Discussion questions
As we continue our series in Romans 8 – looking at how God’s grace makes us “confident people” – we pick up this week in verse 5. As we all know from experience, uncertainty is the enemy of confidence – so we do what we can to remove as much uncertainty as we can before we venture into something new. That may be what Paul is doing in the first few verses of Romans 8 – answering the big questions about the Christian faith for his audience in order to ease their uncertainty and give them confidence in their new life.
For the next 6 or 7 weeks, we’ll be in just one chapter: Romans 8. Written around 55 AD, Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians somehow helped give them the strength and confidence to endure the coming persecution from Emperor Nero and others – and grow rapidly as a church, until Christianity became the official religion of the empire around 300 AD. The letter builds in its first 7 chapters and then crescendos in chapter 8 – perhaps the single most important chapter in the New Testament – a chapter that might be titled, “The Secret Life of Confident People.” And what were they so confident about? As Paul put it in his letter, their confidence was based on the fact that they were now “in Christ Jesus” – a place where there is now no condemnation, no matter what the “voices” might say.
We’re called by Scripture to have a “childlike faith” – a complete dependence on a good and loving God, our Heavenly Father. And with that dependence comes a sense of purpose – a trust that, if God created us, he created us with a purpose in mind; we were created “on purpose, FOR a purpose.”