FAITH WORKS

"For the promise that he would be the heir of the worls was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise made of no effect, because the law brings about wrath; for where there is no law there is no transgression. Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all (as it is written, 'I have made you a father of many nations') in the presence of Him whom he believed--God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did; who, contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, 'So shall your descendants be.' And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah's womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that waht He had promised He was also able to perform. And therefore 'it was accounted to him for righteousness.' Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification."

--Romans 4:13-25

We started a journey last week which will continue for some time, a journey through Paul's epistle to the Romans. If there is a richer book in the Bible, I would be hard pressed to decide which one it would be. Paul lays out for his readers all the major doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, making this a valuable teaching and preaching tool. Following the lectionary readings, with the one exception of next Sunday, we will be looking at Romans each week, Lord willing, from now until the middle of September. And hopefully this journey will not be the dry experience we sometimes think of when we hear that word "doctrine" mentioned, but I hope to find the areas in our lives and in our Christian walk where these doctrines connect.

Last week we took a look at the doctrine of original sin, one which puts us all on equal footing at the same starting point, having been affected by the disobedience of Adam and Eve as their common descendants. In the passage from chapter three last week, Paul has brought up the subject of another righteousness that has been made available through Christ. Now he elaborates on that thought, trying to bring us to an understanding of how that righteousness is appropriated to us. The doctrine he speaks of is one that should not be new to us, the belief in justification by faith. That is, we do not earn the gift of salvation by any attempts at law-keeping or good deeds, but it is the free gift of God's grace granted to us through the merits of Christ's sacrificial death for us on the cross.

Abraham is the classic example pointed to again and again in the New Testament, of one who was truly justified because of his faith. And what an example! At the time the promise of God came to Abraham that he would have a son, Abraham was 100 years old. His wife Sarah, who was barren, had reached the age of 90. And yet somehow, when this promise came to Abraham, he didn't even flinch in the face of what by human knowledge was an obvious impossibility. As we just read a moment ago, "He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that waht He had promised, He was also able to perform. And therefore it was accounted to him for righteousness." I have seen some strong examples of faith in my time, and we have some powerful examples in Scripture, but I wonder how many people there have ever been that would have had a faith strong enough to be able to accept this promise without question.

You know, if I see any one thing in this passage that stands out to me as essential to having a strong faith, it would be in verse 18: hope. It says that Abraham, "contrary to hope, in hope believed." I have heard a lot of people speak about hope and faith as if they were synonymous, or at least very close in meaning. I believe there is a very strong distinction between the two, although I do believe they go together hand in hand. To me, hope is not quite the certainty in the mind and spirit that faith is. Saying that I hope something will be is not the same as saying I have faith it will be, because with hope there is still a question mark. With faith, that question mark becomes an exclamation point, especially in the lives of Abraham and other heroes of the faith who have claimed the promises.

Right about now, if you're on your toes and not just simply accepting every word I say without question, you're probably thinking, "But preacher, life has a way of throwing a lot of hopeless situations at us." To that statement all I can do is agree, because I have seen so many situations that make a lot of people question the goodness and faithfulness of God. I was reminded very strongly of that by some of the examples of situations that occurred in my first appointment. There was one dear lady in that church whose mother had had Alzheimer's for a number of years, and we could only watch and wonder as this dear, sweet child of God had to endure the increasing deterioration of her mother's condition until she no longer recognized her own daughter when she came to visit. There was another precious lady in the church, one of the last of her generation remaining at the time I served there, who had been a charter member and one of the pillars in the early days of the church. It was discovered at the age of 89 that she had ovarian cancer, and that it had grown so large it was pressing against her stomach and compressing it to the point that she could not eat. It was her loss of appetite that had led to the discovery of the tumor. She was hospitalized and eventually reached the point that she was being fed through a feeding tube connected to her stomach. At her age, an operation was almost out of the question, because even if she did make it through the surgery, there was no way of knowing if she would be able to recover to the point of regaining her health. The agonizing decision had to be made, and was eventually agreed upon by all the family, to disconnect the feeding tube. This was done, and a week later the woman essentially starved to death. How would we manage to maintain hope in such seemingly hopeless situations?

I am happy to say that there was another incident which stands out in contrast to these two, and it was a case in which a person's faith seems to have been what made the difference. A man in the church had been in the hospital a couple of times in a one-year period, and it was found that he had a slow-growing tumor in his lung. It was an inoperable tumor, but one which would not be life-threatening for some time. He had also had a cancerous kidney removed and had done well during and after the surgery. Now he was back in again for what was a relatively minor hip surgery. After the surgery, he did not regain consciousness. He developed an intestinal block which baffled all the doctors. Several tests were run, and the source of the blockage could not be determined. After he had been unconscious for almost a month, the doctors began to discuss options with the family. He had been on a ventilator the entire time, and showed no signs of beginning to breathe on his own, and so the family began to talk about disconnecting him from all life support. The doctor presented the case to them, and he told it pretty plainly, that if they disconnected the life support, he would probably die within three days. The man's wife had remained strong throughout, and felt that her family was looking to her to be the one to make the decision. She talked with me about quality of life expectations and such, and I saw in her face and her body language a resignation to giving him up, that there was very little hope of recovery. She made the decision to disconnect the life support that evening.

That was on a Saturday evening, and the following Sunday morning, when I announced the decision as she had asked me to, the lay leader of the church said with conviction, "I think we need to pray." This was a church that believed in anointing with oil and praying, and so since we could not anoint the man there, someone sat in his place to be anointed for him, and we did so and prayed. To get to the point quickly, three days later, on the day the doctors said he would be dead, he was sitting up in a chair in his hospital room carrying on a conversation with me as if nothing had happened. This one man's faith in the situation stands out in sharp contrast to the attitude and bearing of the doctors and the family. It was a response of faith by one who truly believed that our simple actions of anointing and prayer could make a difference. And from that point, I could see a distinct difference in my own responses and in the response of the congregation members each time a situation was mentioned during prayer time that seemed hopeless. It was as though we had seen the impossible, and in seeing it we had all been injected with a highly contagious dose of hope.

How do we understand the difference between those who accept the "normal" expectations and limitations of difficult situations, and those who somehow see beyond the circumstances and are able to assert faith and believe God for a different outcome? If we look once again to our text, I see a couple of things that may explain this to us a little. One key word I see used more than once here that may be helpful to us is "promise." I have noticed that there are some people who just seem to be more able than others to reach out in faith and claim the promises of God and cling to them in faith until they see the fulfillment. Yet there are others who seem to recognize the same promises, yet it is almost as though they "see them afar off," and faith never really leaps up and takes hold of those same promises. When I speak of promises, I speak of the Word of God, however that Word may be made known to us. For Abraham, of course, there was no written word, and it was the promise of God revealed directly to him. There are many people who still receive what they feel to be direct promises of God, revealed to the heart, and who respond in complete faith to those promises without wavering. There are those who see the promises contained in the written Word of God, who find certain ones that become almost lifted out and filled with life, and which become personal promises which find personal fulfillment.

I don't believe I have ever seen a group of people who believed in the promises of God any more than the people I met on the faculty and staff at Kentucky Mountain Bible College while I was a student there. One person on staff there was a very sweet and very frail person who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and during a chapel service the announcement was made and prayer was requested. That was 15 years ago, and the last report I had she was still in remission to the amazement of the doctors. My aunt, who taught music at the college, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which later went to lung cancer, a year or so before then, and was not expected to live. And although she eventually lost that battle last year, she had fought a 15-year battle during which time her faith had been an incredible blessing to a lot of people. She had a firm belief in the faithfulness of God to His promises.

The other thing I see as I look back to our passage is the Resurrection. I don't know if there is an image which fits in any better with a discussion of faith and hope than the image of Resurrection. I was not surprised to see that in his discussion, Paul inevitably moved to the subject of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, in verses 24 and 25. Christ, he says, was raised "for our justification." That is, Christ was raised so that we could be justified, put in right relationship with God, that our sins could be forgiven. As Paul put it in another place, if Christ is NOT raised, then "your faith is empty," and you are "still in your sins." No resurrection, no faith, because there is no foundational hope upon which faith can build. That may explain why many times faith looks a whole lot like a resurrection from the dead.

I heard a story several years ago, about two frogs who went out one night looking for bugs and fell into a pitcher of cream. It was deep enough that their legs could not reach the bottom, and so they began to try to swim. After swimming away for what seemed like hours, one of the frogs told the other one, "It's no use. Nobody's coming to help us out. The sides are too high to climb out. We can't reach the bottom to get a good kick and jump out. And this stuff is so gooey and slimey. I give up." And with that he sank to the bottom and died. Meanwhile, the other frog kept kicking and kicking, hanging on in desperate hope that somehow he would get out. By the next morning, he was sitting on top of a pitcher of fresh-churned butter, caused by his constant kicking all night. And with all the flies that were attracted to the smell, he was happy as could be.

I realize that we started this discussion talking about being JUSTIFIED by faith, and I have actually brought the discussion to a very different place. The shift was an intentional one, because after we have been justified by faith, we are told in more than one place in Scripture that "the just shall LIVE by faith." That truth can be seen in the example of Abraham, whose faith led him to faithful actions as a result. If we are among those justified by faith, called to be faithful, how can we be found leading faithful lives when situations confront us that steal our hope?

For one thing, immerse yourself in the Word of God. Read the Word, devour it, find a promise that speaks to your heart in your specific situation, and CLAIM it. This Book has been around a long time, and untold millions have found it faithful and true. This Word contains, I've been told, over 8,000 promises, and you can believe every one of them except six. That's because not all the promises contained in here come from God, there are six promises in there that were offered to Adam and Eve during the temptation in Eden, and to Christ during the temptation in the wilderness.

Let me also encourage you to take another look at the example of the resurrection, and let it encourage your heart that no situation is ever truly hopeless. I can remember my grandmother, who was basically blind and deaf for the last ten years of her life. She had eleven children, and they were all faithful about coming to see her. Each time someone was brought to her to let her know they were present, they went through the same ritual of touch so she could identify them. They would come take her hand, and she could tell immediately by the size and feel of the hand if it was male or female, and would then ask the names until she hit the right one. The one holding her hand would squeeze once for a no, and twice for a yes. When she guessed the right one, she would break out in a beaming smile, and would then communicate by asking a series of yes or no questions about the person's family, etc.

I have found the maintenance of faith during the dark times of my life to be very similar. It can be almost as though there is nothing but darkness, until in the middle of the darkness, a light shines through and I hear the sure voice of God and have a beam of light to show me the way. And I find it surprisingly true that in looking back at those times when all was darkness, those times where God has broken through are like beacons. Those times when it almost seemed as if God wasn't there, seem now as if God was more present than at any other time in my life, when viewed in hindsight.

Think again about the resurrection. After the death of Jesus, who in this world could ever have been as discouraged and hopeless as that band of disciples who had walked with Jesus for so long, who had abandoned their occupations and given their lives and livelihood up for Him? And now the one they thought was to deliver Israel was gone, and Israel was still not delivered. Can you imagine what a vivid memory that was for Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road when they realized it was Jesus who had been with them? Or how about the ten who were present when Christ appeared behind locked doors and spoke peace to them? Or how about Thomas when he was with them later as Christ appeared once more? Can you let the resurrection kindle that same fire within and give you hope to face any situation?

Then finally, I would say, ask yourself in every difficult time, "What is my faith quotient? Where do I see God at work in my situation? Where do I see my faith at work, and beginning to take wings? Answer these questions to the best of your ability in your circumstances. Then FIND that place, and step out in faith, believing the promises of a God for whom nothing is ever impossible.