The Promise To Abraham; The Promise To Us

Lent, to be sure, is a time of focused and intense reflection and repentance but as we have mentioned before it is not a time to grovel or imagine that the worse we feel about ourselves (maybe even the more we loathe ourselves) the more likely it will be that God will just maybe let us have a second chance. Now, we don’t for a minute want to suggest that we should be complacent about our sin whether it is almost wholly interior or the sins of omission and commission that so profoundly impact others. No. Complacency is not a mark of discipleship; complacency is not a mark of gratitude for God’s love. What we have been emphasizing, though, is that the gospel teaches us that our repentance is in response to the loving God and that our repentance has promise because of God’s promise. After all, God sent the Son not to condemn but to save (John 3).

The text from Romans before us this morning is full of so many theological ideas that it would be impossible to touch on many let alone all of them on one Sunday so I am going to focus on what I take to be the heart of this passage - Paul is concerned to explain to the church at Rome, a church of Gentiles but also of Jews, that the promise of God has always been for the whole world and not just for Jews. He makes this point by going back to God’s original loving initiative with Abraham. The promise is given to him that God will work through his lineage to bring about the salvation of the world, of the nations, and not just the Jews. In Paul’s argument the significance of when God’s promise is made to Abraham is of vital importance. The promise was made before Abraham was circumcised and before the law was given (Romans 4:9.13). This emphasis of Paul’s argument would be unsettling to many of the Jews of Paul’s day who not only took pride in their ethnic heritage but who had also come to rely upon that ethnic privilege as counting for privilege and righteousness before God. Some had even come to the point of despising the thought that God’s salvation would be for gentiles too; recall, it is the expansiveness of God’s love in the ministry of Jesus that always got him trouble with the religious leadership of his day. In telling the story the way Paul does he is not simply confronting a race trumps grace position that poisons the well of God’s love; he is also preaching the gospel, which is what he always does. He is saying: look here is good news. Before Abraham could do anything to move towards God, God moved towards him and claimed him for his redemptive purpose in the world, claimed him for his own; what you take pride in, your circumcision, not only robs you of a full relationship with the Gentiles but also obfuscates the truth about God’s unconditional love of you.

Application:
I don’t know if you have ever noticed this about yourself but I know it to be true of me. I don’t want to love other people when I doubt God’s love for me. One of the most important things you can do for those who love you and indeed for the whole world is to learn to cherish God’s unconditional love for you. The force of Paul’s argument for those who had come to value race over grace was based on a simple yet profound logic about when God’s love found Abraham.... God’s love found him as a sinner ( point that Paul drills home by citing Psalm 31 in Romans 4:7,8, in the midst of his discussion of Abraham: “happy are those whose sins are forgiven”.) A key to our spiritual formation it that we understand well the foundation of our relationship to God. God’s love for us is prior to and without respect to our good deeds, our bad behavior, or our religious life. It is when we are looking at the caller id on a phone call from a friend with whom we are angry and we decide to let it go to voice mail knowing that we will wait a long time before we call them back as a way of showing who has control.... as a way of punishing them..... it is when we are yelling at our spouse or our kids and wondering if life will ever look like we want it to look - these moments reveal us as God always knew us to be when we loved us for the first time!

Questions for discussion:

1. Paul says in Romans 4:16 that God’s great work of salvation got its start by Abraham responding in faith to a promise (though Abraham’s wife was barren he believe God could make him the father of many nations). Paul goes on to say that it must be this way so that God’s promise may rest on grace - not on the works of the law or ethnic privilege. Paul seems to be driven here and elsewhere to lay us bare before God, to take away from us anything that we could take religious or moral pride in. Why does he do this? What is he protecting us from? What is protecting the church from? Do you think that you think about this aspect of your relationship with God as much as you should?

2. When you catch yourself in a moment of sinful behavior or thoughts are you quick enough to think of God’s love for you? What slows you down from seeing God’s love in those moments?

3. From our John 3 text: if you had to put into your own words what Jesus meant when he told Nicodemus that he had to be born from above, how would you put it?