Yesterday, my family had the opportunity to visit Pillar Church in Twentynine Palms. Crossview Bible Church helped sponsor and plant this church back in 2017, so it was a sweet reunion with friends and exciting to see how God is at work. I was invited to preach, and chose to speak on Romans 4, which is all about justification by faith.

Faith means trusting God, even when you don’t have all the details, and God’s plan doesn’t completely make sense. In this study, we learned…

• What is faith?
• Why it’s essential to trust in Jesus and no one else
• The danger of thinking good works get you into heaven
• Abraham and David as examples of faith
• The result of faith is righteousness and eternal life

Here’s a link to the audio if you’d like to listen.

And here are my sermon notes:

The Footsteps of Faith
(Romans 4:1-12)

Introduction
• Thank you for the opportunity to share today. Jose said you have been going through the Gospel of John. The Apostle John explains why he wrote the book in 20:31. “These things are written that you might believe.” Essentially, John says, “I’ve spent 21 chapters demonstrating that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Now it’s your responsibility to believe that message.”
• I would like to think more about the subject of faith together with you, and our key verse this morning is Romans 4:5 “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
• There are two words in this verse that look very different on the surface, but actually share the same meaning, and have the same root. They are the words “faith” and “believe.” “Faith” is the noun, and “believe” is the verb. These words speak of trust, or dependence, even when you can’t make out all the details. The same word used in Jn. 20:31 “that you may believe” that Jesus is the Christ.
• Here in our passage, there are three features of saving faith: the object of our faith, the opposite of faith, and the outcome of our faith.
The Object of Our Faith
• Faith is always believing in someone or something. It is not just a matter of having faith – faith in something – but having faith in the right thing, i.e. the right person.
• Rom. 3:22 “the righteousness of God [has been revealed] through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe”
• Rom. 3:26 God provided salvation “that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
• And in our text here this morning: Rom. 4:5 “in him who justifies.” The one true God.
• Rom. 10:9 “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is not simply confessing something, or believing something. It is knowing and believing specific things.
• In the new Indiana Jones movie, at one point, Helena Shaw asks Indiana, “Do you believe the Dial has magical powers?” Indiana: “I don’t believe in magic… But a few times in my life, I’ve seen things. Things I can’t explain. And I’ve come to believe it’s not so much what you believe. It’s how hard you believe it.” Now that is a Paul would take issue with that. It does batter what you believe. More precisely, it matters who you believe.
• Even John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes … will not perish, but have everlasting life.” Is that what it says? Well, no, not exactly. It must be in him.
• You need to make sure your faith is placed in the right object. And the object of that faith is Jesus Christ. Believe in him because he alone is the Son of God. He alone died on the cross for your sin and then rose from the dead. He alone has the family lineage and fulfills all the prophecies to be the Messiah. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through him. God, through Jesus Christ, must be the object of our faith.
• Have faith, but make sure you have faith in the right person.
• >>In our text the “one who believes” is contrasted with another kind of person…
The Opposite of Faith
• “And to the one who does not work, but believes” (v. 5)
• This is part of Paul’s larger argument in the letter. Some of his Jewish readers must have thought, “Paul, you’re saying faith in Christ gets us into heaven. But what about our ancestor Abraham? Wasn’t he saved by good works, most notably circumcision? If Abraham was saved by good works, then why any different for us?
• Read vv. 1-5
• Many Jews did think in fact that “Abraham was justified by works.” This was a common teaching by the rabbis at his time. The Book of Jubilees 23:10 said, “Abraham was perfect in all his deeds with the Lord.” But this was not the teaching of the Bible.
• Paul asks a great question in v. 3. “What does the Scripture say?” This is one of the best questions you can ask regarding any topic or decision.
• Quoting from Genesis 15:6. God had made a promise years earlier that he would give a son to Abraham (Abram at the time). Yet still, Sarai was barren, and Abram was still childless. Abram says, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” The LORD replied, “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir….look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be.” I miss the starry nights up here in the desert. We have a lot more cloud cover and marine layer where we are at now. My wife were sitting outside the other night, and she said, “I see a star.” Literally in the entire sky, there was only one measly star. The rest were covered by the clouds. But I have to believe when God told Abraham to look up, it was a cloudless night, with no artificial light. Just thousands and thousands of stars. And God said, “So shall your offspring be.”
• That was a bold promise. Do you know how Abram responded? He didn’t scoff. He didn’t argue with God. He didn’t laugh, like his wife Sarai would do later (18:12). “He believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”
• Paul now applies that here in Romans 4. If Abraham was justified by works, then he would have reason to boast. But if he simply believed, then it was a free gift from God. Not a paycheck, but a free gift.
• Romans 6:23 sums this up beautifully. The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
• In sharing the gospel. I will sometimes ask if a person has any spiritual beliefs, or if they own a Bible. If other religions are brought up, I will try to say something, “the thing I appreciate about Christianity is that it is the only religion where God solved our sin problem. He sent his son to die on the cross for our sin. All other religions say “do.” Christianity says, ‘done!’ The work is finished. We must simply repent of our sin and believe in Christ.”
• We aren’t saying works don’t matter, but works flow downstream from faith. We are not saved by works. We are saved by faith. We are not saved by good works, but we are saved for good works. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. Not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10).
The Outcome of our Faith
• “he justifies the ungodly…counted as righteousness”
• We’ve used this term “justified” already several times, but I’ve waited until now to explain it. Appeared several times in chs. 2-3. It means to be “declared righteous.”
• Read vv. 6-8. Quotes from Psalm 32. Episode found in 2 Samuel 11-12. David lusts after Bathsheba, a married woman. Calls her into his royal palace, sleeps together. Then when he learns she is pregnant, he tries to cover up his sin by bringing her husband Uriah home from the battlefield. When that doesn’t work, he puts him right in the line of fire so he will be dealt with. Uriah is killed, and David takes Bathsheba as his wife. Kings did this sort of thing all the time. But David was no ordinary king. He was a representative of God. And the sin began to eat away at David and make him sick.
• Have you ever had a time where sin was eating you up from the inside? You try to ignore it, but it won’t go away. You tried to cover it up, but it keeps staring you in the face. You try to block it out, but it just keeps coming back. The only way to find freedom and cleansing is to trust in Christ. Why not do that today, right now?
• Blessed –happy, relieved. “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long…Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (Ps. 32:3-4). After a long season of spiritual drought, David confessed his sin, and God once again showers David with happiness. His joy is restored.
• That is the joy that David received. And just like Abraham, all of this was “apart from works.”
• Paul goes on to show that this salvation equally applies to both Jew and Gentile. Read vv. 9-12.
• According to Gen. 17:24, Abram was 99 years old when he was circumcised. When you do the math, it was at least 14 years earlier when Abraham believed God and was counted righteous in 15:6. So his righteousness didn’t follow his circumcision. It preceded it! In a sense, even Abram was a Gentile before he was circumcised and God established a new people through him.
Conclusion
• Review: The Object, the Opposite, the Outcome
• During the Vietnam War, US troops would be dropped behind enemy lines in the jungle and go on patrol along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Their presence could be detected and they would become easy targets. Developers came up with the idea to make a unique sole that imitated the bare footprint of the Vietnamese. Because of the smaller footprint sole, there was no heel support and operators were practically walking on their toes for the duration of the patrol. Other tactics were tried like wearing Vietnamese sandals, or putting socks on the outside of the combat boots. Finally, they launched a different idea. The collected all the boots that had been disposed of by military hospitals, then did an airdrop of the boots over the jungle canopy. Over 20,000 of them. These boots were much better made than North Vietnamese or Vietcong footwear, so they were snatched up quickly and worn by the enemy. Soon, footprints in the mud were everywhere, and you could no longer tell if they were from US troops or from other Vietnamese.
• Whenever you see footprints, it is a sure sign that someone has been there before you. The same is true with faith. It may feel risky to step out and follow God. But as you look closer, you discover there are spiritual footsteps that have gone before you. Men like Abraham who trusted God, and was counted as righteous. Men like David who cried out to God, and found forgiveness due to no merit of his own. We, too, are called to walk in those footsteps of the faith, as one unified people, who find salvation in Christ alone.