Promises! Promises!

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Don Filcek; Romans 4:13-25 Promises! Promises!

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack, I'm the lead pastor here. And it's a great thing to gather in the name of our mighty
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God. I hope that you believe that this morning, that he is indeed almighty. Our community is in many ways defined by the reality that we are a people of faith.
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We are a people who are gathering together to express our faith and our trust in the God who is great and awesome.
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We trust that he is faithful and we trust that he is powerful enough to accomplish the things that he has promised to us from his word.
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And so, that's kind of a little bit of a teaser into the message here. Our text this morning in the Book of Romans is gonna help us to more accurately define the way that faith works in the process of salvation.
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The Book of Romans is all about the good news, that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The good news that there is a rescue for us, a way for us to be reconciled and made right with God.
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Paul is giving us in this book, and really to the Roman church, a tour of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the way that he has worked salvation into human history, into real history, into our history, even here in Matawan.
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God has provided a way for the ungodly to be acquitted. Hear that? The ungodly to be acquitted while he still remains just and righteous.
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And that's the great glory and majesty and awesomeness of the gospel, is that God remains just, he remains righteous, and we have an opportunity to be acquitted of our unrighteousness and our ungodliness.
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And so, now we're gonna come to a passage here, a text this morning that's gonna carry us from the Old Testament example of Abraham right up to the personal implications of faith for all of us, where we sit, where we live, where we work, where we interact with our families.
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See, God has made promises, and one of the very important things to keep in mind is we're gonna read this text here in a moment and then we're gonna sing some songs and then we're gonna dive in a little bit more in depth into the text that I'm gonna read.
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One thing that we need to keep in mind is the way that a person responds to a promise. Is this kind of an understood thing?
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How many of you ever had somebody promise you something? You've had somebody say, I'm gonna be there at a certain time, I'm gonna meet you at this time.
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We have it happen all the time. You probably had somebody kind of pledge something or say something to you this past week that was like, I'm gonna be there,
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I'm gonna show up for this meeting, I'm gonna do this thing. So the question is, do you obey a promise?
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That doesn't even make sense. Like, I mean, terminology, language, you don't obey a promise.
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What you do is you believe or you trust in a promise. That's the choice.
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When someone says, I'm gonna come and help you move next Tuesday, I'll be there, I'm gonna show up, I'm gonna be there with my muscles and my back and I'm gonna help you lift stuff and put them in a truck at a certain time, when they promise that, the only thing you can do about it is either believe them or not believe them.
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That's the choice that you have when somebody says they're gonna be there. You cannot obey a promise that is given to you.
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And when we assess the promises that are given to us, when somebody says something like that, I'm gonna be there at a certain time or I'm gonna show up for this meeting or I'm gonna be there to help you move, we usually evaluate whether or not to trust a person based upon the character of the one who is pledging the promise, the one who is offering it.
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Will they show up next Tuesday at the time that they promised? Well, that depends on our evaluation of the character of the individual.
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And we're gonna see in our text, God making promises. So let's open up our
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Bible, if you're not already there, to Romans chapter four, verses 13 through 25. Again, Romans four, 13 through 25.
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You can turn over there in, if you have a device that you can navigate over to there, you brought your own
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Bible. If you don't have a device or your own Bible, then grab the Bible under the seat in front of you and you can follow along in that one.
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The print's a little bit small, but hopefully you can follow along. Again, recast, this is God's precious word. This is valuable, this is powerful, this has the potential to change our lives by encountering what
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God has to say to us here. And so Romans chapter four, verses 13 to the end of the chapter.
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For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.
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For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.
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For the law brings wrath. But where there is no law, there is no transgression.
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That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, not only to the adherents of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.
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As it is written, I have made you the father of many nations in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
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In hope, he believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations. And as he had been told, so shall your offspring be.
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He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead, since he was about 100 years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.
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No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.
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That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness, but the words that was counted to him were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also.
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It will be counted to us who believe in him, who raised from the dead Jesus our
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Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our, raised for our justification.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much that the promise comes through faith, that at the end of the day, we know our own frailty, we know our own weakness, we know our own inability, and if we're just honestly assessing ourselves, we know that we fail our own standards, we break our own rules.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would just lighten our hearts with the knowledge that as we study this text and we come to worship you in song right now,
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Father, that we only come on the basis of the grace that has been given to us by faith in you.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would just allow us to freely sing to you as those who are set free by the cross of Jesus Christ, who have hope, beyond hope, that we are saved and we are your children.
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Against all the odds, against all the things that we see around us, we have a hope for eternal life because of what
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Christ has done. So, because of that hope, I pray that we would be all the more enthusiastic, all the more joy -filled as we sing songs together, and as we live this life together as a church,
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Father, I pray that you would continue to open our eyes to the cause for rejoicing, the deep and glorious causes that we have in scripture through your promises, in Jesus' name.
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Our text this morning outlines into a movement from more general or more generic to more specific.
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So, that's kind of a movement of the text, and part of it is that Paul, starting last week in chapter four, is really giving us a
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Bible study. He's modeling a study for us. He had asked, what does the scripture say about Abraham?
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He's basically kind of talking to people from a Jewish perspective, and he's saying, let's think in terms of where the law and where faith fit into a relationship with God.
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So, he's been leading us on a Bible study in those terms, and now he is going from general to the specific so that we see
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Paul begin with, in our text, the necessity of faith for all. That's the first point, the necessity of faith for all.
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And that's in verses 13 through, halfway through verse 17. The guy in the
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Middle Ages who sat down and divided up the chapters and verses didn't always get it right, and in this case, it's kind of half a thought goes with the first and half a thought goes with the second.
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So, 13 through 17a, and then he goes on to explain the second point, God is the proper object of our faith.
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Our faith is to be placed in God, and that's 17b through verse 22. And then he makes it more personal, and I'm just gonna word the last point as a question.
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Do you have a faith like Abraham is what he's gonna say. He's gonna say, this applies to you, church. This applies to us,
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Recast. This is not just something that was for the Old Testament times, this is something that is for us today, and that's verses 23 through 25.
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So, that's the outline. Let's dive into the first point, the necessity of faith for all. That's verses 13 through 17, as I mentioned, and faith is the only way.
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Here's the main idea behind this first point. Faith is the only way to get to God's grace.
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It is the only pathway to God's gift of salvation to an individual. In other words, another way of stating this on the converse, on the flip side of it, is that every other religious endeavor to try to reconcile with God leads to his wrath.
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Did you hear that? Every other attempt to try to reconcile with God leads to wrath. There's only one doorway into his good favor, and that is through faith.
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That is the only pathway in. That is the fundamental meaning of verses 13 through the middle of verse 17, and Paul is making a universal case for the necessity of faith for the acquittal of our sins, for justification.
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The big word that just means in the court of law, standing before the almighty God who is holy and righteous.
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For you to be found not guilty in his court requires faith.
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But we have to begin with the word promise here. We're gonna find that word five times throughout our text this morning, and sometimes when you see a repeated word in scripture in a short section, you can kind of begin to see what the theme is, and he's gonna begin with the promise, and it starts right there in verse 13.
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You see it there in the text, the word promise. Because the nature of God's first movement in human history toward healing our broken relationship with him.
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You remember broken in the garden, creation, fall, redemption, restoration. That's the storyline of scripture.
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And that first movement to buying us back, to winning us back, to redeeming humanity from slavery to sin and death was to make a promise.
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That's step one. The very first thing that God did in his effort and in his attempt and in his divine wisdom to win us back was to make a promise.
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A pretty cool thing. And he made this promise to a man named Abram. He promised him uncountable descendants.
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He said, he took him out one night, and he said, look at the stars of the sky. Your descendants will number like that.
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Or look at the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will be, if you can count those, then you can count your descendants.
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And then he went on to make a couple of other promises. He said, I'm gonna give you a good land that's gonna protect and preserve your people through the ages.
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And he promised that one of his descendants would be a blessing to all nations who, spoiler alert, we know him by name.
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His name is Jesus Christ. And in verse 13, verse 13 states that this promise given to Abraham came through the righteousness of faith.
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It did not come through the law. One thing that's interesting is later on in various letters that Paul wrote, one particular letter, he actually identified that it was 430 years after the giving of the promise to Abraham that the law came.
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Think about that. When was the law given to Israel? All the way after the exodus, before they enter the promised land under Moses.
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430 years after the life of Abraham. So the promise came first.
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The promise is the fundamental thing, the law given later as a part and a portion of covenant with a particular people group at that time.
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But a little graphic on the screen here might help. And so I'm just gonna kind of go through this a little bit.
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I think sometimes I'm the kind of person who needs a graphic from time to time. To understand the flow of this text,
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I think that this'll teach a little bit better than just my words. We start with the promise of God at the top.
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And let's trace it and pretend as if the promise comes to us through the law.
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So as if it goes promise and then law. Let's think about that. Let's imagine, in other words, that God's promise to save us depends on our ability to obey him.
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That's what Paul was going on about in this text here at the start. So just imagine, if you will, that that's the way that it goes.
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And in verse 14, Paul takes up this track and says that if it is only the law keepers, adherence to the law, those who seek to keep the law, if they're the only ones who can inherit the promise of God, then faith doesn't matter at all.
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There is no purpose to a trust in God. It is an employee -employer relationship with God and we're gonna earn it for ourselves.
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But then he goes on to say, then faith doesn't matter at all and the promise would be voided.
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The promise would be voided. If we have to earn it, if we have to keep it, if we have to struggle and strive to please
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God in order for him to accept us, then it would be voided. And the reason is given at the start of verse 15.
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Why would it be voided? Well, what does that mean? God wouldn't be faithful if he says, you have to do these certain things in order for me to keep my end of the bargain.
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You have to do these certain things for me to keep my promise. Then he says at the end of verse 15 that it will result in wrath.
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You see, at the start of verse 15, the law brings wrath. So that in our graphic, the logic of Romans says, if we start with the promise and then make
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God's fulfillment of that promise to rescue come through human obedience, then we cannot escape the reality that the promise comes to wrath.
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Wrath is where it all ends. And the reason is because Paul has already argued carefully and clearly.
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For those of you that have been here for part of this series, and even if you were just here for a couple of the first couple of sermons, you've got enough to know that you're indicted before God.
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We are all lawbreakers. Every one of us to a person is ungodly and unrighteous and lawless.
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All of us. Now, that doesn't mean you're as bad as you could potentially be. That doesn't mean that every unbeliever out there is a murderer.
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But all of us have broken God's laws. All of us have a shame -filled relationship with God and with others.
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So if the law is a prerequisite to salvation, then all of humanity is destined for wrath.
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And that's where the story ends. That's it. If there's not something else to break into this story, that is the story of humanity.
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Full stop. That's where you just close it up and go, good luck. Just go do whatever you want, because at the end of the day, all you're going to incur is
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God's righteous and holy wrath. That's a terrifying thought, right? But at the end of verse 15,
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Paul declares that if we could find a place, if we could find a place where the law had no bearing over us any longer, where we were no longer under the stipulations of the law, in that place, there would be no transgressions.
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If we could find a place free and clear from the law, then we would have no worries of sin.
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It's a bit of a difficult phrase to understand and why Paul says that at the end of 15, and there's different scholars that have talked about it and tried to figure it out, but I believe that what
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Paul is getting at here at the end of verse 15 is the introduction of the true way of salvation.
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In grace, you see, there is a place where there is no law. It's in grace.
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In grace, there is no law. The only place where there is no law over us is the place where the perfect law of God was fulfilled on our behalf.
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You see, in Christ and in his cross, the perfect law was completed. It was fulfilled, satisfied.
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The sacrificial system was rolled up in Christ's atoning, covering work on the cross for our sins.
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At the cross, the moral law was completed, and there at the cross, immoral people were given his righteousness as he took away our immoral actions and our immoral thoughts by paying the just penalty that they deserved.
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That's the dynamic that's going on here. There is a place free and clear of law. It's the foot of the cross.
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And I say this because I think this is part of Paul's central argument. In verse 16, he goes on to say and to clarify that this is the reason the promise depends on faith.
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It had to be God fulfilling the law for us. We couldn't do it on our own, and he's made that clear chapter after chapter after chapter for these first three chapters of the book of Romans.
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We couldn't do it on our own, and we needed a place where the law no longer applies to us. Without faith in the cross of Christ and his sacrifice, you are still under law.
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If that's not where your faith is placed, if you haven't received forgiveness, if you haven't received his righteousness credited to you there at the foot of the cross, then you have chosen the pathway represented on the screen, a promise given, a law to keep, and a certain wrath because you cannot keep it.
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Do you see the flow? Do you see what Paul is on about right now? What he's talking about is this structure of thought.
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And I think if we're just honest, it's a very, it's a tendency in the human heart to default to looking at it this way.
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How many of you would say that maybe at some point in your life, this has been the way that you viewed God? I'm raising my hand, too, because there have been times in my life and seasons where I was like,
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I'm not keeping it up enough. I'm not doing enough. I haven't earned enough, and this is our tendency.
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But that's not what Paul is gonna conclude with here. Let's look at the other side of the picture.
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There's another way to live, and it entails a trust in the Almighty God. We start once again at the top with the promise.
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But if the promise now passes through faith, the text tells us it results in grace.
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It allows God to give you something for free because you don't have any pretense to earn it.
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You don't have any pride in self to say, I've achieved, I've accomplished, I've done it.
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And when you come with those empty hands of faith before God, he says, now there's some place to put my salvation.
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There's nothing there. There's space in your hands to receive it. You come to him with all of your filthy rags of righteous deeds and good things that you think, and he's like, there's no room there.
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You think you've got it all figured out yourself. Where am I gonna put my salvation?
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Your hands are full. But you come to him with empty hands of faith, and he's like, now there's a place
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I can put my gift. Someone who's ready to receive it. It results, if the promise is believed and trusted by faith, then it results in grace.
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And here's the thing. Did you know that God wants to give you something for free? That's what he wants.
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He just wants you to accept it in humility. And at the end of verse 16 and the beginning of verse 17,
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Paul wants to make sure that the whole world realizes that this is not only for the Jews, this is not a salvation available to only the
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Jews who are out there seeking to adhere to the law, but this grace through faith, this gift of righteousness by faith, this gift that Abraham modeled for us by faith is available to any and all of his descendants.
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And in Genesis 17, five, he's gonna go on to explain how we are his descendants.
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You see, he's gonna quote Genesis 17, 15, where God changed
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Abram's name. The first movement of God in redemption, I said, was a promise made to a man named
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Abram. Abraham is a name that means exalted father. But many of you know this, maybe you grew up in the church and you heard this in Sunday school class and you could finish it for me, but his name was changed to Abraham, which means the father of many nations.
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His name was changed from exalted father to the father of many nations.
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And Paul sees a fulfillment of that promise and the reality that all who come to God by trust and faith are following in the footsteps of their father,
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Abraham. So faith is necessary for the promise to come to fruition in our lives, for it to yield grace and a gift from God.
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Where there is law keeping for salvation, there is only the promise of wrath. But where there is faith in the promise, there is life giving grace and forgiveness.
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But now Paul goes on to define the proper object of our faith. So where should we put our trust?
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What direction does our faith go? And that's where our second point comes in. God is the proper object of a saving faith.
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It is a faith and a trust in him. It's verses 17 through 22. If you're taking notes, we trust in the
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God who is able to do what he has promised. The text makes some pretty awesome claims for God.
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He can raise the dead and bring into existence things that don't exist. That's the God that we're trusting in.
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In the very presence of the almighty God, it says in verse 17, Abraham was granted these promises. Where?
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In God's presence. God spoke these things to him. And he was in the presence of the
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God in whom he believed and put his trust. And at the end of verse 17, God has given two titles that are meant to bolster our faith.
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He is, again, called the God who gives life to the dead. I think a little bit of a foretaste of what our faith is supposed to be placed in, but he's the
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God who gives life to the dead, and he is the God who calls into existence things that don't exist.
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You ever think about the awesome power of God? He speaks, and space and time appear.
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Light appears. He speaks, and there's whales. He speaks, and there's flying things, and bats, and birds, and...
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He speaks, and stuff happens. And things that don't exist come into existence at his voice.
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That's the God that we are being asked to put our trust in. Abraham, it says, believed in that God.
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And this, by the way, is more than just merely a mental assent, as if to say, yeah, I think that what you're saying is true.
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It's not just an academic belief. It's not just a, yeah, okay, line these things up, and that comports with reality.
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This is a relational trust, a relational belief. Really, at the end of the day, the word belief here in the text is interchangeable with trust and faith.
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It was a trust in God's faithfulness and a trust in God's power. In other words, that God is able and that God is willing to keep his promises.
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And the very nature of Abraham's belief in God at the start of verse 18 shows that he hoped against his human observation.
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I love the way that it says it in verse 18. In hope, he believed against hope. He hoped against hope.
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Some may be tempted to think of faith, then, hoping against hope, as kind of a leap off of a cliff.
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So you just stand there, you just kind of go, you know what, I think God's gonna catch me. Close your eyes and just jump over.
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That's faith, right? And some of you have maybe heard faith taught that way, that it's just a leap into the unknown with a trust, just kind of generic trust that God is going to catch you.
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Some of the philosophers and some of the German philosophers in the early 1800s would talk about this leap of faith and just this notion of the specter of death is chasing you through the forest.
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One particular philosopher, Kierkegaard, talked about this. And he said, it's like this beast of death is chasing the human race and you come up to the cliff and you don't know what to do.
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But that's scary, so you jump. And he was kind of in one sense, he called himself a
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Christian philosopher, but at the end of the day, he was kind of painting a joking picture of why we would, why in the world would we trust
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God like that, just a leap off of a cliff. But I wanna be clear that when you think about this, what the text is saying, this hope against hope, which is gonna be defined by some of the things that Abraham was able to see.
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Abraham was able to see his body is nearly dead and the barrenness of his wife's womb and the promise of God given to him.
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And how many of you think that sometimes the promises of God don't look like they're gonna come to pass in your life?
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You know what I'm talking about? And so we hope against hope, but he was trusting in the
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God, hear me carefully church, he was trusting in the God who had told him about his offspring, who had promised him a child.
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He wasn't standing there with no basis upon which to trust God, he was there basing his trust and faith on the promises, do you hear me?
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It's so much different than standing on the edge of the cliff. It's so different than just standing there leaping into the darkness.
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You see, what didn't really make sense from an earthly standpoint was that God would promise offspring to a man and a woman nearing 100 years old.
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Abraham was as good as dead and the word, it's interesting, but there's a play on words in the Hebrew language because even the word that's used for Sarah's barrenness, there's a play on words, a very rare word used in Hebrew in the
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Old Testament for her barrenness, it is dead, her womb was dead is the word that is used there.
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His wife had never given birth to a child, but God had told him his wife
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Sarah would bear him a son. You see, faith is not an irrational leap off of a cliff presuming that God will catch us, no, no, no, it is so much more like the picture of a child on the side of a pool being coaxed to jump into the arms of his loving father.
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I'll catch you, says the dad. I won't let you drown, I'm right here, I love you. You know me,
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I've caught you many times before and I'm right here and, I mean, yeah, you look at the water, the water looks scary.
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I mean, I can understand why you're a little scared. The water's a little bit deep, but don't worry, it's warm. Jump in,
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I'll catch you. You can trust me. The promises, that's faith.
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I'm here, I love you, and I've told you what I'm gonna do. You have a choice to believe me and jump or to distrust me and stay in your sin that leads to wrath.
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See, we have his promises. Abraham, Abraham had his promises.
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And although the content of our promises are quite different, the common thread, you know, he hasn't promised us offspring, he hasn't promised us children, he hasn't promised to make each one of us a great nation or to make one of our descendants the one who's gonna bless all the world or anything like that.
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But the common thread is the necessity of faith in the God who has made promises and he has indeed promised things to us.
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Salvation comes to those who see the Heavenly Father as trustworthy. Jump, and he will catch you.
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He promises to do so. Just make sure you're studying his word well to understand what it is that he has promised and what he hasn't promised, and that's for another sermon.
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But that's important, right? I mean, how many of you know that if you're trusting and you're gonna jump off, you better know what he says he's gonna do, right?
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I mean, every time that I tell you, by the way, there is never a time that I tell you to read your
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Bible so that you'll feel guilty. That's never my intention. It is only because I have seen its fruit in my life and I've seen its benefit and I've seen it grow my faith to such a degree that I just kind of want that for everybody,
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I really do. And not that I've arrived, not that I'm there, but I have seen the fruit of studying and waking up early in the morning and getting into his word that has borne itself out in my life, and I don't know where I'd be without that.
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And so, I just am commending that to you, but getting to know his promises. Preached more on that than I was going to, but still, there's a whole other sermon in there.
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But Abraham is our example, and we see that despite all the odds stacked against the likelihood of he and Sarah having a single child, let alone offspring like the stars in the sky, we see this strange phrase that Abraham didn't waver concerning the promise of God.
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And those of you that are aware of the back story of Abraham may find it surprising that it says in the text, no unbelief made him waver.
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I mean, some of you are pretty informed, and you're like, well, after all, didn't Abraham laugh when the angel of the
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Lord told him and Sarah that they would have a child? Wasn't there that whole Hagar thing, where he tried to have a child with somebody else so that he could fulfill the promise on his own?
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But the construction here of this Greek phrase indicates an unwavering stance in the face of real unbelief.
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In other words, Abraham was actually assailed by temptations to disbelieve, but none of it was able to knock him off of a steadfast footing that God was trustworthy.
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And I believe that in part, it's because Abraham's focus was on God and not on every little detail of the promise.
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Instead, it says that he, in the midst of temptation and enticement to doubt, but with a trust, with an attitude towards God, you're trustworthy,
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I'm gonna trust you to figure out the details and get this done. It says instead that he grew strong in his faith according to verse 20, and he gave glory to God in the way that he trusted him.
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And I would suggest to you that it is often in the testing and trials of faith that we grow stronger.
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Have you experienced that in your own life? The difficult times that really grow us and shape us, and the direction of worship is found in our text, by the way.
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The indication is that by growing in our trust and faith in God, we are worshiping him.
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By living out our faith, we are worshiping him. That is why everything in our lives that we do can be rendered to him as worship.
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Anything you have done in faith this past week has been worship. Everything that you do in faith, that is in trust in who
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God is, in the way that he rolls, in trusting in his commands that what he has set out for us is right and good.
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So anybody this week that has loved him more than pornography has worshiped him.
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Anybody here who has served others based on loving him has worshiped him.
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Anybody who has spent time fueling your faith in prayer or by scripture reading, you have worshiped him.
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Or even just what we've done recently by praising him in songs, reminding ourselves of his faithfulness, is of course worshiping him.
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But I wanna suggest the opposite as well. You could have just sang any of those songs, show off your pipes.
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You could have sang those songs just in your strength and just in your flesh, mindlessly, just reading the songs on the screen.
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That's not worship. As much as we wanna say that singing songs to God is worship, and you can sing all you want, but if it's not in faith, if it's not in trust in God, if it's not something that you're actually thinking about God and you're actually recognizing who he is, then that's not worship, whatever it is.
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We finally see in verse 21 a definition of faith that should inform the remainder of Romans for us.
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I love this definition. We'll jot this one down. Even if you're not a note -taker, I'd just like you to just zero in on this one.
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A place that you could turn to, we know that faith is the evidence of things not seen. We know that from Hebrew, some of you have memorized that.
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But not many have really paid attention to this definition of faith here, and it's just simply that Abraham was, here's the quote, fully convinced that God was able to do what he promised.
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That's the definition of faith. Fully convinced that God is able to do what he has promised, hoping against hope in the things that God had told him he would do.
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And that was only possible because Abraham believed God was able to give life to a dead man, and he was able to give an old barren woman a baby to hold, their own baby to hold.
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A child who they would name Laughter, because of how ridiculous the promise sounded to their earthly and very human ears.
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Laughing as God gives the promise, but believing, believing that he can do it.
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Do you hear that? How many of you can relate to that? I can relate to that. I can relate to, really?
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You're gonna do that, God? But you're able, you're able to do whatever you want, but it just doesn't, it doesn't comport with the things that I've seen in life.
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And this implicit trust, this belief in the power of God says that this faith was counted, reckoned, considered to Abraham as righteousness.
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A gift of righteousness from the Almighty based on his trust in God.
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And that leads to the conclusion of verse, of really chapter four in verses 23 through 25, our last point.
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Paul's now gonna personalize his Bible study on the life of Abraham with a call to application. Now we'll word it as a question for us.
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It's simply this, do you have a faith like Abraham? It's verses 23 through 25.
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Abraham's example, Abraham's example should land smack dab in the middle of your life.
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Just as faith in the God who promises was counted as righteousness to Abraham, our faith in God who raised
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Jesus will be counted as righteousness to us. In verse 23, Paul explicitly states that Abraham wasn't the only beneficiary of accredited righteousness.
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Those words recorded in Genesis 15, six and quoted at the beginning of Romans chapter four were not only for him.
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Abraham believed God and it was counted as righteousness to him. It wasn't only for him, they were written for our sake as well.
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A reckoned or a given righteousness is what all of us have needed. It's the thing that, the thing that our souls and our hearts and our lives have needed most.
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Faith will be counted as righteousness even to those of us who believe in God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.
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And earlier in verse 17, there was already a hint at the promise given to us in the new covenant that he would be, he's a
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God who could raise the dead. You see, Abraham was called to hope beyond all hope in a promise of God.
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He says, God told him, you will have a child even in your old age. And everything Abraham and Sarah knew about life would go against the likelihood of that promise coming to pass.
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They had never seen anything like this before. You ever put yourself in their shoes? They had never seen a hundred year old give birth.
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And so all they could do was believe that God would do it. And further, that he was faithful to do it.
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That he was a, he's a faithful God who will keep his promises. And take that over to the promises that we're being asked to believe.
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A promise that he will raise us from death is a very similar promise. How many of you have ever witnessed a funeral?
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Go ahead and raise your hand if you've been at a funeral. How many of you have ever been at a graveside service? I've led some of them,
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I've led too many of them. And to be honest, in my earthly experience, I have only ever seen the grave work in one direction.
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How many of you would testify? You've only seen the grave work in one direction. That's our experience, right?
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I've seen bodies go into the grave, but I have yet to witness anyone come the other direction.
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And that's what we're being asked to believe. That's what we're being asked to trust.
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So trust in resurrection is to trust in the God who has promised such a thing.
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You hear that? To believe in him. Do you believe in him who raised
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Christ? Is your trust and faith in the one who has promised eternal life to you?
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If you would just put your faith and trust in his son, Jesus, according to verse 25, was delivered up for our trespasses.
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That's a big way of saying that he died a sacrificial death to pay for our sins. But it goes on to say that he was raised for our justification.
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I have to confess that as a child, I was often confused about the importance of the resurrection and its connection to salvation.
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Do I need to believe in the cross of Christ? Or do I need to believe in the empty tomb? Or which of those is more important?
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At the end of the day, isn't the resurrection is overkill because he died for us on the cross?
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And that's what, it seemed like that really stuck in my head and the resurrection was kind of just like, just a little bit of icing on the cake or something like that.
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But really, the main event was the cross and the resurrection was just something there.
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But I believe that this is a false dichotomy that I had developed in my mind because both the cross of Christ and his resurrection, his death, his burial, his resurrection, those two things are inseparably connected in saving faith.
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The atonement and forgiveness of sins and the big word that we talked about earlier in Romans, the propitiation of the wrath of the father, the appeasing of the wrath of the father was granted to us at the cross for sure.
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That is very important and fundamental. But the evidence of that acceptable sacrifice and further, its results.
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Think about what the results are. I kind of want the results, the victory over sin, victory over death, how many of you want that?
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We want that too, right? And all of that was made clear to us at the resurrection of Christ.
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So that faith in the resurrection is to believe that the atoning work of Christ was acceptable to his father.
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And if we believe and trust in the father, then we will believe in the resurrection of Jesus and further, we will believe it as a precursor to our own resurrection one day.
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So do you trust in the God who has made a way for us to be saved? Do you trust in the God who can bring dead things back to life?
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Do you trust in the one who can even make that which doesn't exist, exist? Amazing in his power.
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I'm convinced that we need this message about faith all the more as the world around us is raging and foaming at the mouth in fear and division.
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We're called to live, to be a people who live by faith and not by sight. And our faith is to be squarely placed on the shoulders of the
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God who is able to make the dead live and to call into existence things that do not yet exist.
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Do you believe that he is powerful enough to keep his promises to you? Do you believe that he is faithful enough to be worthy of your trust?
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Follow Abraham and put your trust in the God who has promised acquittal of guilt to any and all who trust in his promises.
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And how should we live as Christians in light of this revelation of faith? We ought to do those things that will fuel and grow our faith in him.
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That's where I'm gonna give you the three standard applications. I don't do this very often, but these are the three.
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These are the three that every sermon it felt like came back down to this. Are you ready? Study the word to fuel your faith.
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You come to me and you say, I just feel like God is distant. I feel like he's a ways out. I just don't feel that connection.
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And I'm gonna ask you the question, are you getting to know him? Are you connecting with him through his word, through the way that he has chosen to reveal himself to us?
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People wanna just kinda talk to God in general and expect him to just answer our questions without doing the work of seeing what he has already told us of himself.
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He's a God who keeps his promises. He is patient with humanity. And he has been developing history toward a final and ultimate redemption through the return of his son.
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So dig in so that you can be more acquainted with his promises, so that you can trust him more.
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And so that you know the content of your faith. You know the content of your trust. To be quite honest, I think many of us as Christians are just pleased to just stand at the edge and by practice, right?
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By the way that we show in our lives almost an ignorance of his word or an unwillingness to dig in.
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And so that's what we're doing as Christians, we're standing on the edge with no real assurance, no real solid ground to stand on and say, hey,
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I have reason to believe that he's gonna catch me because I've gotten to know him. I see the promises that he's given to me.
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You see what I'm saying? So study his word, get into it, dig in. It's actually a feast. And I saw a skit one time where it was up at the
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Camp Barakel and there were some kids that did this skit and they were basically eating cereal and they were like, boy, the first time
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I read the word of God, it was kind of like this and they were just eating this, just the brain flakes, just the really gross stuff, okay?
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And no sugar, no nothing. And then they kind of went over here and they were like, then after time of eating it kind of started to turn more into, and then it was like the frosted mini -wheats.
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Still, eh, okay, it's got that sugar coating. If you could just get that off of there, suck on them, spit out the shreds.
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Oh, that's gross. Good word picture. And then the last bowl, the reason this stuck with me, my favorite,
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Lucky Charms. That's where it's all good. And did you know they're making boxes with just the marshmallows now?
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Yes. But I think that your experience would be very similar to that. It was for me.
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Getting up at five o 'clock every morning and studying the word took a lot of coffee early on. Now it just takes a lot of coffee.
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But in all honesty, I cherish it. And again, that's something that God has worked in my life, but it did not fall out of heaven.
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You're going, oh, you're a pastor, so that's just easy for you. It's taken work to develop a habit of spending time in God's word.
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It is not something that was easy at first. It was like eating the gross brain flakes that you have to chew and your jaw hurts after you eat it.
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You know what I'm talking about? But it's now something that's sweet. It's a delight. And even when
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I'm reading Leviticus, yeah. You guys are, now you know how creepy
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I am. You're like, reading all those blood sacrifices? No, I just love it, I love it, because I'm seeing
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God in the way that he works in it. And so again, a little bit too much of me in that illustration, but I mean,
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I hope you can take away from that the reality of at least the way that God has worked in my experience to make reading his word a delight, to get to know the one who has promised so much to us and what he has promised.
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And the second thing is to pray. You saw it coming. These are the three, what are they?
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Read the Bible, pray, and share your faith. Those are the three applications to every sermon I heard growing up, at least what
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I remember. But pray, prayer is a demonstration of our trust. It is an action of faith.
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Potentially the most active thing you can do in faith is pray.
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We come to him with our requests, we come to him with our praises, we come to him with our confessions, because we believe he is powerful and he is faithful.
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Prayer fuels faith because it's acting on faith. Nothing quite says
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I trust God like taking the time that you could be working and doing stuff, and instead, talking to him and resting in him.
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How many of you know that every minute you're praying, you could be getting something done? Right?
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And some of us are like, then just go do the stuff. An exercise of faith to say,
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I got so much on my plate this week. I got so much on my plate today, I have to pray. I have to give this over to you,
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God. Prayer is so powerful in building faith, and part of its power is that when
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I pray, I'm reminding myself that I am not the most powerful actor on the stage of my life.
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Anybody else guilty like me of often thinking I'm the main actor, I'm in the lead role in my life?
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You're not the lead role in your life. God is. And so go and talk to him about that.
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The last thing is to share the promises. Our faith will grow more as we share the glorious good news with others around us.
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Get looking for those opportunities. I've challenged a couple people in the church to just pray at the start of your day.
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Maybe it's on your commute into work. Maybe there's just a little time that you've got to just say, God, please give me opportunities.
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Open my eyes to opportunities that you have for me to connect with people in a spiritual way today, maybe even to share my faith with them.
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And I'm found, and somebody came back and reported to me just last week, standing at the door. They came to me and they said, Don, you challenged me to do that a few months ago, and I would say it's just extremely rare that I don't get an opportunity to share my faith with somebody.
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Because your eyes are open to it. You see it. And you're looking for opportunities, and rehearsing the promises of God.
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How many of you know that if you thought that you were gonna share your faith, today was the day that God was gonna call you to share your faith with your coworker, would you rehearse a little bit in your mind about the gospel?
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God, that's a good practice. That's a good thought. Practice it, think it through.
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It's good for us. It's encouragement to our souls to remind ourselves of the gospel of faith, really grace through faith.
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So if you're not sure how to share the gospel with someone, though, someone's here and you're scared of that, just come and talk with me, and I'd love to get you pointed in the direction of confidence in the gospel.
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And lastly, I would encourage you to use the communion time. This is the last application. Use the communion time each week as a faith -growing experience.
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This isn't a holy snack time. It's not because, oh, yep, it's getting close to noon, and we need to get a little snack in here.
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It's a set -aside time to reflect each week on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us. It is exclusive in the sense that only those who have faith in Jesus Christ for salvation should participate in this part of the service.
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For those of you who do believe, you should do this. And you should do it every week as a reminder that you couldn't keep the law.
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You couldn't obey enough. And if the promise came through the law, you would only have wrath ahead of you.
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But the promise of forgiveness in Christ through the cross results in acquittal for all who trust in him by faith.
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So let me encourage anyone here who is in Christ, anyone here who has put their faith and trust and believed in him and is saying, you are the one who is going to carry me.
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We encourage you to come to the tables with a renewed awe and wonder this morning, but also come with a renewed commitment to feed your faith and not your flesh.
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Feed your faith by taking in his word, by depending on him in prayer, and by sharing his promises with the world who doesn't understand the power of faith.
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Let's go out and be the people of faith in this next week. And let's go out growing in our faith.
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And in growing in our faith, we will worship him and give glory to our God. Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you so much for your grace that comes to us through faith and that we are not on that track and that trajectory that goes through law to wrath, that hopelessness that so many in our world around us face, working and working and striving, and all along in their conscience knowing that they're not doing right, all along in their conscience knowing that they are not worthy.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would just give us opportunities to share the one who is worthy with others,
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Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Thank you for the hope that we have in him. I thank you for forgiveness through him, and I thank you for the opportunity we have even now for those who belong to you to come to the tables, to take the cracker, to remember his body broken for us, the juice to remember his blood shed for us.
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Father, I pray that you would move us out to look into your word more and grow in faith, to spend time in prayer, giving our days over to you, and growing in our faith, and then looking for opportunities to share this with others in rehearsing that gospel.