- Covered In His Dust
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- Romans Chapter 1
Before you dive into the notes, I encourage you to read Chapter 1 first.
There’s something about sitting with the whole chapter first — giving yourself room to be curious.
What catches you off guard?
What doesn't make sense?
Where is that?
Who's that?
Why?
Those questions will make the notes hit deeper.
I’m just gonna throw this out there.
The Book of Romans can change your life.
If Christ is your Lord, these words will deepen your roots.
If your faith feels weak, Romans will pour a foundation beneath your feet.
And if you don’t believe, if you’ve been watching from a distance, I want you to know—
I’m praying for you.
Before I hit send on these notes each week, I’ll pray.
You’ll be on my heart.
You’ll be on my lips.
Every
single
time.
When we were last together, we’d just finished the Book of Acts.
Paul had finally arrived in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, the center of Caesar’s world.
After surviving a violent storm and being shipwrecked on the island of Malta, Paul was taken to Rome as a prisoner. By God’s mercy, he was allowed to live in a rented home under house arrest, with a Roman guard by his side.
The chains on his wrists didn’t stop the gospel.
The locked door didn’t stop the people.
As soon as Paul arrived in Rome, he did what he always did: he went to the Jews first. Since he was a prisoner and couldn’t go to the synagogue, he called the leaders together, and they came to him.
Even in chains, Paul carried authority.
He told them he’d done nothing against the Jewish people or their customs, and that the Romans themselves had found no reason for the death penalty. But because of the accusations, he was forced to appeal to Caesar.
In other words, Paul was not bound for breaking the law.
He was bound because he refused to stop proclaiming that Jesus is the Messiah.
“Some were convinced by what he said, but others disbelieved.”
Did you catch that?
When Paul spoke to the Jewish leaders in Rome, the text doesn’t say none believed.
It doesn’t even say only the Gentiles believed.
It says “some were convinced.”
That means even in a city dominated by Roman power and Roman gods, the gospel still pierced Jewish hearts. God was still keeping His promise to Israel.
This is important because it shows that Paul’s message wasn’t a rejection of the Jews. He wasn’t abandoning them. He was showing that the hope of Israel, the Messiah, was being fulfilled right before their eyes.
Some refused to see it.
But some believed.
So Paul reached for the same words God once spoke to Isaiah.
The same words Jesus quoted when crowds turned away.
“You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.”
Paul was standing in a long line of messengers.
He wasn’t surprised by their resistance.
He’d seen it before.
So had the prophets.
So had Jesus.
That’s how Acts ends.
Not with death.
Not with despair.
But with the gospel alive and unchained, reaching into the very heart of Roman power.
The Book of Romans is not a continuation of Acts.
It doesn’t pick up with Paul chained in Rome. Romans was written years earlier. Not from a prison cell, but from Corinth, during a brief stop in Greece (Acts 20:3).
By the time he wrote this letter, Paul had already been preaching for nearly twenty years. He’d seen miracles with his own eyes. Been beaten, stoned, arrested, and left for dead. And still, what he was about to write may be the most important thing he ever put to paper.
He wrote Romans from Corinth, most likely during his third missionary journey, as he prepared to deliver the offering collected from the Gentile churches to the poor believers in Jerusalem.
Paul had never been to Rome. He hadn’t planted the church there. But word of their faith had reached him, and it stirred something deep in his heart.
“First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.”
Paul had prayed and waited for the day he could be with them.
And until he could, he wrote.
Romans wasn’t written to fix problems like the letters to the Corinthians. It wasn’t written to confront false teaching like in Galatians. It wasn’t driven by church drama or spiritual confusion.
This was different.
Paul wrote to the believers in Rome to strengthen their faith,
to unite Jew and Gentile as one body in Christ,
to anchor them in the truth of the gospel,
and to prepare them for the greater mission God was calling them into.
Paul had a plan.
He wanted to use Rome as a launch point to take the gospel further, to Spain, to the very ends of the known world.
This letter was Paul’s masterpiece.
When Paul talks about the “church,” don’t picture a building. The early church met in homes. It was a body of believers, scattered, but connected. Under pressure, but deeply rooted. Hungry for truth, and willing to suffer for it.
This letter would be passed from hand to hand and it would be read out loud in living rooms.
And it would change everything.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
The word servant here is doulos in Greek.
It doesn’t mean ‘assistant’ or ‘volunteer.’
It means slave.
Bondservant.
One who’s been bought.
One who’s owned.
One whose life is no longer their own.
Paul is saying, right from the first line, I belong to Jesus.
I do what He says.
I go where He sends me.
My life is not mine anymore.
Can we just slow down here for a minute?
Can we sit with those words like we’re standing in the Louvre, staring at the Mona Lisa?
You wouldn’t just walk past, right?
Let’s soak it in.
Paul’s not ashamed to say he’s a slave.
As a matter of fact, he’s anchoring his entire identity in it.
Do we?
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
Paul had gotten a letter from the high priest giving him permission to hunt Christians. He was on his way to Damascus when everything unraveled.
A light from heaven flashed.
He fell to the ground.
And a voice called his name.
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
In a moment, the hunter became the one who was found. The persecutor became the preacher. The man carrying orders from the high priest was stopped by the voice of the true High Priest.
God didn’t just stop him.
God called him.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
Before Paul was born, he was set apart.
Before the road to Damascus.
Before the letters of rage.
Before the stoning of Stephen.
God had already chosen him.
“But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace,”
Paul wasn’t just intercepted.
He was appointed.
Called.
Marked by grace.
Set apart from his mother’s womb for the gospel of God.
We’re used to hearing the phrase “the gospel of Jesus Christ.” But Paul opens this letter with something even deeper. He writes, “The Gospel of God.”
The word gospel means good news. But this isn’t just good news about how to live a better life. It isn’t even just the story of Jesus entering the world. It’s the good news that starts in the heart of the Father.
The gospel of God.
His plan.
His initiative.
His righteousness on display.
Paul isn’t introducing a new religion to the Jews.
He’s revealing what God has been unfolding from the very beginning.
That’s what makes this letter so different.
The word God shows up 153 times in this letter.
That’s more than any other book in the New Testament.
Before we talk about sin,
or salvation,
or the law,
we have to start with this:
Who is God?
And what has He done?
Because if we get Him wrong,
everything else will crumble underneath us.
We need to get back to God.
We need to get right with God.
There are three words Paul returns to again and again, like markers guiding us through the heart of this letter.
The word law appears 78 times,
righteousness is used 66 times,
and faith, 62.
Each one builds on the other.
The law reveals our sin.
Righteousness reveals God's standard.
Faith is the only way we can be made right.
We can’t be made right by the law of Moses.
Not by our effort.
Not by our performance.
But by what Paul will later call the law of faith.
“Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.”
What you can expect.
Scholars and pastors across generations have pointed to Romans 1:16–17 as the summary of everything Paul is about to say.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”
These two verses are the doorway. Everything that comes after them walks through this frame.
The gospel isn’t advice, philosophy, or a path to self-improvement.
It isn’t a system to follow.
It is the power of God.
It makes dead people alive again.
We covered ONE verse of Romans 1.
Don’t worry. We won’t go this slow every week. But we needed to start here. Slow, careful and grounded.
Because if we don’t understand who Paul is, if we don’t understand what the gospel really is, if we miss that this letter is about God, not just about us, we’ll move too fast and miss what matters most.
Paul doesn’t open with his resume, he opens with who he is.
A servant.
A slave.
Called.
Set apart.
And not for ministry or influence or applause.
He’s been set apart for the gospel of God.
And
it
is
good
news.
It began with the Father, it was fulfilled in the Son, and it’s revealed through the Holy Spirit.
So yes, we started slow.
But the foundation matters. Because everything that comes next will be built on what we just uncovered.
We’re only getting started.
I love you,
George
Uncovering Scripture
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George Sisneros is a full-time missionary in Guatemala and the founder of Ordinary Missionaries and the El Rosario Christian Academy for Boys.
He’s been married to his wife, Vonda, for 27 years. He’s a father to nine children, five adopted.
In 2024, George and his wife expanded to Cuba, joining forces with nine pastors committed to transforming lives through the gospel.
You can get George’s newest digital book, Uncovering Scripture: The Gospel of Luke HERE.
“It feels like God is speaking through your devotionals. I’ve fallen in love with His Word again.” Isabell