Romans: The Gospel for Everyone — Week 4 - Romans 2:1-5

Asked how the culture would describe Christians, a congregation offers words like hypocrite, judgmental, and arrogant. This message on Romans 2:1-5 concedes the church has a public relations problem—and that some of those labels have been earned. Paul's "you" is aimed at the religious, not outsiders. Judging is defined as magnifying others' sins while minimizing our own; Jesus' woes in Matthew 23 expose the hypocrisy of cleaning the outside of the cup while ignoring the inside. A simple test follows: are you more enraged at the sins of others than at your own? The pastor offers his own confession of ongoing struggle, modeling that the church is a triage unit for the broken, not a gathering of the perfect. The decisive point is that God's kindness leads to repentance, so why would we ever adopt a different strategy toward those still outside?