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Quick note for new subscribers: We're in the middle of Romans right now. If you just joined us, you might feel like you're walking into the middle of a movie. You are. Here's what I recommend:

Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 5:9-11)
Or go back to the beginning - [Here's the intro to Romans], and [here's the full archive] so you can start from Chapter 1.

Either way works. I just don't want you to feel lost.

Before diving into my notes, I encourage you to read Romans 5:9-11 first (or the whole chapter if you have time).

I include all the Scripture below, but 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.

"When disciples followed a rabbi, they followed him closely so they would never be out of his sight, never be someplace where they couldn’t hear him speak. They followed him so closely that his sandals often kicked up dust."

May you be covered in His dust.

Let's take inventory for a second, because I don't want to rush into verse 9 without remembering where we've been.

Paul opened this chapter with one word. Therefore. And since then he's been handing you things. Not vague spiritual comfort. Actual possessions. Things that belong to you right now if you're in Christ.

He told you the war is over. Peace with God. The end of a hostility you didn't even know you were born into.

He told you Christ walked you into a throne room you had no business standing in, and that you're not visiting. You're standing there. Firmly.

He told you that one day you'll see what Moses only got to glimpse, the back of God's glory, hidden in a rock with God's own hand shielding him.

And then, just when you thought he was done being generous, he said three more words. Not only that.

He told you the tribulation you've been trying to survive isn't wasted. That it's forging something in you. Perseverance. Then proven character. Then a hope so tested it doesn't wobble anymore.

We talked about Cuban pastors preaching under a government that's watching, walking miles because there's no other way to get to church, and coming out the other side with a faith that has weight to it.

We talked about the furnace being His and the fire being His and Him not wasting a single degree of the heat.

And underneath all of it, he told you why any of this is even possible. Not because you found your way to God, but because while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Love, not as a feeling, but as a fact with a body count. Proven before you ever asked for proof.

If Paul had ended the chapter right there, we would have had more than enough to live on for the rest of our lives.

But if you look ahead to verse 10, you'll find a word Paul hasn't explained yet. It's quiet. Almost easy to miss.

"For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son..."

We already touched on this back when we started this chapter. Peace with God. And if we now have peace, there had to be war. And in that war, there were enemies.

But Paul hasn't fully unpacked what it cost to end a war like that, and more importantly, he hasn't told you yet what it means for what's still ahead.

Because there's a question that's been poking at you since chapter one.

You believe you're forgiven for yesterday. But what about the day you finally stand in front of God with everything laid bare? What about the wrath that Paul spent three chapters making sure you understood was real? Peace with God today is one thing. But what happens on the day everyone answers for everything?

Paul knew that question was coming.

In two words Paul tells you where this is going. He tells you the conclusion up front and then spends the rest of the passage proving you can trust it.

Having now been justified.
Shall be saved.

Two verbs. Two different tenses. And if you miss the difference between them, you miss the whole argument.

Most of us talk about being saved like it's one moment. A single line you crossed. The day you prayed the prayer, walked the aisle, raised your hand.

And that's not wrong. But it's not the whole picture either.

"For by grace you have been saved." Ephesians 2:8

Past tense. Finished. If you're in Christ, that already happened. The guilt, the penalty, the debt you couldn't pay, it's not pending. It's done.

"To us who are being saved." 1 Corinthians 1:18

Present tense. Right now, today, this week, God is still working on you. Still pulling sin's grip off your hands finger by finger. Still rescuing you from the power of the very things that used to own you.

And then there's Romans 5:9.

“Shall be saved.”

Future tense. Not maybe saved. Not probably saved. Shall be saved, from a day that hasn't come yet.

Past. Present. Future.

You've already been rescued from the penalty.
You're currently being rescued from the power.
And you will be rescued from the wrath still to come.

That's the whole story of your life in Christ, told in three tenses, and every single one of them is already true.

Paul doesn't say justified by how He lived, or what He taught, or how He loved.

If you were a first century Jew reading this letter, the word blood wouldn't have been a word to you. It would have been a memory. For us, "blood" is mostly a metaphor. Jews grew up watching blood on an altar their entire life. But for them, it was a smell, a sound, a word they could almost touch.

An animal died so the worshiper could live. That was the whole system. Blood on the altar meant a life had been given in the place of another life, and everyone standing there knew exactly what they were watching.

A life, given in the place of yours.

Something has to be true enough or wrong enough to make a holy God angry. And there is.

Our sin.

The kind that provokes a response from God, the same way it would provoke a response from any judge who takes the law seriously.

"But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed." Romans 2:5

Paul doesn't want you afraid of that day. So he tells you why you don't have to be.

“Much more.”

God loved you when you were His enemy.
Christ died for you while you were ungodly.
The verdict has already been rendered.

Declaring His enemies righteous was the hard part.
Carrying His sons home isn't.

Before we ever got to hold them, we spent years meeting with lawyers who spoke in terms we had to get translated. Appointments with Guatemalan social services, where a stranger with a clipboard decided whether we were fit to be trusted with a child's whole life. Endless paperwork with the adoption agency, documents notarized, translated, resubmitted, lost, resubmitted again. Years of waiting, hoping a phone call would come, and then waiting some more when it didn't.

That was the hard part. That was the part that cost us sleep and worry and more than a few tears in parking lots after appointments that didn't go the way we needed them to.

We did all of that so we could bring them home.

Much more then, so we'd get to feed them breakfast, wrap our arms around them at night, love them on the easy days and on the hard ones, without ever needing to fight a court battle for the right to do it again.

Nobody who spends years in front of a judge fighting for a child wakes up the next morning wondering if they'll still love them by dinnertime.

That's Paul's argument.

God already did the harder thing.

He gave His Son for enemies.

Do you really think He's going lose the people He died to bring home?

Not because he forgot he already said it in verse 9. Because he wants you to feel it a second time, from a different angle, before he moves on.

Verse 9 sounded like a courtroom. Justified. Blood. Wrath. A verdict handed down.

Verse 10 sounds like a relationship. Enemies. Reconciled. A Son given. A life still being lived on your behalf.

Same promise. Paul's just walking you around it so you can see it from every side.

We were opposed to Him in our rebellion, and He was opposed to us in His holiness, because a holy God cannot simply shrug at sin and call it love any more than a good judge can look at evil and walk away.

And then Paul writes a word that's dulled over the years.

Most of us have heard it so many times we've stopped actually hearing it. We nod along. We know, generally, what it means. And somewhere in all that familiarity, we've gotten lazy with a word that cost God everything.

Peace where there used to be war.

And it happened by the death of His Son.

The cross wasn't God deciding to finally become loving toward people who'd earned His disgust. The cross was God doing what love had planned all along, the same love that had been reaching toward you before you ever knew there was a war to end.

Jesus didn't simply die for His people and leave the rest to memory.

He rose for them.
He reigns for them.
He intercedes for them even now, while you're reading these words.

The Christ who reconciled you through His death is actively preserving you through His life.

If Jesus was willing to die for you when you were His enemy, what exactly do you think He's going to do now that you're His child.

The difficult work has already happened. The cross is behind you. The empty tomb stands in front of you. And somewhere between those two realities, past and future, death and life, sits everything that’s still ahead of you.

"He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them." Hebrews 7:25

Present tense.

The risen Christ is not absent from your salvation. He’s the reason it reaches the finish line.

The Christ who died to reconcile you when you were His enemy now lives to make certain you arrive safely home as His child.

We sat with this word back in verse 3, when Paul told a room full of suffering people that they could exult in their tribulations, and it felt almost impossible to believe. Not survive them. Exult in them, from somewhere in the heart that pressure can't reach.

We talked about Cuban pastors who live that word instead of just reading it. We talked about a chain forged link by link, tribulation to perseverance to proven character to a hope that doesn't wobble.

Same word.

Except now Paul aims it somewhere else entirely.

Not in what He's given us. Not in peace, though the war really is over. Not in grace, though you really are standing on ground that won't drop out from under you. Not even in the hope of glory, though that's still coming too.

All of that was true a few verses ago, and all of it’s still true.

But if Paul could tell a suffering church to exult in tribulation, something that by every human measure deserves grief instead of joy, then how much more should we exult in the God who was working through it the whole time. If the shadow was worth exulting in, what does that tell you about the One casting it.

This is the last and the highest of the exultations in this passage, and Paul saves it for the end on purpose. Hope of glory. Tribulation. And now, finally, God Himself.

When Vonda and I told people we were leaving for Guatemala in 2012, not everyone celebrated with us. A good friend of mine sat down and wrote five pages by hand and mailed them.

I remember holding the envelope and feeling how thick it was.

I set it on a shelf.

I knew how he felt. I knew he didn't agree. And I didn't want to feel his anger. So I left it exactly where it was, and every time I walked past it, I stared it down. But I didn't open it.

Whatever he'd written was already true the whole time it sat there. My not opening it didn't delay it or soften it. All my avoiding did was keep me standing a few feet away from a friend who cared enough to write five pages. A friend who was hurt. I was too afraid of what his words might cost me to actually receive them.

We believe the doctrine. We can recite the verse. If you asked us on a survey, we'd say yes, our sins are forgiven, our future is secure, God has made peace with us through the blood of His Son. And we'd call that Christianity, because in a sense it is.

But it's like running a marathon for 26 miles and stopping. There's only two tenths of a mile left. The finish line is right there.

And we stop.

Maybe we stop because nobody ever told us there was more. Maybe we stop because believing the right things felt like enough, and nobody handed us a reason to keep going. Whatever the reason, most of us never make it to the part Paul's actually pointing at. We never get to know the glory of exulting in God Himself.

The letter arrived. Our name is on it. We just never opened it all the way, and we've been living a few feet from something that was already true, afraid of what receiving it fully might ask of us.

Believing there's a letter with your name on it is not the same as reading what it says. That's not what Paul means by receiving the reconciliation.

Not just forgiveness, though that's real. Not just a clean record, though that's real too. What's inside is God Himself, reconciled to you, no longer at war, no longer distant, no longer someone you have to wonder about.

And Paul's entire point in verse 11 is that receiving that letter the way it was meant to be received means you open it. You don't leave it sealed and call that enough. You read the whole thing, all the way down to what it's actually saying. And when you do, you can't respond to it quietly.

"Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." Psalm 63:3

Better than life.

Better than the single thing every human being clings to hardest, which is their own existence. That's not a sentence you write about a letter left in a drawer. That's a sentence you write about a Person you've actually met.

Exultation comes through Christ.

It's Christ who reconciled you. It's Christ who's alive right now, interceding for you. It's Christ through whom you have access to the Father you were once at war with.

Through Him, we exult in God.

Not someday. Not once we've earned it, or proven it, or suffered our way into deserving it.

Right now.

And that brings us back to the question we started with.

You have the answer.

The war is over, and it ended the way wars actually end, not with both sides agreeing to disagree, but with one side laying everything down. You were justified while you were guilty. Reconciled while you were an enemy. And if God did the hard, costly, impossible thing while you were still against Him, there’s no version of the future where He abandons you now that you're His.

And He's not finished, because He's not dead. He's alive, praying for you tonight the way He prayed for Peter before Peter knew he needed it, holding you the way you'd hold a child you spent years fighting to bring home.

You don't have to wonder what's waiting for you on that day. You already know.

Open the letter.

For me, that's never happened apart from His word. Without it, I don't think any of this stays real for long. It's why you're reading this right now. It's why I keep coming back to Romans, week after week, letter after letter, verse after verse, refusing to let any of it stay a fact on a shelf.

The point was never to admire the letter.
The point was to know the One who wrote it.

I love you,

George

Covered in His Dust notes will always be free. If you’d like to support our ministry click here. Write Covered in His Dust in the memo.

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 28 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.