Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on February
27th 2005
Back in Orange
County, California in 1962 Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield had a dream. They wanted to put together a band that had enough
pizzazz to play in Las Vegas. Eventually they came up with a winning song ‘You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' which stands
as the most played song in the history of American radio. Twenty-five years later
their song ‘Unchained Melody’ helped make the romantic movie ‘Ghost’ a smash hit. They called themselves
‘The Righteous Brothers’.
Righteous brothers and sisters. Such would
be a description of what the church is meant to be. Now we may be comfortable
with the idea of being brothers and sisters united in a common cause. But what
about that ‘Righteous’ bit? What’s the deal with righteousness?
We’re heading towards Easter and looking
at passages from the Book of Romans. In the book of Romans righteousness is a big deal. Paul wanted to know what it meant to
live a righteous life. Why? For
Paul, it was a matter of life and death. Only the righteous were children of
God. Only the righteous could live a life that was acceptable to God and knew
God’s guidance. Only the righteous could be saved.
Paul’s bible
was the Old Testament. There he encountered verses such as Proverbs 3:33 “The Lord's curse is on the house
of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous.” Psalm 69:28 said of the unrighteous, “Let
them be blotted out of the book of the living.” It is in a letter attributed
to his fellow apostle Peter that we read “For the eyes of the Lord are on
the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil." (1 Peter 3:12)
When Paul had wanted an illustration that represented how all people
were inclined towards living in a way that was other than what God required, he looked to Adam as a universal archetype of
all humanity. When he looked for an illustration of a person who lived a righteous
life, he turned to the great father figure of Israel’s faith, Abraham.
He notes that most of the time Abraham was a good person. He was a pretty
good person back in the days when he was an idolatrous worshipper of the moon-goddess in Ur. He
was more or less law abiding once he started down a road with the One True God that promised tremendous blessing if he and
his family cast there lot in with Him.
But he also suffered some regrettable moral lapses. He
passed his wife off as his sister in order to save his own skin. He made his
slave girl, Hagar, pregnant and then insisted that once his wife Sara was pregnant, Hagar and his son Ishmael leave town.
So what was it about Abraham that made him a righteous brother before God? Was it that he tried to live a good life most of the time? Was
it that when you weighed up the good he had achieved, it outweighed the bad? No,
says Paul, it can’t be that.
To illustrate his point, he points out that if you do a job, and get paid for it, then
all you are doing is getting what’s due to you. Romans 4:4 says “Now
to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.”
You gave something to the person or entity that employed you, and they fulfilled their side of the contract and paid
you.
He weighs up that argument. Maybe that’s
how it works. We do something for God, and God will do something for us. And if we can do enough good to balance out some of the bad, then things will work
out.
But then he starts thinking: Now hold on a
minute. God was holy. God wasn’t under any obligation or contractual agreement. God had 100% shown people what was right.
To be holy as God was holy, as scripture taught, would mean living lives where we never messed up. Even the slightest transgression
would make that sort of relationship a no-go.
Abraham couldn’t do it. Noah
couldn’t do it. Israel’s greatest King, David, couldn’t
do it. He concludes that we can’t do it either. Go to church or not go to church, do the good we know or ignore the good we may do, kick the cat or stroke
the cat, sometime or other we mess up!
So here is the problem. Scripture teaches
that without righteousness we are outside of God, separated from God’s love; under God’s displeasure, not under
God’s blessing. Righteousness is the essential ingredient that we need in our life if God is to be involved in our life.
So can anybody be righteous? You know, says
Paul, I can’t speak for everybody, but Abraham was. Romans 4:3 says “For
what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”.
When Paul writes about Abraham ‘believing’, he’s not talking about giving
intellectual assent to some creed or formula. He’s not talking about being
regular at church or synagogue. He’s not talking about making some isolated
decision to walk with God.
For Abraham believing in God was a daily activity that involved the whole person. Faith for Abraham meant acting every day upon the things that he believed God was calling
him to do. He knew himself well enough to know that before God he had nothing
to bargain with. This is what lies behind Paul statement in Romans 4:5, and I’ll
read it the way it is phrased in ‘The Message’ Bible;
“If you see that the job
(that is, the job of making your life righteous before God) is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you
trust God to do it—you could never do
it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-God-to-do-it is what gets you set right with
God, by God. It’s a gift.”
Jump down to Romans 4:16: “For this
reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all Abraham’s descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share his faith, for he is the father
of us all.”
Ever watched a mother or father playing with a little one, lifting them up, throwing them
in the air, and catching them whilst the child giggles with glee? Ever noticed
the way a secure child will often throw their whole body back, throw their head back, because they know they are secure in
their parent’s arms? ‘Hey... let’s do this ‘. Shoom, back goes the head! But Dad or Mum has it all under
control.
To be the inheritors of Abraham’s promise, that by faith we will be made righteous,
requires throwing our lives into the strong arms of God. It depends on resting
in grace. “You must become as a little child,” Jesus once said.
The word righteous is one
of many layers. One of the roots of the word is that it simply means “acceptable”.
What makes our lives acceptable to God? Just
this. Our lives are acceptable to God because God wants to share in our lives.
God
makes them acceptable... makes them... ‘righteous’… as we believe that God accepts us, that on the Cross
Jesus died to remove whatever barriers may make us unacceptable to God, and that through the Holy Spirit we can experience
that acceptance.
One of the lines in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Brief Affirmation of Faith declares: In everlasting love, the God of Abraham and Sarah chose a covenant people to bless
all families of the earth. To be an inheritor
of Abraham’s promise means to be accepted by God not for what we do, but for who we are, a child of God deeply loved,
eternally chosen, greatly cherished and of eternal worth.
By and of ourselves, we have no righteousness. Years before even Paul
was born the prophet Isaiah declared, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up
like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” (Isaiah 64:6)
There’s an account
in one of the lesser known prophetic books, the Book of Zechariah, that speaks of how God takes the initiative in clothing
our lives with righteousness. Zechariah is a prophet given to having visions. In
one of these visions, recounted in chapter 4, he finds himself in the company of an angel and the High Priest Joshua. Also present is Satan, the great opponent of God’s ways.
The angel is bringing charges
against Satan and saying, “May the Lord condemn you.” Then he looks over to Joshua and says about Joshua, “See
this man here, now he is like a stick snatched from the fire.” But as the
scene moves to Joshua, Joshua doesn’t look so good. In fact Joshua is standing
there wearing filthy rags. And although the text doesn’t say so, the implication
is that Satan looks at Joshua and sees no threat. Satan sneers as if to say,
“Like I’m going to be worried by a dirty loser like that!”
The angel calls upon
his heavenly attendants and says, “Take away the filthy clothes this man is wearing.” We read in Zechariah 3:4, Then he said to Joshua, "See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you." And sure enough Joshua is clothed in rich priestly
garments, is promised that his prayers will be heard, and that neither he nor any of those whom God clothes with righteousness
has anything to fear from the likes of Satan.
When we put our trust and hope in what Jesus Christ
has done for us upon the Cross, in the reality of God’s resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, when we believe
that God is present through the action of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and around our lives, then it is as though God says
to us, “See, I have taken away your sin and clothed you with the garment of righteousness.”
When we talk of how Jesus Christ has set us free,
of how we are forgiven and cleansed by God’s amazing Grace, we are acknowledging that God has done for us what we could
never do for ourselves. He has covered our lives with the righteousness of Jesus
Christ, chosen us to be light in a dark world, and called us to be bearers of the message of God’s love to all people
and all situations.
Our good is never good enough. But God’s Grace is greater than sin, God’s love more powerful than death, and God’s victory
more powerful than our defeats. We can hold our heads up high. By faith, we can
be the inheritors of Abraham’s promise.
From time to time we righteous brothers and sisters
may indeed say to each other, “You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling.” When
life gets us that way we may feel we haven’t got the ghost of a chance before God that our lives may be considered righteous.
At such times we need to remember that God’s acceptance of us is an act,
not of our personal worthiness, but of God’s grace, and that it is an act of the Holy Spirit to release an unchained
melody into our hearts.
May God help us be those who live in a way that reflects the amazing grace of the Father’s
love. As God has chosen to clothe our lives in the righteousness of Jesus Christ,
it is for us to seek to live in a manner that brings praise to God, a way that reflects not only who we are, but whose we are.
To God be the Glory! Amen.
Adrian Pratt
