Years ago, I was in a hardware store and from a distance I saw someone I knew. Typically, when that takes place, I'll take the time to say "hello", but on this particular occasion, I didn't want to. The man I saw had just created a lot of conflict for some mutual friends, and I didn't want to engage him in conversation because I didn't want to get drawn into the drama. So I pretended like I hadn't seen him. I kept shopping and tried not to be seen. To my knowledge, he never knew I was there, but it felt very strange to try to walk through the aisles of the store while actively hiding from him and pretending I didn't know he was there.

In many ways, that's the way a large percentage of humanity lives their lives in regard to God. Instinctively, they know He's there, but they're doing their best to pretend He isn't while doing everything they can to avoid running into Him. There are consequences for doing this, and a dark side to living with this kind of disbelief that Romans 1:18-32 illustrates.

When you read through the chapters of Romans, it quickly becomes clear that Paul was trying to help the believers in the church at Rome come to a thorough understanding of sound doctrine. He wanted them to be able to understand deeper details about our faith so that their love for one another would grow and their appreciation for the work Christ has accomplished on our behalf would be strengthened. We don't need to be ashamed of Jesus. Rather, we can be joyful and grateful for who He is and what He does on our behalf.

Prayer is a beautiful and powerful thing. When Scripture speaks of prayer, it's describing the privilege we have as those who trust in Christ, to come to God personally, collectively, and directly, and communicate with Him. In prayer, we can praise Him for who He is, confess our sins and struggles, thank Him for the work He's accomplishing in our lives, and make requests for His divine help and intervention.

Various aspects of God's nature are so different from our daily human experience that it can be challenging for us to comprehend them. In time, as our trust in the Lord matures, we may come to accept the fact that these things are true of God, but we'll also probably spend a considerable amount of time wondering how these things work.

So why should it matter to us that God is self-existent? And what difference does it make to trust the fact that God is sovereign over His creation?

God wants us to live righteously, but how can we practice righteousness when, by nature, we're sinful people? And how can anything we do be considered righteous since all aspects of our lives have been tainted by sin? Our God is pure and far above everything He has created, but still His righteousness is made available to us, and in blessing us with it, He remedies this dilemma.

Are we as thankful for God's justice as we are for His love and mercy? Truthfully, as we'll demonstrate in a few moments, God's justice, love and mercy go hand in hand. They compliment and work perfectly together. Still, most often, we tend to be more thankful for God's justice when it's applied to someone else than we are when it's applied to us.

Scripture teaches us that we have been created in the image of God. There are many ways in which we resemble Him or reflect His attributes. Scripture also encourages us to seek to be like Him in how we see things, treat things, and value things. God is empowering us to navigate life like He wants us to, but we also need to acknowledge that while we're learning to be more like Him, He is far above us and is the perfection of all the attributes we're seeking to emulate.

And while some of His attributes can be incorporated into what we value and what we do, other attributes cannot even be replicated because they are unique to God alone.

We can be grateful that our eternally good and gracious God extends those perfections of His nature toward us. He delights to be good to us. He delights to be gracious toward us. He delights to grant us eternal life as an unearned gift.

Many articles have been written to men in particular with advice on how to strengthen their marriages, but please allow me to do the opposite for just a moment.  Today, I'd like to offer a few words of advice to men on how to have a miserable marriage and lose the respect of your wife and children.

The Lord invites us to be people who repent. As our relationship with Him grows, we're invited to continue to practice repentance every time we become conscious of sin or unbelief in our lives. It isn't dreadful to repent, it's joyful because we know our Lord loves us and is eager to welcome us into His presence. He doesn't hate us when we make mistakes. He loves us and invites us to return to Him so we can experience His cleansing.