3 Day Bible Reading Plan - “But Now”

Day 1

• Featured Verse: Romans 3:21–25

  • How do you understand the significance of God’s righteousness being revealed “apart from the law,” and what does this shift mean for the way you relate to both the Law and the gospel?

  • In what ways does the truth that righteousness comes “through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” challenge or reshape your own understanding of how a person stands right before God?

  • What does it mean to you personally that justification is given “freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus,” and how does this free gift confront any tendency toward self-reliance?

“You see, we cannot become righteous by the law. Paul says that there is no one who has ever obtained righteousness in that way. We, on the contrary, have so sinned that we never can become righteous through the law; but there is a new way of righteousness, the way of the righteousness of God; and God’s righteousness is much better than the best human righteousness can ever be conceived to be. There is a righteousness which comes to us by faith in Jesus Christ, not by doing, but by believing, a righteousness which is freely bestowed upon all them that believe.” - Charles Spurgeon

Day 2

• Featured Verse: Romans 3:26–28

  • In what ways does the truth that God justifies the one who has faith in Jesus challenge or deepen your own sense of how divine justice and mercy meet at the cross?

  • When Paul asks, “Where, then, is boasting?” and declares it excluded, how does this confront any tendency you may have to find security or superiority in your own performance or religious achievements?

  • How do you personally wrestle with the claim that a person is “justified by faith apart from the works of the law,” especially in light of the ongoing call to live a holy life?

“God will have the great work of the justification and salvation of sinners carried on from first to last, so as to shut out boasting. Now, if we were saved by our own works, boasting would not be excluded. But the way of justification by faith forever shuts out boasting. Yet believers are not left to be lawless; faith is a law, it is a working grace, wherever it is in truth… From all this he draws this conclusion: That a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” - Matthew Henry

Day 3

• Featured Verse: Romans 3:29–31

  • When Paul insists that faith does not nullify the law but rather upholds it, how do you reconcile the free gift of justification with the ongoing authority and goodness of God’s law in your own life?

  • How does the claim that faith upholds the law deepen or complicate your understanding of what true obedience looks like once you have been justified apart from works of the law?

  • In light of God’s universal lordship and the upholding of the law through faith, what new posture of humility, gratitude, and mission does this passage invite you to adopt toward both the people of God and those still outside the faith?

“From these premises he then draws the obvious and inevitable conclusion, that by obedience to law no man living shall be justified; that so far from justifying, the law proves every one to be guilty and under condemnation. The way is thus prepared for the grand display of the grace and mercy of God announced in the Gospel, by which men are saved consistently with the honor of the law. What the law could not do, not from any deficiency in itself, but owing to the depravity of man, God has fully accomplished. Man has no righteousness of his own which he can plead, but God has provided a righteousness for him. This righteousness, infinitely superior to that which he originally possessed, is provided solely by grace, and received solely by faith.” - Robert Haldane