Merely Circumcised

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Don Filcek; Romans 4:1-12 Merely Circumcised

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Morning, welcome to Recast Church.
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I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and a special welcome to those of you that are here maybe just checking things out.
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I recognize that it can be a little bit dicey, checking someplace out for the first time, and so just grateful that you've taken the time to come and join us this morning.
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I hope you make yourself comfortable. I encourage everybody to take advantage of the coffee and the juice and the donuts that are back there, and then also take advantage of the connection time that we're gonna have for just a few minutes coming up at the end of the worship set, just to introduce yourself to somebody you don't know.
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I've recognized increasingly more new faces. How many of you have noticed that around here? So it's a great thing, and something that's great to celebrate, but also something that just puts the onus on us to make sure that people feel comfortable and that we're friendly and greeting one another.
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Here at Recast, we believe that every follower needs three primary things to continue on in their faith with God, their walk with God, and their journey with God.
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The first is that it's really three things that we need to be growing in, not that you have to possess them and then be increasing in them in your life.
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It's growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service. That is the main growth plan that we have here for people here at Recast Church, and so we offer opportunities to grow in faith by hearing from his word and by believing it.
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Our text this morning is gonna be very fundamental text about the necessity of faith, that is what
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I said we should be growing in, the necessity of faith in the process of salvation, and the purpose of this text will be to show us the testimony of two individuals in the
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Old Testament who were considered as righteous because they trusted God by faith.
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I say this often, that what I mean when I talk about growing in faith as a church, and what
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I mean by that as individuals, is that it means that we take in God's word. There really is no opportunity to grow in faith without first coming in contact with a
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God who has promised things to us, who has told us things about himself and told us what he intends to do. So faith requires some level of knowledge and understanding about who
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God is and what he has said to humanity about us and about the way that he's gonna work. So the first step of growing in faith is taking in his word.
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The second thing is believing it. You have to believe it's true. If you just think it's like a novel or it's on par with something that's been written by some fiction author or something like that or just some ancient mythology or something like that, then it's not gonna impact your life at all.
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So you take in God's word, you believe that it's true, and you believe that it's true in a way that you go out and live according to it.
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So how much do you believe it's true? So much that you would go out and base life decisions this next week based on the truth of who
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God is and how he rolls. And we're gonna see that in our text. This is exactly the model, the example of Abraham, the model example of King David, what they did in the
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Old Testament. They serve as a model and example to us showing that all people, whether religious
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Jew, whether somebody who's very religious in their life, and in this context, in the Book of Romans, he's gonna be talking about the
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Jewish religion specifically but anybody who would trust themselves in their own religious actions and their own behaviors and their own patterns and routines of worship, or even the pagan
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Gentile, all need, and by pagan Gentile, I mean the kind of person who just goes out and lives it up in parties all the time, all need faith in order to obtain the righteousness of God that is available through his son,
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Jesus Christ. There is a righteousness from God that's available, and it's only available by faith in his son and what his son has done for us.
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And that is the righteousness that matters. It is a righteousness granted, not a righteousness obtained by works, by doing, by our actions, our behaviors.
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And this text is gonna be one of the most central texts of declaring that to us. And so, if you're not already there, open your
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Bibles to Romans chapter four, verses one through 12. Again, Romans four, one through 12, and we're gonna dive into this text and read it together.
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If you have a device that you can navigate over to the Bible, use that. You can use the Bible that's under the seat in front of you or your own
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Bible that you brought with us. But recast, this is God's precious and holy word written to us.
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This is what he, this is the fuel for faith. This is the fuel that will help you to grow this week.
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And so, not my words, but his words. So let's listen in. What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh?
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For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about. But not before God. For what does the scripture say?
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Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due.
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And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
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Just as David also speaks of the blessings of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered.
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Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised?
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For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him?
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Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.
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The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness would count to them as well.
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And to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised, but also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father
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Abraham had before he was circumcised. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for the glory and the beauty of how explicitly you state that salvation comes by faith.
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That at the end of the day, the only people that you can justify are ungodly people.
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And so Father, that seems like a downer at first when we think and consider about our status and what the scriptures and the book of Romans have been saying to us week after week after week for several weeks now, emphasizing our sinfulness, emphasizing our ungodliness, emphasizing our unrighteousness so that we would know who we are before you to see all the more the glory of your breaking in and saving.
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We are unworthy and you are worthy. You have indeed carried us.
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What we couldn't do and what we couldn't accomplish on our own, you have done for us through the blood of your son.
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And Father, I pray that that very truth, our frailty, our brokenness, our ungodliness, our sinfulness before you would give way to the light of the glory of your beautiful grace and mercy toward your people.
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The wrath that was poured out on the son that we no longer stand under your wrath because of that. Father, I pray that our voices would just rise together in enthusiasm and delight and joy for the salvation that has been granted to your people in Jesus.
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And it's in his name that I pray. Well, you can go ahead and be seated. I just wanna give a shout out to the band and just how grateful
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I am for them and especially Dave. He worked really hard on that. That was a new song that we just sang and he worked on that this week to get that one in there, my request.
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And so I just really appreciate the way that he works, works diligently to help lead us in worship.
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So grateful for him. And if you appreciate what he does, I'd encourage you to just let him know that. Like, that's a good thing too.
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So I encourage you to get comfortable. Keep your Bibles open to Romans 4, 1 through 12 as we're gonna dive into this passage.
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And again, like I always say every week, if at any time during the message, for the sake of your own comfort, if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts or you need to get up and stretch out in the back or you need to go use the restrooms, they're out the double doors down the hallway on the left.
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So, but our goal at the end of the day, what we want most is to keep our focus on God and his word and what he has revealed to us over the remainder of our time together.
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And so I wanna start off by saying just a statement. Faith is one of those words that we're pretty confident we understand until somebody asks us to define it.
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So you have this fuzzy notion that you're pretty confident about how you would define the word faith until somebody says define it.
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And then it's kinda like, wait, what, what? Hold on a second. I've got some memorized things or some quips or some things that I heard from a sermon once or something like that.
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But it can be a little bit hard for us to define. But it's interesting that what Paul does here in our text, he does something that is valuable for us, something that's a little bit different.
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He defines faith for us in the context of an example of a real person in real time and in real history.
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You see, faith is not a thing, a substance that can be defined in terms of, you know, you can walk around it and look at it from the right and look at it from the left and look at it from the top and look at it from the bottom and kinda feel it and touch it and see it.
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But I would suggest to you that you can see it when it's embodied in an individual, when it's in a person, when a person is expressing it, when this person is living it, then you can see it, then you can begin to describe it, then you can begin to define it.
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But it is only in the context of what it is in a person that makes sense. You see, faith cannot be detached from the human element in defining it.
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It is ultimately the response by a person to another person. It requires one who gives a promise and another to trust the one issuing the promise.
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That's what, it requires that. And Paul established very clearly in verses 21 through 31 of the previous chapter, remember that the chapter divisions are not inspired, they're there just to help us out, to be able to find verses and reference it and stuff like that.
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But at the end of the day, what just came before this is significantly comes to bear on what's written here. And in verses 21 through 31 of that previous chapter, he said that faith is essential for us to be acquitted of our unrighteousness and ungodliness.
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We must have faith in order to be acquitted, in order to be set free from the bondage and the slavery to sin and death.
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So for the religious Jew and for the pagan Gentile, faith is the only way for either one to be justified.
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In other words, if you had an upbringing where you were in church the first Sunday after you were born, you were in church the nine months before you were born, okay, and then every day your family was in church three services a week, and then multiple events during the week and all of that, and the only people you ever knew growing up were
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Christian church people. Or if you grew up in a party family where your parents bought the beer for your high school parties.
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The two opposite. Faith is the only way for anyone to be justified, to be declared righteous, to be acquitted of our sin.
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So it shouldn't surprise us that Paul now launches out into two examples who will serve as witnesses from the
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Old Testament, declaring to us that the way, really of the way that faith is the basis for being okay in God's eyes.
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And so he's gonna start off and he selects Abraham to begin with. The father of the
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Jewish religion is really the example here that he highlights for us, and one that any
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Jew at that day and age would have got their attention. Abraham, of course, to us here in the text, if you're reading through the book of Romans in one sitting or you're reading it as a letter and you're thinking about it from that context,
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Abraham shows up pretty abruptly in this text. But to the religious person in Paul's day and age, it would make complete sense for Abraham to show up and really even unannounced in a monologue about religion.
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They would have been like, oh yeah, of course you're gonna talk about Abraham. That makes sense to us. He was the father of the Jews, it says in the text, according to the flesh, what that just simply means is that all
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Jews trace their ancestral line back to Abraham. But it goes without saying that Abraham was also the forefather of the
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Jews religiously as well. It's not just a descendant, it's not just their champion, it's not just their hero, but it's their faith hero as well.
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And so in the overarching story arc of the Bible, I mean, the whole
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Bible is telling a story. I don't know if you're aware of this, but this is very fundamental to your understanding. When you sit down and you read scripture, it's good for you to know the plot lines.
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The overarching story arc of the Bible is that really Abraham is standing at one of those key junctions, and you have to understand why.
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Why is he so significant? What's so important? Well, if you understand the flow of human history and God's working with history, then it's gonna make sense.
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The flow of scripture is this outline. Creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
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That is the story of scripture. That is the story of God's work in human history.
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Stated more clearly in kind of sentence form, God created it all good. Mankind broke it in rebellion against the creator.
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God set out with a plan to buy it back, and one day the creation will be restored to a place even better than it was at the start.
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That is the storyline of scripture. That is what the story is telling us. But Abraham, Abraham stands at a really key point in that story arc, because Abraham is the first move that God makes toward redemption.
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You have the creation, all good, the brokenness, and you have the flood, and you have all of those things that are there in early
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Genesis, and then in Genesis 12, God singles out an idolater that lived in probably what is modern -day
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Iraq and the territory of Babylon during that time, and he calls him by a new name,
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God, the almighty God, the creator, who we rebelled against, reaches down into real human history and grabs a man and makes some promises to him, changes his name, and gives him these three promises.
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He says, I'm gonna turn your descendants into a great nation. I'm gonna give them a great land for the protection of this people, and the protection, really, at the end of the day, the giving of that land is for the protection so that one of their offspring from that nation will be a blessing to all peoples, all nations.
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The entire world will be blessed through one who is born from your family's line. I share all of that backdrop so that you understand just how foundational
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Abraham is to God's plan of redemption, how fundamental it is that Paul is addressing and talking about Abraham here, because it was a real hinge point in the entire history of humanity and relationship with God.
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Mention Abraham in Paul's day, and you would have the attention of any Jew with an earshot. And he begins by a simple question about Abraham here in the text.
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What should we say that Abraham gained? Another way of stating this question, really, in essence, at the core of this question is really, guys, what made
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Abraham special? What made him stand out? What was distinct about Abraham? And the answer is, he begins with kind of answering what didn't make
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Abraham special first. What made Abraham acceptable to God was not his works.
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It was not that he was a super good guy. It wasn't that he would stand out among his people. It wasn't that he was amazing and awesome.
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Did Abraham's obedience and good deeds make him special? Did he gain God's attention by giving to the poor, by going to church every
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Sunday, or being honest with his business dealings? And God looked down upon the peoples of the earth and said,
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Abraham, he's super awesome. I need me one of those. No.
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You see, he's gone on already in the text, really, ultimately, if he was justified, if he was made acceptable in God's eyes by works, then the text tells us he would have cause for boasting.
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He'd have cause for boasting before others, like, God likes me more, I'm better than all of you, nana nana, right?
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Like, some of us know that person. You've lived with them. But by linking the words boasting and justified in the same sentence in verse two, we ought to consider what he has just said to us back in verse 27, because we're only a few verses away from that, but because there's a chapter break, our minds turn off what was before that chapter break, but it's important, because in verse 27, he says, since justification can only come through faith, all boasting is excluded.
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There is nobody who's justified that has anything to boast about. Nobody is acquitted in God's courtroom that can boast and say, it's because I'm awesome.
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Nobody is justified or acquitted of their sin based on works of the law, but only based on faith in the work of Jesus Christ.
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And I love the little addition at the end of verse two, by the way. At the end of verse two, basically, Paul's saying, even if Abraham did, in this hypothetical scenario, have something to boast about, even if he did a really good job, even if he was a really good man, he still wouldn't have anything to boast about before the holy, righteous, and almighty
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God. Not before God, nobody could boast. You see, Paul couldn't bring himself to state even a hypothetical scenario where someone would stand before the almighty
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God and boast. And I love how Paul models something for us here, starting in verse three.
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It's fundamental, it's very important. If you're taking notes, I want you to get some notes down on paper about this section.
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You see, when we find ourselves at a religious question where there are differing views and a variety of religious opinions, a bunch of different thoughts about a religious subject, what do you do?
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Do you go with the one that seems most logical? Do you go with the one that's got the most degrees behind their name?
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Do you go with the one with the most experience, the older person? How do you determine who you're gonna follow in those situations?
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Do you throw up your hands and hide behind a lazy agnosticism that says, I guess nobody can truly know what made
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Abraham special? Or even worse, you have your opinion, you Jews think he was special because he kept the law enough that God liked him, and we,
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Paul and the Christians, think that he was special because of faith? Your truth is true for you and our truth is true for us, you do you,
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Jews. But that's not what he says. What does he say in this text in verse three?
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No, Paul says, hey guys, novel idea. Let's do a Bible study up in here and see what the word of God says about Abraham.
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Let's get into the word, what does the scripture say? What an excellent question in verse three, do you see it there?
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What does the scripture say? Unfortunately, this question is asked less often than it is needed in our lives.
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Think about this, the religious Jews who launched out into teaching justification by keeping the law, by obedience, they said, you can be made right by God, by your works, by the things that you do.
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They missed what the scripture said about the father of their religion regarding his works and his faith.
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They missed a sentence in there, and it's an important and vital sentence.
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And how could that be? How could they miss something so fundamental as to say that Abraham was justified by faith and not by works?
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How could they miss that? I would suggest to you that we see what we want to see so often, and we ignore what doesn't fit our bias.
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We have to be cautious of this as Christians, but this is how we end up with flat earthers and people who think
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Elvis is still alive. I mean, everybody knows Elvis died last year on some remote island. I mean, everybody knows that.
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He's not still alive, come on, folks. No, really, information bias is real. We see data that lines up with our preconceived bias, and we ignore the data that disagrees with our bias, and that is why we must turn to scripture.
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God knew what he was doing when he gave us a text we can turn to time and time again.
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We can verify, we can study, we can research, verify again, test, study, read, obey, and verify once more.
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We've got a text that we can take in, we can memorize, we can work our way through it, we can draw understanding from it and draw life and nourishment from this word.
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It's available to us to study, to know him. And really, for the next 10 verses of our text,
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Paul is gonna lead us all in a Bible study. We're in the Bible, we're doing a Bible study. He is verifying from the law and the writings, really, basically, two major sections, two overarching sections that the
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Jews would have looked at as fundamental. You need to give us some evidence from the first five books of the Bible, of the
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Old Testament, and then something from the rest of the Old Testament to verifying witnesses that will say this before we're gonna believe it.
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And that's the way that the Jews would have processed their theology. And so, Paul is giving them a very technical
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Bible study, saying, here's one person from the first five books who verifies that salvation is by faith, and here's somebody from the rest of the
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Bible. It's gonna be in the Psalms. And so, what he does here for us is seeking to verify from the law and the writings that faith is the basis for acceptance by a
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God who only has wrath toward unrighteousness and ungodliness. And so, he quotes
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Genesis 15, six. That's what we're looking at here. When he says, Abraham believed
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God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. It may come as a shock that such a clear indication of a faith -based righteousness is found in the
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Old Testament. But you can look it up for yourself. There it is. And it's right there to ignore if your bias is toward a works -based salvation.
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If you have the preconceived notion that you can be good enough, then you'll skip this one. But it's there.
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It's there for us to wrestle with. It's there for us to deal with. And Abraham believed God. This means that Abraham took
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God at his word. He trusted God's promises. He listened to the things that God was pledging.
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He believed God was telling him the truth. And then he went out and lived according to those promises.
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And think about this. I think there's something beautiful, the way that scripture comes full circle on itself, from the beginning fall to the way that redemption happens.
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The way that God purchases us back is consistent with the way that we fell and broke the world around us.
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The original fall in the garden was fundamentally about a lack of trust in the almighty creator. A lack of faith in him, if you will.
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And the seeds of the temptation that Satan sowed were distrust. Did God really say?
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And then further, even more emphatically, more direct to the point of sowing distrust. God doesn't have your best interest in mind here is what
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Satan is getting at when he talks to Eve. He knows you will be like him if you eat this fruit.
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And by implication, Satan was sowing seeds of distrust between humanity and our creator there in the garden.
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Saying God is willing to hold you back. That's what he wants. What a pity. Do you people know what you could be if you just disobey and go off on your own?
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Do you know what you could be, how powerful you could be? But God doesn't want you to be as powerful as him.
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And he knows if you eat that fruit, you'll be just like him. Eve says, oh, sounds good, crunch.
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It's so fitting that the human race, which was broken by distrust, would be healed by trust.
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Do you see that? There's a beauty to the way that God works in the gospel. That belief and faith and trust is the mode of our breaking, or disbelief and distrust and a lack of faith is the mode of our breaking, and therefore, trust, belief, and faith are the mode of our healing.
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And that trust is not, by the way, some generic feelings of goodwill that you try to drum up. It was in Abraham's case and in our case, a trust in specific promises that the
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Almighty has given to us. Abraham didn't just muster up a sense of, out of the blue, he's worshiping idols and going along with his father's religion and doing all of that stuff that they did in Ur, in the area of Babylon during the time, and he wasn't just doing that, he just mustered up some sense of, wow,
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I bet there's an Almighty God who created all this, and I bet he's good and kind. He didn't come to that on his own, but he trusted specific promises that God came to him and addressed.
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He will give me offspring. He will make my descendants into a great nation, says Abraham. He will give us a great land and he will bless all nations through my offspring.
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I believe him. I believe him, I trust him. And the end of verse three is, it's crazy important, it's fundamental.
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It actually has divided Christendom. Christendom is split because of a misunderstanding at the end of verse three.
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Abraham's faith was not righteousness. It was counted as righteousness, but it wasn't righteous.
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Abraham didn't drum up faith to have God say, oh, I like that, your faith got my attention, your faith is amazing, your faith is righteous.
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It says he counted it as righteousness. The word counted or credited,
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Paul is going over the top, he uses that phrase eight times, that Greek word counted, credited, reckoned, different translations have it in different ways, but it occurs eight times in the next nine verses.
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And I think that indicates that there might be a theme here, something that he's trying to communicate to us. The theme is that faith is reckoned, it is counted, it is given.
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Or even to think of it in terms of being considered as righteous. Salvation by grace through faith is actually a much more, what
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I think you need to hear here is it's actually a much more passive thing than our human hearts want to believe.
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We want some credit at least for something. At least I believed. But saving faith is believing simply straight up what
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God has said and what he has done. Emphasis on him, trusting him as faithful to keep his word and to fulfill what he has promised.
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Faith is not an act of righteousness. It is a trust in his work through which he credits our account with his righteousness.
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Nobody, nobody except the son of God himself ever possessed on this earth their own righteousness.
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It is only a gift, ever. You've never met a righteous person. You've met a person who displays the righteousness of God.
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And that's only through his spirit living in them. In verses four and five,
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Paul reemphasizes that works has no part in this and he does so through a real common everyday illustration talking about wages, talking about employment, talking about how we work.
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The acquittal of God is not a wage that is earned. Back in Romans 3, 24, Paul already established that acquittal in God's courtroom is established or really rather received by his grace as a gift.
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He's already told us that. It's a free gift. It's free to you. And therefore, the one who believes they are working to earn it, if you believe you're working for salvation, you cannot have it.
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God will give it to nobody who thinks they deserve it or believes that they have earned it.
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Salvation is not for sale. It has already been purchased for you. Salvation is a redemption by God.
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It is him purchasing a sinner back from slavery to sin. And no price can accomplish what the blood of Jesus has already bought for you and I.
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In these two verses is found one of the most profound rejections of any notion of a works -based, actions -based salvation.
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You can't earn it. You can't do anything for it. It is not a wage earned by one who works hard for God because at the end of the day, we've already established well through the previous three chapters that nobody works for God.
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Go back and read it for yourself if you doubt it. Paul has been clear that in our status, without the righteousness of Christ, none of us are able to do any
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God -honoring good at all. No one is righteous. No one does good. No one seeks after him.
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And in verse five, we find one of the most used passages by the reformers in the face of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500s.
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Paul paints an extreme picture of salvation by grace, an extreme, extreme picture. And what he's basically getting at in verse five, if I can summarize, he says that even one who does absolutely nothing in any attempt to please
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God, someone who didn't even know anything about the church, somebody who didn't even know anything about doing good, somebody who tried to do evil their entire life, but believes and turns to God and believes and puts their faith and trust in the
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Son would be justified because they believe in the God who justifies the ungodly, the text says.
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And that one, his faith will be counted as righteousness. This is profound.
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He is painting a clear and powerful portrait of every single person who has ever found the treasure of justification, who has ever found the treasure of acquittal and forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ.
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He is describing every single one of us who have believed that God will acquit us based on the wrath poured out on his
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Son for us. And he is saying, even if you had absolutely zero religious activity, no spiritual work, when you believed in the redemption and justification that God promises, you were counted as righteous.
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Let that sink in. Counted as righteous. What was necessary for you to be saved?
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What did you need? Simply to believe the good news. Trust that Jesus had paid the penalty for your sins.
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No work was necessary before the point of an open -handed reception of this salvation. And the reformers love to camp on one phrase that's found in here.
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It's a beautiful phrase, it's an intentional phrase. It is simply this. He says that those who have done no work must believe in him who justifies the ungodly.
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Justifies the ungodly. What a beautiful reminder. What an important reminder for us of who we are.
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The word selection is intentional. Those who are already, there are some of you in this room that are already thinking about the ways that works are helpful.
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But I mean, you gotta do some good, don't you? You gotta do something right. You've gotta have something in order.
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You gotta line something up. But those who are thinking down those lines need the reminder of what we are.
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Not just merely what we do, but what we are. We are ungodly to such a degree that doing a couple of minor things like working to supply water for several villages in Africa.
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I mean, nothing that you can think of that you can think of as really super good. None of it is worthy of even noting in the scope of his holiness.
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Doesn't even get his attention. Salvation is always, recast salvation is always
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God justifying an unworthy, ungodly person. Every time.
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He never justifies a godly person. It is never him justifying a good person who has served him and worked for him well.
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None of you were there. He has only ever saved an ungodly person.
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He has only ever justified and acquitted and set free someone who knows that they are ungodly.
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You hear that? That's us. That's all of us. This text flies in the face of any religious notions that one must do certain things or clean up their act before being justified.
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Paul uses a second witness to confirm that even in the midst of ungodliness, trust in God is the key.
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Trusting in the God who will justify on the basis of his goodness is the key. Justifying the ungodly based on his goodness.
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So he quotes David as an example of one who understood in the Old Testament that righteousness is counted to a person apart from works, even in the midst of sin.
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The context here is even in the midst of sinning against God. It's not even so much like that you're saying, well
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I didn't do enough work for my employer so therefore I don't deserve the wages. But it's like literally
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I was undercutting my boss. I was literally stealing from the employer. I was literally doing bad when he justified me.
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So he quotes David as the one here. And in the midst of being caught up in the knowledge of his own sin,
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David, read the Psalms, a man who is very, very, very clearly acquainted with his own sin. And in Psalm 32, one and two, he says this.
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David writing, I'm sure the weight of his own sin pressing him down and he says this, he knew who he was, he knew what he was, he knew what he had done, he was well acquainted.
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How many of you would say that there are times in your life where the weight of your own sin presses in on you and you are well acquainted with your ungodliness, well acquainted with your unrighteousness?
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And it presses on you. And this is what David says in a moment like that when he's like actually kind of going, oh gosh, oh my goodness, if he counts against me my unrighteousness,
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I am toast, I am eternally condemned if he pays attention to my sin.
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If I stand before him and he holds this against me, it's over. And this is what he says.
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Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven. David admitting,
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I've done lawless deeds, I've done criminal things, I've done things that are an affront to the holiness of God.
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And he says blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the
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Lord will not count his sin. Does that excite anybody?
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Notion, just even the notion, just even the hint that there's a possibility that God would not count your sins against you.
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You see, David here in this text is giving every indication that he knew what he deserved.
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He knew that he didn't deserve to have his lawless deeds forgiven, he didn't deserve to have his sins covered up.
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He deserved to stand before the Lord God Almighty, the Holy One, and have his sins recounted against him.
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So how could he state with such confidence that there was such a thing as the opposite of that? And I believe that it's because he had come to know the
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God who is faithful to keep his promise of salvation to those who trust him. He obviously had some understanding of atonement and covering for sin, probably through all of the
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Old Testament, symbols and signs and things that pointed towards the God who would justify by redemption, the
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God who would atone. He also had a faith in the forgiveness and the amazing truth that there was a way for a man to be set free from the righteous wrath of God toward his sin.
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David had a pretty amazing understanding of salvation as expressed in these two verses. He's basically saying that none of us can really hope that we would be literally sinless.
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But we need something else. The only hope left to us is that God would somehow forgive our sins, he would somehow cover our sins, he would somehow not count our sins against us.
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All things dealt with by the gospel. He forgave our sins, and he did so by covering them with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And he will not count them any longer against those who are in Christ, why? Because he counted our sins against him at the cross.
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Already counted, already given and accounting for, already reconciled, where? At the cross of Jesus Christ.
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And now for the remainder of the text, Paul will say the word circumcision so much it'll make us uncomfortable. But Paul will bring us back, he's gonna bring us back to Abraham as an example, and the main point is that faith must precede any good work, circumcision just being that external sign that the
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Jews would hold up high and say, well yeah, I haven't, I'm not, at the end of the day, I'm not even just trusting in my good works, but man,
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I've done these external things in order to demonstrate that I am fully, I fully belong to God, I mean,
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I am his because I've done these outside things, and not only that, I belong to his people.
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I mean, I'm one of the, I was born to the right family, I was born into the right place at the right time, and therefore I'm okay.
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The idea of a Christian from birth might come into mind here. My parents were
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Christian, so I must be okay. Or I've attended the right church my entire life, so I must be okay. Or I've even,
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I did that whole campfire, raised my hand with everybody's eyes shut and prayed the prayer, or I walked forward at a tent meeting, or I prayed the prayer at watching
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Billy Graham on TV, or I did these things, and therefore I must be okay because of the external things that I did.
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And the main point here is that faith must precede any good works that really matter. Should we, are we saved unto good works?
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Should we do good works? How many of you think we should do good works? We should do good works, but there's nothing good prior to faith in Christ.
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There is no such thing as a good work prior. We talked about that, we talked about the Greek words and how there's a certain brand of God -honoring goodness that can't happen without salvation and without his spirit resting with us.
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So any works before salvation by grace through faith is not good in the eyes of God. It may be substantially good by an earthly standard, but it has no eternal value, regardless of how apparently loving and sacrificial it might be to our human eyes, because we're not the judge,
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God is. And even the all -important Jewish custom of circumcision was only valuable as a sign of faith already established in God.
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That's what it was, it was a seal, it was a sign, a symbol of the faith that Abraham already had. Now the logical question might be, since Abraham was the father of the
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Jews, and that's what Paul is really addressing, is those who would, in his day and age, ask this question, if Abraham was the father of the
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Jews, was this justification by faith only therefore available for the Jews, only available for those who had been circumcised into the family of God?
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They were set apart by that sign, and so they would assume that that made them at least first in line for this good news.
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But in verse 10, Paul states very clearly that Abraham was justified by faith way before he was even circumcised.
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As a matter of fact, Jewish scholars would even say, you can look it up and study it for yourself, most scholars would agree that there's about a 29 -year gap in Abraham's life between him giving the covenant and believing it, and then circumcision as a sign for him.
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And so Paul concludes two points to this last section that we need, for our purposes, we need to understand.
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In verse 11, he declares Abraham to be your father too. That's why we sang the little
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Sunday school song, you know, Father Abraham had many sons, many sons. Anybody even know what I'm talking about?
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Some of you grew up in the church, those of you that don't, you weren't missing out on anything, okay? Let's just carry it on from here, move forward, we're gonna be all right, okay?
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Especially if I were to sing it, oh boy. But he is the father,
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Abraham is here in this text, kind of stylized as the father of those who take God at his word.
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Not the father of those who are circumcised, not the father of those who follow the law, but the father of those who believe
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God at his word and are beginning to reestablish. In that whole creation, fall, redemption, in that hinge, he's saying, he is the one who first began to re -believe in God.
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Adam and Eve, at one point in the garden, believed in God. They walked with him, they talked with him, they interacted with him, and when
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I say believe, I mean trusted him. And then Satan in the fall, and distrust, to the degree that I would suggest to you that the fundamental reality in humanity is a general malaise and distrust toward God.
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Even those who don't believe in God would still have that in their heart, a distrust toward him, even if he does exist.
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If he does exist, he's cruel, if he does exist, he's mean. That would be the perspective. And so, we have to just think about these things and just get,
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I totally lost my spot here. That's really funny. Totally distracted myself on that one. None of that was in the notes.
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But God is not merely the father of the circumcised, was where I was going. But he is the father of those who take footsteps of faith just like Abraham.
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And Abraham is the model for the Jews and the Gentiles alike. He is our father too. Really, Abraham is an example of the power of faith for anyone who knows that they are ungodly but trust
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God to be a God who justifies, get it, the ungodly. He's the one who justifies the ungodly.
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So, the final point in the text is he is not merely the father of any who trust the almighty
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God for salvation, but he is the father of all who are not merely circumcised.
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And that's where I get the title of this message from. The idea and the notion of being merely circumcised. You see, he is the father of those who walk in the footsteps of faith like Abraham did.
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And so, it's not merely just an external thing. It's not merely a doing that which is on the outside, but it is a heart change where we come back to that place where we trust him, where we come back to that kind of same start as what was in the garden before.
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And we come back to a trust and an implicit trust in him. And that's where I got sidetracked. But I wanna conclude with this amazing and powerful phrase that I see in the text that really stuck out to me and I think you'll get it.
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And that is this phrase, not merely circumcised, that you see in the last verse of our text here. It says, and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised.
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That is, that there's a way of being merely circumcised. It's just merely doing the externals, just merely stepping into the forms of the
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Christian life. Merely doing the things. Do you think about it that way? There is a merely circumcised.
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Like, there is a merely attending church. There is a merely giving to the poor.
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There is a merely serving the broken and hurting in Calcutta, India. As extreme as that sounds, you can do that merely.
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There is a merely digging wells in Africa. There is a merely healing the sick.
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A merely casting out demons. Merely parenting toddlers. Merely preaching the word.
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And even merely singing the praises of God. Merely. Merely.
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Jesus said it this way. And some of the most chilling and stark words uttered on the mouth of our
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Savior. Matthew 7, 22 through 23. Jot it down, you don't need to turn there, but you can look it up later.
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He said this. One that many of us have heard and shuddered. On that day, many will say to me,
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Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And cast out demons in your name?
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And do many mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them,
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I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.
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A word that relates to unrighteousness. A word that relates to ungodliness. A person who's done the external.
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A person who's done all the right things on the outside without ever trusting in the work that God has done for them.
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Some merely prophesied in his name according to this text. Some will merely cast out demons. I haven't even done that.
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Some have done some amazing things. Some merely, I just think this is interesting.
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Some have merely done mighty works. You hear that? Merely done some really awesome things.
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But without the righteousness that comes by faith, you're still stuck in your ungodliness. You're still stuck in your unrighteousness.
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You're still stuck in your lawlessness. Your sins cannot be expiated, cannot be washed away by your good deeds.
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There is no scale. There is no your good deeds on one side and your bad deeds on the other and hope that it measures up.
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None of that. It is only the work of Christ that can save.
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It is not the one who works that is acquitted. It is the one who trusts in the gospel that God has provided.
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It is that one who trusts, that one who has faith, that one who puts their belief in the son of God dying for them and paying the price.
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The one who recognizes their ungodliness, their unrighteousness, their lawlessness and says,
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I can't do this. I cannot save myself. It is that one who is justified.
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It is that one who is redeemed. It is that one who is brought into his family. It is that one he will say,
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I know you. I know you. Well done, good and faithful servant.
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It's that one who has been brought into his family by faith and faith alone.
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If you believe God's precious promises to acquit you based on the grace given in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, then let me encourage you to come to one of the communion tables in the back during this next song that Dave's gonna play and take the cracker to remember his body that was broken for us and then also take the cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed and given to appease the wrath of the heavenly father that was toward our unrighteousness but he took it on himself.
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You know recast? We've only ever been ungodly and he rescued us while we were ungodly.
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No works counted for anything but now in Christ, he has set us free to love him and he has set us free to love others because of his great love first poured out on, poured out for us rather on the cross.
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So let me encourage you this week, really the application is simple, a profound go out this week as one acquitted by faith in the work that has been done for you and then therefore serve your king with gladness and joy.
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Serve him with gladness and joy. He has worked salvation by grace through faith so that we could glorify him all the more and so that should be a great cause for us to go out rejoicing this week.
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Father, I thank you so much for your grace and mercy that comes to us by faith and faith alone. What an amazing system you have put together for those of us, for all of us when we recognize who we were without Christ and our complete incapability of saving ourselves.
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You have carried us and brought us into your family through the blood of Jesus Christ. We have a seat at your table because you have taken us there.
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Our legs wouldn't work, we couldn't sit up, we couldn't revive ourselves and you have done so through your mercy.
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And so Father, I pray that you would make each one of us all the more aware of the calling that you place on our lives to convey this glorious message of hope to those who are hopeless and when we say hopeless, we just mean in a state of incapability of saving themselves.
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Father, I pray that you would give our church a renewed zeal and boldness for sharing this with the world out there, but not neglecting to share it in our own hearts in here.
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That we'd be moved to humility recognizing who we are and that it is you and you alone who have given us the faith to believe and the promises to believe in, in Jesus' name.