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Jan 28, 2024
Included | Romans 4:18-25
Against All Hope
What does it mean, and what does it look like to ’trust God’? It’s one thing to talk about theories or doctrine; it’s another to actually do it! Enter Abraham and Sarah, two people staring down the barrel of a hopeless situation. Faith may not look like what you think.
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- Recall a situation in your life that felt hopeless. How did that turn out? Tell that story.
- Verse 19 claims that Abraham faced his hopeless situation “without weakening in his faith”? If you’ve read the account in Genesis, you might not evaluate Abraham that way. How do you reconcile those two versions of the same story?
- The upshot of Abraham’s story is that God credited righteousness to him. What does that mean? What did it mean for Abraham? What does it mean for you?
- God requires faith from you, except for you - it's faith about God raising Jesus from the dead. Why must Christians believe that?
- Is there a hopeless situation in your life right now? Share that and pray with each other over those issues.
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Recent Sermons
Paul never recovered from God including the Gentiles in the salvation invitation.
Like some of us, perhaps, he felt like some people should be excluded by virtue of where they were born or how badly they have behaved.
More than included, Paul instructs that former ‘outsiders’ should be treated as precious insiders, treated even better than we would treat ourselves. What would it look like if love came to town?
Human beings need reminders about how to get along, and Christians are no exception. We especially need reminders about how to love each other while we disagree. Paul draws the believers' hearts and minds back to what Jesus has done, and that paves the way for loving each other well through conflict.
How do we live with Jesus in a society that opposes him? Paul tells us to wake up to our resurrection hope. When we do that, loving others and rejecting sin in our own lives makes sense.
Romans 12 is the description of what happens when God’s mercy overflows in a church’s life. Lifelong attitudes change, love becomes genuine, mocking enemies are not met with equal and opposite force but, quite the opposite, with peace and gentleness. Be praying even now for how God will speak uniquely to your small group.
All along, we’ve been saying that God’s heart is to see us INCLUDED. That’s why Jesus came, and that’s the subject of Paul’s letter to the Romans. At times, Christians forget God’s radical inclusion of them and go back to the old patterns of competing and comparing. Sadly, that was happening in the Roman Church. Paul has one powerful dose for that sickness.
The resurrection changed everything! The story includes an invitation, a blessing, and a commission for the first witnesses … and for us today.
