A Different Take on How to Please God
—Romans 4 & Gen 15
Andrew Fountain – Dec 9, 2018 Click on this slide and then press the spacebar to advance slides: ➜ (or swipe on a touch screen)
A Different Take on How to Please God
The story of “Joe”
What Joe discovers in the Bible
What it looks like in practice
Joe becomes a Christian
Joe becomes a Christian and learns that all his sins are forgiven He is full of joy, his burden is light and his life is happy! =
Keeping the Commandments
Then he is told that to please God he needs to keep the commandments Every day he examines himself and goes through a checklist of how well he is doing
He is told that he has the Spirit to help him, but it is still a great burden =
Great burden
He is told that he has the Spirit to help him, but it is still a great burden =
Not under Moses
Then one day he meets some people who explain to him that he is not under Moses but under Christ! It is not the old external law he is under, but Jesus’ “law of love”
For a while he is happy again =
Jesus is harder!
Then he realizes that Jesus’ laws are far harder to keep than those of Moses Jesus sets much higher standards =
Grace
Then he goes to a new church where they teach “grace” He learns that he is now under grace , not law
He’s told that there is nothing he can do to make God love him more!
He is so happy and relaxed
Extreme grace movement e.g. All of Jesus’s teaching before the resurrection was law. (preaching the kingdom?) =
Confused
But after a while he is confused What should he be doing if there is nothing he needs to do?
What about all those commands of Jesus? =
Motivation of love
He is told that now he is free to obey Jesus, motivated by love, not law So he tried to do this
Constantly reminding himself that he was not earning God’s love
But doing it simply because he loved God
Does that sound good? =
Uneasy
But he still felt a vague sense of unease He never felt he was doing enough
He knew that:
It was all of grace, a free gift
He was loved by the Father
That there was nothing he could do to earn God’s favour
But there was still a vague feeling that
God wasn’t happy with him
He had disappointed God
If I were to ask each of you, “When God looks at you right now, is he pleased with your life?”
You might answer, “it doesn’t matter because I have Jesus’ righteousness”
But that is avoiding the question
I suspect that most of you feel that you are letting God down to a certain extent
He’s disappointed in you
You are not the Christians you should be
even though we teach grace and you know that God’s love is not dependent on your performance
This is a problem in churches like ours which teach grace =
Finally…
Then one day Joe was reading Romans and Galatians… and suddenly he GOT IT!
It was so obvious, why hadn’t he seen it before?
Romans 4
For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”
…faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.
That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. 24 It will be counted to us who believe in him… Gal 3:6 just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”
(the quote is from Gen 15:6)
Romans 4:3
This is how he had always been taught how to read it:
“Abraham had faith and on the basis of that faith God transferred the righteousness of Christ to Abraham, and Abraham’s sin to Christ, who paid for it on the cross.”
Now of course, Jesus did die for our sins, and Abrahams, and that is how God could forgive him
And this is a free gift that we receive by faith (Rom 4:25 & Gal 3:13 go on to say this)
And Abraham did receive this free gift by faith
But that is not what the text is saying So what does Rom 4:9 “faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness” mean?
I want to define some of the words
faith=trust, (same word in the Greek), but faith has become almost meaningless today
Religions are called “faith communities” whether they be Moslem or Hindu or Christian
faith is nebulous, trust is concrete—you have to trust something or someoneThey are exactly the same word in the Greek “Abraham’s trust was counted to him as righteousness”
e.g. our neighbour going away, Anne looking after the house (snow)
Romans 4:9
“Abraham’s trust was counted to him as righteousness”
Righteousness:
You can’t be righteous unless there is a standard of righteousness, i.e. a law
In the Old Testament, this legal framework was called a covenant
If I make a covenant with someone, then if I fulfill all my obligations with repect to the covenant, then I am righteous
If I agree to look after Martin’s appartment while he is away, and I do that faithfully, then I am righteous within that covenant
This is why Paul spends the first three chapters of Romans establishing what covenant frameworks Jews and Gentiles are operating under, because without law or covenant there is no concept of righteousness
So let’s define righteousness as “having met the obligations of the covenant”
So now let’s put this understanding into the verse.
We get
Romans 4:9
“Abraham’s trust was counted as having met the obligations of the covenant”
Jesus has met our legal obligations
So that God can count our trust as all he requires
“Abraham, you’ve trusted me and that’s all I require of you, I’m pleased with you”
So what do we call this covenant God had with Abraham?
In Galatians Paul calls it the “covenant of promise” (3:17), or simply “the gospel to Abraham” (3:8)
Now this raises a problem: How is God fair to do this, to overlook the lies and other stuff?
God is a perfect judge.
This indeed is a problem, and Paul answers it in Rom 3:25–26 Gal 3:13,14
How can God be perfectly just, yet pronounce as righteous those like Abraham?
Jesus died to free Abraham and us from the curse of the law
Because Jesus has severed our obligations to the law, God is free to bring us under the same arrangement as Abraham
Two sides to it: slide
So to sum up
What Joe discovered:
He was loved by God whatever, because of what Jesus has done
To please God, day by day, all he had to do was to trust him
That is all God was asking
Then he remembered what gave Jesus the most pleasure??
It gives Jesus the most pleasure when
The Roman centurion who trusted in Jesus’ ability to heal his servant at a distance
Mat 8:10 When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.
The Woman who trusted Jesus for her daughter
Mat 15:28 Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Little children who simply trusted
Then Joe remembered
Heb 11:6 Without trusting God it is impossible to please him
Rom 14:23 For whatever does not come from faith is sin.
So now Joe had an answer
An answer to his question “Is God pleased with me?”
He is pleased with me when I simply trust him
This is not a “work” because the very faith is a gift
So what does this look like on a Monday morning?
Monday Morning
Joe wakes up
slighly later than he should have due to forgetting to set the alarm
Quickly prays to God, “forgive me for negligence, please look after this problem”
He doesn’t feel guilty, because God is not much interested in his alarm-setting performance
compared with how he will deal with being late
when he trusts it to God, God is very pleased
He realized he can either
be late for work
call in sick (which would be lying)
skip breakfast and be on time
Sometimes there are multiple options that are ok.
He realizes that if you lie then obviously that is not trusting God
He decides he could do either of the other two in trust
but decides on skipping breakfast and trusting God he will be ok till lunch
As he is waiting for the subway, he notices he is right by a coffee and bagel stand, so ends up with breakfast anyway
He arrives at work and realizes instantly that his co-worker Mary is in a bad mood
He knows how easily they “put each other’s buttons” and realizes a row is about to happen
He knows in theory that the answer is to “show the love of Christ”
But no matter how hard he tries, it always seems to end in an argument
He prays “God, I can’t do this—you will have to, I trust you!”
Before every reply to Mary, he sends up a tiny prayer to God
Amazingly he never loses his temper and everyone calms down
Joe feel’s God’s pleasure, that he simply trusted
But what if you give it to God and it still goes bad?
Later that day Joe gets called into the bosses office
He gets chewed out for something he didn’t do
He tries the same method of trusting God to love his boss
He still gets chewed out, and never gets the chance to show any love in return
After the meeting he feels a failure at first
But then he realizes that he did all God required of him—he simply trusted
God is actually very pleased with him
On the way home his mind is on other things and he has not thought about God for hours
He suddenly realized that he is doing something he shouldn’t be doing
He immediately stops and asks for forgiveness
He then trusts that he is forgiven and doesn’t start beating himself up about the sin
He realizes how pleased God is that he is trusting Jesus for forgiveness
Even though God hates sin, he is much more concerned about faith
He is much more concerned that when we do fall into sin and ask for forgiveness that we trust that we are forgiven
So what is faith/trust?
Primarily it is allegiance (God or idols) Rest/Dependence (Abraham rested in the promise of a son)
Obedience is the fruit (Abraham left his home country “by faith”)
Perseverance—not giving up on trusting God (Abraham waited 25 years) Real trust does not give up after a time. It continues to believe in the person, when the answer does not come immediately
Summary
God so loves it when you trust him!
It brings him great pleasure