According to the Promise

Prayer

Who Is Trustworthy?

I got a text message this week, sounded like a fun invitation. It said, “I got a new number, are you free to have a cup of coffee today?”

That’s a always a fun invitation when a friend gets in touch with you and wants to get together.

Problem was, there was something very fishy going on. After all, who texts you from a new number but doesn’t tell you who they are. That, plus the fact that the phone number was from a Denver, Colorado area code, that’s a little suspicious.

So, if you one of you changed your phone number to a Denver number and invited me to coffee, let me apologize for not responding.

But it raises an essential question we ask continually in our interactions with others - can I trust you?

Some of us are more skeptical or suspicious by nature, or perhaps we’re more so because of past wounds, hurts - you’ve been burned or betrayed in the past trusting others. But all of us, in every interaction - question in back of our mind, how much can I trust you?

How much do I reveal of myself? How much will I allow myself to depend on you?

With some folks, relationship is tried & true - we relax, share openly, we tend to be more playful, the conversation is easily light-hearted.

With others, keep it more formal, polite, distant - only reveal bits and pieces.

The question of who is trustworthy is a critical one - because it’s the basis of every relationship we have, including our relationship with God. The gospel, the message of grace available through Jesus Christ - is an invitation to trust God above anything and everything else - including (perhaps especially) ourselves. Because he is trustworthy.

This is our main point this morning. God, through Jesus, holds forth the promise of life to us. And he’s asking us to trust that promise. Are we willing to trust God’s promise to us? Trust it to the point that it becomes the message on which we base our lives.

We’re in the third week of our sermon series on book of Galatians, The Word Lived. We began with talking about what the gospel is. At its most basic level, the message of the gospel is that Jesus gave himself (willingly laying down his life on the cross)…for our sins (to pay the penalty for our sins)…to rescue us (in order to offer us eternal life with him). Gave himself - for our sins - to rescue us. That’s the gospel.

Last week, we looked at what it means to live our lives based on that message, as Paul says so beautifully, Galatians 2:20: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Today, we’re going to be looking at Galatians 3, picking out some key verses that will help us dig deeper into question of faith, what does it mean to live by faith - to trust God above anything and everything else - including ourselves.

According to the Promise

Paul makes clear that whole basis of the gospel is rooted in the promise of God. We are invited to trust that what God says will come to be, will come to be.

Promise has always been God’s way of inviting us into relationship with him - God has always wanted our willingness to trust him. God makes promises to us, then we choose to either trust those promises, act accordingly - or we don’t.

This has been true from the very beginning - and it’s one of the main points Paul makes in Galatians by pointing them toward Abraham and the covenant, the agreement, that God made with him and how it’s on the same basis of faith as they are, Galatians 3:5-7...

So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham.

But it’s important to understand the nature of the covenant between God & Abraham, which was fundamentally different between the covenant that God made with his people through Moses, the covenant of the law, which is another point Paul makes in this chapter.

God’s covenant with Abraham was a unilateral covenant. It was one-sided - God makes promises, “I’ll do these things”. Abraham didn’t have to do anything, he simply had to trust that God would be true to his word. Notice how God speaks to Abraham in Genesis 15:4-5, 7 (just for context, Abraham had been questioning God because he and Sarah were still childless, and he feared his inheritance would go to a relative named Eliezer):

Then the word of the Lord came to him (Abraham): “This man (Eliezer) will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars - if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”…He also said to him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”

Everything about this covenant is what God will do…I will give you an heir, I will give you descendants, I will give you this land.

Abraham’s part? Trusting God. Genesis 15:6: Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness. Abraham was deemed righteous, faithful - not because he’d been such a good person, but because he took God at his word, believed God’s promises - and he lived his life based on those promises.

Contrast that with covenant given to Moses, the law, which was not unilateral, but conditional: Covenant God gave the people through Moses was the 10 commandments. Filled with things they were supposed to do and things they were not supposed to do. You shall worship Lord your God alone. Honor your father and mother. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery.

Lots of shalls and shall nots in there. God’s blessings (or curses) came according to their obedience - or lack thereof.

Natural question is why did God give this covenant based on works, not based on faith, to his people? If way God engages us is through a faith relationship, why did he give his people the covenant based on how well they obeyed? To make clear that we could not trust ourselves. That we are incapable of obedience to the law on our own, Galatians 3:10: For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.”

No one has been able to continue to do everything in the Book of the Law. There was a guy I knew in high school that told me one time that he had lived three perfect days. Three days where he had done everything right. I have no idea how he figured that out, but that was his claim. Now, admittedly, he was a little strange - but it fascinated me that he kept track of that. Of course, you’ve lived a lot of days by time you’re in high school, three days out of thousands is not very high percentage.

But, heck, I’m lived thousands more (thousands more) than that and I’ve never come close to living a perfect day. And that’s exactly what the law reveals, that trusting ourselves, our ability to be good and righteous, is a doomed venture.

Which is important to recognize, because our natural tendency is to trust ourselves, to trust our judgment, our wisdom, that we know what’s best, we know what will work for us, we know what will make us happy.

Some of you may have heard of Ray Comfort, one of the things he’s known for is engaging in street evangelism. I remember watching a video of him interacting with some people. He was talking to one woman in particular, who was high skeptical of the Christian faith. So he started asking her a series of questions, questions that seemed fairly simple, such as how many of each type of animal did Moses bring on the ark.

Easy enough, everybody knows that. She answered, two. But it was a trick question - Moses didn’t bring any animals on the ark, it was Noah!

As it turns out, she missed all of the questions (they were all trick questions). But that was point of the exercise - if you’re so easily fooled by these silly trick questions, why would you trust yourself? Wouldn’t it be far wiser and better to trust God - his wisdom, his goodness, his power - and his promises?

That’s our essential question: Is God trustworthy? Are his promises sure? Can we rely on him? It’s an important question, because the easy answer is yes, of course I can trust God. But we resist it, don’t we? We don’t give ourselves over easily to God. It’s a struggle for us to surrender our will to his.

Yet over and over again, God demonstrates how trustworthy he is. In that sense, we have a lot more to go on that Abraham did - we have a whole record of God (I’m talking about the Bible here) keeping his promises, including all the promises he made to Abraham.

God kept his promises to Abraham. When Abraham was 100 years old, God gave him his own flesh-and-blood son, an heir. And out of that heir, Isaac, have come descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. Isn’t it amazing to consider that, out of all the people groups that have ever existed, it’s the Jews that have maintained their sense of identity as a people, as the descendants of Abraham, over thousands of years? And God fulfilled the last promise he made to Abraham, the giving of the land, the Promised Land (which is amazing considering that they took over the land after spending 430 years in slavery and then wandering in the desert for another 40 years - not exactly the conditions you’d expect that would prepare you to conquer already occupied land).

When you see a rainbow in the sky, that’s a reminder of God’s faithfulness, promise he made to Noah to never again destroy the earth through a flood.

Coming of Jesus as the Messiah was the fulfillment of so many promises made by God to his people: that there would be a Messiah, a Savior, he would be born of a virgin, in the town of Bethlehem, he would come out of Egypt, he would suffer for our sins, redeem us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us - by hanging on a cross. That he would rise from the dead…the list goes on and on.

Again and again, God has demonstrated his faithfulness to us so that we will entrust our lives to him and to his promises - particular to this promise: grace offered to us through Jesus Christ.

Galatians 3:26-29: So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith (through faith!), for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to (what?) the promise.

According to the promise. Not according to whether I’m a law abiding Jew or I’m a Gentile. Socio-economic status, slave or free, doesn’t matter. Man or woman, no difference. Only whether we belong to Jesus through faith because we trust the promises of God.

Such a beautiful image that Paul uses here, of being adopted into the family, becoming children of God. Just think about this for a moment with me - it’s such a rich image when we think about what it means to live in trusting relationship with someone we know we can rely on. In a healthy family, there are assumed promises that children rely on that undergird their lives.

A child doesn’t knock at the door of their own house, they just walk right in, because they know they belong…this is my home, my place.

A child in such a family trusts the presence of his or her parents - they don’t wake up wondering whether or not they’re still there in the morning. They assume it, they trust it. That’s why they holler out for them all the time (or try to run and hide when they know they’ve done something wrong).

And that child looks to parent to provide for them, care for them, because they trust they will. When they’re hurting, they cry out for comfort. When they’re confused, they ask for guidance. When the parent tells them this or that is going to happen, they accept that as fact. They look to the parent. Their lives are centered on what they trust is true about their parents.

How naturally and willingly and eagerly children turn to their parents because they believe them to be trustworthy? How much more us, because of how much more trustworthy God is?

Isn’t that the point Jesus makes in his sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:9-11, Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

This is the faith relationship God is inviting us into, to live in confidence that we belong to him and his promises are trustworthy. That he is with us. That he is watching over us. That he will provide for us, care for us. This is true of every area of our lives. God doesn’t want just want of our life, he wants the whole thing, given in willing surrender to him. Trusting him over ourselves.

When I go about my day not giving thought to God, I’m trusting my abilities, my cleverness, my smarts - more than I am power of God, what he has for me to do in any given day. It’s remarkable how easy it is to do this - even doing ministry (putting this sermon together!).

My struggles with money, resistance to being generous - trusting money, my managing it more than I am God’s provision.

When someone makes an accusation about me - the natural desire to defend my reputation, rather than trusting God, trusting that he knows my heart, that I’m already declared righteous in his eyes

Center my schedule around Jesus…abide, remain in him

This is the invitation from God - to trust him, his promises, above anything and everything else - including (especially) ourselves.

Spiritual Disciplines

Practice of self-surrender - This is very center of Christianity, very heart of it. Why life in Jesus can never be compelled or manipulated…because it’s all about the surrender of our self to his Jesus. Our will to his. Our willingness to trust him, over and above ourselves.

Prayer of self surrender…words of the Lord’s Prayer…Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…and in my life.

To put that surrender into action through obedience. Obedience, done willingly, not begrudgingly, is always an act of trust. Respond in obedience this week. C.S. Lewis has a great quote here: Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

Has there been a nudging, a nagging sense that there’s something God has been wanting you to do - or something he’s been wanting you to give up, to not do.

Something that would center your life more around him, take on a spiritual discipline...

Maybe there’s been a friend you need to forgive or be reconciled to…an act of faith in regards to money, willingness to give generously…serve in some way…reach out to a neighbor or friend

Sinful behavior you need to give up...

Inspiration - Beauty of a life giving in trust to Jesus, the story of Kevin