Romans 4:13-25 – Romans

Okay, this is Romans four, verses thirteen through twenty-five.

For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.

For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.

For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, there is no transgression.

That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, not only to the adherent of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.

As it is written, I have made you the father of many nations, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

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.

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.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness.

But the words it was counted to him were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also.

It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

And so reads God's word.

And uh if you have uh come to the Odeon over the last few weeks, uh expecting there to be church here, sorry about that.

We've been kind of uh nomadic uh over the last little while.

Uh, but we're here, we're back, we're in uh the Odeon for the next uh foreseeable anyway.

Please let me reiterate what uh Ben's invitation to come back here next Friday evening for our Good Friday service.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday are great services to invite friends, family, uh housemates along uh with you too, uh, because people still have a have a cultural memory anyway of going to church at Christmas and Easter, and uh those will be evangelistic in their thrust, so please uh plan on coming to those.

Uh people who um who perhaps aren't familiar with uh with Christianity or with um what it means to be a follower of Jesus can sometimes, uh I think wrongly think that what faith is is a kind of holy daydreaming, uh, that it's uh that it's nothing more than uh than wishful thinking.

That to have faith is you know people talk about faith, it's blind faith, or uh believing in things for which uh there is uh no evidence, uh that there's there's little connection to uh to reality.

And so faith often gets uh dismissed because that's what people think that faith is.

They think it's no more, it's no more solid than a than a mist, that it's kind of pointless, an emotional crutch to get you to get you through the day.

And one of the reasons why it gets dismissed is because, well, we are by nature hardwired for for work.

We are uh doers uh by nature.

We want to uh advance and we want to achieve and we want to do and we want to strive and we want to earn.

That that's kind of uh what we do.

I mean, you whenever you're sitting having a first conversation with someone, and I do this all the time, and maybe it's just an Irish thing, but as you hi, what's your name?

What's the second question?

What do you do?

People turn around, somebody says, Oh, I I don't, I don't don't do anything.

You go, what sort of weirdo are you?

You're you're clearly up to something if you don't do anything.

We sort of define our reality by doing, and so having having faith then seems to not quite make sense.

How could you possibly hope to gain anything by what we assume is holy daydreaming?

But in the very first verse of the reading, verse 13 uh of Romans chapter 4, if you come in after the reading, you're like, where are we?

Romans 4 · chapter mention

We're in Romans chapter 4.

Romans 4 · chapter mention

You can look it up on your phone, you can go to Bible Gateway and look up Romans chapter 4 if you've got a Bible with you.

Romans 4 · chapter mention

Uh, turn it up so that you can look with us.

But in the very first verse of the reading that Grace read, Paul says that God has made a promise.

He made it to Abraham, a character in the Old Testament, who we looked at uh in the autumn last year.

He made a promise to Abraham and to his offspring that can only be realized by faith.

That it can't be earned, that no amount of success or striving can grab hold of it.

That only faith can do that.

Did you see what the promise is?

It's a very odd little phrase.

It's not a phrase that really occurs anywhere else in the Bible.

Look at verse 13.

For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be the heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.

God has made a promise to Abraham, but not just to Abraham, to Abraham's offspring as well, that he, they, would be heirs of the world.

Heir of the world.

It's not a phrase that actually really occurs in the Old Testament.

You might think about Jesus in the Sermon on the Mind and the Beatitudes, where he says that the meek shall inherit the earth.

It's similar to that.

He's saying that on some level, the believer in Jesus, the one who trusts in God, is an heir of the world.

This promise surely lifts our eyes in some way to see all of God's work throughout human history.

You that being a follower of Jesus isn't just a personal, private renewal of our individual selves, though it is not less than that, but rather it is a participation in the promise of God to renew all things and to unite all things under his good rule and to draw together one united people for himself.

And that's what you're a part of.

That ever since Genesis chapter 3, and our first parents turning from God, their rejection of his rule and of his goodness and of the life that he offers, God has been working to renew the whole cosmos and to give it back to people who trust in him.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

The promise that Abraham is heir of the world, is why we're here this morning.

It's evidenced amongst us this morning.

Verse 17 says that Abraham might be the father of many nations, of all those who share in not his actions, but in his faith.

So the God of Abraham, the God who brought everything out of nothing, who brings life out of death, he's not simply the God of Abraham and his descendants by by birth, but he is the God who's the God of all who trust in his promise, just as he did.

And so I want to begin this morning by laying before you that if you are a follower of Jesus, or if you are considering what it means to be a follower of Jesus, that one of the things that's going on in the world, one of the things that God is doing in the world, is that He is connecting you into making you part of something much grander and bigger than yourself, than any individual person in their relationship with Jesus, certainly any individual church.

It's much bigger than city, it's much bigger than you, it's much bigger than what God is doing in Dublin or in Ireland, it is much bigger than what God is doing at this time.

It is all time and all places and every one and everybody that gathers together and calls upon the name of Jesus, that God is uniting one new people to himself, and that all those who share in the faith of Abraham are heirs of the world.

Who are you?

If you are trusting in Jesus, if you share in the faith of Abraham, you are an heir of the world.

You might feel insignificant, you might feel unsuccessful, you might have failed in a whole bunch of ways this week.

You might think, that's why Andrew's prayer was so apt from Psalm Ed.

How is it that you would be mindful of me?

The psalmist is saying.

What Paul is saying here is, yeah, God is mindful of you in your smallness.

He's making you an heir of the world.

That each one of us is written into the great story of God's redeeming of the cosmos and his eternal commitment to his people.

Lucy at the end of the Chronicles of Narni in the last book and the last battle says that that story has only just begun.

That we've only just written the title page.

That all of human history is just the introduction to what God is doing, and that every chapter of that unfolding story is better than the last.

You're an heir of the world.

If you share in the faith that Abraham had.

Because that's what Paul wants to press home to us, that we are part of this promise, that we are, you and I, heirs of the world, but then he wants to flesh out well, how do I become an heir of this promise?

How do we know that it's sure?

How is it that we, weak and wandering though we are, how is it that the promise might be fulfilled in us and become true for us?

This is what concerns Paul for the rest of this chapter, and this is what we're going to unpack.

I'm going to unpack it uh in uh in two different ways.

I'm going to make two statements and ask two questions.

So we've taken notes.

Two statements, two questions.

Two statements.

First statement is this the promise comes by faith.

The promise comes by faith.

Now, in a sense, we have kind of been talking about this over the last couple of weeks.

And so I want to build simply upon what some of the things that we've already been saying.

But it's simply this that if God had said to Abraham, I would like you and your family to inherit the world, now go and try your best.

Uh go and do all that you can, and I will I'll try and keep my promise.

Well, what would happen?

If God had said, I'd like to keep this promise to you, but I need you to uh to go and try your hardest, what would happen to the promise?

It would have failed.

The promise would have failed.

Why?

Because of our human weakness, because of our inability to live perfectly under God's good rule.

We wouldn't be able to live up to it.

The promise would have failed.

This is why Paul says that the promise cannot come through law-keeping, that is, moral goodness.

Now, he has specifically in view the 613 uh rules of the Old Testament law, but what his point is the same is that we cannot do it through our own moral efforts.

That hard wire for working doesn't work.

We fail to meet the standards, not only of God, we fail to meet the standards that we set for ourselves.

We make resolutions and bargains with our own spirit of, well, I'm never going to do that again, or I'm always going to do this, or that's the last time that that's going to happen.

And we don't even live up to our own standards, the own or the own little rules that we set for ourselves.

If it was based on our law keeping, the promise would have failed.

Seeking to keep the law makes faith useless because it replaces faith with work and not trusting, but trying to earn.

In fact, Paul makes the contrast more stark in verses 14 and 15, saying that if you try to earn it, what you will actually earn is wrath.

For if the adherence of the law were to be heirs, faith is null, doesn't matter.

The promise is void, the promise would have failed.

For the law brings wrath.

But where there is no law, there is no transgression.

That's an odd little phrase at the end.

What does that mean?

That you know, if we uh if we're not aware of a law that we're not, we're not guilty of it.

No, not quite.

Let me try and explain what is going on in verse 15 like this.

Imagine for a second you're walking through, you're walking through Trinity, uh, through the uh through the quad there in the front, uh, or you're walking through Dublin Castle, and it's a beautiful warm summer's day, and you see the little signs that there are on the grass saying, do not walk on the grass.

As soon as you see those signs, what happens in your heart?

If you're honest with yourself, and see people have already started to laugh, what happens in your heart?

Before you saw the sign, you had given no thought to walking on the grass at all.

But now that there is a sign telling you that you can't, it is almost impossible to resist your feet stepping over the little black metal barrier and walking on the grass.

It's like when you say, you know, hot, do not touch, what's the first thing you'll do?

Right?

It's the first thing you'll do.

Hot, do not touch.

So you walk on the grass and you walk right past the sign, even though that it says that you shouldn't.

Not you meet someone coming the other way.

You walk past someone who didn't see the sign and is walking in complete ignorance of the rule.

Who's more guilty?

You are.

You're more guilty because you know what's wrong, and you've done it anyway.

The person who is acting in ignorance has still broken the rule, but they're less guilty than you are.

That's what's going on in that second half of verse 15, where there is no law, there is no transgression.

When you knew the law, the law gave you, oh sorry, because you knew the law, the law gave you the idea to do it, and so you willfully broke it.

And Paul is saying that's what God's law does.

God's law doesn't rescue us, God's law makes us aware of all of the possibilities of sin that we could do.

This is his argument in chapter 7, which we'll come to uh in about six weeks' time or so, which is basically he he takes the example of uh the law and the Ten Commandments, do not covet.

So to covet is to enviously desire somebody else's stuff.

And Paul uses the example to say that when the law, before the law said, do not covet, I had no idea what coveting was.

But as soon as it told me no, it the way my heart interacted with it is that I immediately started coveting a whole bunch of things.

I immediately looked at all of these things that I desired and I coveted them.

That is what the law does when it interacts with a sinful human heart.

It cannot save you, it can only bring you wrath, it cannot make you an heir of the grand promises of God, it can only bring you wrath.

Inheritance is never something earned, it is something received as a gift.

If you try to earn, what you will earn is wrath.

You are an heir of the world by faith in the promise.

It can never be by lawkeeping.

Second statement.

First was that the promise comes by faith.

Second is that the promise is guaranteed to all by grace.

The promise is guaranteed to all by grace.

If the promise rested on law-keeping, if the promise was only for those who kept the rules and were good little boys and girls, then the promise would only be for a very small number of people.

It would only be actually for the Jews who have the law, the oracles of God, as Paul talks about them.

But even then, it couldn't be guaranteed that they would earn it.

Because there would always be this question of, well, have I done enough?

Have I achieved the right standard, the right level?

But here he is saying that the promise rests not on law, but on grace.

Look at verse 16.

This is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, who are all his offspring, not only the adherent of the law, but also the one who shares in the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.

The promise does not rest on law-keeping, it rests on grace.

What is grace?

Grace is God's undeserved, unmerited kindness.

This not only means that you can be certain of the promise, that it is guaranteed to you because it's not based on what you do, it's not based either on your successes or on your failings.

It is made no more secure by your successes or jeopardized anymore by your failings.

It is guaranteed because it comes from God's kindness.

Not only does that mean then that we can be certain of it, it means that it is opened up to all.

Because it's not based on keeping the law.

Of God.

And so those of us who did not grow up with access to the law of God, who don't come from a Jewish background, we are swept up in these promises because they are based on faith.

That we become Abraham's descendants, not because we share his genetics, but because we share the faith that he had.

The people who enjoy these promises are not simply those of Jewish descent who seek to adhere to the law, but those who have the same faith as Abraham had.

Excuse me.

This goes right to the very heart of the world that God is remaking that we are heirs of.

This world is a world of law.

It's a world of success and of earning.

It's a world of transaction, it's a world of achievement and success.

It's a world of succeed or fail.

It's of have and don't have, of work for it, pay for it.

But the culture of the world, the new world that God is making, the kingdom that He is bringing in, expressed now in local churches, is profoundly different to that.

It is not a place of earn.

It's a place of receive.

It's a place of gift.

The kingdom, the new world that God is bringing in, rests on grace.

Imagine this.

Imagine you got home today and there was a there was a letter sitting on your mat, and so you open it up, and inside it, there are two free tickets to an all expenses paid holiday in the Caribbean.

You didn't do anything to earn it.

You're simply being whisked away tomorrow morning from Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport for two weeks of sunshine and sand and sang and whatever else.

You walk along that beach, and one of the things you realize is that everything about this holiday speaks of grace.

Every meal would be a meal of grace.

Every sunset would be enjoyed by grace.

Every morning ocean air would be sniffed by grace.

Every moment, every breath, all laughter, all delight, all joy, every moment and every breath and every sense would be a gift of grace.

That's the world that you get to inherit.

It doesn't make sense, therefore, that the way that you would get into that world with that sort of DNA, with that sort of culture, that you would get into it by earning.

It all comes to us by grace.

It's not just grace in it.

It's grace at the start of it.

It's all grace.

Do not mistakenly think that the faith that you now possess, if indeed you possess it, that it is something that you weld up from within yourself.

No.

That even the first embers, the first little sparks of considering Christ and wondering what it would mean to turn to him, that even those first little flickers of life are a gift of his grace.

It's all grace.

It's always been grace from start to finish.

Grace, that is, God's undeserved, unmerited kindness, roots the promise of God in God Himself.

That the fulfillment of the promise is not dependent on our ever-changing goodness, but in his unchanging character.

Grace holds out the wonderful promises of God, and faith humbly receives those promises and trusts them.

The promise is guaranteed to all by grace.

Those are our two statements.

Two questions then.

What sort of faith trusts the promises of God?

Paul, in the rest of the chapter, goes on to kind of talk a little bit about what Abraham's faith was like.

If it's not holy daydreaming, if it's not just a kind of sanctified, wishful thinking, then what is it like?

And Paul uses Abraham as an example.

So verse 17, he'll say, as it is written, I have made you the father of many nations, in the presence of God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

In hope he believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations.

As he had been told, so shall your asking be.

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.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promises of God, but he grew strong in his faith and gave glory to God, fully convinced that he was able to do what he had promised.

What is the nature of Abraham's faith?

And how does that help us understand what our faith is like?

Let me give you three pointers in this question.

So the question is: what sort of faith trusts the promises of God?

First, a faith that looks beyond appearances.

Abraham trusted that God was able to do what he said despite circumstances.

That's why Paul says this phrase in the start of verse 18, in hope he believed against hope.

That is, everything else seemed to go against the promises of God.

He was a hundred, his wife had never been able to conceive, and yet God is saying you're going to have a child.

That to all intents of purposes, intents and purposes.

You know, people often say that wrong, don't they?

So to all intents of purposes.

No, no, to all intents and purposes.

Um it seemed complete and utter foolishness.

If he was looking at the circumstances, he would never believe or rely upon that God was able to do this.

He was as good as dead, Sarah was barren, circumstances seem to show that Abraham was a fool.

But faith, faith sees realities that are deeper, that lie beyond the circumstances in front of us.

Abraham looked at his body and everything looked hopeless.

But he didn't trust appearances.

He put his faith in the promises of God.

So what's faith then?

Well, faith is certainly not vague optimism, but here's another thing that faith isn't.

Faith is not faith in ourselves.

People sometimes talk about faith in those sort of sorts of terms.

I just need to have more faith in myself.

Well, no.

Real faith, biblical faith, Christian faith is the exact opposite of that.

It is the death of self-reliance, of looking to circumstances, and trust in something more.

But what is that something more?

And this is the second thing that faith is.

Faith is faith in a God who raises the dead.

Faith is a faith in God who raises the dead.

That is why Paul says in verse 17 that he believed in the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Have you realized that our faith, here in 2024, and Abraham's faith, back 4,000-ish years ago, that our faith is essentially the same.

That it's the same faith.

It's a faith in a God who raises the dead.

That's who Abraham believed in.

That's what Paul is saying.

Abraham believed that God was able to take the dead womb of his wife.

Sounds kind of crass, but that's kind of how it parallels, and bring it back to life.

That he was able to raise the dead.

Or put it another way, Abraham's body is a hundred years old.

He was as good as dead.

Anyone listening on Spotify who's a hundred years old, I'm terribly sorry.

But that's what Paul is saying.

Abraham was as good as dead, and yet God brought life out of him.

And we believe in a God who raises the dead.

Ever since Good Friday and Easter, Christians have believed in a God who raises the dead.

The clarity of the promise might be different.

We've seen God's unfolding plan all the way through the Old Testament, culminating in the Lord Jesus.

We look back to his life on earth.

We look back to his crucifixion and to his resurrection.

Abraham could only hope to glimpse those things in shadow.

And yet the essence of the faith is the same.

We trust the one who is the ability to do the impossible, to bring the dead back to life again.

Abraham saw the reality of resurrection in his own day, in his own small way, in the birth of Isaac.

And we have seen the truth of the empty tomb.

One of the things that I say over and over and over again.

If you're new to the city, this will be the first time you've hear it, but everybody else is like, I know exactly what's coming.

The resurrection of Jesus is not a metaphor.

It is a reality that took place in history.

It makes best sense of the evidence of the empty tomb that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

Faith, therefore, is not wishful thinking, but it is rooted not just in history, but in the power of God expressed in history to raise the dead.

That is the kind of quality of faith that we and Abraham share.

And thirdly, in this point, faith is a faith that takes God at his word.

Faith is a faith that takes God at his word.

There were points in Abraham's life when he had nothing else to go on but the promise of God.

He had nothing else to go on but to cling to what God had said.

That again, circumstances and his own failing life seemed to cut against the grain of everything that it was promised, and yet he relied on what God had said.

You know, in our lives, there will be times when it feels like trusting in God is the most foolish thing that you could possibly do.

There will be times in your life when it feels like it's the most ineffective thing that you could possibly do.

But living faith, real faith, growing faith, maturing faith is faith that lays hold to the promises of God, to the promise of God that we are heirs of the world.

And in those moments when we have nothing else to go on, we allow his words to define our reality, and we say, everything else looks like it's falling apart, everything else looks like it's going against trusting you.

But this is what you have said, this is what you have promised to me.

And so I will rely on it.

You know, it's like this happened in the in the life of Jesus' ministry.

You know, the the start of John chapter 6, there's about 20,000 people following Jesus.

John 6 · chapter mention

And he begins to teach them what it means that he has come from heaven.

And by the end of his sermon, everyone's gone.

We've gone from twenty thousand people to twelve.

And one of those is going to betray him.

And he looks at the disciples and says, Well, you're going to go too.

Do you remember what Peter says?

Peter says, Lord, where else would we go?

For you have the words of eternal life.

Jesus' ministry looked like a failure.

Everyone had left him.

The circumstances were not looking good, and yet Peter realized what faith was.

Faith was realizing that you have the words of eternal life, Lord.

Where else would we go?

So in those moments, when you are struggling to see the goodness of God's word, ask yourself, where else are you going to go?

You fall into despair, you're just going to escape wherever it is that you escape to.

All those pits that offer death.

Where else are you going to go?

You have the words of eternal life.

That's what faith is.

It's taking God at His Word.

Finally.

This promise, this glorious promise that we are heirs of the world.

How is it fulfilled in us?

How does it become true for us?

Paul tells us.

Verse 22 to 25.

That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness.

But the words, it was counted to him, were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also.

And it will be counted to us who believe in him, who raised from the dead our Lord Jesus, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

How is it that we become heirs of the world?

The same way Abraham did.

By trusting in the promises of God and having that trust, that faith be reckoned to us, counted to us, credited to us as righteousness.

This is what we saw last week.

If you weren't there last week, do not think that when you become a Christian, when you become a follower of Jesus, that all that has happened is that God clears your debts and brings you up to zero in your bank account.

That's not the whole story.

The whole story is not just that God clears your debts, but that he makes you positively righteous.

He puts you in credit.

Spiritually speaking, you're in the black.

That is what happened to Abraham.

That he trusted God and God regarded him as though he always obeyed perfectly.

And Paul is saying that it is true of us as well.

How is it that we become heirs of the world?

Well, it is because by faith we are made righteous.

Not just declared innocent, but declared as those who are positively righteous.

In a sense, Paul ends where he began, God has always justified people by faith in his promise.

And that's why he says, Genesis 15, 6, Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.

It was not just written for him, it was written for us to assure us that this is how God has always operated.

God has always been in the business of bringing dead people to life.

And so God, so Abraham looked beyond the barren womb of his wife to the child that they would have.

And similarly, we look beyond the cross and the empty tomb and see the risen Savior, to trust the one who was delivered up for our trespasses.

That is, that he took the penalty for our sin as we will meditate upon this coming Friday.

And yet he did not stay dead, but was raised in order to assure us, to guarantee to us that forgiveness and righteousness is possible.

Only then can we be heirs of the world.

Only then are we heirs of the world because of him.

He is the heir of all things.

He is the heir of the world.

And by faith in him we are swept up, caught up, united to him.

And so that all of those promises become true to us as well.

And we become part of that great work of God of restoring all things to himself, of making one united people of God, from all places, from all times, from every tribe and tongue and nation.

Friends and brothers, sisters, if you are trusting in Jesus this morning, you are an heir of the world.

Take heart that God has brought you into that great grand narrative, that story, where every chapter is greater than the one that went before.