Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning,

I hope all of you have had a great week

We’ve made so much progress in painting the halls; everything looks so nice!

So I just want to give our appreciation to everyone for all your hard work!

Challenge

Internalize the word.

Allowing the word of God to dwell richly within you will allow the Holy Spirit to bring to your mind those truths of the gospel that the people you share with need to hear.

Assignments

Read Romans 4:1-8.

My Testimony About God’s Hand

Before we get into our lesson I want to provide an update on my health:

I am still feeling weak, but am improving slowly

This week has been really difficult

But God showed himself in a powerful way

And as I was reflecting on what God has done, I realized just how timely this all was for us right now, not only for the work we are undertaking, but also in the message of Romans that we have this week.

So, I want to take a moment to give my testimony about what God has done this week.

My relapse began about three Thursdays ago

I asked for prayers and my relapse seemed to level out

I hoped I was possibly in the clear and improving

By Wednesday, though, things took a turn for the worse

At this point something important happened.

Brother Cliff told me that last week he felt like he was supposed to anoint and pray for me.

So he took me home on Sunday because I was too weak to stay for potluck and he anointed me and prayed over me.

And I want to say without hesitation that I believe this act of faith paved the way for what came next.

On Monday I was sent into the infusion center

While at the infusion center I crashed

My BP went dangerously low and I passed out

They called in the crash unit and sent me to the ER

When I got to the ER they did a full workup to check my heart and the doctors were quite perplexed about what happened.

All of my indicators were completely healthy.

So they discharged me after I finished my infusions.

And here’s where things get interesting:

I had a consult with the surgeon at 2:00 to discus removing my gallbladder

I didn’t want to go in, but something kept pressing on me to go

When I arrived the office was surprised because they knew what happened

Because of all this, the surgeon spent more time with me than the usual 10-min consult

While going through my history he asked me what I do

This peaked his curiosity to know more about what a minister does

He inquired about what disciplines I study: Bible, “life questions”, epistemology, etc

At this point he asked me what I think about the purpose of “life”.

I answered that I believe “the purpose of life is to know God and be at peace within his creation” (John 1:18; Ephesians 2:17; Ecclesiastes 12:13).

This touched him where he was, and we spent the next hour and a half talking about the gospel.

After this conversation, he thanked me, gave me his card, and told me that I had blessed him and that he needed to have this conversation today.

Suddenly everything made sense.

Without my relapse, I wouldn’t have crashed at the infusion center.

I have been praying and asking God this whole year to spare me another relapse because I know relapses do cumulative damage.

But if I hadn’t crashed at the infusion center, my consult with the surgeon would’ve been done in 10 minutes.

This chain of events is what opened the door for me to share the gospel.

This is as Scripture says:

God’s Kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world, which fail when their people are weak.

This is why the nations rage against one another and put up such bold appearances of strength, because they know that if they appear weak they invite destruction.

But God says that “when we are weak, then he is our strength”.

God’s Kingdom does not fail when we are weak.

And this is why you and I are so often called to enter weakness to bring God’s Kingdom to those who are searching for hope in this life.

You and I are called to act, not based on how strong we think we are, but based on who we think God is!

And I can say that for this small church family, our actions speak louder than our words: we believe God is the God of wonders and faithful love!

We believe he can do what we cannot.

And so we are stepping out in faith because we trust in God’s faithful love.

Your work in painting the hallway, in planting the community garden, in learning the apologetic skills on Wednesday evening that you need to give a reasoned defense for the faith you have in Christ, and in going door to door to share the gospel, speaks volumes about who you believe God is.

And so I commend you for this faith!

Let’s keep it up!

The Principle of Faith

To understand what is happening in this diatribe we will benefit from an illustration:

One of the most unique things that strikes most Christians when they cross the Pacific from churches in America to churches in Asia is that "they sing the right hymns to the wrong tunes".

So when everyone gathers for worship and everybody else goes “up”, you go “down”.

The result of all this chaos is that for a few weeks you feel like the odd one out until you get catch on to the tune everybody else is singing.

I think this very much describes what’s happening here.

Jewish Christians have been singing to the tune of righteousness by works, which goes something like this:

“God gave Israel the Torah.

Israel is required to keep Torah.

Those who do so will be vindicated as God’s people when he acts in history to judge the nations and rescue Israel from their clutches.

The way to know right now who will be vindicated in the future is if they are keeping the Torah right now.”

Unfortunately, sometimes when enough visitors join in worship, or when a few really vocal individuals join into a small group, they can inadvertently change the tune of the hymn being sung.

Get a few bold individuals into a group, and you can see how easy it would be to divert Christian thinking into the tune of righteousness by works.

So Paul is correcting their pitch to something more like this:

“God gave Israel the Torah to expose their sin.

Israel is required to humbly turn their hearts back to God.

Those who trust God and live by his faithful promises will be vindicated when God judges the nations and rescues his people from their clutches.

The way to know right now who will be vindicated in the future is whose hearts trust in God.”

Although similar, you can see where these tunes clash: one places confidence in one’s self, and the other in God.

And this relationship to God based in faithful-love is what the prophet Hosea called for:

So we will see the clash between these tunes reaches its climax later in chapters 9-10:

Given all this, I simply cannot sufficiently emphasize the importance of this principle.

Failing to understand and incorporate this principle of faith into our relationship with Christ will result in destructive spiritual decay, it will strip the gospel we preach of its power, and can even result in our being excluded from the Kingdom of God if we then seek to establish our own righteousness.

Now I think it will be helpful to make a few exegetical observations.

Exegesis

First, you’ll see in verse 27 the phrase “law of faith”; the underlying Greek word here is nomos, which Paul normally uses to refer to the the Mosaic law.

But Paul’s use of the word here calls instead for faith.

And since verse 28 appears to be an elaboration of verse 27, I prefer the NET’s translation “principle of faith” over “law of faith”; the point being made is not that we have a new law replacing Moses, nor is the point that Moses’ law called for faith since the Law said “Keep my statutes and ordinances; a person will live if he does them.

I am the Lord” (Lev.

18:5; cf.

Gal.

3:12).

Instead, Paul’s point is that the principle of faith excludes even the possibility of putting one’s confidence in oneself.

Second, some scholars have seen in verse 30 how Paul says that God will justify “the circumcised by faith” and “the uncircumcised through faith”, alternating the use of the Greek prepositions “ek” and “dia”, and they infer from this the idea that there are two separate modes of salvation by faith.

This conclusion directly undermines the entire point that Paul will draw from this section in the next four chapters, namely, that there is one God of both Jews and Gentiles, who saves the world through faith in Jesus Christ.

This is simply an example of placing too much interpretive weight on grammatical form.

Last, this diatribe opens with the inferential particle “οὗν”, which is used to draw a conclusion from what has been said in verses 21–26.

So now let’s get into our text.

Where is Boasting?