Monday, January
8, 2018
There are a lot of different words that
describe it: getting right with God,
getting saved, being born-again, completed, coming to faith, beginning a
relationship with God. This can be expressed
in so many ways, and the essence of what constitutes responding to our Creator,
and how that happens, has been debated for millennia.
Paul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, spent a lot of paper and ink to
help us understand which comes first; is it our faith in God or our works for
God which move God to accept us? Did the
chicken come first, or was it the egg?
Let’s let Paul’s explanation instruct us this morning. He uses the illustration of how God’s acceptance
of Abraham is a model for responding to God with faith:
So how do we fit
what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of
looking at things? If Abraham, by what
he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly
have taken credit for it. But the story
we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered
into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning
point. He trusted God to set him right
instead of trying to be right on his own.”
If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we
don’t call your wages a gift. But if you
see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can
do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how
hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set
right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts
God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it
is one fortunate man:
Fortunate those
whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate. Fortunate the person against whom the Lord
does not keep score.
Do you think for a
minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our
religious ways and are circumcised? Or
do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even
heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don’t we, that it was by
embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God? Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he
was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That’s right, before he was
marked. That means that he underwent
circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to
bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had
embraced with his whole life. And it
means further that Abraham is father of allpeople who embrace what
God does for them while they are still on the “outs” with God, as yet
unidentified as God’s, in an “uncircumcised” condition. It is precisely these people in this condition
who are called “set right by God and with God”! Abraham is also, of course, father of those
who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just
because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky
faith-embrace of God’s action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he
was marked by circumcision. Romans 4:1-12(MSG)[2]
God gave Paul these words for us to understand that, the “chicken” of God
wanting us close to Him, definitely came before the “egg” of our wanting to be
with Him; it’s God’s initiative to save us.
In fact, elsewhere[3]
Paul wrote that it was God Who first placed faith within us, in our hearts and
on the very tip of our tongues, just waiting to get out. It is true, we must respond in faith, just as Abraham; but we couldn’t even
do that unless God had first placed faith in our hearts. This is what Methodists have always referred
to as prevenient grace,
where God shows up first to watch over us, before we ever know anything about
Him. I may not be able to answer which
actually came first in the chicken
& egg debate, but the right answer is always God shows up first!
For You
Today
Every
step you’re going to take today has been checked ahead of time…from above!
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