The Example of Abraham

I'm so glad that
Father, we're just so glad that the living word is what is
appointed to by the written word.
And, Lord, that we're not saved by what we are or by what we do.
That you're not impressed by any of the things which the world is
impressed and with which we try to impress ourselves.
But, that, Lord, I only hope for righteousness, this is the
righteousness of Jesus, and that as we trust in Him, we are
reckoned as righteous before you.
I don't know this morning, Lord, if there may be a particular man
or woman, boy, or girl in this auditorium that really needs
to understand this message of fresh.
But, I do pray and we all join in praying, Father, that you will
sovereignly and mightily with the power of the Holy Spirit.
Give us an increased understanding of who Jesus is,
who it is that we are in Him.
And, then, Lord, help us to live our lives boldly out of the
confidence that no matter how weak or sinful we may be in the
flesh, in Jesus Christ, we are righteous.
Our sin has been covered, your face has turned toward us,
and we are in Christ, ears of everything you have for us.
Not because we have deserved it, not because we have worked
for it, not because we have lived for it, but it is a gift.
A gift of your grace.
And, then, Lord, fill us with His Spirit, His Spirit of
boldness and His Spirit of confidence, and help us to share
with a hurting world the message of reconciliation through
faith in Jesus Christ.
Oh, Lord, God, shine your face upon us, reveal your presence
we pray to Jesus' name, Amen.
I want to begin this morning by trying to put the message of
Romans chapter 4 in the context of what it is that Paul teaches
in Romans chapter 3.
Romans chapter 3, you may recall, is that chapter in which Paul
zeroes in on the foundations of the Christian faith,
namely the fact that we are restored to fellowship with God,
not by anything that we are, not by anything that we can do,
but by the gift of His grace to be received by faith.
Verse 23 and verse 24 of Romans chapter 3 are probably the
best summary of that chapter, when Paul says, "Since all
we have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are
justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption which
is in Christ Jesus to be received by faith."
They are justified by His grace as a gift, all have
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
What Paul is saying there really is this.
When it comes to receiving the favor of God, being restored
to a relationship with God whereby His faith shines upon
us and His power is there to help us enter into the things
that He has for us, God, He says, is not impressed by who it
is that we are in the natural or what it is that we can do.
He's not impressed by our good looks.
I said, "My good looks this morning and everybody started
to laugh," I thought I'd better change it.
He's not impressed by what we look like.
He's not impressed by your looks either.
I want you to know that.
He's not impressed by our status.
He is not impressed by all of the things that the world
looks upon as making us somebody.
There is no way that we can earn the favor of God
because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
You can take the best specimen of the human race, the most
morally upright individual, the most remarkable, talented,
rich, whatever type of person you can imagine.
That person, when he stands before God, God will still
have to turn his back on him in the natural because all
have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
One of the hardest things for people to understand,
one of the hardest things for people to really believe
because there is something in us that says,
"Well, there must be something in me that will have some merit
with God so that there is something I can do to get God's
favor so that I can boast a little bit."
Paul says in Romans chapter three,
"There's no room for anybody to boast because you in Gentile
all have sinned, fallen short of God's glory,
and there is no way to be right with God but through faith
in Jesus because only Jesus have the righteousness
that God requires and it is not until we get our eyes open
to that reality.
Confess our sins and embrace Him as Lord and Savior
in the true biblical sense of the Word."
But the veil is removed and through this spirit,
we have access to God, the Father.
That's Paul's message in Romans chapter three.
And he repeats that again and again in the book of Romans
as being the foundation stone on which all of life is built.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
They are justified by His grace as a gift to be received
by faith.
Now you can well imagine, can you not that if you are a Jew living
in the times of Paul, and you have been brought up
with an interpretation of the law that says that God
has special people, that he likes people that live a certain way
better than people who don't live that way,
that it matters what family you have been born into,
that it matters what nationality you belong to,
that it matters whether you have been circumcised or not
in short that it matters what you do to gain the approval
of God when you being that kind of an individual
here Paul's message of salvation by grace through faith.
You can't earn it, you can't work towards it,
you've got to receive it by faith.
That kind of message sounds like a contradiction
to everything that you've ever heard.
And so here in Romans chapter four,
ever the master, debater, and eloquent speaker,
the Apostle Paul begins to answer that the gospel
that he preaches is not some sort of a newfangled thing
that he has sucked out of his thumb
and that he's trying to impose upon the people.
Rather he says it is a truth that goes back
all the way to the beginning of the scriptures
because already in the Old Testament,
the gospel that he preaches today is the gospel
that had its fulfillment in the law
or its foreshadowing in the law and in the prophets.
And he introduces this whole section by asking
a rhetorical question in the closing verse
of chapter three, chapter three, verse 31.
He says, "Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?
Do we overthrow the law by this faith?"
In other words, is what I'm teaching,
he says, at odds with everything that you've ever heard before
and everything that is contained in the Old Testament,
do we overthrow the law by this faith?
And his answer, a categorical by no means.
It's one of Paul's favorite phrases.
It's meganoito in the Greek.
It literally means may it or let it never be meganoito.
By no means sweet on the contrary, uphold the law.
And then he goes on in chapter four
to give us two Old Testament illustrations
of how already way back in the Old Testament,
people were not saved by what they were
or what they could do.
They were saved by faith in the gracious gift of God's life.
And that's what he addresses in Romans chapter four.
One example is the example of David.
We won't be looking at that this morning,
but the other example is the life of Abraham.
He says, you go all the way back to the Old Testament,
you look at Abraham and you'll discover
that those things which God gave to Abraham
were given not because of works,
but as a gift of God's grace.
Notice how he puts it, what then shall we say about Abraham?
Our forefather according to the flesh.
For of Abraham was justified by works,
he has something to boast about, but not before God.
For what does the scripture say?
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him
as righteousness.
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him
as righteousness.
Go back in your mind's eye for just a moment
to Abraham and his life as you find that recorded
in the Old Testament book of Genesis.
Those of you that have been in our church for some time
will know that in the last year or so,
we've done a fairly extensive study in the life of Abraham.
You'll recall how God enters into covenant with Abraham.
Says to Abraham, I'm going to be your God
and you're going to be my people.
God says to him, I'm going to bring you into a land
that is your own.
You're going to inherit actually the whole world.
I'm going to make out of you a mighty nation.
I'm going to bless you and your blessings will flow
to the ends of the earth and by you all nations
will bless themselves.
In short, God promises to Abraham a restoration
of the whole creation.
He will be restored to the position
that Adam and Eve had lost because of their sin.
And all of the things the world is trying to accomplish
by their cleverness and by their own wisdom
and by their own ambition.
God, as the creator and the sustainer
of the whole universe, he says I'm going to give it
to you Abraham as a gift.
Now go back to that story for just a few moments.
What was it that made Abraham worthy
to receive that inheritance?
Was there something in Abraham that caused him to deserve?
God's favor and God's blessing.
Did he come out of the right family background
so that he had good standing and wife?
Well, not exactly, Joshua chapter 24 tells us
that his forefathers were pagans, served false gods.
Well, was it maybe because Abraham was a good man?
And undoubtedly Abraham was a good man.
But was his life perfect?
Was it without blemish?
Could it stand before the judgment of God?
Hardly you look at his life in the scriptures.
Even after he's entered into covenant with God,
he pulls some pretty bad stunts.
He was a sinner like you and me.
Well, was it maybe because Abraham had a natural zest
and zeal and energy and an ability to make all of this happen?
And did he have the inherent power to become a mighty nation
and was it to his own credit
that his descendants would one day inherit all of the earth?
Wrong again?
I mean, the poor guy had a wife that couldn't have any children.
And you know how that whole story goes?
Abraham, in spite of all his attempts,
didn't have what it took to be able to fulfill the promises.
And he could have lived 100,000 years
and he could have never had
seen the multitude of the stars or the seashore
because he didn't have what it took to earn the favor
and the approval of God.
How then did Abraham come into his inheritance?
How did he become worthy for God to take note of him
and for God to say, "Abraham, here's the whole world.
I'm going to throw it in your lap and it's all yours."
How did he get to the point where God,
instead of meeting him in judgment, met him in favor?
Well, Paul says, according from the Old Testament,
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him
as righteousness.
Abraham believed God, which is to say Abraham understood
in a way that many people today don't understand,
that he didn't have it within himself
to bring about the restoration of all creation.
He knew he couldn't make himself a mighty nation.
He knew that even though he came out of a good family
and had good background,
there was no way that he could earn the approval of God
and be worthy of the gift that God had a given
because he knew that he was a sinner
whose righteousness depended upon God's forgiveness
and God's healing power.
And however dimly Abraham and David with him
and many of the Old Testament people, men and women of faith
knew that if there was going to be a restoration,
if they were ever going to be worthy to receive
that which God had for them,
it was God who was going to have to do it
and it was God who was going to have to restore them
to their inheritance.
We don't know how clearly they understood the gospel.
We do know from the words of Jesus in John chapter eight
that your father, Abraham, rejoiced that he was to see my day.
He saw it and was glad.
I interpret that as being,
there was something in Abraham's life
and probably in the lives of many of the Old Testament saints
that understood however vaguely or dimly.
That it was God in Jesus Christ who was going to come into the world,
that it was God who was going to take care of the issues of seed,
that it was God who was going to raise them up
and make them righteous
and it was God who in declaring them righteous
would restore them to their inheritance
and they would inherit all of the earth.
Abraham believed God
and because he knew the emphasis had to lie on the Lord.
It is through faith that he became righteous
to inherit those things that God had for him.
Abraham, he said, "Believe God."
It was reckoned to him as righteousness.
And if you go through this whole chapter,
you will discover again and again the emphasis lies in the fact
that this gospel that Paul is preaching,
this gospel of salvation by grace through faith.
There isn't anything that we have
or we can do to contribute it.
It is all the gift and the grace of God in Jesus Christ.
This gospel isn't the new kind of a thing.
Nor is it at odds with that which the people had been taught
over all the years of the Old Testament.
It was the fulfillment of the law.
Everything the law stood for was already proclaimed
and came to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
And Abraham, the father of all believers,
already back in his day, modelled the reality
that the things that God was going to give you
were not the result of his own wisdom,
the result of his own cleverness,
not the result of his own good living.
It was the result of a gift of God to be received by faith.
And therefore, Paul says we uphold the law
because it depends on faith.
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him
as righteousness.
Now, if you understand that,
and it's a vital importance that we do,
because this issue is the issue that is the separating line
between the peoples of the world and the children of God.
If we understand the reality of salvation
by grace through faith, then you'll understand
that has many very profound applications
to your life and to my life.
And the time that we have, let me share too,
with you number one, God is not impressed
by my credentials in the natural.
You've noticed, have you not how in the world
what you are and what you have matters.
Your status, your position, the amount of attention,
the amount of love, the amount of affection,
how you feel about yourself is determined by who you are
and by what you have.
And a lot of people spend a lot of time priding themselves
in the fact that they come out of a family.
That is smarter than other families or better than other people.
They're proud because they belong to a particular nation
or a particular nationality,
and they look down their noses at other people
who don't have the advantages which they have.
There are people who are proud of their talents
and proud of their abilities,
proud of their position in life,
and you can spot them everywhere you go
because they are self-made people.
And they are often the leaders in the world
because they are the people who are motivated
by their natural gifts and by their natural abilities.
And there is the temptation and the tendency to think
that somehow or another, God is impressed
by any of the things that we are in the natural.
The biblical answer is that all have sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God.
God is not impressed by any of the things
that we are impressed with in the natural.
He's not impressed by our ability.
He's not impressed by my position.
He is not impressed by any of the things the world uses
to identify good and noble people.
The best person in the world,
as opposed to the worst sinner in the world,
all fall short of the glory of God.
There is no ground, no room for anybody to boast
before the face of God.
Paul, you'll recall in Philippians chapter three,
puts it this way.
He says, "If any man thinks he has reason
for confidence in the flesh, I have more."
He goes on to elaborate his credentials in the natural.
You gotta remember Paul came out of that background.
Paul came out of a background where we're earning
the favor of God and impressing other people
by your religiosity was of paramount importance
because it meant that you had an edge on God.
And so he goes on to say his credentials.
He says, "If any other man thinks he has reason
for confidence in the flesh, I have more."
He says, "Circumcised on the eighth day
of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,
Hebrew, born of the Hebrews."
You talk about pedigree.
He had the right pedigree.
He came out of the right family,
out of the right tribe, and out of the right people.
As to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal
a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness
under the law, blame the you measured Paul's life
by any externals of how a person ought to behave
and he would put it all to shame.
How many of us can say as to righteousness under the law?
Blameless.
I mean, he observed the letter of the law to a tee.
He had an energy and a zeal to serve God
that I'm sure would put most of us to shame.
In terms of what in the natural was required
to be somebody before the face of God, Paul had it all.
But then came the day he met Jesus.
And his eyes were open to the fact that,
in spite of the fact that he thought he had it all together,
he was totally in dead raw.
And he began to see his own sin.
He began to understand that all his self-discipline
and all his efforts could never change his own heart,
could never make him the kind of man that he was to be.
He could never get good enough or God to bless him
or to get to a point where he would receive the favor of God.
Can you imagine the incredible anguish in his heart
when in those three days when he was blind
and God had opened his eyes to what was really happening
that he came to the discovery that he thought
with all of his energy that he was right
and he was dead raw and he was under the judgment of God.
That's unnerving business.
That's the zeal, a persecutor of the church.
Then he saw Jesus and how Jesus
because of his righteousness had a right
to all of the inheritance of God.
He was on to say then in this passage,
whatever gain I had I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
Indeed I count everything as loss for the surpassing worth
of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things
and count them as a manure garbage.
All of these credentials that he was just bragging about,
all of the things that made him somebody in the eyes
of other people, he says I count them as useless.
In order that I may gain Christ and be founded him
not having a righteousness of me on based on law.
In other words, not anything that I can boast in,
but that which is through faith in Christ,
the righteousness from God that depends on faith.
Not having a righteousness of me on based on law,
but that which is through faith in Christ.
All begins to explain in terms of his own life.
That it wasn't until he came face to face with Jesus.
That he really became reconciled to God
because he came to understand sin.
And he laid aside all of his own self righteousness
to embrace the righteousness that is in Jesus Christ
and that is what it is to become a Christian.
To become a Christian is to understand that all
of the things in me in the natural that I might admire
or that other people might admire.
God doesn't admire at all that which is of high esteem
in the eyes of men the Bible says
is abomination in the sight of God.
Becoming a Christian is coming to the understanding
that even if I live to be 100,000,
none of those things in the final analysis matter,
I have to lay them all on the cross
and I have to understand that because Jesus Christ is righteous.
He had it all, I am righteous through faith in Him.
That's the essence of the gospel.
You hear it preached a thousand times
and I want you to know that a multitude of people
don't understand the simplicity of the gospel
because it offends the human heart.
Have you ever noticed that?
It is offensive to have to admit
that what God wants, I cannot do myself.
It's offensive to have to admit that my clever mind
cannot understand spiritual reality
unless God gives it to me by revelation through his spirit.
It's offensive for me to acknowledge that
the way that God wants me to live in terms of loving God
above all and loving my neighbor is myself.
I can't do it and I can never do it in my own strength.
And that therefore there is nothing I can do
would plead to blood of Jesus and that when I do,
God looks at me in Jesus Christ
and He sees me as being perfectly righteous.
If you've come to Christ,
acknowledge your failure.
Admit it, you can never measure up.
Given your heart and your life to Jesus,
then God reckons you as righteous.
But you say there's a lot of sin in my life.
I'm far from complete, I'm far from perfect, that's true.
And Jesus Christ living in you will change you
from glory to glory.
But you are righteous before the face of God
just as if you had never seen
because we are justified by a gift of His grace.
And as we walk in repentance and faith,
God's no longer angry with us.
Doesn't just push us aside because we haven't measured up.
And we chastises and disciplines and cleanses and renews us.
But He calls me His old
because you see the righteousness of Jesus
has been imputed and imparted to me by faith,
Abraham believed God.
It was reckoned to him as righteousness.
So number one, God's not impressed by my credentials.
And to become a Christian, I have to let go of my credentials.
Everything that I've ever worked on,
to make me somebody outside of Jesus Christ,
I've gotta let go of it.
That's why the more you have in the eyes of the world,
the harder it is to become a Christian
because the harder it is to come just as you are
without leading on your reputation, your character,
or all of the things that you've built up around your own life.
There's another side to this and that's this.
Not only is God not impressed by my credentials.
Neither is He turned off.
By my lack of credentials.
Because you see if there's one category of people in the world
that are strong in the natural
and they think they can all do it themselves
and they don't need anybody,
there's another category of people
who often and constantly live with a cloud of condemnation.
They see their requirements of God,
they see the kind of lies that other people are living.
They know what it is of the order being.
They try so hard for a period of time
to be good and to be righteous.
They fail again and again and after a while,
they just throw in the towel and they say,
"Well, not laid up for me.
God's never gonna love me."
I mean, if you really knew what I was like,
you'd understand why God wasn't gonna love me.
And they look at all of the things that are happening in life
and they always feel as if they are under a cloud of condemnation
and a cloud of failure and a cloud of inability
because you see they don't have the credentials,
they don't come out of a good family,
they come out of a bad family.
They haven't inherited a lot of natural strength
in self-control and discipline, they're just all over the place.
They turn to mush and they just go the flow
and they hate themselves for it.
That kind of a person gets discouraged
because that kind of a person having tried so hard
to earn their way, finally come to a point where they say,
"I can't earn it, God doesn't like me, I don't like me,
nobody else likes me, I'm useless."
But that kind of a person, God comes with a gospel of hope
and says, "Look at Abraham, look at Abraham."
A man who looked at his own body and it was as good as death.
And he tried everything under the sun to try to make himself
into something that he wasn't and it never worked.
He gave it all up but he had faith in God
because he understood that even though he had none of the things
that it took to be righteous, God in Jesus Christ
would declare him righteous.
And he believed in God, it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
If you're here this morning and you fit the kind of category
that I've just been describing,
you despair of ever being anything
and you despair of ever really meeting face God,
face God face to face.
Then you need to understand
that our righteousness before God
is not the result of what we are or what we can do.
Even though in a human scale, you might be here
and somebody else might be there,
the righteousness of God so far exceeds their own ability,
all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God
and we are justified as a gift of his grace.
And when Jesus died and when he arose
and when he presented himself before God
and God the Father gave him authority over all things
in heaven on an earth, when you come to Jesus Christ
and gave your life to Jesus, when God gave to Jesus,
he gives to you.
You may not be much in your own eyes.
You may not be much in the eyes of anybody else.
But if you've come to Jesus, then you are a child of God.
And if you're a child of God,
then you are an heir of God's kingdom.
Have one God looked at you in Jesus.
He doesn't see your sin.
He doesn't see your inheritance.
He doesn't see any of your shortcomings.
All he sees is the righteousness of Jesus Christ
and the purposes that God has for you in Jesus Christ.
Some of you've heard me tell the story of Bob Hoyt.
Bob was a man that a number of us got to know
quite a number of years ago in the last church
that I pastored and Bob was a mental patient.
I think he was a manic depressive or a schizophrenic.
Individual had been born into a fairly good family,
had inherited a fair bit of property from his parents.
Drank and gambled it all away.
When we met Bob, there was nothing left of Bob,
other than a very broken man who suffered constant seizures
if he hadn't been in the right kind of medication
which he consistently refused to take.
And he would have seizures in the most unlikely
and improbable places.
Bob became a Christian.
Struggled him living out the Christian life
but it really began to understand the message of salvation,
by grace through faith, God began to change his life.
Some years after that,
for reasons that nobody has ever understood, Bob died.
And shortly after I came to this church back in '85,
some of you will recall I went back to do Bob's funeral.
My studded Bob's grave sighed when we brought him
to the cemetery and I wept and I don't weep a lot
but I wept years
because I shared with the folks that this man,
who was nobody in the eyes of the world,
an object to be pity,
a man who took a lot of time and a lot of attention
for a lot of us.
In Jesus Christ was my brother
and I loved him because in Christ,
he was an heir of God's kingdom.
And while we had known him with all of his shortcomings
and with all of his failures,
God looked at him through the eyes of the Lord Jesus,
saw in him the righteousness of God,
saw the potential that God in Christ was creating
for Bob Hoyt today, he is at the presence of the Lord Jesus.
And one day I'm gonna see him again.
I'm gonna shout for joy because everything that was broken
in his life and everything that couldn't be put together
in this day and in this age, it's all gonna be restored.
And we're gonna shout for joy before the throne of God,
the Father, because of his love for Jesus Christ,
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him
as righteousness, that offer of salvation is open to you
and to me, it doesn't matter what we are,
it doesn't matter what we are, God's not impressed either way.
But when by faith we surrender that,
we become children of God, and when we become children of God,
the favor of God is upon our lives,
and God will lead us into that kind of inheritance
that he has for us and I hasn't seen any year,
hasn't heard, and the heart of man has not conceived
what God has prepared for those that love him.
That's why Paul gets excited.
Because for laying aside his own reputation,
his own abilities, all of the things that he prided himself in.
God gave him the inheritance that God had and that inheritance.
Nobody can ever take away.
I want to ask you to take out your hymn books, 424.
Song written by Charlotte Elliott.
Lady who was severely handicapped,
rebellious and bitter because she found her life to be useless.
A doctor by the name of Caesar Milan had come and visited her father
and asked her about her spiritual well-being
and she bristled with anger.
But later repented and asked him,
"What do I need to do to find the kind of joy in Christ that you say I need?"
The good doctor said to her, "These words, dear Charlotte, cut the cable.
It will take too long to unloose it, cut it, you must come just as you are."
She came just as she was and 12 years later, out of that experience,
wrote this hymn of invitation.
Let's sing the five verses together, please stand as we do.
(Pomp and Circumstance music)
♪ The land by every love that we, ♪
♪ the land by love, ♪
♪ the ocean for me, ♪
♪ the land by love is the country, ♪
♪ the country, ♪
♪ the land of my child, ♪
♪ my child. ♪
♪ The land by earth that we, ♪
♪ the land by earth that we, ♪
♪ the land by the song, ♪
♪ the one that come, ♪
♪ the real world that we, ♪
♪ when this world, ♪
♪ go where, ♪
♪ of the land I come, ♪
♪ I come. ♪
♪ The land by earth that we, ♪
♪ the ocean for me, ♪
♪ the land by earth that we, ♪
♪ the land, ♪
♪ I came and came, ♪
♪ We live with our own joy ♪
♪ Of our thy God ♪
♪ Thy God ♪
♪ In the dead thy end ♪
♪ For this end time ♪
♪ Thy nations lead thee ♪
♪ In all the glory ♪
♪ In all the glory ♪
♪ In thee ♪
♪ To find no end ♪
♪ From crowned by God ♪
♪ Thy God ♪
♪ In the dead thy end ♪
♪ For this end we lead thee ♪
♪ In the dead thy crown ♪
♪ In the dead we lead thee ♪
♪ To find no end ♪
♪ Thy beautiful end ♪
♪ From crowned by God ♪
♪ Thy God ♪