Romans 4:18-25
Romans Exposition Student Ministry • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Resurrection Power, Not Human Effort
Resurrection Power, Not Human Effort
18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
Statement of Doctrine or Application
Faith and Grace are both involved in salvation, but are not equal
Intro:
Statement of proposition
In these verses Paul gives us a biographical sketch of Abraham he shows us his life before and after encountering God
There is one thing that we need to focus on:
Without God’s grace we would not receive faith in Christ
We talked about the importance of coming to the realization that salvation is only through faith in Jesus Christ, but the start of that equation is grace.
Without God’s grace we don’t have anything nor do we deserve anything
Other texts that support
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
2 And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods.
Here we see that before God’s grace and Abraham’s faith in the future messiah he was an idolatrous pagan.
Abraham was not different than anybody else
Why does this matter?
Paul is laying out the fact that Abraham was nothing special before God intervened in his life.
Why is Paul doing this?
He wanted to show and develop the portrait of who Abraham truly was to show the Jews of Paul’s time that in God’s eyes there was no difference between Abraham or anybody Jew or Gentile that has saving faith in Christ.
God can pick anybody, anywhere and by His sovereign grace change their entire life.
What was the reason why God delayed in sending Abraham and Sarah a son?
He needed them to be 100% faithful to the promise that he gave them years prior.
He needed all of their natural strength to decline and then completely disappear.
At their respective ages 99 and 89 they would be considered reproductively dead.
The thing about faith though is that you can’t see it
Seeing something does not guarantee you salvation.
It is something that is in the heart of a believer.
How many people witnessed the miracles that Jesus did while he was here on earth? A lot. There is no correlation between seeing and having faith.
As we see in Genesis 17-18 that Abraham was strong in faith. It was this faith that gave him strength
The application is very clear if we apply Abraham’s saving faith to everyone that comes after. As the prototypical believer we must do so.
God must wait until the sinner is “dead” and unable to help himself and that only God can save him.
Abraham did not have a Bible to read, he was alone as a believer, no long record of faith
Today we have a complete Bible to read and study, church fellowship, look back to centuries of church history and yet so many refuse to believe.
Main Point #1: Faith is a marathon not a sprint
Statement
18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,
Prove
Verse 18:
Here we have Paul describing Abraham’s faith as the standard for all believers.
Even in his advanced years he still had hope and believed the promise of God that offspring would be given.
God waited until it was physically impossible for Abraham and Sarah to have kids before he fulfilled His promise
Circumstances had made the fulfillment of the promise impossible apart from supernatural intervention. His only recourse was God and he was able to rest his faith in God’s promise.
We must trust in Him for our life and death, and living by trusting His promises even when we cannot see the fulfillment of those promises.
People will at times would think that saving faith is a leap into the dark.
Just close your eyes, take a deep breath and jump into the darkness
BUT Jesus tells us to jump out of the darkness. Faith is not believing the absurd or the foolish
This gives the idea that true faith is faith that believes against the evidence and against all reason.
Verse 19-20:
Nothing wavered Abraham nor Sarah’s faith
This is an open testimony for others’ ongoing trust in God’s faithfulness to his word.
We must trust in Him for our life and death, and living by trusting His promises even when we cannot see the fulfillment of those promises.
People will at times would think that saving faith is a leap into the dark.
Just close your eyes, take a deep breath and jump into the darkness
BUT Jesus tells us to jump out of the darkness. Faith is not believing the absurd or the foolish
It is impossible for God to break a promise. He might not answer it on your time, but his time is always perfect
God is the only being that can get something out of nothing
Satan cannot perform miracles, he does not have the power to do so.
All of this attempts at miracles are counterfeits because he does not have the power that God alone possesses.
Satan could have grabbed the water and like a bad magic trick could not have turned that water into wine
He could have done the same thing with the feeding of the 5000. He could have tried all day and yet nothing would have happened.
Flowers in texts
2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”
I can’t imagine. People get frustrated when their Doordash is delivered 5 minutes later than they had estimated.
Here we have Abraham saying ‘Lord” I know you promised this years ago… I am still waiting… patiently.
No matter what he still had faith in God.
Illustrations:
Creation of the God particle.
they keep trying to create matter out of nothing, but they can’t.
Apply or Confront
Main Point #2: Genuine Faith at its best
Statement
21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”
Prove
Verse 21:
As far as Abraham was concerned he was not taking a chance. He was 100% persuaded that God’s power would match his promise.
Abraham was called to believe in a special divine intervention not after it occurred, but before.
There are a lot of things that people are confident in a Steph Curry 3, or Hannah Smith quoting Scripture, but one thing even more guaranteed is God keeping his promises.
Godly faith glorifies God
On the other side any faith that does not glorify God is not of or from Him.
Abraham was fully persuaded that God’s promise was certain and His power sufficient.
Basically sums up the fact that his faith in God was complete and unqualified
Genuine faith trust’s in God’s righteousness, not human wishes and hopes
Abraham’s faith was counted righteous because he was all in on God’s promise
Something that these verses remind me of is Psalm 139 and God’s sovereignty.
There are going to be tough times in your life when it is going to be tough to fully trust in God, but it is at those times that you need to persevere.
You need to Pray that God will give you the strength to finish the race
I could not have begun to think how tough the last two months would have been if I didn’t believe in God and His promise.
I get it we are human and we will fall short, but that is not an excuse to say that God doesn’t care or cares less than what you think he should care
We are so invested in our own needs and wants we tend to ignore the big picture which is the glory of God.
We are impatient and want things now, immediately, problem solved on our timeline.
God does not work that way. He knows how much faith we have, but he wants us to realize how much faith we have in him.
We go through these trials not to prove to God what our faith looks like, but to prove to ourselves how much faith we truly have.
Do you see growth in your faith? Dependence on God? hunger to be in the word?
Or do you see yourself blaming God for what’s happened? Do you slowly start to pull away from Him?
This leads us to see that there is a variation in faith
Look at Peter when he was walking on water. What does Jesus say? “You have little faith” not zero faith, but little faith
but it also suggests that there is the possibility of more faith
20 He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
The mustard seed is the smallest seed and yet it still grows. Our faith should never
10 Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son.
Illustrations:
Let look at the varying amount of faith from the standpoint of strength
If we compare a child to a human yeah there is a huge discrepancy in strength, but the child still has strength and has the potential to get stronger.
We need to pray that the Lord continues to strengthen our faith
We do not want to continue as babes in Christ or babes in faith
Apply or Confront
Main Point #3: Everyone is justified only through faith in Christ
Statement
23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
Prove
We need to understand that Paul is not just interested in Faith he is focused and interested in “justification” by faith
Martin Luther says in regarding verses 23-25 “In these verses the whole of Christianity is comprehended”
The case of Abraham is the case for everybody that is in Christ.
So what is this faith that justifies? How can a man be just with God?
2 “Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be in the right before God?
How can man approach God in prayer with confidence? How can someone face death without fear? Face uncertainty without dread?
It is a faith that believes in God and glorifies God
Look at the terms in which he puts it in verse 24 “who believe in HIM who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” He is talking about God. Who believe in God
How much emphasis do you put on prayer to Christ v. prayer to God?
We have some where their tendency is all on Christ and not on God and some where it is all on God and none on Christ
We need to put an emphasis on the whole Triune God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit)
All of the work that Jesus Christ did was to point us to God. Everything starts with God and everything ends with God.
This is the starting point: “believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord”
Justifying faith is faith that believes God had said something special in the raising of His son. It is not just a general belief in God, it is this peculiar belief in the word of God that comes to us through the resurrection
There are people that are preaching and teaching of the Gospel and yet they do not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ.
Our entire religious base in founded on Christ being raised from the dead and ascending into Heaven.
If Christ was not resurrected then there would be no point in preaching his Word.
It is that faith that believes that he physically died and physically was resurrected and then ascended into Heaven. This is the faith that saves
This is central and vital to Christianity
Verse 25:
Notice that Paul does not just say “Jesus died”. “He was delivered up for our trespasses”
32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
It was God the Father that delivered him up for our transgressions
But why did he have to die? If he was the Son of God why did he have to die? Could he have avoided that?
The answer is that God sent him to the Cross on account of our trespasses or offences. WE who believe in Him know that He died for our sins, that He was delivered up for our transgressions and our trespasses against God.
When a moral transgression has taken place, the offended person is under no obligation to accept the payment of a substitute on behalf of the guilty
Christ laid down his life for his sheep on the cross.
He offered himself in his perfect righteousness and took upon himself the sin of his people. If Jesus had stayed dead, we would have no justification, but when the father raised the Son from the head, he said to the world “I accept this payment for the debtors who cannot pay.”
The resurrection is not just vindication for Jesus it is justification for all of His sheep
24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.
This is where true Christians must come back to. It is here that you see the way in which God has forgiven him and saved him and reconciled him unto himself.
21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
He was delivered up to the punishment that the guilt of our offences deserved.
Christ was punished for our transgressions against God
So why are people prideful when it comes to their faith? Why are there believers that are willing to talk down to someone that has less head knowledge than they do?
Here we have clearly laid out that all men are sinners and fallen.
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
No one is above another human.
There is no excuse to be prideful. What is the difference between pridefulness and thankfulness. Thankfulness is going to have a servants heart.
They are going to recognize that they had nothing to do with their salvation and what they have is a gift of the Lord to possess the knowledge that they have in regards to God.
Abraham was not prideful when it comes to his faith.
Illustrations
Application Points:
Be thankful that because God in Christ by grace has made you the true spiritual seed of Abraham
You must trust in the Word of God without wavering
Have confidence in God, His promises and His Word
If you have not yet come to Christ know that the God of the Bible is still the God who “gives life to the dead.”