It's time to reconnect.  We have been in lockdown for a long... LONG.... L..O..N..G.. time.  We are getting ready to return to life and the first thing you need to return to is meeting with people.  God designed us to lie in community and Good relationships keep us happier and healthier, mentally, physically, and spiritually. 

It's that time of year, the time to plant, the time that dead things come back to life.  We see the resurrection in nature every year about this time. Can you imagine a year where every seed buried in the ground didn't rise up? There is a difference between being buried, and being planted. Buried things are dead. Planted things rise up to new life.

What is this Christian Faith?  That is the big question answered in the book of Romans.  Pastor Ian encourages us to consider a simple phrase "more than rules".  This faith is more than rules, more than a get out of hell card, it's more than life, it's an abundant life.  Dive in this week with your group and discuss how much more your faith can be.

Let's recap, we are all sinners, and through faith in Christ we are justified (made right) with God.  That is the great salvation outlined in Romans 1-4.  As we turn the page to Romans 5 we see that being right with God changes everything for us.  It changes our Identity, our destiny, and our response to suffering.

Father Abraham had many sons, and many sons had father Abraham. And I am one of them..... Take a trip way back with Pastor Glen as we look at the illustration of Abrahams faith.  In Romans 4, Paul uses Abraham to illustrate and help us understand that we are all saved by faith all the way back to the Old Testament.  Share with your group how you came to faith and how God has sustained you in times where you had to hope against all hope.

Its been a lot of bad news so far in this book thats all about the Good news.  That starts to change today.  Paul has been laying his argument for Sin, but he will turn the corner to tell us the good news about Gods plan to defeat sin (pssst its already been done).  Join us on this great overview of the first four chapters of Romans from the Bible Project folks.

When you hear the word "religion" what do you think of?  The Jews from the Roman church were banking on their Jewish heritage, knowledge of the law, and their observance of spiritual rituals to keep themselves in a right relationship with God.  But religious experiences and activities don't make us right with God.

We often think of ourselves as better than most, maybe not the best of the best but certainly better than that guy.  The problem is being better than others isn't enough.  Pastor Steve Newman takes a look at what it means to be sinful and deserving of wrath.  We need God.

Romans is a book about good news, but before the good news is good we need to understand why the bad news is so bad.  Paul runs us through a laundry list of Sins and how they separate us from a good God.  He shows us how we have suppressed the truth of God for a lie.  The point isn't to try harder to be good, the point is we need a good God and we need the good news.