Romans 10:9-10 "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart..."

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. (Romans 10:9-10)

Comment:

These verses expand upon Paul’s earlier point: “For Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes” (10:4). In this letter, sent in advance of his proposed visit to Rome, he is trying to make the Christian community already formed there aware of his understanding and interpretation of the ministry of Jesus Christ. (At that time there were many different teachers traveling throughout the Mediterranean basin, with diverse interpretations of Jesus.)

Paul is distinguishing between the religion of obedience to the law that Judaism represents and the religion of faith and personal connection that Jesus Christ introduced through his message and example. “Christ” is the name for the divinity (the creative Oneness with God) that Jesus demonstrated and taught. It is the true identity of every person. Our link to the divine is not through obedience to the law, but through faith in the indwelling Presence of God that allows us to make loving, empowering choices that help to bring into expression the next dimension of spiritual consciousness, which Jesus calls “the kingdom of heaven.” The easiest way to believe in the Christ is to believe in Jesus as a full expression of the Christ and to believe in his example—up to and including his final demonstration that death is simply an illusion, fear of which should in no way hamper our spiritual purpose. This faith does not exist only at the intellectual level; it must be anchored in our deepest feeling nature—the heart as well as the head. And it is not simply a theory. It must be physicalized, brought through us into human expression as we speak the creative Word with our lips and commit our hands to the spiritual work that is ours to do.

Blessings!

Rev. Ed