Passage: Romans 1:17

The Big Idea

How do I live the righteous life God wants me to live? The answer is so simple it’s almost silly: always, in every way and in every circumstance, trust His Son.

The Question Everyone Asks

“I know what Jesus did for me. But how do I respond? How do I live this life?”

God has made a way. Trust Jesus:

That He loves you.
That He has paid for your sin.
That He will walk with you and never leave you.
That He will answer when you pray.

Can we do that? Can we take God at His word and believe Him? Or will we try to take things into our own hands? That is what faith is all about.

Read: Romans 1:17

The righteousness of God revealed

This is not the holy righteousness of God that condemns the guilty sinner. It is God’s kind of righteousness, given as a gift to the sinner who trusts in Jesus (Romans 3:21-22; 2 Corinthians 5:21).

William Barclay explains the Greek word dikaioo, “I justify.” Verbs ending in -oo mean to treat, account or reckon a person as something. When God justifies a sinner, it doesn’t mean He finds reasons to prove the sinner was right. It doesn’t even mean, at this point, that He makes the sinner a good person. It means God treats the sinner as if he had never been a sinner at all.

From faith to faith

This difficult phrase probably means “by faith from beginning to end.” As the old commentator Matthew Poole put it, Paul does not say from faith to works, or from works to faith, but from faith to faith: only by faith.