Hey everyone I’m Gary Hoban and welcome to Refinery Life Church.
The four gospels contain the written testimony of inspired writers who report not only the events in Jesus’ life but also the significance of those events.
Paul’s letters were written to exalt Jesus Christ and to explain the meaning of His life and teachings.
They were also written to meet the great needs of the early disciples.
“The Central theme of the Apostle Paul” is the theme for this series based on five of Paul’s major letters.
Today’s message is titled Believe and Behave.
Believe and behave is the central theme of the book of Romans.
Paul understands that what we believe has everything to do with how we behave.
If our belief is wrong, our behaviour will be wrong.
And if our behaviour is wrong, our belief cannot be right.
Our behaviour says more about our beliefs than does our verbal testimony or written statement of faith.
We often tend to emphasise either belief or behaviour to the exclusion of the other, which makes for a partial and imbalanced Christianity.
Paul, a man of balanced faith, assigned equal importance to each.
The first eleven chapters of Romans deal with belief and the last five with behaviour.
In the winter of AD 57-58, Paul was in Corinth at the end of his third missionary journey.
He was about to return to Jerusalem with an offering for the poor.
A woman named Phoebe, who lived in a suburb of Corinth, was about to sail to Rome.
Paul saw an opportunity to send this letter to the church of Rome with her.
Because there was no postal serving in the Roman Empire except for government business, personal letters had to be carried by friends.
Paul was not sure he would get away from Jerusalem alive.
Desiring to leave a written explanation of the gospel of salvation the hands of the Christians at Rome, he wrote this letter, which Phoebe delivered safely to the church.
Realising that this may be his only communication with the church that was so strategically located in the capital of the world, he stressed what he must have felt to be the two cardinal truths of the Christian faith, the belief that results in salvation and the behaviour that results from salvation.