Living Wide Awake: Freedom, Love, and Urgency in a Complicated World

There is a question that quietly follows every person who has ever received grace: now what?

The relief of forgiveness is real. The weight lifted from a life that once carried condemnation is genuine and profound. But grace was never meant to be a destination. It was always meant to be a starting line. And the starting line leads somewhere — into the streets, into the neighborhoods, into the ordinary moments of everyday life where the kingdom of God either shows up or it does not.

Romans 13 presses hard on this question. It refuses to let us settle into spiritual comfort. Instead, it lays out a vision for what it looks like to live freely in God while still living fully in the world — a world with governments, neighbors, debts, and a clock that is ticking.

Authority Was Never the Enemy

The first thing Romans 13 does is go somewhere unexpected. It talks about government. Not in a way that is partisan or politically charged, but in a way that reframes the entire conversation. Every governing authority that exists, Paul says in Romans 13:1-2, has been established by God. Not because every ruler is righteous, but because God is sovereign over all of it.

This was written while Nero was Caesar. Let that sink in. The man who would later murder family members and reportedly blame Christians for the burning of Rome was on the throne when Paul wrote that governing authorities are established by God. Paul's confidence was not in the goodness of the ruler. It was in the sovereignty of the God who rules over all rulers.

This matters because it reorients where we place our hope. Government is not our savior. It never was. Its purpose, as described throughout Scripture, is to cultivate good and to punish evil — to protect its citizens and restrain wrongdoing. It does this imperfectly, because it is made up of imperfect people. But when we expect government to fulfill what only God can fulfill, we will always be disappointed, and we will always be distracted from the actual work we are called to do.

The call for believers is to submit where we can, to honor those in authority, to pay what we owe, and to pray for those who lead. And when human authority directly contradicts God's authority — as it did for Daniel, for the Hebrew midwives, for the early disciples who refused to stop speaking in the name of Jesus — God's authority is the one we follow, even knowing there may be a cost for doing so.

The point is not blind obedience. The point is a rightly ordered life in which God sits at the top and everything else finds its proper place beneath him.