“Through Him we received grace and apostleship ...” There are several interesting things in this verse. First of all grace. We tend to think of grace in very passive terms, ie we have been forgiven for our sins by grace. Now this is true, but there is much more to grace than this. Here Paul talks about receiving grace and apostleship to call the Gentiles to faith. Through grace Paul was appointed as an apostle. God gave him the grace to succeed in his mission. Naturally speaking there was no way that Paul should have become an apostle to the Gentiles in the first place, and no way in which he should have succeeded in establishing this weird religion throughout so much of the Roman Empire. God’s grace enables us to achieve much more than we have any right to expect. We should ask God what He wants to achieve in and through our lives, what has He given us the grace to achieve? Then it says we received apostleship, so the term is being used to apply to more than just Paul. Finally, The Gentiles are called to faith and obedience. We so often forget to associate faith with obedience. To believe the gospel is not a choice, but an act of obedience. To refuse to believe is an act of disobedience. The choice is whether to obey God or not, and the consequences are a matter of life or death. And when we do believe in Christ a lives take on a new course, we receive a new life and that life is one of increasing and deeper obedience to God.
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