4 Or do you disregard the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you to repentance?

5 But because of your hard and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

6 God “will repay each one according to his deeds.”

7 To those who by perseverance in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality, He will give eternal life.

— Romans 2:4-7

10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one.

11 There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.

12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

20 Therefore no one will be justified in His sight by works of the law. For the law merely brings awareness of sin.

22 And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no distinction,

24 and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

— Romans 3:10-12, 20, 22, 23

Thoughts on Today’s Reading

Grace, mercy and love from Christ to you.

The tragedy of sin involves all people. This includes moral people and the piously religious. Moral people fail to live up to the higher moral standards they claim to embrace. Piously religious Jews stubbornly refuse to believe in Jesus as Messiah who is their only hope for reconciliation with God. Outward conformity to human laws in their own strength does not prove godliness and cannot change human hearts.

God has a gracious gift of righteousness for us. The full scope of God’s gift provision is from justification by faith, being declared righteous before God, to sanctification, the ongoing process of our being made holy by God. The gospel’s good news gloriously entered the world. Sin’s firm grasp on sinners lost its power. Though people remain unable to do good, understand the gospel, or seek and find God, God took the initiative to offer salvation to the world. Through Jesus Christ and His work on the cross, God provides the righteousness human beings lack. God did this for all men. (Inspired by BSF’s Study on Romans)