A Gift of Faith
Notes
Transcript
Good morning. This truly is the most wonderful time of year. The wonder, the spectacle, the beauty and pageantry of this season is unmatched throughout the year. Even in a year that has been highjacked by so much grief and pain and inconvenience this is truly a wonderful time of year. Yet to realize this and to acknowledge it is one thing, to actually be capable of living it out is another. That is where our theme for the advent season this year really becomes so important.
As you look out at the world there is little true hope. Of late it seems the greatest hope that many, at least here in America, have is that we’ll get another stimulus check from the government and that an effective vaccine will be found for the Coronavirus sometime within the next year. Yet even that event bears little hope as the latest information from the experts is that even after the vaccine is viable this virus wont be defeated and that it will be necessary to continue to wear masks for the forseeable future.
There is little joy - even in this most joyful time of year. We just celebrated Thanksgiving and one of my favorite parts of that holiday is sitting on the couch with the kids and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade - with all the balloons and antics. Did anyone watch it this year? Everything was so fake. There is no joy right now. Suicide rates, depression rates are on the rise as months of isolation are taking their toll on our nation. Just this week an eleven year old in California committed suicide during an online class. Described by a neighbor as "That little boy was one the nicest little boys you’ll ever want to know. He was special. Easygoing. He was the type of person who would never hurt anybody. Soft-spoken, with a beautiful smile." There is little joy in the world right now as many are simply trying to get from day to day - we’re simply existing.
There’s little true peace. In a nation that is divided politically, socially, economically there is little opportunity for peace. When most discussions devolve into debates that are simply people talking past one another with out actually hearing the points that the other side is making. In the words of the sixty’s song “For What It’s Worth” There's battle lines being drawn And nobody's right if everybody's wrong Young people speaking their minds Are gettin’ so much resistance from behind. A thousand people in the street Singing songs and a-carryin’ signs Mostly say, "Hooray for our side". No we are very fractured and there is no peace.
And so we come to the advent season in which we examine the true source of each of these. It really is only through Christ that anyone can find true hope, true joy, true peace, true love and true faith. This morning we will look at the gift of faith - the gift that is given to every true believer and the gift that builds on the gift of hope. What hope expects, faith realizes. As the writer of Hebrews says
Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.
Now that you have the punchline - that the real Gift of this season is Christ and all of these lesser characteristics are facets or aspects of the gift that has been given. What I mean is that it is only through Christ that we can experience any of these. As Chuck taught us last week from Genesis 3 it is only through Christ that the hopeful promise of that chapter, of the curse, can be realized. It is only through Christ that any true faith can be experienced. The faith that we receive as a gift through Christ is through a progressive gift of a saving faith, a sustaining faith and a serving faith.
As we consider this wonderful aspect of the Christian life, of this gift given to us through and by Christ, we will be travelling back to the Old Testament to look at a man who exhibited great faith and who became the spiritual father of all those who would be gifted faith in Christ. Turn with me to Genesis 12 - we’ll be bouncing around several chapters in Genesis this morning but we’ll start here.
The Lord said to Abram: Go from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
We’re going to be bouncing around in the book of Genesis this morning to look at a couple of different incidents in the life of Abraham that reveal the ideals of saving faith, sustaining faith and serving faith.
The Gift of Saving Faith
The Gift of Saving Faith
Genesis 15:6; Eph 2:8-9; Isaiah 64:6; Romans 4:3-5;
We like familiar stories. We like stories we’ve heard before - that’s one of the reasons that the Hallmark Christmas movies are so well loved…every one of them has the exact same plot and so we are not surprised by the ending. The story of Abraham is a very familiar story to us. The man who was born in Ur and had moved with the family to Haran. Sure he couldn’t have children since his wife was barren but that gave him plenty of time to study the stars. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Abram was very skilled in the celestial sciences. From his book the Antiquities of the Jews “ Berosus mentions our father Abram without naming him, when he says thus:—“In the tenth generation after the Flood, there was among the Chaldeans a man righteous and great, and skilful in the celestial science.”
The story of Scripture does not deem it necessary to tell us why it is that God chooses Abram, only that He commands him to leave his home and to travel to a land that God would show him. The Lord promises to make this childless astronomer into a great nation. To Abram’s credit he packs up his family including his nephew Lot and leaves into Canaan.
The story of Scripture does not deem it necessary to tell us why it is that God chooses Abram, only that He commands him to leave his home and to travel to a land that God would show him. The Lord promises to make this childless astronomer into a great nation. To Abram’s credit he packs up his family including his nephew Lot and leaves into Canaan. There is a famine, a family argument that results in Abram and Lot going their separate ways and a war that involves Abram rescuing Lot among some of the other Canaanites who lived near them.
God visits Abram again and we are told
Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
The question we must ask is what does it mean that He “credited” it to him as righteousness. Or rather in what manner was righteousness credited to Abraham? We can apply our modern understanding of credit here as it does not detract from the truth that is being taught. If I desire to buy Bekah a Christmas gift that is outside of a reasonable expenditure from my bank account then I have the option of paying for it with credit. I pledge to the store (or rather to the credit card company) that I will pay the amount that is due. So when God credits righteousness to Abraham it is on the understanding that that credit will eventually come due. It is not that the bill, as Paul refers to it in Colossians 2:14, the certificate of debt has been wiped away for Abraham. There will come a day when it must be paid either by Abraham or by someone else.
And the basis of his credit was not based on Abraham’s past performance of behavior or demonstrating any sort of righteousness that would lead to the belief that he could attain to righteousness at some future date. You would think that a man who had given up his whole life and blindly followed the Lord’s commands would be given some sort of credit. But this is not so. Instead it is solely based on the faith that Abraham exhibits in the promise of the Lord. If anything Abraham’s works only served to fulfill the words of the prophet Isaiah who writes
All of us have become like something unclean, and all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment; all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities carry us away like the wind.
Even though he had followed God’s commands and left Haran for Canaan, Abraham falters during the famine that would sweep the land and took his family to Egypt instead of trusting in the provision of the God who had promised to bless him. And so Abraham’s righteousness is credited to him based on his faith in God. Paul refers to this passage in Romans 4 to demonstrate how we can be saved by faith.
Turn with me to Romans 4:3-5
For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness.
Now to the one who works, pay is not credited as a gift, but as something owed.
But to the one who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited for righteousness.
It is the wonderful Christian artist Shai Linne who quips that before Christ believers were saved on credit but after Christ believers are saved on debit and there is much truth to that statement. Before Christ men such as Abraham were saved on the belief that the hope that Chuck preached on last week, the Seed of the woman, would come and crush the head of the serpent. And yet here in Romans Paul still talks of the need for righteousness to be credited to us. Because it is the same faith - the same belief - one is without direct knowledge of the resolution of that faith, the other is with the sure knowledge that the promise has been satisfied, the covenant has been ratified and forgiveness has been purchased.
Another meaning of credit in Genesis 15 is to impute or imputation. This is the great exchange that took place on the cross. That our sins were imputed to Christ and His righteousness was given to us.
He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
The certificate of debt that had been credited to Abraham so many years ago has come due and is now paid in full - not by his works so that he could not boast, as Paul writes in Romans, but through the gift of saving faith that enabled him to believe God and through that trust to be forgiven and counted righteous. And it is through this gift, through this faith that Abraham is saved. Paul would write in Ephesians
For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—
not from works, so that no one can boast.
The early 20th century theologian B.B. Warfield said it this way “It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or the nature of faith, but in the object of faith; and in this the whole biblical representation centres, so that we could not more radically misconceive it than by transferring to faith even the smallest fraction of that saving energy which is attributed in the Scriptures solely to Christ Himself.”
The same faith that was gifted to Abraham, enabling him to trust in the eventual realization of the covenant that God had made with him, is the same faith that is gifted to us today. It is this faith that enables us, this Christmas season, to know that the promise delivered as a baby in a manger has become reality as the crucified savior on the tree, that the gift of faith to us enables us to believe and to receive the righteousness that was promised.
But this faith is not a one time event that provides salvation - it also has a sustaining effect in the life of the believer with far reaching ramifications.
The Gift of Sustaining Faith
The Gift of Sustaining Faith
Genesis 17:1-8; Hebrews 11;
We have seen how Abraham trusted God, put his faith in Him, and it was counted as righteousness. It is this righteousness, imputed through faith rather than his works, that is given to the believer both in the Old Testament right down through today. Paul writes in Romans 3
God presented him as the mercy seat by his blood, through faith, to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his restraint God passed over the sins previously committed.
God presented him to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
Him being Christ. But the influence of our faith over our lives extends to more than just a one time event in which we put our trust in God for our justification.
Turn with me to Genesis 17. We’re going to be looking at another time that God visits Abraham and institutes His covenant with him. It is important to note here who is making the covenant. In most instances there are two parties required with requirements from both party - yet that is not the case here. The Lord makes this covenant unilaterally meaning that all of the onus for covenantal completion resides on God not on Abraham. It is here that we get our first glimpses of the unilateral nature of salvation in man - the idea that it is all of God and none of man. This may offend some of our sensibilities as we, by nature, desire to have some part in our salvation. We desire through our own free will to come to God and to submit to Him - yet that is not the picture we get from this covenant. That is not to say that we do not have free will, or that we are not free moral agents capable of making our own moral decisions, but it is easy to look at the world and determine where our free will is bent on going.
In fact if we look out at the world right now it could be very tempting to falter in the faith that we have proclaimed. In a world where an Ellen can become an Elliot. In a world where this statement can be made “As a medium who has spoken to many baby spirits who were aborted I can tell you that none of them are sad about it. None of them feel the mother made a mistake. Souls come when they want to and leave when they want to. Abortion violates no universal laws.” In a world where, at every turn, evil seems to be glorified and good is frowned upon. Where pictures involving the babe in a manger can be determined to be “violent or graphic content”. Now more than ever we need to understand the implications of our sustaining faith - both for ourselves and for the generations that come after us.
Notice the promises in verse 7.
I will confirm my covenant that is between me and you and your future offspring throughout their generations. It is a permanent covenant to be your God and the God of your offspring after you.
The covenant is between Abraham and God but has long lasting benefits for the generations to come after him. The promise here is that the faith that saved Abraham, that was counted as righteousness for him, would continue on throughout his life. Even though he has tried to circumvent the promise of God by taking his wife’s servant and conceiving a child to be the child of promise, even though he will again try to preserve his own life through a lie, the Lord sustains Abraham so that it would be written of him
He took his last breath and died at a good old age, old and contented, and he was gathered to his people.
And he is the spiritual father that all Christians look back to as the antecedent and the demonstration of a faithful life. At each point, at each crucial fork in the road of his life, Abraham put his full confidence in the Lord. Nathan Busenitz writes “Though he did not always know that the outcome would be, he had no reason to doubt or grow anxious. God had everything under control, and Abraham was content to rest in Him, knowing He is faithful. That is the essence of faith - full dependence on our sovereign God both for this life and the life to come.” Abraham’s full dependence and full confidence in the Lord is not the product of his own determination but instead it is the byproduct of the gift of faith given him by God.
And this is the faith that was passed on to Isaac and Jacob and has been passed down through the generations to all those who put their faith in Christ. It is the fulfillment of the teaching that was told to happen in Deuteronomy 4 and Psalm 78.
He established a testimony in Jacob and set up a law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach to their children
so that a future generation— children yet to be born—might know. They were to rise and tell their children
The faith that has been handed down is not simply that Christ saves but also that Christ sustains. Paul writes in Philippians 1:6
I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
and in Romans 8
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
For Abraham’s faith was not in this life or the benefits that he received in this life, but in the promise of the life to come.
For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
and again in Hebrews 11:14-16
Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.
If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return.
But they now desire a better place—a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Our hope now, our faith is sustaining us now, for the desire of that city that is promised, that heavenly city. That is the gift of sustaining faith - that because of saving faith and having submitted our lives to Christ we will be sustained to see the city that He has prepared for us.
“Don’t let your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.
In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?
If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also.
But Abraham’s faith was not only for his own or for his offspring’s benefit alone. The faith passed down through Abraham to all of his descendents was to be a serving faith.
The Gift of Serving Faith
The Gift of Serving Faith
Genesis 12:1-3; Genesis 22:18;
Turn with me to one final episode in the life of Abraham as we continue to look at this man’s example of faith. Genesis 22. The promised son has been born. Abraham has kept the requirements that God asked of him and has circumcised Isaac. The promise that his descendents would outnumber the stars seems to be being fulfilled - even from the dead womb of Sarah. Yet God delivers this command
“Take your son,” he said, “your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Well, that doesn’t make any sense. This is the heir. This is the promise. The womb that has given up only one child is now even further from youth than it was - can it give another? Yet Abraham, even now in the face of seemingly counterintuitive instructions, responds in faith. What a demonstration of growth this is. Earlier in life, when the promise seemed threatened Abraham responded by taking Hagar and spawning Ishmael as a way of helping the promise of God along. Yet here when the promise is once again seemingly in doubt, he responds by taking Isaac and two servants, loading up the donkeys and walking toward Mr. Moriah.
Let’s pick up the story in verse 6 and we’ll read to the close in verse 18.
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac. In his hand he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked on together.
Then Isaac spoke to his father Abraham and said, “My father.” And he replied, “Here I am, my son.” Isaac said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Then the two of them walked on together.
When they arrived at the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and placed him on the altar on top of the wood.
Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.
But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” He replied, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.”
Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son.
And Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide, so today it is said, “It will be provided on the Lord’s mountain.”
Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven
and said, “By myself I have sworn,” this is the Lord’s declaration: “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your only son,
I will indeed bless you and make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring will possess the city gates of their enemies.
And all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring because you have obeyed my command.”
Now let me say that I know that the real fulfillment of this promise to bless all the nations is found in the death of Christ on the cross. But I think there is a secondary fulfillment that we miss out on. That one of the blessings that Abraham’s offspring was supposed to carry to the nations was through their witness and their example of service to God. This serving faith is the earthly fulfillment of saving and sustaining faith.
Dr. Steve Lawson recently said
The seed of saving faith always produces the fruit of serving faith.
And this is the truth. This is, as I just said, the earthly fulfillment, the earthly outworking of saving and sustaining faith. It is the fulfillment of Ephesians 2:10
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
Serving faith is the penultimate example of the freedom we have found in Christ. Freed from the need to earn or to work for our own salvation, we are free now to work and bless the body of Christ and to work for the salvation, for the planting of saving faith and sustaining faith in the lives of others.
The trouble with much of the church today - and it is systemic in what have become known as “mega-churches” is that many people try to live a form of diffuser Christianity. Some of you may have them at home, I have an essential oils diffuser in my office. You lift off the top, put in some water and a variety of oils, push the button and the diffuser gives off an aroma making to room more calming or whatever environment you are trying to achieve. Some say if you diffuse peppermint in a classroom the students are more alert - maybe one of you teachers could try that. The point is that its a very passive process.
Some of us try and live out our Christianity the same way. If I just live my life right. If I just show up now and again. Then those around me will be blessed just by my presence - its a passive blessing. And yet this is not the type of activity that any of Scripture is calling us too. The works that Paul refers to, the commission that Christ provides His disciples, and us through them, are active employments on behalf of the Kingdom. Our faith is meant to have legs that demonstrates the validity of our salvation through the works that we do for our new King. Not to earn His good pleasure or His favor - but to demonstrate our submission to Him and our gratitude to Him for what He has done on our behalf.
Conclusion
Conclusion
There is only one way that any of this can take place. There is only one way to receive this gift in our lives - it is as B.B. Warfield said earlier that saving faith is solely accessible through the gift of the babe born and laid in a manger. It is through Him that we receive the gift of faith, the gift of saving faith as we place our trust in His sacrifice to pay for our sins and His forgiveness, the gift of sustaining faith as we trust in His ability to secure that which He paid for and the gift of serving faith as He equips us to serve His church and His mission to the world as His partners and ambassadors.
Do you have this gift today.