“Father of Many Nations”
Genesis 12:1-4a [O.T Lesson]
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 [N.T. Lesson]
There was once a man who slipped off the edge of a cliff, and just before he fell hundreds of feet to the valley floor below, he grabbed a protruding branch. There he was, dangling from that little branch, afraid that any second it would pull out from the side of the cliff. “Help!” he began to cry. “Help! Is anyone up there!” Finally, after no answer, he began to pray desperately, after which he heard a big booming voice. “I am the Lord. I am here to save you!”
The man was beyond relieved. “Oh, thank you. Thank you, Lord! But please hurry. Do something!” The Lord returned, “I will, my son. All you have to do is follow my every direction without doubting or fear.” “Fine, fine,” hollered back the man. “Anything! But please hurry! What do you want me to do first?” The booming voice came back, “Let go.”
The man was silent for a moment. Finally, he hollered out, “Is anyone else up there?”
This business of “having faith” in God is a huge issue. It’s a huge issue today. It was huge, long before Jesus came. It has been a huge issue ever since. The Scriptures talk about faith in many different ways. One of the best comes from the author of the Book of Hebrews [which could have been Paul]: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible” [Hebrews 11:1-3].
St. Augustine said, “Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”
In his book, Toxic Charity, author Robert D. Lupton wrote, “Trust is the foundation of all human relationships. Trust is also the essence of faith. We Christians believe in a God we cannot see.”
Paul used Abraham as an example of faith and trust, which coincidently is also our Old Testament Lesson this morning. God called Abram to leave everything he knew to this point in life [his home, family, friends, and possessions]. Not only did he call him to pick up and leave He didn’t reveal where he was sending him: “Go to the land I will show you.” You know who else showed great faith? “And Lot went with him.”
God promised to bless Abram and make him great [they even had hats made], but God made one condition: Abram had to do what God wanted him to do, kind of like the guy hanging on the side of the mountain. Abram obeyed, walking away from his home for God’s promise of even greater blessings in the future; and he was no “spring chicken” at this point in his life.
God may be trying to lead you to a place of greater service and usefulness for Him. Don’t let the comfort and security of your present position make you miss out on the greater opportunities God has for you.
The Jews were proud to be descendants of Abraham and as I said, Paul uses him in our New Testament Lesson as a good example of someone who was saved by faith.
When people learn that they are saved by God through faith, they start to worry. “Do I have enough faith?” they ask themselves. “Is my faith strong enough to save me?” These people miss the point. It is Jesus Christ who saves us, not our feelings or actions, and He is strong enough to save us no matter how weak our faith is. Jesus offers us salvation as a gift because He loves us, not because we have earned it through our own efforts, no matter how powerful our faith. What, then, is the role of faith? Faith is believing and trusting in Jesus Christ and reaching out to accept His wonderful gift of salvation.
We are not saved by trying harder to be better. We are saved by grace through faith in the atoning life, death, resurrection, ascension, and coming return of Jesus Christ.
I heard about a church that heard there was a bar being built beside their property. The church folks went ballistic. “We can’t have a bar beside our church!” They went through the official channels and seemed to get nowhere. All the while the bar was going up rather quickly. So, they decided to have an all-night prayer meeting against the building of the bar. Well, a few nights after their prayer meeting there was a bad thunderstorm, and lightning hit the bar under construction and burned it to the ground. It was totally destroyed.
The owner of the bar took the church to court for destroying his bar. The church said they didn’t have anything to do with it. The judge said, “We have an interesting dilemma here. The bar owner seems to have faith in God while the church has no faith in God.”
The promise [covenant] God gave Abraham stated that he would be the father of many nations, “Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers. Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, as for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations” [Genesis 17:2-4]. At this time, Abram was ninety-nine years old and to this point had one son, Ishmael, the son of the slave woman Hagar, Sari’s slave she gave to Abram because she got tired of waiting on God to act. But God is promising that the entire world would be blessed though him and his offspring. This promise was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus was from Abraham’s line, and truly the whole world was and continues to be blessed through Him.
Easter reminds believers that the despair of Good Friday is not the end of the story. [It may be Friday—but Sundays a-cumin!]
Romans 5:12-19
Blaming one another is a human trait; that’s why it’s recorded in our Bible in the story of Adam and Eve. In Hebrew, the name, Adam means “humanity” and the name, Eve, means “life.” In our Old Testament Lesson this morning after Adam ate the fruit, he blamed Eve and then went on to blame God, reminding God that Eve wouldn’t be around if He hadn’t given her to him. God then confronts Eve and she blames the crafty serpent. Adam as “humanity” and Eve as “life” portray how we humans often respond to one another and to God.
Why would God place a tree in the Garden and then forbid Adam to eat from it? God wanted Adam to obey Him, but God also gave Adam the freedom to choose. Without this freedom, Adam would have been like a prisoner, and his obedience would have been hollow. The two trees provided an exercise in choice with rewards for choosing to obey and sad consequences for choosing to disobey. When we are faced with the choice of right or wrong, remember that God is giving you an opportunity to obey Him.
As humans, along with laying the blame for our mistakes on others we also try to justify our mistakes by using others as an example. I read that in Newark, New Jersey, a lady lost a purse containing twenty-five dollars. A week later it came back in the mail but contained only fifteen dollars, plus a note from the anonymous finder explaining she had once lost a purse with ten dollars in it. The fact that she was once robbed gave justification to rob a portion from the twenty-five dollars. This justification and rationalization of wrongdoing affects us down the line. It’s not isolated, but very common.
How easy it is to justify our mistakes—to blame someone else—“I can’t help my weakness; I was born with it.” Or how easy it is to blame some imbalance on the chemistry of our body, or to blame the whole world by saying, “Everybody else is doing it.” Or, like Flip Wilson used to say: “The devil made me do it.” Now I know that the devil is a bad person or being but I’m not quite sure he or she deserves the blame for all the mistakes we make.
Why does Satan tempt us? Temptation is Satan’s invitation to give in to his kind of life and give up God’s kind of life. Satan tempted Eve and succeeded in getting her to sin. Ever since then, he’s been busy getting people to sin.
The author of our New Testament Lesson, the Apostle Paul, is without a doubt one of the giants of our faith. He planted churches everywhere he went on his missionary journey’s and converted thousands upon thousands to the new religion of Christianity. Fourteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are attributed to him, and he probably influenced many of the authors of the other books. He was from Tarsus, which was renowned for its university in which students could receive a superior education. After his time there he went to Jerusalem where he studied under Gamaliel, one of the most noted rabbis in history. Paul was well versed in Classic Greek—Philosophy and Ethics—and Mosaic Law. And he writes like the educated person that he was; which sometimes makes it hard for a simple person like myself to understand him.
Sin is the symbol of spiritual death—man’s ultimate separation from God. Adam’s sin involved all of mankind in condemnation and death. We don’t start our life with even the possibility of living without sin—we begin our life with a sinful nature. Though you won’t find this term in your Bible John Wesley tabbed this as “original sin.” This original sin, or the sin that surrounds us, is the reason that as Methodists, or Wesleyans, we baptize infants, considering them the perfect candidates since we are born into a world of sin.
The “first Adam” failed. And since the entire human race sprang from Adam, all of us are incorporated in Adam and inherit what he passed on to us—death and all that leads to it. Our relationship to God is the same as Adam’s—a broken one. We have no more access to God than Adam had—and we haven’t improved all that much. We are just as rebellious today as Adam ever was. This is our predicament.
Just as sin and death came into the world through the action of one man, Adam, so the solution to sin and death come through a single individual, Jesus Christ, the second Adam. Adam is a “first” in sin and a source of it. Likewise, Jesus is the source of righteousness. Adam, through his choices caused separation from God while Jesus puts us back together with God and holds us there.
Paul says that what Christ has done can alter the character of every single person and can transform the nature of the common life which we all share. The heart of Paul’s argument is that the grace of Jesus Christ is mightier than sin. This grace is so free and effective that it is stopped by nothing except by our rejection—called by some the “possible impossibility.”
In any case, we know that grace provides for us all but can be rejected and lost. Where faith is possible, it is required as the one absolute and immediate condition of salvation. Repentance—obedience—and dedication are required and necessary in order for us to truly have faith.
The reign of death, having been traced to sin, raises a question. How can there be sin even before the law? Paul broadens the horizons; sin is not just breaking commandments; it’s a matter of rejecting God and failing to glorify Him as God. As he wrote to the Ephesians, those who have sinned are “alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart” [Ephesians 4:18].
But sin is deeper than just breaking the rules. It’s a deadly attitude of rebellion that in moral order cannot bear anything other than death. Where sin is universal, death was king.
But, and in this case, we should be thankful for it. But Christ, by His perfect obedience, even death on a cross, sets in reverse the process that Adam began, but it must be accepted rather than rejected. Revelation 3:20 says, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Jesus doesn’t force Himself into our lives. Yes, Adam gave us sin, but he also gave us freedom of choice and it’s up to us to receive the free grace offered to us in Jesus the Christ. And when we do, He gives us the opportunity for a fresh start. He becomes the head of the justified—the redeemed—and the triumphant community. He makes it possible for us to become someone that we weren’t before He came into our life.
What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
O precious is the flow that makes me white as snow;
no other fount I know; nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Friends, it doesn’t matter how far you have strayed or how often you have fallen—our needs are enclosed in the bounds of Jesus’ offer of mercy and grace. Even when our past is stained by hideous transgressions, God’s free gift assures the sinner of acquittal. Our new status isn’t due to our own merit—nor can we in any way secure it—which is why the emphasis falls so strongly on the free gift and our acceptance.
Adam gave us sin, but he gave us a choice as well. We can choose to go down the road that leads to sin and death or we can choose the road to success. It’s our choice.
Thanks be to God!
Eastman First Methodist Church 