Romans 8 - No Condemnation

And we live in a world where things even change faster, more quickly.

The cost of living changes.

Technology changes.

Politics change.

People's values change.

When everything around us changes, it's easy to feel uncertain and insecure.

So we start asking questions.

What's going to happen next? I mean, can I handle this? Can my children handle this? What can I really depend on? As Christians, how do we live in the world that keeps changing? Now, we need to anchor our lives to something that does not change.

Over the next five weeks, we are going to study Romans 8.

This chapter reminds us that even when everything around us changes, we can build our lives on Jesus Christ and rely on the power of the Holy Spirit.

Because God's grace, God's power, God's purpose for our lives never change.

Now here's a little bit contest.

The Book of Romans was actually a letter the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome around AD 57.

It's probably 25, 24 years after Jesus' crucifixion.

So back then, the church itself was facing a big challenge.

What happened? Because the church obviously included both Jewish people and Gentile.

Gentile means non-Jewish, right? The Romans, Greeks, Asians, Africans.

But under Emperor Claudius, many Jewish people had been expelled from Rome because he didn't like the Jewish community.

But after Claudius died, the Jewish community were able to come back Now imagine coming back to a community you once knew and a church you were once part of, only to find that things had changed.

Because while the Jewish Christians were away, the church had become 100% Gentile.

No Jewish people anymore here.

So people had different backgrounds, different traditions, different ideas about how to live out their faith.

So the Jewish Christians may have feel that okay, we don't fit in anymore.

And the Gentiles Christians struggle to understand those Jewish people, they got weird traditions.

And they eat certain food.