Does Your Faith Work? Series

Do you remember the advertising slogan, “They got their money the old fashioned way: they earned it!” It was very popular, and very clever. But of course many - if not most - people with the real money in this country didn’t get it by earning it. They got it the real old fashioned way: they inherited it. As a matter of fact, for hundreds of years people who got their money by inheritance looked down on the people who earned it. They were “nouveau riche,” “parvenus,” “upstarts,” “Johnny-come-lately’s.”

Nonetheless, the ads were done very well and appealed very effectively to a strong and quite admirable strain in our culture which admires hard work and believes that is the way to get ahead. Many of us joke about winning the lottery, but few of us really believe it’s a hope you can build your life around. But we have all seen that in this country it’s possible to achieve almost anything - wealth, fame, political power - if we just work for it hard enough. And so we’re taught from a very early age to work hard to succeed, to make our dreams come true. We’re encouraged to be “all that we can be” - and all this we inherited from our Protestant forebears. The roots were actually planted long before, with the Jewish tradition of teaching each son a trade regardless of the family’s resources, and reinforced with the Christian insistence that labor is not only honorable and pleasing to God, but a necessary part of a complete life. But the idea that God rewards hard work with prosperity really began to bear fruit with the Reformation. And that work ethic is the root of America’s extraordinary financial prosperity.

You’ve probably heard this illustration before... the story of the frog who fell into a pail of milk. Since he was floating in the milk, he didn’t have any leverage and couldn’t leap out of the pail no matter how hard he tried. But rather than give up, he did the only thing he could do. He paddled and paddled and paddled to keep afloat. And an amazing thing happened. As he paddled, a pad of butter formed. The frog hopped on the pad and jumped. out of the pail. And of course the moral of the story is that if you work hard, it will pay off. And it’s true! It does! At least most of the time...

The problem comes when you apply this model to Christianity. An awful lot of people really believe that if you do the best you can, God will credit your work as righteousness and let you into heaven. But of course as we all know this thinking totally misses the whole point of the Gospel.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years to the effect that every person has some sort of spark of divinity which only needs to be fanned into a flame. Friends, that just isn’t so. Being a fallen person in a fallen world means that we have come completely disconnected from the divine. What lives within us is a hunger to get reconnected that can be numbed, misdirected, or temporarily assuaged by other means, but there’s no redemption in it.

We’re taking this passage in reverse order from the way Paul addressed the problem. The passage before ours shows that Adam’s initial slip into disobedience had consequences that has reverberated throughout all creation, and that something correspondingly greater was therefore needed to lift us out of the swamp. Today we’re going to back up and see that no one, no matter how admirable, has ever climbed out of the hole on his own.

Paul uses two Old Testament illustrations to make his point. One, Abraham, is a saint - well, sort of - the other is that well-known sinner, David. Both illustrate the primacy of faith. Abraham’s story illustrates that no one can take credit for their own salvation, and David’s shows that no one is outside God’s reach. “What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.” [Ro 4:1 2]

Now, to the Jews, Abraham was a hero. (Somehow they managed to overlook his lying to Pharaoh, his relationship with Hagar, and his mistreatment of his illegitimate son Ishmael. But I digress.) If anyone could have been saved by works, they would certainly have pointed to Abraham. But even as righteous as Abraham was made out to be, it wasn’t his works that counted. “For what does the scripture say? 'Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.'" [Ro 4:3]

Neither good deeds nor religious rituals earned Abraham the title “friend of God.” Whatever righteousness Abraham had was the consequence of his trust in God. Righteousness was credited to his account because of his faith. It’s like going into a restaurant and having the proprietor wave away your credit card, saying “Your money’s no good here, it’s on the house.” If you ask why, he replies “because you’re on the boss’s son’s list.” If you’re like most of us, that would make you feel a little uncomfortable. “What does he expect in return?” you might wonder. We don’t like being in debt. We don’t like being obligated to someone. Because when we are, it takes away some of our control, some of our independence.