Peace and Joy
1Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we[a]have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we[b] rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3Not only so, but we[c] also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

I love these verses because do a nice job of summarizing everything we have been reading in Romans up to this point. So here we go, in my understanding: In order to gain salvation, we have to be righteous/sinless. We cannot be righteous on our own, our righteousness comes through having faith. And through that faith, we become righteous and we are then therefore justified and able to gain salvation through Jesus.

Even though we have faith, this doesn’t mean that we will not be faced with difficult times. Paul says to rejoice in those difficult times because from hard times, we learn to perservere and that builds up our character. We become stronger people, more confident, and it builds our faith, too. And because of our perserverance and character, we then have hope. Hope does not disappoint us because hope comes from the Holy Spirit.

And why does this hope come from the Holy Spirit? It appears, from what Paul says, that we have hope because Jesus died for us. Paul makes a really great point that it is much easier to die for someone who is “good” than for someone who is bad. That makes me think, there are people that are so easy to like/love, but Jesus died for me and I am a sinner and probably not very easy to love. I make mistakes, I fall short, yet He died for me.