Romans 4:1-12 // Hamish Peterson

We've been in the middle of a series on the book of Romans. Paul is writing this letter to the church in Rome, which is comprised of two different people groups. Who are they? You know them? The who and the who? The Jews and the Gentiles. So there's Jewish Christians. There's Gentile Christians. Gentile is just a fancy world word for not Jew. Two different groups of people. Trying to live together, trying to be Christians together, trying to be the church together. In chapter one, Paul started talking about those who are destined for God's wrath, and those are people who, whilst they know that God is the true God, they choose to reject him, not acknowledging him as Lord, and instead choosing to worship themselves, worship other created things. And in chapter one, it says that God gives them over to their sin, leading to a whole host of other sins, secondary sins, as punishment, and then just when you think he's, Paul has kind of like laid up a slam dunk on the sinners, like, "Hey, you guys suck." Then chapter two, he's like, "Ah, just hold on. Hold the phone there, Bukarou." Because you who judge sinners for doing that, you're deserving of the same judgment, because you do the same sins as them. Oh, and so he flips the script, and basically long story short by the end of Romans chapter three, Paul has come to the conclusion that whether you're a Jew or a Gentile, all of us have sinned and fall short of God's perfect good-standard. So none of us can achieve perfection by just trying to do more good things. None of us, here's another word, none of us can achieve righteousness by just trying to obey God's rules. Now does that make God's rules not good? By no means, God's rules are good, but in trying to obey them, we just discover how incapable we are of truly being good. And so the conclusion at the end of the last couple of weeks, I mean, Dinella preached last week at Tugas, I preached last week at Queen Bien, I preached the week before at Tugas, we've gone through Romans chapter three, the conclusion that we got is that we cannot save ourselves. Before you hear the good news, you've got to hear the bad news, and the bad news is that you can't save yourself, but it's kind of good news, because if you can't save yourself, you don't want to be told a lie that you can't save yourself, because then you'll be trapped, and you'll be damned, and there's a lot of actually, every single religion, except for the one true Catholic religion, Christianity, I used the word Catholic because it means universal. Every religion, except for Christianity, will sell you the lie that you can reach enlightenment, that you can better yourself and then save yourself. That is a lie from the pit of hell, it is a doctrine of demons, because the good news in a way is that you can't save yourself, so natural conclusion, if you can't save yourself, you need someone else to save you. And if everyone around you is just as incapable of saving themselves, it will, it's not going to be your best friend at school who can save you, it's not going to be your youth leader, your mom, your dad, your youth pastor, it's not going to be any other normal human being, the only human being who could save you would be one who actually obeyed all of God's laws perfectly. Come on, we all know that none can actually do that, really. Everyone says, hey, everyone makes mistakes, everyone has those days. Was that Marley Cyrus? Was that Hannah Montana? It was Hannah Montana. You might know what he's going, you know, you're not. Nortis is in 2000s, bro. Oh my gosh. Look, look, when I'm out on the street and I'm sharing Jesus with people, in fact, Ruben and I were sharing Jesus with this girl who wants to revive the old Greek religion. She wants to worship Zeus. I'm like, come on, it's 2026 in the year of our Lord. Can we let a dead religion stay dead, please? And she was like, she was like, the thing I love about the Greek gods is that they're just like us, you know, they make mistakes. And I think it's because like, you know, no one's perfect. I'm like, oh my goodness, the gods that you've called upon to save you are just as sinful if not more than you. So you're damned. We need a guy. Who is perfect? I know a guy. Come on. Who here knows a guy and his name is Jesus. Come on. Praise if you know Jesus tonight. Jesus is the only one who can save because he was the only human being who was perfect. Why? Because Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God. He became a man. He put skin and burns on and he lived the perfect life that you and I could not do. We're trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Jesus actually obeyed God's law and he fulfilled it perfectly. And then he went to a cross and he died, the death of a criminal, even though he committed not a single crime. But every stroke of that whip on his back, every lash, every thorn in his brow represented a sin of humanity. And my sin, because the only sin that was on his back was ours. He was blameless. He was perfect. And our faith hinges on him. I want to teach you a word. This is really important. Justification. Would you say it? Justification. If you go to chapter 3, verse 28. Paul says, "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the Lord." Does anyone have the NLT translation? Yeah, Kaya. So we are made right with God through faith and we are not by obeying the law. Do you hear the word justified in that one? No, that's because the NLT does some of the translating work for you. So if you marry these two translations, what could the word justification mean? What do you say? Was that made right? Justification is a legal term for being made right. Let's present it this way. Let's use the legal analogy. Imagine you're in a courtroom. And guess what? It's you on trial because you've broken God's law. Denali reminded us last week if you were at Togas Youth that we've all broken God's law. So you're on trial. And you're asked to give in a defense to justify yourself to prove that you're innocent. And no matter what you say, no matter how many good things you say, "Well, yes, I did light up my parents. Yes, I know that's why I'm on trial today." But I like rocked up to church every Sunday this month. And I started a Youth Club in my school and you start giving a defense to justify yourself. It doesn't matter how many good things you've done. It doesn't change the fact that you still lied to your parents and that's why you're in court today. Right? The fact of the matter is, we're all on trial because we've all broken God's law. And because we're all sinners, yes, some of us have sinned more than others, but all of us, even the smallest sin, we've all broken something. We're all broken something of God's law, which means we're actually incapable of giving ourselves a valid defense. We're incapable of making ourselves right. We need a gracious judge to call us right, to consider us righteous. Hear those words, consider us righteous. That's justification. The question is part of what we call salvation. Justification is a moment of time where God looks at you and he declares you righteous. And I want to tell you, based on this verse, verse 28 of chapter 3, that we are justified by faith without even obeying the law. Now, that doesn't mean we don't seek to obey God's law, but what I'm saying is the thing contingent on receiving the justification of God, God declaring us righteous, is not our works, but by putting our faith in Him. So you don't have to do more good things for God to declare you righteous. You put your faith in the merciful judge and he looks at your faith and he declares you righteous. Now we have a problem at this point in Romans and Paul will answer it a few chapters down the line. So you have to keep coming to youth to figure out. And the problem is this, God has, at this point, He has declared us righteous because we put our faith in Him, but at this point we're still sinners who haven't actually obeyed the law. So how can God actually help us obey and fulfill the law, and Denel actually touched on it a little bit because faith is the beginning of how the law gets fulfilled in us. There's a process. We don't fulfill the law to make ourselves righteous because we can't. We put our faith in the maker of the law to declare us righteous and then spoil it. He gives us His Holy Spirit which produces His righteousness in us. There's a process. Why is this important? Because without knowing that the answer is in God first and not us, you've got to get the right order. Without knowing that the answer is in God first and not us, you will spend your whole life trying to be good and good and good and good and good and it's going to lead to nothing. It's going to lead to spiritual abuse, religious fatigue. You'll get sick and tired of church and say it doesn't work, it's all out of bogus but it's because you missed the gospel. This is not a self-help club. This is not a behaviour modification AA meeting or something. I don't know, our problem is that we're not mostly good but a little bit bad and we just need some correctional help. Our problem is that we are dead in our sin. Come on. Jesus didn't come to give us a couple self-help phrases that we can put in our Instagram bio. He came to raise the dead to life and without Christ we are dead in our sins. I haven't even started on chapter 4, let's get to chapter 4, that's what I'm meant to be preaching today. The first 12 verses, let's read it. Chapter 4, "What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? "For if Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about, but not before God. "For what does the Scripture say, Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness." Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his Jew. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, just stop on those three words, justifies the ungodly, because stay there for a whole night. His faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks, the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. And he says this, "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven. One is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin." Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? Now, when I say the circumcised, what group of people am I talking about? They're Jews. When I say uncircumcised, who are we talking about? Gentiles. So he's saying, "Is this gift of justification God calling us righteous? Is it just for Jews or just for Gentiles?" But we say that faith is counted to Abraham as righteousness, verse 10. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he'd been circumcised? Was it before or after he became the first Jew by doing the religious ritual ceremony? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. The God justified him and called him righteous before he even started obeying Jewish law. Boom. What? Verse 11. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised. So that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who were not merely circumcised, but who also walked in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised. Look at that word here, that phrase, not merely circumcised, but who also walked in the footsteps of the faith. What is wrong with chapter 1 verse 5, say? What does it say? Someone remind me. It says through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith, the obedience of faith. And I'll go back. So what's Paul doing here in chapter 4? He's saying that if Jews and Gentiles are justified by putting our faith in God who graciously counts us as righteous, he's saying to prove that point that I'm making. Jewish Christians, I'm going to use your most venerated hero, literally Abraham. They called him the father of the faith. Like if Paul's going to make this point to the Jewish Christians, that it's not by having a part of their bodies slipped off, that makes them saved, but that it's actually a work of faith in them receiving the grace of God. If he's going to make that point to the Jews, because remember he needs to make that point to them, because they think they're better than the Gentile Christians, just because they have something cut off, right? He's going to make this point to the Jews, so who better case study than to use Abraham? Who's like the big bad boss of the Jewish faith, like he's the guy who started it all. And so he goes back to Abraham and he says, I'm going to prove to you that this salvation, sorry, justification by faith is not something that I've just cooked up now to convince you with an argument, it's actually at the beginning of the Jewish religion, because if he can do that slam dunk, Paul, the apostle, you've won, you cooked them, their goose is cooked. And he does it. He goes, turn with me to Genesis chapter 15, oh my goodness, you think Paul was just using his own words, he was actually quoting Genesis 15, start with verse one, after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram, now that's Abraham's name before God called him and changed his name, in a vision, fear not Abram, I'm your shield, your award shall be very great, but Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless. In the air of my house is Ellie, user of Damascus, and Abram said, behold, you've given me no offspring, and I remember of my household will be my heir, and behold the word of the Lord came to him, this man shall not be your heir, your very own son shall be your heir, and he brought him outside and said, look to the heaven, and number the stars, if you're able to number them, then he said to him, so shall your offspring be, verse six, and he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness, this is the first covenant that God has made with people. And Abraham received this covenant, another word for that, a promise that God makes with us and a agreement that God makes with us. He received this promise, this agreement, before he debate any of God's laws. In fact, what Paul said is true, this happens, this verse of Abram believing God and it being counted to him as righteousness, it happens two chapters before Abraham agrees to get circumcised. Genesis 17 is when he starts obeying God's law, Abram just, God just shows up to him and says, "Hey, look at the stars in the sky. "I know you and your wife Sarah are really old "and you're probably not gonna be out of have any kids, "but guess what? "I've plucked you out of obscurity. "I've plucked you out of nothing and Abram, "I'm gonna turn your whole family line into a nation. "There's gonna be so many of them. "You won't even be like, out of count them all." And Abram standing there before a holy God, who he's never met, who he's just finding out right now is giving him this massive promise and Abram's like, "Okay." And that okay was counted to him as righteousness. Did Abram do any good work to earn that? It was purely by the grace of God. Can I prove it even further to you? Go to Joshua 24 of us too. I know, random place, trust me, it'll make sense. Joshua 24 verse two. Hear what Joshua has to say about Abram. Joshua is giving a speech to the people of Israel before they come into the promised land. And he's reminding them of God's covenant, God's promise that he made with the father of their faith, Abraham. And he says this in verse two of chapter 24, and Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, "long ago your fathers lived beyond the afraidies. "Terra, the father of Abraham and of Nahor, "and they served other gods." Do I have to prove any more to you that Abraham wasn't following God's law? He wasn't producing any righteousness of himself enough to earn his salvation. What was Abraham doing before God plugged him out of nowhere? He was in, Earl of the Childeans. He was in a pagan city worshiping. It was a polytheistic city, which is normal. He wasn't particularly bad, dude. I'm sure he was an averagely normal, nice dude. Most of your friends are who don't know Christ, right? He was a normal, nice dude. But he was worshiping false demonic idols. Can I push this point of God's grace to you any further? Now, did he continue to stay in his sin after God called him? No, he did not. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying it's not like he was on his knees every day, saying, Jesus, I love you. He wasn't doing this. God plugged him out of nowhere. And that's our story. That's your story. That's my story. That's the story of your friend who's yet to know Jesus. That's the story of your dad or your mom who is yet to know Jesus. They're just out there living their life, doing their own thing. Not a particularly wicked person, not a mass murderer or anything. But still sinful, broken, fallen just like all of us. And God pucks them out of obscurity and says, He is my covenant to you. Will you believe? And our job is just to say, okay. And he credits it to us as if we are righteous. He calls us righteous. And it's not him lying. When he calls you righteous, oh, when he calls you righteous, he's not just, I'm choosing to identify you as righteous. No, it's not an arbitrary label like the world uses labels. When he calls you, when God speaks, it's prophetic, which means it's going to happen. And his word does not return to avoid. So if he calls you righteous, if he calls you righteous, it's because he predestined you to be righteous. So he saw you at the dawn of the world. And he said, I will make Tara my servant. I will make her righteous. And so if he calls you righteous, if he justifies you, he will sanctify you, which means makes you righteous. And he will glorify you, which means bring you into completed righteousness. Perfection. So he's not lying. Even though he's, right now, he's called us righteous. He's justified us. He's called you righteous. If you're a Christian today, if you've like Abraham, if you've stand before a holy and mighty God, who's given you a promise of salvation, and you've said, okay, if you've done that, he has justified you, which means he's called you righteous. But that's not a lie. That's not an empty promise. That means he will produce his righteousness in you. Boy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. He will produce those things in you. Every day, as you journey towards glorification, when your body, your mortal body, dies away, and you're given an immortal body that will last forever, and that will be perfect without any sin, and will be spotless, just as Jesus is spotless. That's the hope of Christianity. All because he called you, not because of any work of your own, but he justifies those who he calls. Our response is just simply to say, okay, that's not a work. That's just falling into the mercy, safety net of a loving, powerful God. And so if Jesus says, be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, then you don't say, well, I'm not going to do that, because I'm already saved in my heart. I don't need to prove to anyone. Getting baptized is not a work to earn your salvation. Getting baptized is you just saying, okay, God, yes. Do you understand? So for the Jewish Christian, I want you to understand this. For the Jewish Christian, getting circumcised was a good thing. But they had to get the priority right. Getting circumcised was not a work of earning salvation. It was a faith response to God's covenant promise. Same with baptism for us and communion for us. Anything that Jesus asks us to do. We do it, not because we're trying to earn our salvation. We've already been declared righteous. We do it because we're just saying before a cosmic being who loves us. Okay, use me. I forgot my whole sermon. Whenever I come and preach at Queen Men, I go off the rails. The Queen Men guys know this. Here's what I wanted to say. I wanted to say, remember, Romans 1, verse 5. Paul's goal is that the world would receive the obedience of faith. Here's what I wrote down. I wrote, faith precedes obedience but is proven by obedience. Right? Before Abraham obeyed a single commandment from God, he just put his faith in him. But then that faith was tested and proven to be true when God asked him, okay, cut off something personal and precious to you. And I mean two things when I say that. I also mean his son. He was asked to give up his son. And when he said, okay, again, his faith was proven to be true. Let me tell you, if your faith costs you nothing, if there's no obedience to your faith, remembering that the obedience is not earning your salvation, the obedience is from salvation. Right? But if your faith costs you nothing, I sincerely doubt your faith. Oh, but Abraham should understand I have sport on Sundays. I can't come to church. If you don't understand, hey, I just got a job at Mac as I can't come to you. I'm firing and I got it. Maybe God would want you to. give up your sporting career for him. Could that be worth it? Maybe? No, no. Maybe he wants you to earn less money by accepting less shifts. Or even if you say to mackers, no, don't roster me on Fridays or Sundays, they go, well, tough like you, don't have a job. Maybe just trust God that he'll provide for you and money is not like the most important thing in life. Or maybe God should be the most important thing. Am I being too real? Like, here's the thing, right? We talked about a leader's meeting on Tuesday. Hebrews 10 has that line in it where it says, don't disregard the gathering. Don't forsake the gathering of believers. And we often use that just to say, hey guys, your church attendance has been down a little bit lately. Remember, Hebrews says, don't forsake the gathering of the believers. Why did the writer of Hebrews say that? The writer of Hebrews said that because Jewish Christians under threat of martyrdom like being unalived for believing in Jesus, Jewish Christians were being tempted to forsake Christ and to not come to church on Sundays, 'cause if he came to church on Sundays, it was obvious who, which Christians needed to be unalived. So Christians in persecuted parts of the world across history have literally smuggled people into church services to be obedient to God. And then here we're like, oh, sorry, I've got a game on Sunday. Sorry, I've got a shift on Friday night. Maybe your faith is going to cost you something. Maybe it's going to cost you popularity at school. Maybe it's going to cost you friends. Maybe it's going to cost you, I don't know, your life. I've gone off the rails. So what is justification? It's God calling you righteous. And if he calls you righteous, he's faithful to make you righteous. And what is faith? It's not a work of earning. It's a response of receiving. And how do I know if you have faith, if you're obedient. So youth edge, do you have faith? Do you have faith? Now, here's where I'll end. Go with me to Luke 22, verse 19. So God made a covenant with Abram. And a covenant is a promise. And our duty is to respond to that promise with belief. Remember, Genesis 15 said that Abram believed God and it was countered as righteousness. That kind of belief is not believing that God exists. It's believing God. When He makes a promise to you, when He shows you His promises for you, it's just saying, "Yeah, I believe you. I trust you." That is the faith that is countered as righteousness. So that was Abram's covenant with God. Well, God's covenant with Abram. What is God's new covenant with us? Verse 19, this is Jesus. And He, Jesus, took bread. And when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you." Do this in remembrance of Me. And likewise, the cup, after they had eaten, saying, "This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood." The promise that God makes to us through Jesus is that Jesus's broken body and spilled blood is the way we can enter into eternal life. The fullness of life. And you've been sitting under my preaching for a long time. And some of you have not yet put your faith in Jesus. Close your eyes right now. I want to give it you an opportunity. You've been sitting under my preaching for a long time. And you have not yet put your faith in Jesus. I want to tell you that faith doesn't mean you have all your questions answered. If I have to convince you of every doubt in your mind before you put your faith in Him, we're going to be here forever. And then we'll die, and it will all be for nothing. So at some point, with the level of knowledge you have, you have to just say, "Okay, to a cosmic supreme being who loves you." And His promise to you right now, His covenant to you, is that He has sacrificed His body and His blood for you so that you can have everlasting life. That's His guarantee to you. And it's not a hopeful wish or a prayer. If God says it, if He makes a promise, He's going to pay on it. He's going to deliver it. So that's His promise to you. This is my body. I've given you my body, broken on a cross. This is my blood. I've given you my blood, spilled out to cover all your sins and to give you life. So what do you say? Do you say, "Okay," and accept it in faith? It might be a quivering, silent okay. It might be a very unsure okay. It might be a very doubtful okay. But as long as you say okay, that is faith that He credits His righteousness to you. If you want to say, "Okay," to God's promise tonight. If you want to say, "Yes, I accept," to God's promise that He has died for you, but you can have life through His life, through Jesus' blood. If you want to say, "Okay," to that promise tonight, and become a Christian. Put your hand up right now. I want to pray for you.