive. It is my will that I am wanting to hear from God. If only God would tell me what I want to hear, then I could approve it and do it. Then I would confirm that God is speaking, because what he is saying is what I want him to say.

Except it doesn’t work like that. God has his will and his plans, and we have ours. Our job, instead of getting God to do what I want him to do, is to learn to align myself with what God is doing.

This is what Paul is saying as he tells the Romans that they must renew their minds and be transformed. Here is what he says:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is —his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Romans 12:2

The difficulty in this situation is that we are trying to understand God’s will for our lives, or for a particular situation, but we are doing it with a mind that is conformed to the world. We are thinking in the way that the world thinks and we don’t even realize it. We are thinking with solutions that involve money, power, fame, or pleasure, and yet these are exactly the opposite of how God thinks. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts.

God will not change. We must. We must renew our minds by praying, by reading the scripture, by asking God for his help in understanding. Then, and only then, will we be able to test and approve God’s will for our lives. Then, and only then, will we see what it is that he is telling us and begin to do it because we understand that he has already told us what to do and it is the right way for us to go.

Living here in Sicily, we have had the opportunity to see the process of grafting in action several times. Whether on orange trees, olive trees, lemon trees, or others, each time that we have been around any farmer that is working with trees, they are almost always in a process of grafting or talking about what they are doing with it?

First, what does it mean to graft? If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a concept that seems quite strange. You take one tree and you connect it to another tree and they grow together.

Why do that? Why graft? There has been enough cross-pollination, either through natural processes or through man-made processes, that you may not get a particular kind of fruit by planting a seed from that fruit. For example, imagine that you are a farmer who grows and sells Granny Smith apples. You are known for that apple and people buy from you because you sell that apple. Now you decide that you want to expand your business. If you take the seeds from some of your apples, buy new land, and plant the seeds, you may get some Granny Smith apples, but you may not. You don’t really know.

However, on the other hand, if you cut a branch off of a tree that you know produces Granny Smith apples and you graft it to an existing tree that is compatible, they will grow together and you can now produce more Granny Smith apples.

Paul used this example to explain what God himself had done with the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews were removed from the tree so that the Gentiles could be “grafted” into the tree:

If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you.

Romans 11:17-18

What exactly is Paul talking about here? How can the Gentiles be grafted in? What tree is Paul referring to?

Paul is saying that, because of their unbelief, God removed the Jews from the “tree”. The tree, in this case, is a metaphor for those who are God’s people. They are grown up in God and are one as his people. The Jews are the people of Israel who were chosen as God’s people, but at a certain point, as a result of their unbelief and unwillingness to listen to God, their unbelief and unwillingness to hear, understand, and do what he is saying, God cut the Jews off of the tree so as to allow the others, the Gentiles, to be grafted in to the tree and be God’s people.

Paul uses this metaphor of grafting because it is an example of a process that intervenes to get the planned and desired outcome. God planned, even throughout the Old Testament, that all of the nations would know him. God planned that they would be blessed and have a relationship with him. We see this as far back as God telling Abraham that he would bless him so that all of the nations on the earth would be blessed, and we see the fulfillment in Christ in that Jesus opened the way for all people, through faith, to come to know God in Christ.

So the non-Jews, the Gentiles, are grafted into the people of God through Christ. Grafting is an interventionist practice, both in agriculture, but also in what God has done. Jesus brought and embodied both justice and mercy in that he received the justice from God for the sins that had been committed, but also demonstrated the love, grace, and mercy of God, being sacrificed, killed so that others would live. God intervened on behalf of all people, but he calls each of us to believe and understand what he has done so that we can be grafted into his family. And that is what God has done for us. Through our faith in Christ, like the farmer, he has grafted us into his family so that we can produce the fruit that he desires.

I can recognize what Paul is telling the Romans when he says that his fellow Israelites’ zeal isn’t based on knowledge. They don’t know. They are ignorant. And yet they are zealous. They didn’t understand what the scriptures were saying. They didn’t understand where they were pointing. They didn’t know that the Law and Prophets told of Jesus. They didn’t know that Jesus had fulfilled what the Law and Prophets foretold.

And yet they were zealous.

This is the same type of situation that we see even today. Religions wrap people up in a lot of zeal because it ties them to their lifestyle. That religion that we grew up with is what we knew, is what we saw with our parents, is what we saw with our grandparents. We are Catholic. We are Muslim. We are evangelical Christian. This is who we are.

Yet that religion is frequently more tied to the geography of where they are from and the culture of that particular place rather than the actual truth of what is being understood and being practiced. Many times, people have told me: We are from west Africa and in west Africa, we are Muslim. Or they might say: We are from Catania and in Catania we are Catholics that celebrate Sant’Agata.

This attitude is the same type of attitude that Paul is referring to. He is talking, in his case, about the Jews. The Jews don’t truly understand, and yet they are zealous. They will continue in their traditions because those traditions are closely connected to their religion and has created a culture for them that has told them who they are. Those tradition, that culture, is actually what it is that they are zealous for because it has defined them as a people. Their identity is wrapped up in these traditions, in their culture, and that creates and continues to drive their zeal for it.

But Paul says:

I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.

Romans 10:2

So it is critical that our zeal is based not on our own understanding, nor upon what our culture or traditions tell us, but that it is based on what God says. If we’re zealous for God, we should understand who he is. We should understand what he is doing. And through this, our zealousness – which we definitely should have! – can be based on knowledge. Our knowledge of who God is and what he is doing will produce a zeal that goes well beyond our connection to our traditions or to our culture. In fact, each of these things will pale in comparison. Instead, our zeal will be for the glory of Christ as we zealously live for our king!

Paul makes a pretty provocative statement when he talks about the people of Israel. He says that not all of Israel is Israel. Wait, what?

The nation of Israel are the people of God. They were the ones that were chosen, that from Abraham and his son Isaac came Jacob whom God renamed Israel. These were the people, that for whatever God’s reasons were, were the ones that God had chosen.

But now, many centuries and millenia later, Paul makes the statement that not all of these people are actually God’s people. But why would Paul say that? Isn’t he going against God’s plan?

For these same centuries that had past, the Israelite people would frequently trace their lineage back to Jacob, to Isaac, and Abraham, showing that they and their families were part of the people of God. Their intent was to show that they were truly part of the nation of Israel, part of a particular tribe, and therefore belonged to the one and only true God, Yahweh.

But now Paul is pointing out that it isn’t just a matter of your physical lineage. It isn’t whether or not you have the right genealogy that determines whether or not you are part of the people of God. No, what determines this is whether you find yourself within the promise of God.

God told Abraham that his descendants would be like the stars in the sky, but then Abraham had to wait for 25 years to have a child. God had given Abraham a promise, but it was a promise that hadn’t come true just yet. About 10 years into the initial giving of the promise, God again confirmed his promise to Abraham, and the scriptures say that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

It was Abraham’s faith that God would keep his promise that allowed him to enter into right relationship with God. God was going to do the work to keep the promise, even if Sarah and Abraham tried to force the matter with Hagar to have Ishmael.

This is the legacy of Abraham, that his faith allowed him to enter into the proper relationship with God. He believed God would keep his promises. He believed that what God said he would do, he would actually do.

Paul is pointing out, therefore, that everything is now different. Jesus is for everyone, not just for the Jews. Jesus opened the door that all might enter into the kingdom of God. Not just the Jews. Salvation and the Spirit of God is available to all. No longer is God available only to a certain people that have the right physical lineage. No longer is God available to a people that perform the right religious acts. What distinguishes God’s people from the other people are those that believe God and have faith in him and the promise that he has given.

“I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people;
and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,”

and,

“In the very place where it was said to them,
‘You are not my people,’
there they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”

Romans 9:25-26

Those that believe that Jesus is the Christ, that believe that he has reestablished his kingdom, and that believe and have faith that, through Christ’s blood, they also can be brought into the kingdom…these are the people of Israel. Jesus is God incarnate who can save. Jesus is Yeshua who has come to us in the flesh. He is God and he came to us in the flesh so that we can know him and to give himself for us so that we can enter his kingdom and give him glory forever.

Those that have faith in this promise are the ones who are God’s people. These are the people of Israel. This is the true Israel, the ones that God will call “my people”.

When we say that we follow Christ, there are several ways in which we mean it. The first way that most people would think of is to follow him in the way that he lived his life. We want to have the mind and heart of Chrst. We want to do the things that he did and speak in the way that he spoke. We can probably never live up to the perfection that Christ showed us as an example, but we look to him as our ideal, the example that we want to emulate.

But more than trying to live a life or pursue holiness in the way of Christ, we also think about eternity. Not just an eternity that starts when we die, but an eternity that starts today. And the only way that we can see into that eternity is in Christ.

In Christ, we can enter into eternity, an eternity with God. But God is holy and can only be with those who are holy, and to be holy, we must be rid of our old selves, and this is another way in which we follow Christ. As Paul told the Romans, we are baptized into Christ’s death. As we are baptized and place our faith in Christ, our old person dies. The spiritual person who was under the law dies a spiritual death. The old person is gone and a new person rises from the water into life.

This is a third way that we can follow Christ. We follow him into life, an eternal life that we have placed our faith and hope in. We trust Christ that we will not be destroyed. We trust him that what he says is true. We trust him that we will live forever with him and we will know the Father through Christ. This is what we mean when we say that we place our faith in Christ. We trust him that he will do what he says he will do. We trust that our hope for salvation from God’s wrath will not be in vain.

From a human perspective, this is probably the most important way that we follow Christ, trusting that we will be saved through him. But this is not necessarily, from God’s perspective, the most important way that we follow him. We also follow him in glorifying both him, Christ, as well as the Father. We give our entire lives for him to use. We give ourselves, just as Christ did, so that we can be both his children as well as his instruments in the world, that more people would hear and would know, and more people would glorify the Father, just as Christ did. Jesus gave himself completely so that the Father would be glorified, and as followers of Christ, we must do the same.

I want to make an important point here, though, that we are no longer under the law. As followers of Christ, the law no longer applies to us. Christ fulfilled the law and we are found within him, so we are no longer subject to the law that was given by God:

For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey —whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?

Romans 6:14-16

An argument that I frequently hear, especially from Muslim apologists, is that Christians believe that they are under grace and believe that they have a right to continue to sin. That is simply not true and is nothing but fiction or a misunderstanding of what the scripture actually teaches. Here, Paul says that we should no longer offer ourselves to sin, but instead we have died to sin.

As I noted above, as Christ’s followers, as we rise to eternal life as the new spiritual person, we find ourselves now desiring to live for God. Not living for myself and to glorify myself, but living for him, to glorify him. As a true follower of Christ, this should be my attitude, that the Father is lifted up, that the Father is glorified. If I don’t have this attitude, I am not following Christ. I am not living under grace, but instead I am living under the law.

But thank God that, through Christ, I don’t have to live under the law any longer. Christ fulfilled the law and I am found in him! As a follower of Christ, I am now a new person, a new creation, and I am living for him and no longer for me.

The love, grace, and mercy of God is astounding. Many people think that if they just clean themselves up enough, if they are just good enough, then God will accept them. They won’t come to God because they haven’t become good enough yet. They haven’t “cleaned up their act” just yet.

Yet this demonstrates, once again, the difference between the way God thinks and the way man thinks. Man would say that we need to earn our way to God. God says that even though you were his enemy, he would come to die for you so that you would be saved.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

Romans 5:6-10

Paul clearly points out the difference between man’s thought process and God’s thought process. Men might give themselves for others in only some specific and outstanding circumstances. Not for a righteous person and only possibly for a “good” person. But God came to give himself while we were still sinners. While we were his enemies, God gave himself.

Imagine this: Someone is against you. Someone opposes you. In word, in deed, and in every way. This person is against you. What would you want to do? What would I want to do? We would want that person discredited. Put down. Destroyed.

What did God do? In this very same situation, because each of us were against God, opposed God, and did everything contrary to what God commanded or desired, we showed ourselves to be against God. And yet in that very same situation, instead of destroying us, God gave himself for us. God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, came to give himself. While we were opposed to him, while we were opposed to God, God himself paid the penalty that was required. He paid with his own blood the price of the rebellion. He paid for our sins through the death of Jesus on the cross.

How incredible of a love is that? While we were his enemies, God gave himself for us. When we truly understand that, what else can we do other than to give our entire lives back to him?

When God created the world, he spoke, and it was. Everything that we see, everything that we are, everything that would be came from God and his word. By saying the word, it was, and it is.

God, just by calling something into being, can make it become a reality. By contrast, for us, we must labor and work, but for God, that which is not comes from the word of his mouth. That is what Paul says as he speaks of the power of God:

As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.

Romans 4:17

We can apply this, of course, to the time of creation, as I’ve tried to do above. But I think that there is much more that we can say. Paul starts this verse by making reference to what he said to Abraham when he said “I have made you a father of many nations.” This refers back to Genesis 17:5 where God spoke to Abraham to declare that he, God, had done what he had promised Abraham that he would do. God had told Abraham that he would be the father of many nations and that his descendants would be like the stars in the sky. To do this, Abraham would need to have children, most specifically a son, but he and Sarah didn’t have any children from the two of them. Only through Hagar, the servant woman from Egypt, in Ishmael.

But God told Abraham that he had fulfilled his promise. In fact, God uses the past tense as he says this to Abraham: “I have made you”, God says when he says this to Abraham. It is done. It is complete. The work is done. There is nothing that is left for you to do.

Except one thing: to believe. He must believe. Abraham can’t see it yet, because he still has no children. He has Ishmael, but God doesn’t count Ishmael within the context of the promise that he gave to Abraham. No, Ishmael is not part of the covenant, God said to Abraham, so Abraham still doesn’t have any children. He has no descendants that are part of God’s promise, so Abraham cannot yet see God’s promise come into reality. The promise has been completed, but Abraham can’t see it yet. So, because he can’t see it, he only has one recourse: to believe that God’s plan will become a reality.

That is the reason that God made Abraham righteous before him. Because he believed that God could do it. He believed that God would carry out his plan. He believed that what God said would become a reality.

God is a God who is able, with a word, to make those things that are not true today in one moment become a reality in the next moment. God can change things with a simple word. This is what we are praying for here in Catania as well. We are praying and asking God to move, to see a movement of disciples and churches as well. God has given us life and declared us righteous through Jesus Christ, but we are also praying for the impossible, that God would call into being new believer after new believer and we are believing that God will do this in our midst, for his glory. By faith, we believe.

Religion is powerful. As human beings, we want to believe that we can be in control and manage our own lives, that we can make our own way to God. Generally speaking, that is the point of a religion: to put in place a series of rules to live by that, by adhering to those rules, we can please God.

I had a similar conversation yesterday with a Muslim man. He started with the suggesting the idea that the most important thing that we can do in our life is to follow our religion. He told me that, whether we are Christian, Muslim, or Jew doesn’t make a difference. What matters is that we follow our religion to come to God.

We read through Jesus’s words to his disciples that he is the way, the truth, and the life. We read that Jesus said that no one can come to the Father except through him. We even read where Jesus said told Philip that if he had seen Jesus, he had seen the Father. Whoa…

My friend was pretty surprised as we read through all of these things. We discussed that there is a way to come to God, but it isn’t through the church, it isn’t through the mosque, and it isn’t through the synagogue. Instead, it is only through Christ. You see, through each of these religions, we effectively say, “I’ll do it – I’ll take care of it”, meaning that we will each be good enough to reach God, to please God.

But this is, of course, completely different from what Jesus says. Jesus essentially says, instead, “I did it – I took care of it”. In other words, it is done. It is already taken care of.

Meaning what?

Meaning that Jesus is the one who was sacrificed by God himself on the cross. That sacrifice was the payment for my sins. There is no more sacrifice required to be right before God. There is no more work that needs to be done. There are no more religious actions that we need to do.

So what is left to do? What is our role?

We are called into a proper relationship with God through repentance and through belief in what Jesus has done for us. He has done it all, he has taken care of everything, and now our job is to live by faith, to have faith that Jesus’s sacrifice has paid for my sins and that I am clean and right before God, and that his resurrection will precede my resurrection. I will live because he lives and I am found in him. I place my faith in Christ to save me from God’s justice and wrath on the day of judgment.

Paul says that we must live by faith:

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed —a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

Romans 1:17

Paul is quoting Habakkuk when he says that the righteous will live by faith, but he is echoing even the beginning of the promise that God gave to Abraham, that through Abraham would come many nations, that his descendants would be like the stars in the sky.

And so Abraham waited…and waited…and waited. And finally, God gave him a son through his wife Sarah that would be a fulfillment of the promise. Abraham and Sarah tried to fulfill God’s promise themselves through Hagar when they had Ishmael. In my estimation, this is similar to the way that religion works: “We’ll take care of it!” But by continuing to have faith, even despite our failings, God will fulfill his promises and we will be saved.

Like my Muslim friend, we each have a choice to make. That is how we ended our conversation yesterday. Do we believe in what Jesus said? Or do we declare him to be a liar? Do we believe that he is truly the way, the truth, and the life? Or do we choose our own path to try to reach God? Do we live by faith from first to the last? Or do we prefer our own religious practices? It is time to choose…

Paul showed himself to be an example for the Thessalonians. When he was with them, he worked so that he and his companions wouldn’t be a burden to the Thessalonian people. They earned their money and in this way they were able to eat. They preached the Gospel as they went, and they were also supported by the churches as they went on their way, but they also worked for their money so that they could live in the areas where they were making disciples and planting churches.

For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

2 Thessalonians 3:7-10

So Paul gave the Thessalonians, and several of the other churches, an example to follow. As he came into a new location, he frequently didn’t have monies to support himself, so he became a physical worker while also doing his work within the kingdom of God.

In the same way, we want to help people to understand that work in the kingdom happens alongside of work in the world. By working in the world, we not only support ourselves and allow ourselves to eat and live, but we also get to know people and establish relationships with non-believers, thus allowing us to be able to share with them our faith. This is an important, practical component to working in the kingdom: knowing how also to work in the world.