I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Romans 4-7.

    We do not earn God’s love, we accept it. As I read through today’s passage I realized part of why Paul’s writing here is sometimes hard to follow. There is a paradox of sorts at the heart of Paul’s understanding of how we become saved. Nothing we can do will earn us salvation. Nothing we do makes us better than anyone else. But we need to have faith that God has made us right with Him in order for that to happen. The best way to describe this is by example. At some point, most, if not all, of us have done something to someone which we know hurts them and which we know we cannot make right. Our natural tendency is to avoid interacting with them or talking with them. If we do talk with them, we tend to keep that interaction to the minimum necessary for the circumstances because nothing we can do can make right what we did. However, that person can make our relationship right by forgiving us. However, if we continue to refuse to interact with them, our relationship will never be made right. Further, because we will not connect with that person again, we continue to do things to them which are hurtful. In order to be reconciled with that person we must do two things. We must recognize that nothing we can do can fix the damage we have done. We must accept that they have forgiven us. In the same way our faith does not make us right with God, it just allows God to make us right with Him.