Romans 1:14-17

14 I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise. 

15 So, as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also.

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. 

17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” (NKJV)

Verse 14 Paul tells us who he has been called to teach to about the Good News of Jesus. Not just called, though, but obligated or indebted to. He was given the Good News by Jesus and was obligated, like a man who was trusted with money from one to give to another, to pass the Good News on to others. We, too, were not given the Good News to hoard to ourselves but to pass on. We are all called to be a witness to the world about Christ.

Verse 15 “… as much as in me is…” (NKJV) Paul was eager to give all that he had to preach the gospel to those who God has led him to. By the time of this writing Paul had endured much persecution, stoning, shipwreck, and imprisonment; yet he still had the greatest of desires to preach the Word of God. Don’t let discouragement, hard days, or persecution stop you from spreading the Word. Don’t discourage yourself. Sometimes we are our own greatest enemy, because we tell ourselves that we can’t do something when God is saying He can do it through us. 

Verse 16: What is it to be ashamed of the gospel? It is whenever you don’t do something, even the little things, because you are worried about what others will think. Maybe you’re sitting in a restaurant and you decide not to pray, because the person at the other table may think it strange. But what if seeing you pray plants a seed in another’s heart that helps them on their path to knowing the Lord as Savior? Or, by chance, encourages another to live out his/her faith in boldness and unashamedly. Being ashamed is when God gives you something to say to someone, you don’t know how that person will react, so you don’t do it. What if what He put on your heart to tell that person was what he/she needed to hear to finally give their lives to God? What if they are the words that bring peace to a tormented heart? The point is that we may be laughed at and scorned for following God’s call, but we don’t see the full tapestry that God is creating so we have to trust that He is creating something beautiful and we are an important part of it.

Verse 17: What is it to live by faith? We believed in God through faith, we believe that Jesus is all He said He is through faith. We have not seen God physically, but we see the effects of God and believe by faith that He is true. Believing is seeing. Once we believed we saw Him more clearly, and over time He reveals Himself more and more to us as Truth. We live by faith by obeying what He says, not because He gave us the full plan and we know exactly what to do, how to do it, and the end result. But, because we trust the One who gave us the command.

~Sarah