Give Us This Day Devotionals, Volume 6: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians

By Charles Erlandson

Give Us This Day is a unique daily devotional commentary for the entire New Testament based on the ancient method called lectio divina. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," is the method used by the early church and countless Christians through the centuries to read the Scriptures to form and transform the soul more than merely to inform the mind.

Give Us This Day deals in depth with entire passages and their contexts. Rather than selecting only certain portions of the New Testament to write about, Fr. Charles has written a devotional for each and every passage of the New Testament.

Fr. Charles writes for the whole person: he's not afraid to use his sense of humor, and he carefully relates the Bible not only to the individual's life but also to the life of the Church. At the end of each day's devotional, an appropriate Prayer is offered, as well as Points for Further Reflection on the day's lesson. Each devotional concludes with a suggested Resolution to put into effect what the Spirit has stirred up in the heart of the reader during the course of his reading, meditation, and prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725282629

Charles Erlandson

Charles Erlandson is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church and serves as the assistant rector at Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, where he resides with his wife and children. He is a professor of church history and the director of communications at Cranmer Theological House in Dallas. His previous works include Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Quest for Unity in a Diverse Religious Tradition; Love Me, Love My Wife: Ten Reasons Christians Must Join a Local Church; and Take This Cup: How God Transforms Suffering into Glory and Joy.

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Introduction

Welcome to Give Us This Day, the daily Bible devotional I’ve written for every passage in the New Testament. I began to write Give Us This Day in the summer of 2006, in response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit for me to write a daily Bible devotional based on the ancient way of reading the Scriptures known as the lectio divina. Originally called Daily Bread for the first five years of its existence, my daily devotionals began as a daily e-mail I sent out to a growing readership. However, for some time it has been my goal to publish the entire series of devotionals so that there would be a daily Bible devotional for every passage of the New Testament. Some of you have been reading Give Us This Day from the beginning, and I thank all of you who have been its faithful readers over the years.

While I originally wrote Give Us This Day primarily for the Reformed Episcopal Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas at which I was serving as rector (St. Chrysostom’s then, but now called Christ Anglican), I became aware that many others might profit by these devotionals. When I first began writing, I surveyed the other daily devotionals that were out there and immediately noticed some differences between what I was writing and what others had written. I was concerned that most of the other devotionals only dealt with a verse of the Bible for each day, and I could find none that provided a devotional for every passage of the New Testament. I also noticed that what I had written was usually longer than the uniformly bite-sized devotionals that seemed to be the publishing norm. In addition, most other devotionals did not include suggestions for further meditations, and virtually none offered suggested resolutions to help put into effect what God had revealed through a given passage. At the end of each Give Us This Day meditation, I, therefore, offer not only a Prayer but also some Points for Further Reflection and a Daily Resolution.

This particular volume covers Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians (both 1 and 2 Corinthians), and is the xis in an eight-volume series that covers the entire New Testament. Give Us This Day will be made available as a printed book and an e-book and is also available as a daily devotional that is sent each day to those on my list.

Give us this day our daily bread is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.

As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The feedings of the four thousand and five thousand (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.

But He feeds us in other ways. In one of his sermons, St. Augustine expressed his belief that the feeding of the four thousand isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to Grant that we may in such wise hear them [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

However, Christians in the twenty-first century often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your real life. I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today, you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.

Scripture must, therefore, be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the spiritual blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?

The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:

1.lectio—reading/ listening

a.Cultivate the ability to listen deeply.

b.Your reading is slow, formative reading.

c.Your reading is based on previous reading and study.

2.meditation—meditation

a.Gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally.

b.Ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud.

c.Say the passage over and over, noticing different aspects—taste it!

d.Allow God’s Word to become His word for you at every level of your being and to interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas.

3.oratio—prayer

a.Pray—or dialogue with God—over the passage.

b.Interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you.

c.Allow God to transform your thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, and habits.

d.Re-affirm and repeat what God has just told you.

4.contemplation—contemplation

a.Rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you.

b.Rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God.

c.Leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you.

Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food we need to nourish and correct our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect, and our random forages into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.

A Few Words of Advice

1.Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.

2.Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Give Us This Day. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary to keep up with a different Resolution every day: you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure! Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Give Us This Day as it is most profitable for you.

3.If God stops you and tells you to do something different—for example, to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today—drop everything else and listen to Him!

4.Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day—don’t ever let go of it!

Ways to Profitably Eat Give Us This Day

1.Find and use some system for reading Scripture daily. I’ve organized Give Us This Day in the canonical order of the New Testament: from Matthew to Revelation. But many church traditions use a lectionary system of reading the New Testament. With your favorite lectionary in hand, you can read Give Us This Day with the daily New Testament assigned by that lectionary.

2.Give Us This Day was written with the conscious aim of encouraging the reader to think more actively about the act of interpretation. While the literal meaning of the text is always the beginning point, the Bible can legitimately be applied in other ways. I’ve especially tried to suggest that the Bible is best read with the interpretation of the entire Church in mind.

3.I’ve also written Give Us This Day so that it could serve as a reference point for Bible study: in other words, as a kind of commentary to be consulted and not only a daily devotional to be used only once.

4.The Resolutions found in each Give Us This Day are another resource that should not be neglected. It may be neither desirable nor possible to follow the prescribed Resolution for each day. But these Resolutions can be returned to for further reference and used even apart from the devotional for the day.

5.The Prayers of Give Us This Day, many of which have been taken from a variety of historical sources, are also a rich resource that bears repeated use. Together, the prayers form a kind of treasury of prayer that can be used in any of a variety of ways. They especially include several different ways to think about how to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

A Note on Interpretation

Most of us who believe the Bible is the Word of God naturally assume that God intends it all for me, but even if this is true, the question remains as to how it applies to me. This is the task of all interpretation, including teaching and preaching. Historically, the Church has read the Bible in four senses or kinds of interpretations: the literal, allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical. The allegorical meaning, of which so many Bible-believing Christians are afraid, is simply applying a given passage to Jesus Christ or the Church Militant (the Church still here on earth). We interpret the Bible allegorically all the time whenever we read the Old Testament and find Jesus Christ in it, for the literal meaning may be about the entrance into the Promised Land or about kings or about the delicate art of sacrificing animals. Yet we know that such passages also teach us about Christ. The moral sense is also one we use all the time, even if we claim we are only being literal. A moral interpretation of a passage involves applying it to yourself or other Christians. The anagogical interpretation means applying the passage to the heavenly realities and is thus (here goes another big word) eschatological in nature, applying the Word of God to the end things, or the world to come, on which we think too infrequently.

Give Us This Day is designed to be primarily moral in its interpretation because I want each of you to apply the Word of God to your life. But your life is not merely your own: it belongs to Christ, and so we seek Jesus Christ in His Church (allegorical interpretation). And all who are truly Christians are part of the Body of Christ and hopefully part of a local body, and therefore much of what the Bible says must be allegorical in this sense.

May God bless you through Give Us This Day, however you choose to use it, however you allow God to use it in your life. It is, in essence, but one way to make sure God’s people are meditating on His Word even as they pray. Feel free to share it with friends and pass along those parts that may be profitable to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Romans 1:1–17

Out of Paul’s life and into his head. This ought to be interesting, having just finished Acts: to enter into Paul’s magnum opus, his letter to the Romans.

Do you get the idea, reading Romans 1, that Paul thinks that the gospel of Jesus Christ is important? More than important, the gospel of Jesus Christ is to Paul an all-consuming passion that is intimately connected to Paul’s life and the life of God’s people before and after Paul.

There’s a temptation for us Protestants to want to jump immediately to Romans 1:17, to the exclusion of everything else. Which is precisely why I’m not going to jump there. The way I figure it, you’ve probably already heard a lot of sermons and Bible studies on it, and so I don’t want to focus exclusively on it. When my brother was in graduate school at Wheaton College, he took a lot of Bible courses and Church history courses. He returned from Wheaton always talking, for example, about doing violence to the text. I would never want to do violence to the text (except maybe to a text like The Da Vinci Code or something like it!), and so let me begin in the beginning.

Paul doesn’t just begin to talk about justification by faith out of the blue: he begins in a very personal way. When we read Paul’s letters (not wanting to do violence to the text), we should always read them in the context of Paul’s life. I have a radical idea: what if we actually begin at verse 1?

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God, which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord . . . .

The gospel, for Paul, isn’t something outside of him: it’s almost as if the gospel is an inseparable part of Paul himself. Paul understands himself to be someone who has been separated to the gospel of God. Separated, set aside, holy. Surely, Paul is remembering the road to Damascus on which the separation to holiness and apostleship and the gospel to which God had elected Paul became very real and alive. When Paul says called, he means called. For Paul, this took the form of an audible voice.

This gospel is Paul’s, and yet it’s much larger than he is, for he acknowledges that it was promised before through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures. It’s as if Paul sees the entire plan of God and his part in it, and he boldly and courageously accepts God’s call on his life.

But this gospel and call are closer still. The call of the gospel on Paul’s life is not some intellectual idea that has taken hold of him: it’s a Person who called him and knocked him down and became a part of his life. The Christ whose gospel Paul has been separated to is the Christ through whom Paul and others have received grace and apostleship. Paul views his life as in union with the gospel because of his doctrine of the union of Christ with believers in the Body of Christ.

But this gospel that is so close to Paul, this Christ of the gospel, is not Paul’s alone, nor only the prophets. Paul was set aside for obedience to the faith among all the nations. This obedience began with Christ’s obedience, and then Paul’s, and so on . . . and so on . . . . And so, the Romans to whom Paul writes are also the called of Jesus Christ (verse 6): To all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be his saints (verse 7). There it is again, the calling of Jesus Christ to be holy and set apart for His purposes.

The Christ who has so forcefully entered Paul’s life has also entered the life of the Roman saints. Christ is in Paul and Christ is in the Romans, and so Paul is in the Romans and the Romans in Paul. For this reason, Paul thanks God through Jesus Christ because the faith of the Romans is spoken throughout the whole world, and for this reason they are a part of him in his prayers, and he is a part of them.

He longs to see them, because they are one in Christ, and he longs to impart some spiritual gift because he has been taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Paul in the Romans and the Romans in Paul, because all in Christ. And so, Paul can long to come to them because in coming to them he finds Christ and in his coming the Romans find Christ. And Paul can know that when he comes, they will be encouraged together because they have the same Holy Spirit who dwells in them all and makes them all one in Christ. Their faith also is a mutual faith, for it is a common and united faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is what happens when you put together those whom Christ has set aside by His call.

And now we come to that more famous part of Romans 1, but only after we understand Christ in Paul: the just shall live by faith. Paul doesn’t really say that much about this phrase at this point, although he returns to it later. But here’s the bridge between verse 17 and Paul’s union with Christ through His gospel: it [the gospel] is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes (verse 16).

I think we have a tendency to think of the gospel as a thing, a set of propositions about God, the Word of God as a commodity that is imprisoned in paper pages and books. It is an object outside of us and something we objectify.

But to Paul, the gospel seems to be nothing less than Jesus Christ Himself, so that the gospel is not merely about Jesus Christ: it conveys or even is Jesus Christ. The gospel is not just a bunch of words or propositions: Paul says it is the power of God to salvation.

And yet this Christ who is God comes to us in mere words after all. We must hear the gospel, but in hearing, it goes into us. Will it stay? Will it become a part of us? If it does, it cannot remain mere words but must be the Word of God to us.

How? By faith. This faith, mysterious as it is, has the power to apprehend the gospel of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ Himself. This faith, invisible as it is, has the power to see the invisible and make it real, and it has the power to receive the power of God to salvation, which is the gospel, which is Christ.

This faith, mysterious as it is, simply says Yes to God and all that God says, and in saying Yes to God we say Yes to life, and so the just, those made righteous, shall live by faith. I think this can be taken in two equally wonderful ways, and I see no need to choose one over the other, for they are one. It means that by faith we initially receive God and His power of salvation by saying Yes to Him, but it also means that we continue to live by faith, to receive God and His power of salvation by continuing to say Yes to Him and His call and gospel.

So, then, what do we have? That the gospel is not just a thing but also a Person, and this Person is the One who calls you by His Word and Gospel. That by saying Yes to this Person and by saying Yes to His Word (faith) we receive life and that by continuing to say Yes to Him by faith we continue to have life in Him. And that by saying Yes to Him we are united to Him and therefore joyfully united to all who also say Yes to Him who is the Yes and through whom all the promises of God are Yes (the communion of saints).

They say that all roads lead to Rome, but in the book of Romans, all roads lead to Christ!

Prayer

Lord, I believe: I wish to believe in Thee.

Lord, let my faith be full and unreserved, and let it penetrate my thought,

my way of judging Divine things and human things.

Lord, let my faith be joyful and give peace and gladness to my spirit,

and dispose it for prayer with God and conversation with men,

so that the inner bliss of its fortunate possession may shine forth in sacred and secular conversation.

Lord, let my faith be humble and not presume to be based on the experience of my thought and of my feeling; but let it surrender to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Amen. (Pope Paul VI)

Points for Meditation

1.How well and how much have I been saying Yes to God with my life?

2.Meditate on the mystery of faith and how Christ has come to you and works through your hearing Him in His Word.

Resolution

I resolve to find one way to say Yes, I believe and will obey to Christ today.

Romans 1:18–32

I’m outraged! Seriously. And I don’t get outraged. You can safely ignore my rant of the next few paragraphs if you want, because it won’t even make it into the final version of Give Us This Day when I turn it into a book with a devotion for every passage of the New Testament.

I don’t even know where to put today’s Give Us This Day because the editors of the 1928 Prayer Book lectionary I am following for these devotions have removed Romans 1:18–32 with all the skill of a surgeon. Except that it’s like a surgeon who was called upon to do plastic surgery and took out a kidney instead.

This has got to be good, the mother lode of juicy passages, for the editors made a point of taking out verses 18 through 32. Monday of Trinity 9, the second lesson in Evening Prayer: Romans 1:1–17. Tuesday of Trinity 9, the second lesson in Evening Prayer: Romans 2:1–16. Why didn’t they just go the whole way and get rid of Romans or Paul altogether?

[Rant off.]

So, what is it that the editors of the lectionary didn’t want you to read?

Things like, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness or Therefore God gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves. Or what about for this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

I’ll bet when those who want to avoid the judgment of God make up their mental lists of Top Ten Wanted passages of the Bible that Romans 1:17–32 is Public Enemy #1, or close to it.

But surprisingly, I’m not going to write much about them. Writing about and judging them doesn’t do my soul much good. Let’s see, who does that leave? I write every Give Us This Day devotional to myself first, as I meditate on the Scripture for the day using the lectio divina. But I do have another audience. As I write this, some of you are receiving it as an email, some of you who pass this onto others, some have read it on my blog, and some are now reading it as a book. I hope that many more people will read this in the future.

And I’m not letting any of us off the hook, because our job today is to hear what the Lord has to say to us, not to them.

I want to make a few, inarguable points from Romans 1, before I learn what they mean for me. First, in spite of assurances to the contrary from a variety of Christians, God is a wrathful God; that is, He has a righteous anger. Why is He angry? Because He is perfectly righteous, holy, and without sin, and He cannot dwell with sin. Second, this wrath is toward those who are evil and are not holy, breaking God’s commandments. Third, those who act against God have some knowledge of Him. Fourth, this knowledge is clear enough from the Creation so that men are without excuse.

If I were writing to those who continued to suppress the knowledge of God and were in danger of God’s eternal wrath against them, I would have something different to say. But since I presume you to be my beloved brothers and sisters in Christ who have received and accepted the knowledge of God, I have something else to say to you.

I’d like to reverse the orientation. If God’s wrath is revealed against those who have no excuse to acknowledge Him because since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were they thankful—what should this mean to us? The opposite. Let me explain.

We, as ones with faith, are to see His invisible attributes by this faith, by which we are justified. From what God has made, we are to understand the Godhead, power, and glory of God. And so, I see intimations of the Trinity, the Godhead, in His Creation. Intimations of a mystery, and not ironclad logical proof. Humans are often seen as tripartite: body, mind, and soul, or body, soul, and spirit. Our reality is composed of the trinity of space, matter, and time, while space itself is composed of three dimensions that hold together in one body, and the one creation known as time is at the same time past, present, and future. Even, strangely enough, our political system of checks and balances reminds me of my Trinity. The Father legislates His holy will, which the Son executes, and the Spirit interprets to His people. Maybe I’m chasing phantasms, and maybe I’m not.

I love not just the nano world that God has created but also the yet uncharted pico (trillionth), femto (quadrillionth), atto (quintillionth), zepto (septillionth), and yocto (sextillionth) worlds, not to mention the giga, terra (trillion), peta (quadrillion), exa (quintillion), zetta (sextillion) and yotta (septillion) worlds. No wonder my favorite book growing up was Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra! (now discontinued.) I love atoms and quarks and neutron stars, black holes, and quasars, but especially the One who created them.

I love biology, the study of life. If my life had taken a different path, I would like to have been a pioneer in the art and science of theobiology, the study of how God is made known by His creation of life. At least I’ve invented a term so that maybe one of my children will invent this science. (Actually, I think there’s already a name for it: natural theology, once called phyico-theology.) Although I can’t say that I love all species of insects (termites, fire ants, and cockroaches [except the giant hissing Madagascar cockroaches] come to mind), I love the God who thought to create a guesstimated eight million species of them.

I especially love man and all of the thousands of different molecules communicating with each other precisely, and the double helix, and the dense mass of neurons in my cranium, but even more the emotions and thought, the science and the art, the work and the play, the relationships and the families and the cultures and most especially the souls that can laugh and cry and love and worship.

If you find these things mysterious and wonderful as I do, then think of how wonderful and mysterious the One who made them is. What power to create not only the obvious glories like the sun and moon and stars but also to be able to do some of His best non-living art while carving solid rock with nothing but the patient brush of windy years.

What glory to be the one who created not only the blinding sun and the heavens and earth but that most deceptively glorious creation of all, the only one who truly images Him: man! Who among us, from the cavemen to the Einsteins among us, from the Mother Teresas and the Teresa of Avilas to the Voltaires and Richard Dawkinses hasn’t feared at an earthquake, tornado, tsunami, or hurricane; gasped at a lake embedded in a canyon or a scarlet sunset; or wept out of suffering or joy or both in a human relationship?

We know God, and we can’t pretend that we don’t. For those of us who believe, how much of the time do we act as if we know Him? And how can we show that we truly know Him and His power and glory?

Paul suggests that the appropriate response to God is to give Him glory and to thank Him, two things we can summarize by the word worship. We were created for God and by God that we might live with Him and worship Him. How else could we possibly respond to Him?

See what you’re missing if you skip Romans 1:18–31? See what you’re missing if you skip any of the words God is speaking to you?!

Prayer

I thank Thee, my Creator and Lord, that Thou hast given me these joys in Thy creation, this ecstasy over the works of Thy hands. I have made known the glory of Thy works to men as far as my finite spirit was able to comprehend Thy infinity. If I have said anything wholly unworthy of Thee, or have aspired after my own glory, graciously forgive me. (Johann Kepler)

Points for Meditation

1.What things in God’s creation reveal Him to you? How does each of these things make you feel towards Him?

2.How many times during an average day do you give glory to God or thank Him?

Resolution

I resolve to worship God with Romans 1 in mind today. This worship may take the form of prayer, a hymn (For the Beauty of the Earth, All Things Bright and Beautiful, This is My Father’s World," etc.), reading a Morning Prayer service, etc.

Romans 2:1–16

. . . in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ (verse 16).

Brhrhrhrhrh! That’s the sound of a massive shiver going up and down my spine and resounding throughout me from the micro to the macrocosm. God will judge my secrets—and yours! That could cause