To the first commenter on my first blog entry :-)

Hold your horses buddy :-) I've commented on Romans 5:1-11. You're jumping all over the book, especially to chapter 12 and further. In the book of Romans Paul lays out an excellent progression of a life starting from no knowledge of God, through salvation and eventually to the Christian life and church life. I’ll get into more of this in further blog entries. Here is what I see as a shortened outline of the book:

Chapter 1 - talks about the existence of God; we have no excuse to disregard Him.

Chapter 2 – we are all guilty before God. The Jew and the Gentile are both guilty of breaking God’s law.

Chapter 3 – “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28)

Chapter 4 – An example of faith – Abraham

Chapter 5 – Christ’s blood takes care of our sins, gives us a relationship with the Father, and takes care of Satan’s claim on us.

Chapter 6 – We have died with Christ, and now He lives through us. The depth of the power of the cross.

Chapter 7 – An example of trying to live the Christian life in your own power.

Chapter 8 – Living in the Spirit

Chapters 9-11 – this is like a parenthesis in the book, where Paul switches focus to talk about Israel.

Chapter 12 and following talk about Christian living and church life. Paul switches from talking about the individual to “brethren” in 12:1.

Chapters 6-8 are sometimes neglected in preaching and teaching. Preaching is often for unbelievers to be saved (Chapters 1 – 5), and then jump to Christian living and church life (Chapters 12 and following). We cannot skip over chapters 6-8. Sadly, the reason these chapters are skipped is often because the preacher doesn’t understand them. But skipping these chapters produces carnal saints.