I remember many years ago taking an art class at Charlotte Country Day.  It was a class on sculpting with clay and to say I wasn’t a very diligent student would be an understatement of correct proportions.  I was a senior in high school and cared very little for things other than parties and coeds at the time, much to my parent’s chagrin.  But this class had a final project.  We were supposed to make some Greek god or goddess and present it to the class.  Well, not having worked very hard (or at all really) on it, what I had to present was, well, laughable.  It was especially embarrassing when it was compared to the last classmate who presented right before me.  Wouldn’t you know it, the student who presented her beautiful piece on Aphrodite was a girl named Krista.  Krista, just so you know, had walloped me pretty good in an election to be class president so I was already feeling a little touchy around her to begin with.  But them to have her present her truly amazing work on clay before my own was especially embarrassing.  In fact, as I was up there with my poorly executed lump of Hercules, I was ashamed of what I had done.

  Shame, as it would turn out, is a very corrosive emotion and can come about for many reasons in the course of our lifetimes.  It can cause us to be silent when we ought to be proclaiming the gospel and it’s identified by our Author Paul as being something of concern for Christians who handle the Gospel.  Paul, as we’ve noted, is our author of Romans and two things bear very heavily on this particular letter.  First of all, that he’s writing this letter to a congregation he does not know yet.  In other letters of Paul, he’s addressing groups he knew well having evangelized in the region.  In Romans though, he’s speaking to a relatively unknown group of individuals.  He knows some but not nearly all of this burgeoning group of Christians in Rome.  Because he doesn’t know them, Paul goes to extra lengths to explain his understanding of the Gospel in order to avoid confusion.  It’s for this reason that Romans can be so thick a work.  It is thick because it is necessarily meant to carry the weight of the theology of the Christian faith. 

  The second item requiring our attention is that Paul writes Romans as a changed man.  As we know and have talked about over the last couple of weeks, Paul wasn’t always Paul.  In fact, he was born Saul, a faithful Pharisaical Jew.  A Jew who was furthermore entrusted with persecuting the Gospel and followers of Jesus from the Sanhedrin, the highest authority in the Jewish territory outside of their Roman overlords.  Yet this Saul had seen his life turned around on the road to Damascus.  There, he’s confronted by Jesus Christ, blinded and led into protective care.  As he emerges from his blindness, Paul is energized by the Holy Spirit and set upon the work of evangelism.  Very early on, Paul is authorized by Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem to share the Gospel with the Gentiles.  And, to that end, Paul is amazingly successful.  But one should never overlook the fact that his success is likely linked to his persecution from previous times.  Paul would’ve likely known more about Christianity because of the people he’d persecuted.  People like Stephen, the very first Deacon in the Church.  Paul is present at his stoning execution. 

  Paul is, as I’ve said, a changed man.  A man who had seen his priorities completely altered.  The very person in Jesus he’d gone out to persecute had become his master.  Now, Paul felt an obligation to the Gospel.  Having been saved, Paul now felt obligated by God to share this same message with the world that had brought him so much comfort and joy.  And, although his turnaround is quite spectacular, we can’t overlook the fact that all Christians have been changed in a very real, very sustainable way.  We’ve all been acted upon by the Holy Spirit of God.  We declare things to be truths that a great many people disagree with.

  Have you been changed?  This is a vital question to ask and one that is seldom considered within mainline denominational churches.  Can you look back on points in your life and say, yes, unequivocally, I am no longer that person?  These are the kinds of changes that the Holy Spirit brings about.  Even though you might not have been blinded by the Gospel, there should be some point at which there was movement away from the darkness and into the light.