The North Church Women

Romans is a detailed explanation of the heart of the gospel and how it works in our lives. Apart from God and his grace, we are utterly without hope. In this episode Pam Larson reviews Romans 1–7 to open our study series on Romans 8, examining various aspects of the gospel much like a jeweler would examine the facets of a beautiful diamond set off by the dark black velvet background ... the bad news that none of us are righteous an...

We have been set free from the law and walk in the new way of the Spirit. The law is holy, righteous, and good, but it can’t make us holy, righteous, or good. Even though we struggle in the fight against sin (which is powerful), thanks to Jesus, his grace is stronger.

The focus shifts from the power of sin (Romans 6) to the powerlessness of the law. (Romans 7)

1–Romans 7:1–6 | Two husbands 

2–Romans 7:7–11 | Story #1: Is the law si...

This week in Romans 6:12–23, Paul reminds us that because of what Christ did, we are not slaves to sin and our passions anymore. Instead, we have a new master, a master Paul calls Obedience, Righteousness, and finally, God. And what a gracious master God is! 

Under this new master, we have become obedient from the heart, we devote ourselves to righteousness, and we bear the fruit of sanctification by living unto God—for eternity. W...

Paul offers a sustained argument debunking the outrageous idea that by saying that “when sin increased, grace abounded all the more,” he was suggesting that we should “continue in sin that grace may abound.” His chief argument is that the old, sinning, self has died giving rise to a new righteous life. Sinning is incompatible with this new life. It’s actually the transformation of sinners into righteous people that really highlight...

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Paul uses a “how much more” logic to show us how much better the free gift of righteousness is than the sin that necessitated it. 

• We have a better Man than ourselves. We are not saved by our understanding of the law or our ability to keep it, but by Christ’s act of obedience at the cross.  
• In Christ we have a better work than Ada...

In Romans 5:1–11, we learned that justification leads to a restored personal relationship with God. In Jesus, we are reconciled and can rejoice in our past redemption, even our present sufferings and our future in glory. Our past is redeemed by the blood of Jesus. Our present is increasingly becoming more like Jesus, and our future is secure.

* Remember and rejoice in all that Jesus has done for you. He died for you while you were ...

This week Paul offered Father Abraham as an example of how to obtain righteousness with God—through Christ by faith alone. We learned that Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness BEFORE he was circumcised. God made a promise to and covenant with Abraham to redeem the world—both the circumcised AND the uncircumcised—and it would be carried out by Abraham believing God and his promises, not by his own keeping the law. Whe...

A jeweler puts a diamond on a black velvet background in order to highlight the stunning beauty of the diamond shining all the more brightly against the dark background. The gospel is the same way—it shines at its brightest when seen against the backdrop of the condemnation of sin and death that we deserve. Knowing our desperate condition—that we are under God’s wrath and hopeless without a Rescuer— makes God’s saving grace in the ...

No one gets a pass. Not the flagrantly immoral and not the private idolater. This is Paul’s argument so far: God judges each person—Jew or Gentile—according to his works. The standard for judging those works is God’s righteousness, explicitly stated in his laws. Both Jews and Gentiles have failed to keep God’s righteous standard. 

What should we do when we hear a word like this? Paul already told us. Stop our mouths. Make no more e...

In God’s mysterious grace, the starting point for hope is to face our desperate, hopeless condition. Our problem is the stain of sin, which we can never scrub away. Sin of exchanging the glory of God for a love of ourselves—that terrible exchange, which trickles down into a hundred other fruits of wickedness.

But there was another exchange. The holy, almighty God we rejected, He made another exchange. The righteous Judge took all t...

Judges concludes with a deeply sobering illustration of what the kingdom of this world is like. While the author doesn’t shrink from revealing the horrors of what humanity becomes when they reject God as king, he nonetheless ends his history of the judges on a hopeful note. He invites us to look through the gloom of “those days” to a new day when “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his [King], and he...

Sometimes, in order to repent and worship God, we have to take a long hard look at what life apart from him looks like. This week in Judges 17 and 18, we saw the ironic and devastating effects of Israel’s rejection of the one true God: “There was no king in Israel, and everyone did right in their own eyes.” The fruit: relational manipulation, deceit, generational sin, the perversion of the priesthood, and death. The pr...