{"id":5056,"date":"2025-11-21T08:18:40","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T13:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2025-11-21T08:18:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T13:18:40","slug":"romans-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/21\/romans-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Romans 1:1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books.<\/em>

\u201cPaul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle\u00a0and set apart\u00a0for the gospel of God.\u201d

Years ago, I came across this statement from a little girl who grew up on the East coast:

\u201cMy name is Martha Bowers Taft. My great-grandfather was President of the United States. My grandfather was a United States Senator. My daddy is ambassador to Ireland. And I am a Brownie.\u201d

She was blessed. She knew exactly who she was.

If life\u2019s most important question is, \u201cWho\u2019s in charge?\u201d then life\u2019s second most important question is, \u201cWhat\u2019s my relationship to the one who\u2019s in charge?\u201d The apostle Paul knew exactly how to answer that question, and his response is embedded in the opening line of his letter to the church at Rome.

It\u2019s striking how many different affirmations he makes. There are at least seven of them.

First, Paul identifies himself as a servant, which is a translation of the Greek word doulos. <\/u><\/em>What\u2019s interesting is that the very same word is routinely translated as \u201cslave.\u201d In Scripture, every slave is a servant, and every servant is a slave. Jesus invites us to choose a voluntary enslavement to him as our permanent way of life.

What kind of choice is that? Slavery is one of the most reprehensible concepts in human history. Slavery is what we wish had never<\/em> been part of our nation\u2019s history.\u00a0

It\u2019s important to note, however, that there are significant differences between chattel slavery as it came to be practiced in the New World and the slavery that existed in the Mediterranean world of the first century. Within the Roman Empire, approximately one third of the population was slaves. Another third of the population was freed<\/em> slaves. As Brian J. Dodd observes in The Problem with Paul, <\/em>we don\u2019t know of a single freed slave who ever championed the cause of eradicating slavery itself. One of the reasons for such silence is that slavery had actually become a relatively good thing for many people.

Nonetheless, we may be confident that Paul would have taken little delight in saying, \u201cI am a slave. Period.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>

What filled his heart with joy was being able to declare, \u201cI know who I am. I am a slave \u2013<\/em> a slave of Christ Jesus.<\/em>\u201d That\u2019s his second affirmation in Romans 1:1. As Christ\u2019s servant\/slave, he was affiliated with the most important person in the cosmos \u2013 an over-the-top honor.

Third, Paul tells us that he has been called<\/em>. He somehow found his way through life without taking a standardized vocational survey in high school, changing majors three times in college, and experimenting with various jobs throughout his 20s.

Paul\u2019s call was famously more dramatic than that.

His first step to becoming Paul the missionary required a blinding, spiritual knock-down on the road to Damascus. Paul never got over that moment. Even at the end of life he was still amazed that God was willing to redirect a misguided, murderous zealot.

Prior to conversion, Paul had sported impeccable spiritual credentials and had the perfect Sabbath attendance pins to prove it. In Philippians 3:4 he writes, \u201cIf anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more.\u201d In Acts 22:3 Paul adds, \u201cunder Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers\u2026\u201d This would be like a physicist recalling that he was Albert Einstein\u2019s graduate assistant. Paul was everything a first century Jewish mother could ever hope.

Meeting Christ \u2013 or rather, being met by Christ in mid-step \u2013 turned everything on its head.\u00a0

\u201cBut whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ\u2026I consider them rubbish\u201d (a gracious translation, since the Greek clearly means \u201cexcrement\u201d) \u201cthat I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ\u2026\u201d(Philippians 3:7-9).\u00a0

In short, Paul\u2019s identity changed from spiritual super-achiever to \u201cdoulos<\/em> of Christ.\u201d And he never looked back.

Fourth, Paul was an apostolos<\/u><\/em>, a Greek term that meant \u201cone who is sent.\u201d His was not a three-year, five-year, or seven-year \u201cassignment,\u201d but a lifelong commission to introduce a religiously pluralistic society to the message of Jesus.

Paul understood, fifth, that he had been set apart<\/em> for this work. He \u2013 like the prophet Jeremiah \u2013 lived with a keen sense that even before his birth, God had marked him out for a special task.

That task, sixth and seventh, was to articulate the gospel, or good news, of God. To us, that may seem like just another drab religious statement. But in Paul\u2019s time, those were fighting words.

There was already a \u201cgospel\u201d circulating throughout the ancient world. It was the Good News of Rome \u2013 the exciting announcement that a semi-divine figure known as Caesar was in the process of bringing peace and joy to all of humanity (if, that is, you were willing to let Rome dominate every aspect of your life).

By proclaiming a rival gospel, Paul was taking a direct shot at Rome \u2013 and doing so, of all things, in the opening sentence of his letter to that very city.

Paul was blessed. He knew exactly who he was: \u201cPaul, a (1) servant (2) of Christ Jesus, (3) called to be (4) an apostle\u00a0and (5) set apart\u00a0for (6) the gospel of (7) God.

Before “Wild Bill” Wellman became one of the legendary film directors in Hollywood\u2019s earliest days, he was essentially a nobody hanging around studio sets trying to get noticed. Few people even realized he was there.

One day, “Black Jack” Pershing, America’s most celebrated World War I general, dropped by the outdoor film set where Wellman was running errands. The young man had fought in the trenches with Pershing, and the general recognized and admired him. “Bill,” he said, “let me know if there’s anything I can ever do for you.”\u00a0

“General,” said Wellman, “would you be willing to walk with me over to that tree, and then just stand there with me for a while so that I could look important?” The very next day Bill Wellman, who was now The Friend of General Pershing, got the Hollywood job that launched his career.

Who are you standing next to? Who are you standing for<\/em>?

Paul chose to be known as The Friend of a Crucified Carpenter.

We, too, can be blessed. We can know exactly who we are.

By surrendering ourselves to Jesus, we immediately become the loved, chosen, forgiven, called, and cherished children of God.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books. \u201cPaul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle\u00a0and set apart\u00a0for the gospel of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5057,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1029,1037,350,261],"class_list":["post-5056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-11-series","tag-call","tag-servanthood","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5058,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions\/5058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}