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 11-14

Paul continues his discussion of the paradox between our free will and God’s providence.  Our salvation is not the result of any action we have taken and therefore not something which we deserve.  Rather we were saved by God’s grace and mercy because He chose us.  Yet, we must be careful because if we stop having faith, and acting accordingly, God will reject us as He has rejected those who refused His free gift.  Even the fact that God has chosen us does not make us better than others.  Paul’s entire point here is to address a very human tendency: the desire to elevate ourselves above others, to find some way to claim that we are better than other people.  Sometimes, we do that by claiming to be worse than they, to be a better sinner than those others.  This even forms the basis for the problem Paul addresses when he tells us not to condemn others.  If our purpose in telling others that what they do is to tell them, “I am better than you because I do not do THAT,” (whatever THAT is) then we are failing to truly love our neighbor.

In chapter 12 Paul brings all of this together.  I have already touched on his instructions that we should not think more of ourselves than we really are.  We should love each other with genuine affection, not just going through the motions of how we think we should treat others, but actually caring about them.  As an aside I want to note that you cannot truly care about those whom you have never encountered.  In order to follow Paul’s instruction to truly care for others we need to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us.  Otherwise we will find ourselves conforming to behaviors and norms which our society claims are correct.  Those behaviors and norms are those of people who choose to think of themselves as better than others, who choose to think that only some people are deserving of love.  When we should know full well that none of us are deserving of love, but God loved us anyway.  Which is why we should love others, especially those we are tempted to believe are not deserving of love.