By Grace Through Faith-Part 1 (Romans 4:1-12)

Romans chapter 4, verses 1 through 12, we'll be reading.

Romans 4:1–12

Let's all stand for the reading of God's word.

What then will we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh, has found?

If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

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.

Likewise, David also speaks of the blessing of the person to whom God credits righteousness apart from works.

Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the person the Lord will never charge with sin.

Is this blessing only for the circumcised then?

Or is it also for the uncircumcised?

For we say faith was credited to Abraham for righteousness.

In what way then was it credited?

While he was circumcised or uncircumcised?

It was not while he was circumcised, but uncircumcised.

And he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith, while still uncircumcised.

This was to make him the father of all who believe, but are not circumcised, so that righteousness may be credited to them also.

And he became the father of the circumcised, who are not only circumcised, but who also follow in the footsteps of the faith of our father Abraham had while he was still uncircumcised.

Let's pray.

That your spirit would be present in teaching us and allowing us to learn everything that you desire for us to take away today.

So I pray that we would approach you with soft hearts and open ears and open eyes for all of the things that you want to accomplish inside of each one of us individually here this morning.

So we pray, uh, Lord, that you would be speaking here this morning.

God, we love you so much and we pray, God, that um that we would be affected, that we would be changed by what you have for us here this morning.

Pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So today, understanding our text is really dependent upon understanding a lot of what we've already covered here in Romans through the weeks past.

Going all the way back into chapter one.

So if you've missed those sermons, uh you can go back and you can listen to them.

But for today, I'm gonna do my best to provide some on-ramps for you.

If you missed some of those or if you're new here, uh, just so that you can kind of come up to speed on where we are, because especially here in chapter four, Paul's pulling from a lot of this the stuff that he's already mentioned, and he's starting to bring it all together.

So it's very dependent upon keeping it in context here.

And we're gonna revisit um things like that we've already talked about about how we as believers we're all on the same playing field.

We're all down here, and God's on this playing field all by himself, and there's nothing we can do to get up there under our own power and our own strength.

Uh, we're gonna talk about, we've been using this analogy that in the Roman church there's the Jews and there's the Gentiles.

So we've been referring to this half of the church as uh the Jewish population and this half as the Gentile population that are all in the same Christian church together in Rome.

So that's gonna come up again today.

And we're gonna revisit circumcision and circumcision of the heart specifically, which is something that we spent a whole Sunday uh talking about.

So those are some of the themes that are gonna come up again.

And that's what we're covering here this morning.

Um, it's really a continuation of the whole book, but specifically a continuation of chapter three that we covered two weeks ago before Easter.

And it's going to be a continuation of chapter three, specifically verse 31, the last verse of chapter 3.

So look at it with me because I think that brings us some good context.

It says, Do we then nullify the law through faith?

Absolutely not.

On the contrary, we uphold the law.

So Paul's asking the question, is the law that's found in the Old Testament, is it now irrelevant since Jesus the Messiah has come?

Now that we have faith, can we just ignore the law?

And Paul gives the short answer in verse 31.

He says, absolutely not.

On the contrary, we uphold the law.

But in that, and what we'll cover now today in chapter 4, is that even though we uphold the law, it has no saving power.

And the theme of chapter 4 is you cannot earn your salvation by obeying the law.

It's by grace through faith that we are saved in Jesus Christ.

And that's exactly what Paul wants to tell us in chapter 4.

And really, this sermon is a two-parter because all of chapter 4 is really the same thing, but there's just so much stuff in it that we're going to cut it into two parts.

So we're going to do the first half this week, we'll do the second half next week.

Alright, with all that said, look at verse 1 of chapter 4 with me.

It says, What then will we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh, has found?

If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

If anyone is saved by their works, then they have something to boast about, don't they?

Like we've been talking about, we're all on that same playing field, way down here.

God's way up here.

And if we, through our own works and our own effort and our own intelligence and our own self-discipline, can elevate ourselves through our own strength up to that same playing field as God, then we have something to boast about.

Because that would be an incredible, impossible feat, really.

The problem is what Paul mentions in the previous chapter, in chapter 3, verse 23, he says, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

There's nobody else that's up here on God's playing field with them.

The problem is nobody can elevate themselves up to that place.

Therefore, nobody can boast.

No Christian has a reason to boast in our own works.

So think about every other religion in the world.

Every other religion is about how people can get to their God, how they can please their God, or how they can appease their God to come into favor.

And I'm talking about little g gods here.

Christianity is the only religion where God came down to the people to make a way for them.

And a good number in the church at Rome came from that pagan background of trying to please and appease gods through their works.

So Paul's going to really drive this home in this chapter.

And it's not just for the Jews on this side of the church in Rome, it's also for the Gentiles on this side.

That you can't earn it through the law, and you can't earn it through trying to appease your God.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Nobody comes to the Father except through me.

It's not the law and it's not good works.

It's through faith in Jesus Christ alone that anybody can be saved.

Look at verse 3 with me.

It says, For what does the scripture say?

Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness.

And this is quoting from Genesis 15, 6 that Paul's quoting right here in verse 7.

And it's so clear that Abraham did not earn his righteousness.

And this is what Paul is trying to convey to the Roman church.

So if you're not familiar with the story of Abraham, I want to give you a very brief summary of who he is.

It starts, I want to start in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

Um, God shows us this guy named Abram, whose name he will then change to Abraham.

And this guy was living in Ur of the Chaldees, and it says in Genesis 12, the Lord said to Abraham, 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, and I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on the earth, referring to the Messiah, will be blessed through you.

So from there, God tells Abraham that, but from there, God tells him to go to the land of Canaan specifically, and he does.

But then a famine hits, and so Abraham takes all of his family and everybody that's with him, and they head off to Egypt because of the famine.

Um, and then they get to Egypt, and uh he tells the Egyptians that his wife is his sister because he has fear for his own life.

So he says, This isn't my wife because she's so beautiful, they're afraid that they're gonna kill him and take uh his wife.

So he says, No, she's my sister.

It's a whole convoluted story.

It blows up in his face.

But eventually, um, Abraham comes back to the land of Canaan.

And then God shows Abraham the promised land, the land that God promised to Abraham, which would become the land of Israel.

And God promised Abraham in that time an heir, a son that would carry on this promise that God was giving him after Abraham died.

And God promised that his heirs would be like the stars of the sky.

They would be innumerable.

You couldn't count them.

And through this promise, God also promised that the Messiah was going to come from the seed of Abraham.

And God told and showed Abraham all of this.

And that's when, in Genesis 15, 6, is when it says, Abraham believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

Literally, God deposited righteousness into Abraham's account for him.

Abraham believed God, believed that what he said it was true and was actually going to happen, and that's it.

He believed, and that is what God credited as righteousness.

Abraham had already messed up plenty, and if you read through Genesis, you'll see some of the horrid things that he did, and he made some really bad choices, but it was his belief that what God said was going to be true that God credited to him as righteousness.

It definitely wasn't Abraham's works.

And to finish this summary, uh, Abraham had Isaac, Isaac had Jacob, Jacob had 12 sons, those 12 sons became the 12 tribes of Israel.

Soon after that, another famine hits, and they end up as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, and in that time their population exploded.

Then they had the Exodus back to the promised land after that 400 years in Egypt, and God established the nation of Israel, which is still the nation of Israel that we refer to today.

The borders are a little different, but it's still that promised land.

So, like I said, that's a very short version, but it's all gonna come into play as we look at the story of Abraham and how Paul's using that to address the Roman church.

And that's why Abraham was referred to as the father of the Jewish nation, because he was the first one that that promise was made through, and it was his descendants that became the nation of Israel.

Now, I want to share a bit more history that's gonna come into play a little bit later before we continue.

Roughly 14 years after Abraham was credited as righteous is when circumcision came on the scene as a way to set apart God's chosen people, Israel.

It was a sign of the covenant that God had entered into with Israel.

And we talked about that a lot a few weeks ago, but it's gonna come into play again.

And here's what will be helpful.

If someone back in this time was not born Jewish through their blood, if they wanted to become Jewish, part of what they had to do was become circumcised.

And they would go as far as to say that if you aren't circumcised, you couldn't even sit down at a Passover table and celebrate Passover with anybody that was Jewish.

And after the new convert came to Judaism and had done all that was required, they still were not allowed to refer to Abraham as their father.

They couldn't say our father Abraham as the Jews referred to him.

They had to refer to him as your father Abraham.

Because in order for Abraham to be your father, according to the Jews at this time, this isn't biblical, this is just their tradition at the time, you had to be related to Abraham through blood.

You had to be the physical descendant.

So hang on to that tidbit, because that's really gonna come to play as we get into this just a little bit further.

But all that to say, back to verse 3.

Abraham was no hero.

He didn't deserve any of this that God was giving to him.

His own works were messed up.

But that's not why God saw Abraham as righteous.

It was simply because Abraham had faith that God would do what he said he was going to do.

Alright, verse 4.

Now to the one who works, pay is not credited as a gift, but as something owed.

So another way of saying this is we cannot earn salvation through our works.

Otherwise, salvation would be something that's owed to us.

Just like a worker is owed his wages.

You don't come to the end of your work week and tell your employer, thank you so much for directly depositing that money into my account as a free gift, right?

You earned it all week through your labor and your time given to that company, and they owe you that money.

That is the wage that is owed you because you earned it.

But say, for instance, say this is a business in here, it's a Friday afternoon, and you clock out from your minimum wage job that you have here in this building.

You walk out into the parking lot to get into your 30-year-old car that's held together with bailing wire, and it only runs on prayer.

Okay?

You know that kind of car?

And somebody's parked next to you, and they're waiting for you, and they're standing right next to you.

A 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO.

I don't even know what it looks like, but I looked it up.

That is the most expensive car in the world right now.

Valued at about$70 million.

And the person standing there says, This car is a free gift.

All you have to do is tear up your measly little paycheck, trash your car, and then take these keys.

And it's a free gift to you.

And you say, Um, what's the catch?

You know, this seems a little too good to be true.

The person says, No, this is a free gift to you.

There's no catch whatsoever.

So you respond, Well, instead of me tearing up this check, why don't you take it?

And why don't you take my car as well?

It's just some form of a payment.

And the person says, Your measly check and your old beater.

You think that even comes close to what you would owe if you bought this car for yourself?

And he says, I have no use for these things.

These are of no value to me.

Just take the keys.

But we insist, well, at least let me work it off.

Let me give you some money.

Let me do something for you.

And the person says, You could work the rest of your life at this job.

And you wouldn't even be able to pay 10% of what this car is valued.

It's a free gift.

Just take it.

You see, Jesus gives us salvation and grace as a free gift.

Praise the Lord.

Because what we are owed for our spiritual works, our spiritual labor, what our wages are, it isn't a measly check from our employer.

It's death.

That's what we are owed.

The wages of sin is death.

Death is what we're owed, and Jesus says, I'll pay that wage and I will die for you.

You just need to ask me to pay your debt and forgive your sin, and I will readily do that for you.

I think the problem that we keep running into is that it seems too good to be true, doesn't it?

So we try to start paying for it with works.

We try to start to earn this free gift so that get this, so that our pride can start to take some of the credit for our own righteousness.

Well, it's because I've been walking with the Lord for so long that I've got things figured out and I'm righteous.

It's because I know the Bible so well and I don't struggle with any major sins, which is why I'm so righteous.

You're not righteous, that's pride.

Trying to help earn our salvation is when we start to think that we can become more righteous or more holy than what is already credited to our account through Jesus Christ.

By adding to the works of Jesus.

You see the problem with that?

It's basically telling God what you did and what you provided through Jesus is not enough without my help.

That's pride, isn't it?

Salvation is a free gift and we have nothing to do with it.

And as soon as we start to elevate ourselves above other Christians, because of our past or our present works, like this side, the Jewish side of the Roman church, as soon as that happens, it's just pride.

As soon as those thoughts start to form in our mind, we should have some major red flags that just start waving, saying something's wrong.

Pride is getting in the way of our salvation.

And that's really what verse 4 is addressing here.

Now let's look.

It says, but to the one who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accredited for righteousness.

You know, this makes me think of the thief on the cross next to Jesus.

What did he earn, or what did he do to earn his way to heaven?

What did he do to earn grace?

What did he do to be called righteous?

All he did was he died on the cross next to Jesus, and the next moment he was in glory, and he did nothing to earn it.

He did basically all he did was what verse 5 says.

He believed on him who justifies the ungodly.

And his faith was credited to him as righteousness.

The thief didn't have time to get baptized or to read his Bible every day or devote his life to prayer or serving widows and orphans and leading others to salvation.

He didn't have time for any of that.

And I think that is so appropriate that this thief was proof that it's not by anything that we can do, aside from believing in him who justifies the ungodly.

Ephesians 2.8 says, 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.

Same author, Paul here, Romans and Ephesians.

Same theme that we're seeing in these verses.

And it's set up so that we can take no credit and that we could never boast in our own righteousness.

Our salvation should be something that's actually humbling us every day.

These verses leave no room for legalism or pride or boasting for any Christian.

We should daily be humbled that we get this free gift because we did absolutely nothing to earn it.

I think it's when we feel deserving of this free gift that the red flags need to start waving, that something's wrong and our pride is being elevated.

Look at verse 6 with me.

Likewise, David also speaks of the blessing of the person to whom God credits righteousness apart from works.

Blessed are those whose lawless acts are forgiven and whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the person the Lord.

Will never charge with sin.

So Paul, right here in verse 7, is quoting from Psalms 32, verses 1 and 2, if you want to look it up later.

Psalms 32:1

And it's written by King David.

That's Israel's second king, who was a man, it says, after God's own heart.

And King David had this understanding in verse 7 that we see here in our text this morning, a thousand years before Jesus came, that his works, and we have a lot of records of David's failures, but that his works had no ability to justify him before God.

It was only through the forgiveness of a loving God that David's lawless acts could be forgiven and his sins be covered.

David says, Blessed is that person that's forgiven for all of those ungodly acts.

Blessed is that person.

And then Paul goes on in verse 9 to say, Is this blessing, that same blessing we're just talking about, only for the circumcised then?

Or is it also for the uncircumcised?

You know, we've been covering this for weeks now.

Romans 2.11 says, for there's no favoritism with God.

Romans 3.23 says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We also talked about how circumcision does not save.

It's circumcision of the heart that God truly desires.

It's a setting apart of our heart for God's purposes that God really desires.

And it doesn't matter if you're Jewish and circumcised like this side of the room, or if you're Gentile and uncircumcised like this side of the room, salvation is a free gift that cannot be earned, regardless of what side of the room you're sitting on.

It's through grace by faith.

And Paul further explains this in the second half of verse 9.

So look at that with me.

For we say, faith was credited to Abraham for righteousness.

In what way then was it credited?

While he was circumcised or uncircumcised.

It was not while he was circumcised, but uncircumcised.

It was Abraham's faith that saved him before he could perform any ritual, before he could obey any law.

He didn't even have God's law yet.

It was before God had given the law to Moses.

It was before Abraham was circumcised.

It was before the institution of baptism and communion.

Before all of that, his faith was credited to him for righteousness.

He had no works of his own to boast in.

Look at verse 11.

And he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while still uncircumcised.

So which came first?

Abraham's faith or the symbol of his faith?

It was Abraham's faith.

It was the circumcision that sealed it, that sealed Abraham in that covenant.

It was the fact that he was forever altered physically and committed to following God in faith.

And as followers of Christ, we have our own version of that today.

Under the new covenant of grace that we're under today, we have the seal of the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 1.13 says, In him you also were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and when you believed.

That's when we were sealed with the Holy Spirit.

When we believe in Christ, we're given the Holy Spirit as the sign of us being set apart for God, as a seal of the new covenant that we've entered into with God.

Old covenant with circumcision was the seal.

New covenant, the Holy Spirit is the seal.

Look at the second half of verse 11.

It says, This was to make him, referring to Abraham, the father of all who believe, but are not circumcised.

So that righteousness may be credited to them also.

Talking about this side of the room again, okay?

You remember what we said about the Gentiles calling Abraham father at the beginning of the sermon?

They were not allowed to, even if they were converted, even if they were circumcised, they could not refer to Abraham as father.

Look at that second half of verse 11 again.

It says, This was to make him the father of all who believe, but are not circumcised.

So I don't know if you can tell what Paul's doing here, but he's rocking the boat.

He's saying Abraham could be the father of uncircumcised Gentiles.

Imagine what this side of the room is doing at this point.

He's saying that you don't even need to be circumcised, and you can call Abraham father.

And righteousness can be credited to your account to just like Abraham.

Anyone who believes can call Abraham father now.

This is where Paul's going with this.

Paul just blew the doors off of the club mentality of the Jewish faith.

The club mentality that may have been looking down on this side of the room on the Gentiles.

Questioning if maybe this side of the room could even be saved in the first place.

Questioning if maybe they really needed to be circumcised first before they could come to faith in Christ.

Who knows?

But I think the Jews in Rome are reading this, and this is probably a really big deal.

Like they're they're reading, they're reading, they get to this point and they're like, whoa, hold on, Paul.

Like this is really starting to rock the boat.

And then in verse 12, he gets back to talking to the Jewish side, or about the Jewish side of the room.

He says, And he became the father of the circumcised, who are not only circumcised, but who also follow in the footsteps of the faith of our father Abraham.

In the footsteps of the faith of our father Abraham had while he was still uncircumcised.

So, regardless of your heritage, regardless of your circumcision status, that doesn't matter anymore.

It's faith.

And circumcision doesn't seal you anymore.

It's the Holy Spirit that does that.

Circumcision is no longer necessary as God only really cares about the circumcision of your heart.

We talked about that a lot just a few weeks ago.

So I feel like as we end this here this morning, I think the question has to be asked, then what is the point of good works?

What's the point as Christians of doing good?

If good works don't make us more righteous or holy, why bother once we've come to faith in Christ?

And I think the answer is because when we come to faith in Christ, when we're sealed by the Holy Spirit, God starts to change us.

He starts to implant his desires into our heart.

And those desires become ours.

And as God directs our paths, and as we become more like Him, good works are a natural byproduct of that abiding relationship with Jesus Christ.

And we're serving him because we love him and not because we're trying to do anything else, not because we're trying to earn anything else.

We'll find ourselves serving out of an abundance of love for God and out of an abundance for love of love for each other.

Therefore, our works and the fruit of the Spirit become a result of our faith, and they go hand in hand.

Because if there's no real faith, there's not going to be any fruit.

And if there's no real fruit in our life, then there's no real faith there either.

We can't force spiritual fruit and good works out.

It's not by our effort, it's not by our works, it's not by our own strength.

Those things are a result of an abiding relationship with Jesus Christ.

And I think all of this comes down to this.

If we abide in Christ, then God just takes care of the rest.

All of the love and the good works are going to be a natural byproduct of that faith that we have in Jesus as he makes us more and more like him on a daily basis.

You see the difference?

One's coming from our own strength, the other one's coming from our love for Jesus Christ and his love for us and that abiding relationship.

Because anything that we try to do under our own effort and through our own strength is a measly little paycheck.

And it's a beater old car that we're trying to give to Jesus to help earn our salvation.

To try and earn that free gift that He so badly just wants to give us.

And he says, just take it.

Just take it.

I've taken care of the rest.

All you have to do is just take it.

And if that's you today and you've never taken the keys to that car, if you've never accepted that free gift of salvation that Jesus is reaching out and holding right before you, all you have to do is take it and accept it.

Believe it in your heart and confess it with your mouth that Jesus is Lord.

And that's a free gift that you get to take home with you today and have for the rest of your life.

And if that is you and you're making that decision now, would you just come tell me afterwards?

I would love to talk with you and pray with you and give you some next steps.

But let's all pray together.

Lord, we thank you so much for the book of Romans and just how rich it's been and to go through these first four and a half chapters.

But I pray that you would continue to mold us, that you'd continue to show us that it's not through our own effort, that it's not through our own strength, that we're all on the same playing field.

You don't have different levels, Lord.

None of us are deserving.

We've all fallen short.

But it's only through the works of Jesus Christ on the cross, through the forgiveness of sins that He offers so freely to us that we have any standing with you.

That we could even be talking directly to you right now.

Lord, we thank you for that access.

We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit that you've given to seal the new covenant, to live inside of us, to be our teacher and our counselor, to be our conviction and everything that we need.

Lord, I pray that you would just continue to mold us and shape us to be more and more like you.

And that we um wouldn't we would just stop with our own effort.

We would abide in you, just realizing that in that relationship is when all of the fruit and the good works and the things that are eternal start to come out naturally from a place of love and not effort.

So Lord, we give up.

We give up trying to do things on our own, trying to do things under our own strength.

We pray that you would be the guiding force in our life, that you would be the one that all of our actions come through, that you would implant your desires into our heart, Lord, and that we would desire them just as much as you do for ourselves.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.