romans...

For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!" The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.

Romans 8:14-17

Or, as the Message puts it:

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, "What's next, Papa?" God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's coming to us - an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!

For a few years, Paul's letter to the Romans has been an intimidating book for me. So often, it's presented as entirely an academic book, a letter which really isn't accessible to anyone but the scholars and theologians, and its existence is to prove or disprove points of systematic theology. I'm neither a scholar nor a theologian, and many of the conclusions I hear from Romans I'm not comfortable with in light of the entirety of God's Story. So do I just skip it completely? Mark... Luke... John... Acts... 1 Corinthians... 2 Corinthians...

It's time for me to have a little more exposure to this letter I've pretty well avoided. I read through most of it in October. Then, at Soularize, both N.T. Wright and Richard Rohr commented they felt Romans 8 was the most important chapter of the Bible (Notice my use of important rather than favorite. I've always found it funny when people talk about their favorite book or verse of the Bible; we speak of it almost like we discuss our favorite song or movie... Psalm 23. Fix You by Coldplay. Black Hawk Down. oh...).

To help me in the endeavor, I'm going to pick up Bishop Tom's Paul for Everyone.