Pentecost 4                                                  8 June 2008                                   Preached at ULC

Text: Romans 4:13-25                  Title: Sharing the Faith of Father Abraham

Main Message: I want people to believe that they are sinners and God loves them.

Special thanks to William G. Carter for the inspiration for this sermon

I have good news for you this morning. None of you are good enough to be here.

My wife said you would think that’s good news. Maybe I need to be a bit more sensitive in how I begin my sermons. Let’s try again.

I have good news for you this morning. God is not impressed with anybody in this room.

That wasn’t much better, was it?  Third time is the charm. Let me give this one more try.

I have good news for you this morning. Every single one of us is a spiritual failure.

How am I doing so far? [Silence speaks volumes]  Yeah, that’s about what I thought.

It is hard to preach Paul’s letter to the Romans. This book is heavy in all kinds of ways. For one thing, it’s a complicated work. Romans is not a brain candy summer beach book. It takes some mental labor to follow it. And if you do get into it, the book is explains the death of Christ and the salvation he earned for us, but you can’t talk about salvation without first understanding what we were saved from. That’s very heavy stuff, because you have to talk about sin and death and hell, but that’s where Romans begins.

Paul writes this letter to a congregation he didn’t charter, to a people he had not yet met. But it’s his deepest work of theology, his magnum opus, and it’s the foundation for a lot of what we believe as Christians. Romans starts by saying the “Gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world” and that “It is possible for every creature in creation to know God and to love God.” That sounds like good news! But this knowledge and love gets tangled up, and by the end of Romans 1, Paul says “All of us tend to exchange the truth about God for a lie, we worship the creation rather than the Creator, and we have no excuse”.

In other words, every single one of us is a spiritual failure. God is not impressed with our way of living. And none of you are good enough to be here.

Or as Paul puts it in chapter 3, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This is not my opinion, folks. These are the words of the Holy Bible.

I’ll be the first to admit, that’s a lot to swallow before 10 o’clock in the morning. It’s heavy. Very heavy.

But this is the context for all of what Paul has to say. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that Paul was just going to tell us how bad we are. Not what you put on your Sunday best hoping to hear. Paul issues this heavy indictment because it’s the truth, and because it’s where the Good News of God has to reach us.

Think about that fact that none of you are good enough to be here. What’s the good news in that? Look around – you ARE here. Did you sneak in past the ushers this morning? Are you here because God is not watching, or doesn’t care? Did you somehow fool God into thinking you’re as good as you look on the outside? No. You are here because God called you. You can’t hide anything from him. He knows everything about you. He called you to be here.

God is not impressed with you. Every one of us could be capable of being more, spiritually, than we are, and God knows it. Where’s the good news in that?  Well, you don’t have to impress God to make Him happy and to know that he loves you.

Every one of us is a spiritual failure. What else do you think it means that all have sinned? But spiritual success is God’s responsibility, not yours. Christ has triumphed over all our sin, over evil and death itself. God proves his love in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

I told you I had good news for you this morning. The good news is that life isn’t about measuring up or else. Not the life I’m talking about. Life is about God, who moves toward us in Jesus Christ to bridge the distance. Life is about God.

If you do nothing else this morning, let that sink in for a minute. For those of you who came to church this morning thinking you were “Good enough”, Paul says, “Get real.” You’re not, because nobody is. The good news is that God isn’t limited by our limitations. God loves us --because of who we are, in spite of who we are, and before we even know who we are.

“There is no distinction,” Paul says, “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Then in the very next breath, he says, “They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…made effective through faith.”

That’s the point of why we’re here, after all. Before the church got to be a big business, this is what all the excitement was about. God loves us. We are sinners but God didn’t leave us in our failure, and for that reason alone He sent Jesus Christ into the world. Sometimes a preacher needs to stand up and say it, whether or not it’s heavy.

That’s the claim that Paul makes in this part of the book of Romans. It is heavy, so let it sink in again. We have failed spiritually. God loves us. Jesus redeemed our failure.

Can you believe it? That’s the question on which all of this pivots. Can we believe it?

You might think, “Of course I believe it. That’s the easy part.”

Is it? Is it easy to accept the fact that you are a sinner? Do you really believe that about yourself? Do you really believe it about everybody else here today? Is it easy to believe that all of these good people around us have failed spiritually? Or does it make you uncomfortable even to hear me say it?

And is it easy to believe that God loves you? Sure, the Bible says it. Do you believe it? Are you convinced? When your child gets cancer, when you lose your job and your home, when the people who don’t believe seem to be happier and healthier and wealthier than the people who do? When the Bible says one thing and your experience says another? When you realize that the Bible is dead on when it says the world will make you suffer if you do what God wants? Do you still believe that God loves you?

It isn’t easy, is it? 

That’s why Paul writes in Romans 4 about the story of Father Abraham. If you look at the life of Abraham, he wasn’t always impressive. He lied to protect himself. He chickened out when he should have stood firm. He didn’t earn the right to receive God’s favor. But God called him righteous because he believed.

When Abraham was 75 years old, God said to him, “Go”. Abraham didn’t ask where; he just went. You might think that God loved him because he was obedient. But the truth is, for some reason, God already vowed he was going to make Abraham special, before Abraham had even begun to respond.

When Abraham was 99, God sneaked up on him and said, “Abraham, I’m going to make you the father of a huge multitude. I’m going to change your name to mean ‘Grand Exalted Father of an Exceedingly Large Family’, or in short, I’m going to call you Big Daddy.” That’s what the name Abraham means, right? Abraham laughed and said, “Get real.” And God said, “I am real. In fact, I’m so real, I want you to get circumcised at the age of 99, after which you’re going to become a father.” Abraham did as he was told, and you might think that’s why God loved him. The truth is, God’s commitment to Abraham had already been made.

Then came that day, that terrible day when God came to him one more time and said, “Abraham! Take your son, your beloved son Isaac, whom you love, and offer him on the mountain as a burnt offering”. Abraham didn’t say a word, but he took his son and went to the mountain. He was ready to make the sacrifice when finally God said, “Stop!” You might think, “What an awful test that was, but Abraham passed, and surely that’s why God loved him.” But all these events came long after the moment when God had already declared once and for all that Abraham was a righteous man.

It happened late one night, many years before, when God said, “Abraham! Go out and count the stars. That’s how many children you’re going to have.” Now picture the old man squinting toward the sky and beginning to count, “One, two, three, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, ten thousand and one, ten thousand and two…” And as he counted, for some miraculous reason, he believed in the promise of the Lord.

Do you believe?

You may not be good enough to be here. Do you still believe God wants you here?

You may never impress God with your polished spirituality. Do you still believe you can serve him and make him happy?

You have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. Do you still share the trust of Father Abraham, that God is on your side, that he will not let you fall, that he loves you?

I have good news for you this morning. God is on your side.

I have good news for you this morning. He will not let you fall. He loves you.

I have good news for you this morning. God has promised all this and more, and He is able to do what he has promised. Amen.