The Law taketh away, the
Spirit
Giveth Life
I am alive
in spirit by the spirit of Christ
who lives in me
Christ Sustains my Spirit, through his abundant Grace
His Riches in Grace Fulfill and
Breaths Life into me
What the law could not do with its rules and regulations,
Christ has done
Christ gives Life
Pray for a better understanding of God’s Word
so you may
faithfully share it with those
who do not believe. In the Gospel of Grace
2 Timothy 3:14–15: But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Pray for the ability to share your Christian faith in love.
Romans 14:1: As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions.
Pray for a sense of urgency in your witness of Jesus Christ.
Romans 13:11: Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.
Pray for your confidence in God’s Word
to remain
steadfast as you share it with others.
2 Timothy 3:16–17: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Romans 15:20–21: And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of Him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.”
Pray that you would be a
willing vessel for the
Holy Spirit to accomplish His work.
John 14:16–17, 26: [Jesus said,] “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. . . . The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
Acts 1:7–8: [Jesus] said to [the disciples], “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the end of the earth.”
Pray for the courage to be bold as you live out your Christian faith in your daily life.
Romans 10:13–14: For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
Rome, Italy—Outside the Basilica San Paolo Fuori le Mura,
commonly known as the Basilica of Saint Paul,
stands an imposing marble statue of a man who appears
ready to do battle with the world. Bearded and hooded,
he clutches a Bible in his left hand and a long cross in his right--
but holds the cross over his chest as if it were a sword.
It is a fitting representation of the man whose
writings arguably have done more to rout the
forces of bigotry and tyranny than those of any other figure in history.
Saul of Tarsus, an observant Jew who was renamed
Paul after his dramatic conversion to Christianity,
claimed a divine calling to bring the message of Jesus
to those outside the Jewish faith, that is, to the Gentiles.
His mission ended here when, according to tradition,
he was executed by the authorities of Rome. Hence, the historical irony:
Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome, the theological loadstar
of the Christian church, helped to topple the regime
that could not tolerate
his uncompromising message of redemption.
A relentless evangelist with almost reckless courage,
Paul is the dominant figure in the early decades of the Christian movement.
Of the 27 documents that compose the New Testament, 21 are letters; 13 of them are attributed to Paul. His Letter to the Romans stands apart. Written around 57 a.d., near the end of his career, it contains the most thorough exposition of Christian doctrine in the Bible.
It also advances concepts
considered utterly radical for their time—ideas that would shape
the course of
Western civilization and the American political order.
In his Social Contract (1762), Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Paul disagreed. To the apostle, every person was born into a state of spiritual slavery and death. Everyone stood guilty before a holy God, no matter what their achievements or circumstances: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). His second proposition remains as controversial today as when it first appeared: Jesus was sent by God to set people free, making salvation available to everyone through faith in his death and resurrection. “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” (Romans 10:9).
The last proposition, which follows from the others,
involves an astonishing universalism.
“There is no difference between Jew and Gentile--
the same Lord is Lord of all
and richly blesses all who call on him”
(Romans 10:12).
The sacrifice of Jesus renders null and void the deep,
cultural divisions within the human family;
all are welcomed into God’s new spiritual community.
In a way no ancient text had contemplated, the Letter to the Romans introduced two great themes into the bloodstream of the West:
human equality and human freedom.
No ideas in the history of political thought would prove
more transformative and ennobling.
Some of history’s most influential figures
have considered Paul’s letter their
north star.
Scholars often draw attention to the role of the letter in the conversion of Augustine of Hippo. This saint’s Confessions (circa 400 a.d.) grew out of his meditations on Romans, Chapter 7, with its description of how faith in Christ empowers the individual to prevail in the struggle against sin. Yet Augustine’s epic defense of the faith, The City of God (426 a.d.), also owes an immense debt to the central themes of Romans. “In the city of the world both the rulers themselves and the people they dominate are dominated by the lust for domination,” he wrote, “whereas in the City of God all citizens serve one another in charity.”
More than a thousand years later, when Christendom was racked by a series of internal crises, an Augustinian monk turned to the Letter to the Romans in his own desperate quest to find peace with God. Martin Luther, a professor of the Bible at Wittenberg University, was initially terrified by the concept of the “righteousness of God” as described in Romans, Chapter 1. His insight—what he regarded as a recovery of the gospel of grace—completely upended his life:
I had greatly longed to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans. . . . I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.
Unlike any work of literature or philosophy, it was Paul’s epistle that compelled Luther to launch what became the Protestant Reformation.
He called the letter “the soul’s daily bread,” “
the gospel in its purest expression,”
and “a brilliant light, almost enough to illumine the whole Bible.”
In his seminal treatise, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), Luther
contrasted the liberty of the gospel, properly understood, with “the crawling maggots of man-made laws and regulations” imposed upon believers by church authorities. Luther’s teachings about spiritual freedom—what might
be called a spiritual bill of rights—became a rallying cry throughout Europe.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the themes of freedom and equality in the Letter to the Romans can be discerned in the beloved hymn,
"Amazing Grace,”
written by a former slave-ship captain, John Newton; in the social reform efforts of John and Charles Wesley; in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain; and in the sermons that shaped the Protestant and democratic culture of colonial America. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Jonathan Mayhew preached a widely disseminated sermon justifying rebellion against tyranny. His text was Romans, Chapter 13—Paul’s instruction to believers to submit to political authorities:
Thus, upon a careful review of the apostle’s reasoning in this passage, it appears that his arguments to enforce submission, are of such a nature, as to conclude only in favor of submission to such rulers as he himself describes, i.e., such as rule for the good of society, which is the only end of their institution. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of anything here laid down by the inspired apostle.
John Adams, reflecting on the origins of the Revolution years later, cited Mayhew’s sermon as a factor in persuading pious believers of the legitimacy of political resistance. Mayhew may also have persuaded the more secular-minded Ben Franklin, whose proposed motto for the American seal was “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
The Letter to the Romans gained renewed prominence in the 20th century after the carnage of the First World War. In his Epistle to the Romans (1918), Swiss theologian Karl Barth shook off his attachment to theological liberalism and its illusions of human progress by meditating on the letter’s key doctrines. “The mighty voice of Paul was new to me,” he wrote, “and if to me, no doubt to many others also.” According to Catholic theologian Karl Adam, Barth’s recovery of the concept of man’s alienation from God and his need of divine grace dropped “like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground.” It is surely no coincidence that Barth was one of the first European theologians to recognize the apostasy of Nazism. He also was the lead author of the Barmen Declaration (1934), the first major ecclesiastical challenge to the racist ideology of the Nazi state.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw many parallels in his own life and that of the Apostle Paul. He used Paul’s Letter to the Romans like a battering ram in his campaign for civil rights. In a 1956 sermon in Montgomery, Ala., plainly modeled on Paul’s epistle, King warned American Christians,
in the words of Paul, not to conform
"to the pattern of this world,”
but rather to recommit themselves to the
binding moral and spiritual
truths of the gospel:
Don’t worry about persecution America;
you are going to have that if you
stand up for a great principle.
I can say this with some authority, because my life
was a continual round of persecutions. . . .
I came away from each of these experiences more persuaded than ever before that ‘neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come . . . shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world.
King’s citation, from Romans, Chapter 8—about the relentless love of God in the face of great evil—was a spiritual anchor in his long struggle for justice. Like Paul, his sense of vocation led to persecution, imprisonment, and, ultimately, a violent death.
>>> A New Order for the Ages
Historians debate Paul’s precise motives for writing his treatise to the Christians in Rome. By virtue of its location in the seat of the Roman Empire, the church at Rome was a thoroughly cosmopolitan congregation: a mix of Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, citizens and slaves. Paul told the believers that he planned to visit them on his way to Spain. Instead, the apostle found himself under arrest and taken to Rome to await trial. He made good use of his confinement: He wrote four letters to other Christian churches that became part of the New Testament canon. As a Roman citizen, Paul was allowed a measure of freedom, and for two years he “welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:30-31).
Eventually, not even Rome’s emperors could resist the gospel message to which Paul devoted his life. As historian Ernle Bradford described it in Paul the Traveler, the apostle never hesitated to hurl himself into the center of the storm: “Rome was always what he sought, the heart of power, the heart of darkness, where he could set fire to the aspirations of millions.” Nearly 2,000 years after Paul’s martyrdom, the hope of freedom and redemption burns steadily in nearly every corner of the world.
The Unifying Witness of Peter and Paul
As one enters St. Peter’s Square in Rome and approaches the magnificent basilica, one’s vision is overwhelmed by the sheer size of the structure and Michelangelo’s dome that sits atop it. So it would be understandable if one were to enter it without noticing the two monumental statues that stand at either side of the steps leading up to the front doors of the basilica. Huge statues of St. Peter and St. Paul greet pilgrims at the threshold of the holy place as a testimony to the unifying power of these great apostles. Peter and Paul are twin pillars for our Church, if you will. They constantly witness to us the two necessary elements of our Catholic faith: the service of Church authority (Peter) and the outreach of mission (Paul). That is fitting because we need both their teaching and their grace to guide us in our pilgrimage toward our good destiny.
In the years I spent studying in Rome, I had many occasions to reflect on the reality of Peter and Paul as brothers, co-apostles and holy teachers of the Catholic faith. The Church places these two apostles together in a single common feast day and celebrates their memory as one. Both lived, taught and performed their final ministries in Rome (although at different times), and both gave their final witness in Rome through their martyrdom.
Theirs is a unified witness, but it has two unique expressions, as if, in a symbolic way, the Lord had sent them out “two-by-two” to Rome as he had sent out all his apostles on their missions. Both their differences and their union in the Faith symbolize something that is vital for the life of every believer: that in the Catholic Church all gifts and authentic expressions of faith in Christ find their greatest fulfilment. The Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass for their feast day expresses that concept beautifully:
For by your providence, Father,
The blessed Apostles Peter and Paul bring us joy:
Peter, foremost in confessing the faith,
Paul, its outstanding preacher,
Peter, who established the early Church from the remnant of Israel,
Paul, master and teacher of the Gentiles that you call.
And so, each in a different way
Gathered together the one family of Christ;
And revered together throughout the world,
They share the martyr’s crown.
Many Catholics do not fully appreciate that this union of Peter and Paul is found in tangible form to this very day in the coordination of the pope with the bishops in their guidance of the Church, particularly in administering the sacraments and teaching the Faith. Our Catechism explains it so well:
“Sacramental ministry in the Church, then, is a service exercised in the name of Christ. It has a personal character and a collegial form. This is evidenced by the bonds between the episcopal college and its head, the successor of St. Peter …. This pastoral office of Peter and the other apostles belongs to the Church’s very foundation and is continued by the bishops under the primacy of the Pope” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 879, 881).
Above all, we must never forget that Sts. Peter and Paul were both martyred for the Faith. Their ultimate and greatest testimony to Christ was not in their teaching or in their shepherding of the Church but in their imitation of the Master, even to the point of a violent death. Martyrdom is not an end in itself but rather a demonstration of the ultimate value of loving others (that is, charity) as Jesus did — to the very last drop of his blood (Jn 13:1).
Both Tradition and Scripture place Sts. Peter and Paul at the center point of the Roman Empire in the first century, and we may see in this a divine purpose. Perhaps God wanted the blood of these two great men to form the seed bed of the Church, to nurture the Church at its beginnings with the strongest possible outflowing of grace. The blood of anyone who dies for Christ is of great value, but how much more so is the blood of the two great evangelizers of the world!
As we celebrate the feast day of Sts. Peter and Paul, we must ask ourselves a final question: How will these great apostles strengthen our own Christian witness this year? We may not be called to martyrdom like them, but each of us has our own testimony to give. With Peter, let us reaffirm our fidelity to the Church and to our Catholic identity amid a culture that is often hostile to faith. Like Paul, let us pursue the holiness that alone transforms the world.