From Lost to Loved: A 30-Day Study of Romans 8Sample

This is a verse-by-verse walk through Romans 8, but this chapter is a well that never runs dry and we’re only drawing a few buckets from its depths. Sometimes readers must zoom out and take in the whole landscape. Romans 8 does not hang in midair. It comes after a long road through sin, slavery, and internal struggle.

Romans 3:10 tells us no one is righteous. Romans 6 paints the image of slavery to sin or righteousness. Romans 7:24 vividly describes a conflicted experience of Christian living.

Against that backdrop, Paul deploys a word loaded with meaning: sons. That small word changes everything. Paul is revealing that all this work of the Spirit in our lives is far more than a change in status. There is a transformation of identity as well. We are former slaves of sin who are now sons of God.

The phrase “sons of God” has a legal flavor to it. In Roman culture, sons inherited the name, status, and future of their father. To be called a son of God is a redefinition of oneself that cannot be overstated. Looking forward to eternity, it also sets your life on a trajectory to an entirely different outcome.

This is the first time the original recipients of Paul’s letter are spoken of as sons. They’ve navigated challenging words of judgment, slavery, and struggle. This verse opens their minds to the reality that the Christian life is not the improvement of an old life but rather the beginning of a whole new one. Paul is calling readers up into a whole new identity.

Sons are “led by the Spirit of God.” That detail matters. Slaves are driven and coerced, but sons are led. Now, this isn’t the kind of leading that happens on the grinder during SEAL training, where an instructor towers over you barking “inspiration” in the way only BUD/S instructors know how. The Spirit doesn’t lead like that. He leads with presence. And that presence? It most often manifests as encouragement.[1]

The world shouts but the Spirit leads. One drives you to perform while the other calls you to follow. Walk by the Spirit… especially when the crowd mocks, the path narrows, and the old life whispers your name.

REFLECT:
What step is the Spirit asking of you right now that comfort keeps resisting?

[1]William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16.