God credits faith as righteousness.

 

Sermon for Pentecost 9, August 10, 2025

To all those loved by God…called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Genesis 15:1-6  After these events the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.  He said, “Do not be afraid, Abram.  I am your shield, your very great reward.”  ²Abram said, “Lord God what can you give me, since I remain childless, and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?”  ³Abram also said, “Look, you have given me no offspring, so a servant born in my house will be my heir.”  ⁴Just then, the word of the Lord came to him.  God said, “This man will not be your heir, but instead one who will come out of your own body will be your heir.”  ⁵The Lord then brought him outside and said, “Now look toward the sky and count the stars, if you are able to count them.”  He said to Abram, “This is what your descendants will be like.”  ⁶Abram believed in the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as righteousness. (EHV)

God credits faith as righteousness.

Dear beloved of the Lord,

            Apparently, Abram was beginning to question the Lord’s faithfulness.  It had been a long time since the Lord commanded Abram to leave his homeland and travel to a land in which the Lord promised to give Abram great blessings: that good land for his offspring to possess, many descendants, everlasting fame, and especially, a descendant through whom the whole world would be blessed.  Site unseen, Abram had followed the Lord’s instructions faithfully.  Yet, though he and Sarai had been married many years, God had not yet blessed Abram and Sarai with even one child, and it would be many more years before God gave them that promised son.

If you are like me, you most likely consider Abram to be a great man of faith.  The Jews of Jesus’ day thought they should be rewarded by God simply because their blood relationship to Abraham made them His chosen people.  Furthermore, the Jews usually assumed that God rewarded Abraham because of his great works; that Abraham actually deserved God’s favor as a reward for his obedience to God’s command.  Thus, they thought God should also reward them for their efforts.  However, Abraham was a sinner like you and me with doubts, weaknesses, and fears.

Now, Abram had believed God’s promise that great blessings would come his way, and he did obey the command to travel to a distant land, but Abram was also often quite weak in his faith.  He often doubted whether God would protect him from potential enemies.  He was even willing to lie and misuse his wife to preserve his own skin when entering certain foreign territories, and shortly after being assured here of the heir God had promised him, Abram and Sarai concocted a scheme to produce an illegitimate heir through Sarai’s handmaiden.  Again and again, Abram showed a weak trust in the Lord God of heaven and earth.

Now, hearing that Abram (just like you, and me, and all the rest of humanity) was a frail, weak, sinner, some people might take offense at the suggestion.  However, rather than be offended by Abram’s weak faith, we should be encouraged by God’s great faithfulness and then hear the message of this text: God credits faith as righteousness.

Dear friends, our human nature is continually tempted to believe that we must earn every blessing we get.  On the positive side, that makes us do many of the things we should be doing.  On the negative side, though, it leads us to hope that our works are worthy of God’s approval by their own merit, and sometimes, we might begin to question God’s faithfulness if our efforts don’t seem to be rewarded.  However, as Isaiah pointed out, all of our works, even the best and most faithful things we do, are tainted by the sin we inherited from our fathers and those sins we commit every day in thought, word, and deed.  Simply put, nothing we do on our own will ever cause God to stand up and applaud us.  Our own efforts can only lead to condemnation as we fall short of the glory of God.  Left in that sorry condition, none of us would know God, and none of us would be saved.  On his own, neither could Abram have been saved, for his works and faithfulness also fell far short of perfect holiness.

At the same time, the good news for all of us is that God did not leave us adrift in godlessness.  God did not want us lost to the torture chamber prepared for the devil.  Therefore, God Himself intervened in our lives.  That’s what the promise to Abram was all about; through Abram, God would one day bring a Savior into the world.  Now, as we already established, Abram didn’t deserve that blessing for he too was a sinful man undeserving of God’s reward.  Yet, God loved Abram as He has also loved the world.  The message of promise God delivered to Abram contained the power to change Abram from a heathen into a believer.  Thus, “Abram believed in the Lord, and the Lord credited it to him as righteousness.” 

The story is the same for you and me.  On our own, we were lost and condemned creatures heading to eternal destruction in the fires of hell.  On our own, we far too often fail to trust God.  Yet, because He loves us, God intervened to save us.  Through the power of the Gospel in Word and Sacrament, God washed away your sins and made you His own beloved child.  God didn’t do that because we somehow merited His intervention.  God intervened with us because He wanted us to be saved and to live with Him forever.

Now, like Abram, most of us were given faith in the Almighty long before we ever understood His plan for our rescue.  Some of us may have lived in our sin for some time before learning through the law that we desperately needed a Savior.  On the other hand, many likely received faith through the water and Word of Baptism.  Either way, God gave us the gift of saving faith by means of His gift of the Gospel. 

As St. Paul declared in his letter to the Romans, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” (Romans 1:16)  He further clarified in a letter to the Corinthians, “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11)  So, it is by God’s gift to us, through the Gospel and the descendant He promised to give to Abram, that we have saving faith in Christ Jesus.

Just like Abram, we couldn’t stand before God’s holiness apart from faith in the promised Messiah.  To our human reason and experience in commerce, God’s remedy for our unholiness doesn’t make much sense.  We always wonder, why would anyone take something very bad in exchange for something very good?  Yet, that is exactly what God did for you and me through the one descendant He promised Abram, for “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) 

Abram’s promised descendant, Jesus, took all sin upon Himself as He took the filth that would have condemned us before God.  In exchange, His Father credited Jesus’ perfect holiness to each of us.  Therefore, along with the great gifts of the Gospel and saving faith, we also receive God’s gift of the righteousness lived for us by His Son, Jesus. 

God promised Abram that the Savior of the world would be born from his descendants.  To make sure that the whole world knew that this happened only by God’s plan and intervention, God waited to bless Abram with that son of his own blood until he and Sarai could no longer have a child without God’s intervention.  This demanded that Abram have the patience of true faith.  That proved to be hard for Abram, yet God strengthened his faith through repeated promises of a son, and Abram believed.

Like Abram, you and I might often struggle in our faith as we wait for God to fulfill all His promises, but we too must live a life of faith.  God has promised that all our sins are forgiven.  He promised us life everlasting in heaven.  He promised to send His angels to protect us from all harm and danger.  He promised to be with us always.  Those promises aren’t always visible in our everyday world.  Yet, we believe them by faith, faith that God gives us and faith He strengthens by His repeated promises in Word and Sacrament. 

Like Abram, we can be tempted to want to hurry God along in delivering on His promises.  It is also quite common for people to look for assurance of God’s grace in things of this world.  Some want to look at works of sanctified living as proof of saving faith.  Some look for assurance in the physical blessings they receive.  Others want to rest their hope of salvation on their own putrid works.  There is, however, only one way to heaven and that is through humble faith in that promised descendant of Abram, God’s own dear Son, the God-Man, Christ Jesus.  Faith that rests in Jesus is God’s gift to you, brought to you at your Baptism and the hearing of God’s sure promises.

Therefore, dear friends, be assured, for like Abram, God gave us the promise of a Son, a Son who gave His perfectly holy life for the world.  On our behalf, the Son of God and descendant of Abraham lived continually trusting His Father in heaven, yet also sacrificed His life on a cross to take away your sin.  Jesus then rose from the grave to assure you of complete forgiveness and everlasting salvation.  It is through Jesus’ righteousness, lived for us, that we stand sanctified and pure before God.

Therefore, God’s promises remain as sure today as they were to Abram.  Just as all of those promises were made true by the One and Only God who gave them, so God guarantees you the forgiveness of sin and life everlasting in His eternal mansions.  All these things are certain and true for you and me, because God credits faith as righteousness.  Amen.

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  Amen.