ROMANS 4

Romans 4 reveals the consistent nature of God - that He was acting from the beginning of creation to work out His plan. He's always wanted worshippers who approach Him by faith, believing that He is who He says He is, and that He keeps His word to bless those who come to Him (Heb 11:6). Abraham is held up in Romans 4 as an example of God's saving grace. In Abraham's life we see that God rewards (credits) faith. God credited Abraham with righteousness (something outside of what Abraham could ever have earned) because he trusted God when He said He would bless him. Abraham believed to the extent that he would leave his comfort and familiar surroundings and enter into a covenant with God. Abraham would trust and follow God, and God would keep His amazing and unmerited promise to bless Abraham and through him, the world.

This same God makes promises to us in His Word, the Bible. He promises to save us completely, He promises to give us life that is abundant; He promises to give us peace; He promises to give us rest. On the other hand, He tells us that in this life, we have tribulation and that we are called to suffer in the manner that Christ was called to suffer. He's upfront with us that this life is no cake-walk, but that we'll have the presence of the Holy Spirit (John 15:26) and the spirit of His Son, Jesus, living in us (Rom 8:14,15). So was Abraham's life. There were crises, battles and wars, heartache and missteps. But Abraham held on to God. That is all He asks us to do. Like a child holds onto his mother, because he knows she is there for him and that she is good, so we are to hold on to the God who is faithful to keep His promises.

The Message translates vs 16 to say that Abraham is our "faith father." He's the one who went ahead of us and proved out in his life that God is faithful - worth trusting. In the same (and better) way, Jesus lived his life trusting completely in the Father - and proved out that God is mighty and powerful and just and completely trustworthy - so that your faith and hope are (solid!) in God (I Peter 1:21).

Here's how the Message renders vs. 13 and on. Read it and see the example of Abraham living a life of faith that brought glory to the Father, just like He wants us to.

13 That famous promise God gave Abraham - that he and his children would possess the earth - was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed.

14 If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal.

15 A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise - and God's promise at that - you can't break it.

16 This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father - that's reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.

17 We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing.

18 When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"

19 Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up.

20 He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said.

22 That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right."

23-25 But it's not just Abraham; it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.

PRAYER

Lord help me to trust you fully. Help me to know Your promises. Help me to trust that you are able to keep those promises - that You have demonstrated over and over in the lives of Abraham and the saints who have gone before, and fully in the life of Jesus, that You are totally faithful and true. Help me believe your promises and your love for me.

Romans 3:4

"... let God be found true, though every man be found a liar."

Isaiah 49:15,16

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;

 TOM ALBERS | Elder Chairman

Tom committed his life to Christ as a junior in high school in 1975. After moving to Austin in 1995, Tom and Cindy attended Hill Country Bible Church in Cedar Park before becoming part of the HCBC Pflugerville and Hutto Bible church plants. Tom serves as a Small Group Leader and in Youth ministry and in other ministry oversight roles. Tom and Cindy were married in 1986 and are parents to Will, Emily, Clare, Hannah and Nathan and grandparents to Owen.