Romans 2:1–11; Romans 1:28–32
If Jesus came back tonight, how would He find you? Pastor Juliet Lyons opens Romans 2:1–11, where Paul writes to a church of Jews and Gentiles torn by judgment and division, and shows that self-awareness is the beginning of growth. God's kindness is His forbearance, the arm holding back the judgment we all deserve, and understanding that is what leads to repentance, forgiveness, and a united church.
Key takeaways
- Self-awareness is the beginning of growth: you cannot change what you do not know needs to change.
- Disunity is one of the church's greatest threats, and the enemy has used it since the beginning to weaken the bride Christ is coming back for.
- Everyone has a fallen mind and everyone is under God's judgment, with no exclusions, so no one has an excuse for judging another person's sin.
- God's kindness that leads to repentance is His forbearance, the fact that the judgment we deserve is being held back right now, not the blessings we enjoy.
- Unforgiveness is a sin that will be judged too, because holding on to it says that what God did for you was not enough for you to do the same for others.
Message notes
Self-awareness is the beginning of growth
Pastor Juliet Lyons begins with her lifelong commitment to leadership development. The first lesson of leadership is that self-awareness is the beginning of growth, because you cannot change what you do not know. She illustrates with a classmate in secondary school who had a serious odor problem that nobody had the courage to mention until another boy blurted it out on a bad day. God’s Word works the same way, giving us a glimpse of what we may not know about ourselves.
Urgency, beauty, and the threat of disunity
Pastor Juliet senses that we are in the last days and that the earth is groaning, yet God’s hand is also blessing the house of God with what she calls the kaleidoscope of heaven, beauty and diversity in the church. But the differences we celebrate can become a breeding ground for division if we are not careful. If Christ came back tonight, would He find us caught up in busyness or ready like the virgins with oil in their lamps?
The story behind the Roman church
Paul did not start the church in Rome. It was likely founded by Roman visitors converted at Pentecost and by believers from Paul’s other churches who gathered in the cosmopolitan city. The remaining Gentile Christians set aside circumcision, food laws, and festivals and simply followed Jesus, and the church grew. Paul wrote Romans, after establishing his credibility in chapter one, to tell them not to let these divisions ruin what God was doing while the world watched.
No excuse, no exclusions
Reading Romans 2:1–11, Pastor Juliet notes that Paul does not start lightly: those who pass judgment condemn themselves because they do the same things. The Jews assumed they could never be judged because they were the chosen people, but God’s judgment is for everyone, first for the Jew and then for the Gentile, and He shows no favoritism. Jesus took on our humanity without sin, bore our sins, and credits His righteousness to those who trust Him. This crediting is called imputation, a legal and accounting term for crediting what was never earned. That should humble us, not make us boast, and it exists so that unity with God can flow into unity in the church. “Unity is the church’s proof that we have the transformative grace of God that the world needs.”
What God’s kindness really means
Many quote that God’s kindness leads to repentance and conclude we simply need to be nice. Pastor Juliet corrects this: the word for forbearance in the Greek means to pause or stop something, and God’s kindness is His arm holding back the just judgment we deserve. If we truly understood what we deserve, we would fall on our faces in repentance. But that forbearance will not last forever, and Romans 1:28–32 warns that those who refuse to retain the knowledge of God are given over to a depraved mind.
Signs of estrangement and hard questions
She lists signs that a person is drifting from God: caring more about the dramas of earth than the thoughts of God, losing awe in worship, wanting to live foolishly, numbing out in sin, setting affections on things with no eternal weight, living a shadow life, feeling no holy fear about separation from God. Then she offers eight principles from Romans 2 with hard questions attached: do my priorities reflect eternal values; whose sin do I tend to judge and what excuse do I use; have I confessed my disrespect for God’s patience with me; how can I extend the grace I have received to those who hurt me; what categories do I put people in; what have I taught that I am not practicing; is my private spiritual life consistent with my public behavior; and how often do I ask for a greater hunger for God and for people to be saved?
Deliver the truth, forgive, and stay united
Pastor Juliet closes by asking whether it still breaks us to think of ourselves as sinners and still overwhelms us to think of the cross. Those who hold on to unforgiveness are holding a sin that will be judged, because it says what God did for you was not enough for you to do the same for them. To be this diverse and still united, she says, is nothing short of a miracle.
