Today, I am reading and commenting on  Romans 15-16.

Paul continues, and wraps up, his admonition to accept those Believers who have different views on how to faithfully follow Christ.  He tells us that we should accept others as Christ accepted us.  If we look at the context of the rest of Paul’s letter to the Romans we see that he did not mean that we should not accept those who openly sin as fellow Believers.  Instead, Paul tells us to take the attitude of Christ who one more than one occasion said something which can be paraphrased as, “Your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.” Let us strive to sin no more and encourage our fellow Believers to do the same.

Paul completes his message to the Believers in Rome by returning to a theme he mentioned at the beginning.  That theme is one of humility in that he expresses the confidence that they already knew what he had told them in this missive.  He emphasizes that what he wrote was merely a reminder of things they already knew.  I believe that if you had asked Paul he would have said that he wrote about these things because there were those who were taking some aspects of Christ’s teachings and twisting them to dismiss other aspects of His teaching.  Paul wrote to correct those distortions, but he emphasized here that he was not better than those to whom he wrote and that they should study both his writing and the Scriptures to come to their own conclusions about how to follow God.  We should not hold the teachings of one person, or even a small group of people, as authoritative, nor should we hold our own understanding as authoritative.  We should study Scripture for ourselves and allow the Holy Spirit to guide us AND we should listen to what other Believers have concluded from their study of Scripture and guidance from the Holy Spirit.

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