Righteousness is a Gift
Righteousness is a gift; gifts ought to be accepted. If a gift has to be worked towards and merited according to good conduct, then it is not a gift, but it is a wage.
1 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things?
2 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.
3 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."
4 If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift.
5 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.
6 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:
7 Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
8 Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.
Romans 4:1-8 MSG
The strange thing about faith is that it loses its power once a timeframe has been placed on it. As soon as we deliberate a time-limit or delivery date on faith, we nullify its effects because we never believe that we have it now. Faith is always now; if faith is attributed to a future date then it no longer remains faith, it becomes hope.
0 comments:
Post a Comment