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Romans 1:30 · World English Bible

Romans 1:30 Meaning Backbiters

backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

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What does Romans 1:30 mean?

This whole list bends around a single hunger: to be seen as larger than others. The backbiter shrinks a neighbor to feel tall, the boaster paints himself up, the arrogant one refuses the debt he owes those who made him.

From the Sufism reading below.

Romans 1:30 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

SUFISM

Sufism

This whole list bends around a single hunger: to be seen as larger than others. The backbiter shrinks a neighbor to feel tall, the boaster paints himself up, the arrogant one refuses the debt he owes those who made him. The cure is small and hidden: do one good thing today that no one will ever know about, so the self stops performing.

Even the parents named here are a window onto the Giver behind them, the first place a person meets a love he never earned and could never repay.

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Live Romans 1:30 today

  1. Do one useful thing today that you will never mention: wash the dish that is not yours, pick up the trash in the hallway, fix the typo without announcing you found it. Let it stay unseen on purpose.
  2. In your next conversation, ask two real questions before you say anything about yourself. See how much room opens up when you are not managing the impression you are making.
  3. When you feel the pull to tell a story that makes someone else look small and you look sharp, swallow it. That pull is almost never about the truth of the story.

Who made you who you are that you have never properly thanked?

The same truth in other traditions

Tao Te Ching 22

Whoever does not display himself becomes clear to others. The one who stops promoting himself stops needing to.

Buddhism

The teaching on the eight worldly concerns names praise and blame, fame and obscurity, as the hooks that drag a mind around all day. Freedom begins when they stop pulling.

Judaism · Pirkei Avot

Hillel taught that whoever chases a name loses the name. The grasping is what empties it out.

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