Exegesis Daily

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. — Paul puts the gospel into one sentence and calls it the load-bearing beam. Remove it and everything else collapses — including the ethics we love to major on.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. — Not "improved," not "forgiven while unchanged." Paul insists on something more violent: the old self is dead, and the continuity we feel with it is illusion.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. — The mouth and the heart are not separate jurisdictions. Paul binds them into a single movement — and we have spent two thousand years trying to pull them apart.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. — You cannot build a life on human effort when the architecture of your salvation is entirely structural mercy. The sequence of verbs changes everything.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. — Paul's argument does not stop at guilt. The same sentence that names the fall announces the grace that undoes it.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. — The most quoted verse in scripture, stripped of sentimentality and returned to its context — a conversation with a Pharisee about what gets judged and...

But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. — The thorn never left. The prayer for removal was...

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. — Worship is not emotional intensity or Sunday-morni...

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. — Paul writes about anxiety from Roman prison. What he offers is not comfort. It is a reordering of what peace even means when circumstances refuse to...

I can do all things through him who strengthens me. — Paul's 'all things' is not superhuman achievement. It is the capacity to remain at peace in poverty and plenty, degradation and honor, without fracturing.