*my notes are unbolded.

[I am writing] to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called to be saints (God’s people) and set apart for a sanctified life, [that is, set apart for God and His purpose]: Grace to you and peace [inner calm and spiritual well-being] from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Saints (God’s people) set apart for God and His Purpose: Find joy in the fruit of being His, peace, inner calm, and spiritual well-being. I’m not sure why we wouldn’t want this. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith [your trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness] is being proclaimed in all the world. And as we receive Him, our faith in who He is and what He does – His Sovereign Provision – becomes the greatest Variable that influences our Life and we Live. This is the preaching of the Gospel, to Live for Him and because of Him. For God, whom I serve with my spirit by preaching the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how continuously I mention you in my prayers; always pleading that somehow, by God’s will, I may now at last come to you. For I long to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift, to strengthen and establish you; that is, that we may be mutually encouraged and comforted by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. -Romans‬ ‭1:7-12‬ amp

That we may be mutually encouraged! Whether we want to admit it or not, we are in this together… to encourage and comfort each other by each other’s faith… by the way we live our lives. What narrative are we living? Do our fleshly lives reveal the unseen?

“The man who for consciousness of well-being depends upon anything but life, the life essential, is a slave; he hangs on what is less than himself… Things are given us –– this body, first of things –– that through them we may be trained both to independence and true possession of them. We must possess them; they must not possess us. Their use is to mediate –– as shapes and manifestations in lower kind of the things that are unseen, that is, in themselves unseeable, the things that belong, not to the world of speech but the world of silence, not to the world of showing, but the world of being, the world that cannot be shaken, and must remain. These things unseen take the form in the things of time and space –– not that they may exist, for they exist in and from eternal Godhead, but that their being may be known to those in training for the eternal; these things unseen the sons and daughters of God must possess. But instead of reaching out after them, they grasp at their forms, regard the things seen as the things to be possessed, fall in love with the bodies instead of the souls of them.” -George MacDonald

Let us not fall prey to what Paul warns us of in Romans 1:25, …because [by choice] they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Let us choose Him and find peace, inner calm, and well-being… let us find Life!