Romans 5
5
Right with God
1We have been made right with God because of our faith. So we have# Some Greek copies read “let us have.” peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2Through our faith,# Some Greek copies do not include this phrase. Christ has brought us into that blessing of God’s grace that we now enjoy. And we are happy because of the hope we have of sharing God’s glory. 3And we also have joy with our troubles because we know that these troubles produce patience. 4And patience produces character, and character produces hope. 5And this hope will never disappoint us, because God has poured out his love to fill our hearts. God gave us his love through the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to us.
6Christ died for us while we were still weak. We were living against God, but at the right time, Christ died for us. 7Very few people will die to save the life of someone else. Although perhaps for a good man someone might possibly die. 8But Christ died for us while we were still sinners. In this way God shows his great love for us.
9We have been made right with God by the blood of Christ’s death. So through Christ we will surely be saved from God’s anger. 10I mean that while we were God’s enemies, God made us his friends through the death of his Son. Surely, now that we are God’s friends, God will save us through his Son’s life. 11And not only that, but now we are also very happy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Jesus we are now God’s friends again.
Adam and Christ
12Sin came into the world because of what one man did. And with sin came death. And this is why all men must die—because all men sinned. 13Sin was in the world before the law of Moses. But God does not judge people guilty of sin if there is no law. 14But from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, everyone had to die. Adam died because he sinned by not obeying God’s command. But even those who did not sin in the same way had to die.
Adam was like the One who was coming in the future. 15But God’s free gift is not like Adam’s sin. Many people died because of the sin of that one man. But the grace that they received from God was much greater. Many people received God’s gift of life by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ. 16After Adam sinned once, he was judged guilty. But the gift of God is different. God’s free gift came after many sins. And the gift makes people right with God. 17One man sinned, and so death ruled all people because of that one man. But now some people accept God’s full grace and the great gift of being made right with him. They will surely have true life and rule through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18So one sin of Adam brought the punishment of death to all people. But in the same way, one good act that Christ did makes all people right with God. And that brings true life for all. 19One man disobeyed God, and many became sinners. But in the same way, one man obeyed God, and many will be made right. 20The law came to make people have more sin. But when people had more sin, God gave them more of his grace. 21Sin once used death to rule us. But God gave people more of his grace so that grace could rule by making people right with him. And this brings life forever through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Copyright © 2015 by Tommy Nelson™, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Romans 5
5
Developing Patience
1-2By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with him, make us fit for him—we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that’s not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.
3-5There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!
6-8Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.
9-11Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!
The Death-Dealing Sin, the Life-Giving Gift
12-14You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in—first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone, but the extent of the disturbance was not clear until God spelled it out in detail to Moses. So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.
15-17Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, absolute life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?
18-19Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.
20-21All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.
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THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of NavPress. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.