The Gospel in Romans, Bruce Arnold

I grew up without any religious training or background. Although I had some sensibility that there should be a God who was responsible for creating the universe I lived in, I didn't know who He was. While in college at the University of California at Berkeley I was very interested in studying literature and philosophy, because I wanted to know how one should live and what values one could firmly believe in as a basis for living in this world. Such questions never had been addressed in my family, and I found the attempts of various writers and thinkers to deal honestly with such problems to be admirable. On the President's holiday weekend in February, 1973, I put aside some time from my studies to read the Bible, a book I'd never seriously looked at, although I had had friends who were Christians. The religious world that I had brushed aside from time to time, however, had no appeal to me and seemed to be without logical foundation.

Despite my skepticism, I read on that weekend Paul's Epistle to the Romans, a book which has the reputation for presenting the gospel. What I read engaged my mind and heart in the most warming fashion. Of course, I only understood a small part of what Paul was saying, but it was both strikingly different from anything else I had ever read and disconcertingly more real in its explanation of the human condition than the “great” literature I had been studying. For above all, Paul explains very succinctly why humankind is at the same time hopelessly corrupted and yet capable of displaying virtue. We were created in God's image, that we might contain His life and display His virtues through our humanity, but a corrupting, degrading element, called sin, has entered into our being, deeply frustrating us. Nothing I had ever read explained my condition so fully and so plausibly. My heart was really stirred toward God that weekend by the truth of the gospel and I began inwardly to seek to know God through Jesus Christ.

Within a month I had met some Christians with whom I began to have fellowship in a regular way, and through my seeking and prayer I experienced Jesus Christ over and over again in undeniable, concrete ways as the faithful Savior and Redeemer that the Bible presents. Now after 26 years of walking in Christ, I have experienced His wonderful life power and sustaining grace in countless situations in circumstances and in my daily human living, to the extent that I could now more easily deny my own existence than the reality of the love of God in Christ.