Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today opens with one of the most powerful, dense chapters in the whole Bible, Romans 8. This is a crowd favorite.

It opens by saying, there is therefore now no condemnation

for those who are in Christ Jesus. So of course we love it already. One important thing to do

anytime you see a connecting word in your Bible is to see what it's connecting you to. Words like,

so, because, since, therefore, these words point us to cause and meaning and motive.

For instance, this verse has the word therefore right at the beginning, which means it's connecting

us back to the end of chapter 7, where Paul was talking about Jesus delivering us from

ourselves. The way this connects is, Jesus delivers us from ourselves, therefore, there is no condemnation

for anyone who is in Christ. Even though the individual sentences make total sense on their own,

context and connection can really help us see more of the big picture. Paul revisits themes from

yesterday, the juxtaposition of the spirit and the flesh and how Christ traded his

life for hours. He tells us to set our minds on the things of the spirit. Paul encourages us to

choose wisely what we think about because our thoughts will become our actions. He says we have the

power to do this because we have the spirit, whereas the lost are helpless to fight sin

with anything other than another type of

sin. For instance, they might fight gluttony with vanity or fear with control. But either way,

sin still wins. That is not victory and it is not freedom. Whereas those who have the spirit,

which is all believers according to verse 9, the spirit is the one empowering their lives.

That's what it looks like to be children of God. The spirit is the sign of our adoption into God's

family. His presence in us is the whole reason we can call God our father. And we're not only God's

children. We're co-hears with Jesus. What? That position and relationship will involve suffering, but ultimately glory,

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