1. "In the case of Christianity, they would undoubtedly be these simple but profound questions. Who is Jesus Christ? What happened to Jesus? What did God do? What should we do? What happens to us?"

2. "Friends, the identity of exactly who Jesus is, who he claimed to be, who in fact he was, is basic to understanding Christianity and even your own life."

3. "This service that Jesus says he came to give himself for is not a service that you and I could reproduce by Saturday volunteering or by giving our lives to work for a non profit. No, this is the service that even if we take up our cross to follow him as he called us to, is not going to reproduce exactly what Jesus did. Because while we should be self denying for the good of others, our self denial is what we deserve. We deserve to be denied. We deserve the cross."

4. "So at this stage in God's great plan, you cannot really believe God without believing the truth about who Jesus is."

5. "The cradle of Bethlehem was a step on the way to the cross of Calvary. His incarnation from its very first day was a part of the humiliation of the Son of God as he began his substitutionary work of identifying with sinners through a sinner's baptism through to a criminal's arrest and trial."

6. "The Bible is not warm therapy to improve our self image, but a dark diagnosis to convince us that we need a new heart."

7. "God quickly added to that Christian faith as I began to understand who Jesus was and that God had actually raised him from the dead. So that you and I, we have hope beyond death. So it's not that death is not fearsome, but death is not our final arbiter of what is good and bad and what we can hope in."

8. "So what is our hope today? Our hope is that the righteousness of another will be counted to us."

9. "Brothers and sisters, we are counted righteous only because Christ was counted as a sinner for us. We are a group of guilty people being treated as if we're innocent."

10. "Santa may look at whether you've been naughty or nice. God looks at who you truly trust in your heart. Are you trusting in Christ? If so, you will be counted as righteous in his sight."

Observation Questions

1. In Romans 4:22–23, what does Paul say was "counted" (or "credited") to Abraham, and how does he say this statement from Scripture was written "not for his sake alone"?
2. According to Romans 4:24, to whom will this same thing ("it") be counted, and what is the condition Paul mentions for this to happen?
3. Still in Romans 4:24, how does Paul describe God, and what two key facts does he state about Jesus?
4. In Romans 4:25, what two things does Paul say happened to Jesus, and for what purposes did each of these happen?
5. In Romans 4:3, when Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, what does the Scripture say Abraham did, and what was the result of that action?
6. According to Romans 4:5, how does Paul describe the one who believes, how does he describe God, and what happens to that person's faith?

Interpretation Questions

1. Looking at Romans 4:22–25, what does it mean that righteousness is "counted" or "credited" to someone, and how does this relate to the sermon’s explanation of imputation?
2. Why does Paul present Abraham’s faith (Romans 4:3, 18–21) as a model for us in verse 24, and in what ways is our believing in God who raised Jesus similar to Abraham’s believing God’s promise?
3. In Romans 4:24–25, why is it significant that Paul emphasizes God as the one who "raised from the dead Jesus our Lord," and that Jesus was "raised for our justification"?
4. How does the title "Jesus our Lord" in Romans 4:24 (and Romans 1:1–4) deepen our understanding of who Jesus is, beyond simply a moral teacher or example?
5. According to Romans 4:5 and the wider teaching of Romans (e.g., 3:21–26; 10:9), why is faith in Christ, rather than our works, the only way for sinners to be accepted as righteous before God?

Application Questions

1. Where are you personally tempted to rely on your own "works" (religious activity, moral effort, reputation) to feel right with God, and what would it look like this week to rest instead in Christ’s righteousness counted to you?
2. The sermon highlighted that faith often involves waiting, as Abraham did; what promise or truth from God’s Word are you currently waiting to see more clearly, and how can you actively express trust in God while you wait?
3. How does believing that God "gives life to the dead" and raised Jesus from the grave (Romans 4:17, 24) affect the way you view your own death or the loss of loved ones, and what concrete difference might that make in your choices, priorities, or conversations this week?
4. If Jesus truly is "our Lord" (Romans 4:24), what is one specific area of your life—such as the way you speak, use social media, handle money, or relate to family—where his lordship needs to be more clearly obeyed, and what is one practical step you can take?
5. Think of someone you know who sees Christianity mainly as a system of moral values; how could you use the truths of Romans 4:24–25 to explain to them that Christianity is first and foremost about who Jesus is and what God has done in his death and resurrection?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Genesis 15:1–6 — Abraham believes God’s promise, and his faith is counted as righteousness, providing the Old Testament foundation for Paul’s argument in Romans 4.
2. Romans 3:21–26 — Paul explains how God justly justifies sinners through the redemption and propitiation accomplished by Jesus Christ, clarifying the basis for the righteousness credited to believers.
3. Romans 10:8–13 — This passage shows that confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead is the way of salvation, echoing the key themes of Romans 4:24–25.
4. John 8:12–30 — Jesus teaches about his unique relationship to the Father and warns that unless people believe in him, they will die in their sins, reinforcing the sermon’s emphasis on believing in Jesus as essential to knowing God.
5. 1 Peter 1:3–9 — Peter describes the living hope and future inheritance that flow from God raising Jesus from the dead, applying resurrection hope to the sufferings and faith of believers.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Current Cultural Interest in Christianity and the Need to Understand Its Core Message

II. Who Is Jesus Christ? (Romans 4:24 - "Jesus our Lord")

III. What Happened to Jesus? (Romans 4:24 - "the dead")

IV. What Did God Do? (Romans 4:24 - "raised from the dead")

V. What Should We Do? (Romans 4:24 - "who believe in him")

VI. What Happens to Us? (Romans 4:24 - "it will be counted to us")

VII. A Call to Decision and Trust in Christ

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Detailed Sermon Outline

Christianity is currently undergoing a new round of public popularity in the West. From British historian Tom Holland to Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, well-known non-religious figures have themselves found new appreciation for the religion and its effects, personally and socially. And are recommending it to others through books and podcasts and tweets and interviews. From Peterson's recorded and broadcast discussions of Genesis with figures like Evangelical Os Guinness to Holland's 2019 book entitled Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, these figures have suggested that it is to our loss as individuals and as a society, if we don't take stock of the truths inherent in Christianity and what they have contributed to our society. For Peterson, it may well be Abraham's willingness to move out of the traditional and comfortable and to be risk-taking in a great adventure in order to benefit himself and others.

For Holland, it could be honoring virtue of self-sacrifice and mercy and care for the poor and others. Attributes which we take for granted as virtues, but which we may only see that way because of Christianity's impact on the West.

In the midst of such public and acclaimed, varied acclaim, it can be a little difficult to find out what Christianity itself means to present as its basic message. That is not what things you and I already like that we find present in Christianity, but things that we rather find after careful exegesis and explanations of the texts themselves, what Christianity would say to us are the most important things in life. Really, what is life all about?

To best understand religions large or small, Islam or the Azizis, Marxism or Christianity. We best look to the sources themselves to recognize not simply what we have questions about, what topics we are curious about and concerned with, but rather simply ask them what the most important questions are that we should be asking and what their answers to those questions are. In the case of Christianity, they would undoubtedly be these simple but profound questions. Who is Jesus Christ?

What happened to Jesus?

What did God do?

What should we do?

What happens to us?

Well, in God's kind providence, all of those questions are found answered in the brief compass of the simple text that we have this morning from Romans chapter 4. So if you open your Bibles to Romans chapter 4, if you look in the Bibles provided, you'll find that on page 942.

We're looking at verse 24, if you're not. You're looking at a Bible, the chapter numbers are the large numbers, the verse numbers are the small numbers. We're looking at chapter 9, verse 24, the second part of it.

It will be counted to us who believe in Him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord.

Our Lord. Here we find succinctly declared the basic message of Christianity. So let's work through it now and see what we learn about God, about Jesus Christ, what we learn about ourselves. And I pray that if you're not a Christian now, even this morning you will come to understand the message of the Bible and more even than liking it, you'll come to believe it. So let's begin first with number one, who is Jesus Christ?

Well, you'll see the verse here ends with those three final words, Jesus our Lord. Jesus our Lord then will be the subject of the last two sermons in this series as He is the subject of both the halves of the compound sentence that makes up verse 25.

The last verse in Romans chapter four. So in these two sermons to come, Lord willing, we'll think more about his being delivered up and about his being raised. We want to get this right. Friends, it is so easy for us to have our preconceived notions and just give scant attention and think we have the truth. There is the urban, maybe myth, or maybe it's the truth.

I tried to do research, I'm not quite sure which it is, but it illustrates the point well. Apparently after World War II, a Japanese department store with all things Western being popular at that point in Japan, had a big Christmas display and in it they had all of the regular accoutrements of Christmas, but instead of Santa being on a sleigh, he was hung on a cross.

It was an innocent mistake, I think. It was an attempt to have this Western Christian symbol of the cross and and the figure of Santa Claus and all together in a jumbled mess of Western culture. I don't know if the story is true, but it does illustrate the kind of mistakes we can make even in the most basic matters if we don't give attention to them. Friends, the identity of exactly who Jesus is, who he claimed to be, who in fact he was, is basic to understanding Christianity. And even your own life.

So we begin our explanation of this main phrase in verse 24 simply by noting that it is about Him. It is about Jesus and that Paul has presented Jesus in Romans 325 as a man especially put forward by God. Jesus is the one through whom our redemption has come according to chapter 3 verse 24. And in verses 22 and 26 of chapter 3, He is the one who is supposed to be the object of our faith. He's the one whom Paul has said back in chapter 2, verse 16, has a unique place in the judgment of each person.

We have to go back to the first several verses of the letter to see what Paul has said about this Jesus. He's been more implicit and assumed than explicit and explained in this letter. Paul began the letter by talking about Jesus Christ. Listen again how Paul began this letter, Romans chapter 1, verse 1.

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of His name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers. And then there's very little about Jesus in the rest of chapter 1, chapter 2, till chapter 3 you begin to get Jesus as the object of our faith.

Now here in 4:24 when Paul mentions Jesus our Lord it is clear that he is talking about more than a teacher, more than an example, Jesus is the one who taught in Mark 10:45 that he came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And friends, this service that Jesus says he came to give himself for is not a service that you and I could reproduce by Saturday volunteering or by giving our lives to work for a nonprofit. No, this is the service that even if we take up our cross to follow him as he called us to is not going to reproduce that's exactly what Jesus did. Because while we should be self-denying for the good of others, our self-denial is what we deserve.

We deserve to be denied. We deserve the cross.

But the self-denial of Jesus Christ, humbling himself as Paul wrote to the Philippians, by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, was part of His providing and atoning sacrifice for our sins. The Son of God took on the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men. Some Christians will call this time of year Advent because it specially commemorates the Adventus, the coming of the Son of God into the world, His incarnation. Paul clearly followed the teaching of Rabbi Jesus himself, that he was not simply a rabbi or a teacher, but that he was the unique Son of God. So Paul's simple phrase here in verse 24 about Jesus, our Lord, is freighted with this special significance about Jesus' person, his identity.

In fact, Jesus taught this clearly about himself. Here in Romans, Paul is arguing that the faith of Abraham is not shared by any who would claim to believe God's promises now while denying that Jesus is who he said he is. Let me just repeat that. Paul is arguing that the faith of Abraham is not shared by anyone who would claim to believe God's promises now while denying that Jesus is who he said he is. Did you understand that?

So at this stage in God's great plan, you cannot really believe God without believing the truth about who Jesus is. If you think, well, Mark, I think that sounds like a very exclusive and narrow doctrine. It is that. It's also a Christian doctrine. That is, I didn't come up with that.

That's not copyrighted by the Baptist Church. That's from Jesus himself. If you want to think about this more, go to John's Gospel, chapter 8, start at verse 12, and look for the rest of that chapter. And just see what Jesus himself taught about this, about him being our Lord. Briefly, Jesus himself taught a group of Jewish teachers there, I am the light of the world.

It is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me.

You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also. And then in John 8:23 and 24, I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world.

Unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.

Jesus taught that how you respond to Him is how you respond to God.

Believing this is the cornerstone of our congregation's life together. If you want to understand this church, you must understand this. You hear it in the way Paul here says not simply my Lord, but he says our Lord. This is the Christian claim, the Christian understanding. You'll see this reverence for Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

In every aspect of our lives, from what we post on our social media accounts, to what we believe in our hearts, to what we sing in our songs out loud. Jesus is our Lord. Another fact we must notice in this concise summary of Paul's here is number two, what happened to Jesus? Because you might think, if we're saying Jesus is our Lord, that means his life story is one of just unending triumph after triumph from one sphere of life to another. But here what Paul mentions directly and succinctly is that he died.

You see that here? The dead. Jesus died. Now that's a central point. It's simple enough.

But I stress it because it separates out Jesus From what we know of Muhammad and Socrates and Gautama Buddha and other teachers or philosophers, for each of those other teachers, their death ended their own personal work. At most we could say maybe that Socrates chose to die by hemlock in order to exemplify his teachings, voluntarily taking the poison rather than renouncing his works. But friends, with Jesus, His death was a central part of His work. You see in John's Gospel at the end, he says, Right before He gives up the ghost and dies, after three hours on the cross, He says, Tetelestai. It is finished.

He understood His death on the cross as the central act of His great propitiation. Not only had Jesus repeatedly predicted it, but He had interpreted it. He explained its meaning. By dying, Jesus didn't simply to illustrate self-giving, He accomplished our atonement, the assuaging of the wrath of God against the sins of all those who would ever turn and trust in Christ. We've already been singing about it this morning.

Lamb of God for sinners wounded, sacrifice to cancel guilt.

The crucifixion of Jesus is so central to Jesus' life and work that the cross itself has taken to be the symbol of Christianity. So the incarnation of the Son of God is warmly embraced by culture as a time for gift-givings and family gatherings in reflection of God's giving the gift of His Son. But our warm associations with Christmas too easily hide from us the reality of the incarnation. Gentle notions of tender Mary, hay and a trough as somehow soft. Cattle softly lowing, entirely missed the picture of what is going on historically and significantly that the Bible presents to us.

Mary's pregnancy itself was unexpected and unexplained and disturbing apart from a startling angelic vision. Joseph's reputation is brought into question. Rome's power dislocates this family to be just when Mary is nearing giving birth.

She gives birth far from home, outside, away from her family. The infant's life is sought by the malevolent Herod. The family is so endangered that they flee to all places Egypt. Literally the worst place in the history of the people of Israel, the place where they had been enslaved for centuries. But even that would be better than Palestine ruled by the malicious Herod.

I could go on. Suffice it to say that your December dinner times could be spent each night coming up, making a list of one more part of Jesus' suffering that was part of His incarnation. List them. You will learn more truth from that exercise than from the sentimental cards that you get.

The cradle of Bethlehem was a step on the way to the cross of Calvary. His incarnation from its very first day was a part of the humiliation of the Son of God as He began His substitutionary work of identifying with sinners through a sinner's baptism, through to a criminal's arrest and trial. We read in Hebrews chapter 2, But we see Him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for every kind of person. For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. Peter wrote about the prophets predicting the sufferings of Christ in the subsequent glories and exhorted the young Christians he wrote to rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

Peter could refer to himself as a witness of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker in the glory that's going to be revealed. So friends you see this biblical pattern of suffering then glory, suffering then glory. Christ's suffering was unique. Ours is not accomplishing the same thing but we still follow that pattern.

Of suffering now, glory to come. The sufferings and death of Jesus because of our sins, not his own, show God's entire and complete opposition to wrongdoing and evil. The cross stands against our wrong, self-serving, self-satisfaction in our lives as we live life as if we're okay, even good. The Bible is not warm therapy. To improve our self-image, but a dark diagnosis to convince us that we need a new heart.

Such suffering was the only way the Son could become the substituting Savior for sinners that we need, like us. More amazingly still is a third truth Paul brings out in our verse number three. What did God do? What did God do? We see that here in this idea of resurrection.

Jesus rose from the dead. You see that in that phrase in our verse, from the dead. Now Paul had alluded to this up in verse 17 in chapter 4 when he described God as the God who gives life to the dead. But that can be taken as a poetic image for bringing as good as dead bodies of Abraham and Sarah back to life to give birth to Isaac. Or maybe even of bringing Isaac back from the dead if Abraham were to have to sacrifice him.

But here at the end of chapter 4, the resurrection of Christ is mentioned for the first time explicitly since Paul's initial greeting in chapter 1, verse 4. It's also the first time Jesus has been called our Lord since that same verse. So I think part of what we're to understand in Jesus as Lord is that it includes the triumph of his resurrection. In the description of Jesus as Lord, Paul is using this as an indication of Christ's victory in the resurrection. Friends, even more than the crucifixion, it is the resurrection that finally and fully gives away Jesus' identity as the Christ.

Thousands of other people were crucified. Merely a man hanging on a cross is not a good image of Christianity. Friends, you've got to understand that cross being empty and what's more the tomb having been filled becoming empty. Jesus Himself taught in Mark chapter 10, See, we are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him over to the Gentiles and they will mock Him and spit on Him and flog Him and kill Him. And after three days, he will rise.

Friends, Jesus taught that he would be raised, that he would rise from the dead. One question about this. Did Jesus simply overcome death because he was God, or did God raise him from the dead?

I think the short answer is yes.

The Bible teaches that Jesus was raised by God, Spirit, Son and Father, God. That's why we have Paul's phrase here, Him who raised from the dead, Jesus our Lord. The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit was involved in the resurrection. We read later in this very letter, Romans 8:11, of the Spirit's work in this. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

And Paul also writes in the same letter of it being the Father's work. If you just look at chapter 6 verse 4, We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. The Spirit is involved, the Father's involved. Jesus also clearly taught that He would raise up the temple of His own body when it was destroyed. He taught that He had authority both to lay down His life and to take it up again.

Surely this is just as we would suspect from one who taught that He was the resurrection and the life, and who literally Himself raised the dead. Friends, most generally Scripture speaks simply of God raising Jesus from the dead, as Paul himself will write later in this letter in Romans chapter 10 verse 9, God raised him from the dead. The works of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are normally inseparable from each other. Each has a part in all the works of God, from creation to revelation, from resurrection to judgment. Here in the way Paul has already described God up in verse 17 as the one who gives life to the dead, we can see Paul relishing in sharing this joyful news that the resurrection of Jesus Christ in this resurrection we see the fulfilling of God's ancient promises.

The promise to David of an heir. The promise to Israel of a prophet like Moses. The promise to Abraham of a seed through whom all peoples would be blessed. The promise to Adam and Eve that the serpent's head would be crushed. The fulfillment of all these became evident at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If you were listening carefully and had faith, maybe you thought it while Jesus was teaching. Once he was crucified, you were probably confused. But when God raised him from the dead, all of a sudden the veil drops and you see this is the fulfillment of this and this and this and this and this. All of that happens at the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In a world stalked by death.

Friends, this is the promise that we need. How many times do we hear of death approaching members of this congregation? Friends, by the time we have 800 people, we have death approaching not just people in their 80s, but people in their 30s and 20s. We hear of friends elsewhere, even when children die being confronted with the reality of death. One of God's strange graces in my life was to make me weird as a 12 year old.

I would look at my hand and I would think this is going to be a skeleton in a box soon.

Very common thought for me as a 12 year old. Friends, I can't tell you how thankful I am for that thought. That has repeatedly kept me from folly and pushed me toward the significant. And if it was simply a kind of stoic trying to deal with reality in the world, it would be one thing, but God quickly added to that Christian faith as I began to understand who Jesus was and that God had actually raised him from the dead so that you and I, we have hope beyond death. So it's not that death is not fearsome, but death is not our final arbiter of what is good and bad and what we can hope in.

God gives life to the dead. God has fulfilled this promise, and if he has fulfilled this promise, what promise will he not fulfill? What promise that you know in your own life from God's Word do you think He will not fulfill. He raised Jesus from the dead to show us that all of His promises are yes and amen. Friends, all of this brings us to a question number four, what should we do?

What should we do? Well, look here at that phrase, who believe in Him. We should believe. We Christians believe in Him. And so we believe Paul writes here, In him who raised.

Again, notice that our faith in God's promise is based on our faith in God's person. God himself, he is the object of our faith. The object of our faith here is he who raised. We are to believe in him. This is the same language Paul used up in verse 5.

Look at verse 5, and to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly. Remember it was Jesus who taught in John 14, Believe in God, believe also in me.

Paul can express this same faith simply by as believing God. If you look in chapter 4, just up in verse 3, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 as saying, Abraham believed God. So, savingly believing in God is believing God. It's the Thessalonians' faith in God, Paul mentioned in 1 Thessalonians chapter 1. But friends, as we said earlier, with the coming of Christ, we now know that believing in God must include, as Jesus taught in John 14, Jesus, believe in God, believe also in me.

Paul will use that language in chapter 9 verse 33 of believing in Him. The cornerstone rejected and elsewhere later in this letter. Jesus taught, God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he's not believed in the name of the only Son of God. We should believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the one he claimed to be.

As Paul will say in just a little later in chapter 10, verse 9, you should believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. That's all part of what Paul meant back in chapter 3 when he talked about being imputed God's own righteousness for those who have faith in Jesus.

You look there in chapter 3, verses 22 and 26. That's what he means. So when we look at our verse for today, to us who believe, this is, remember that momentous turn we thought of last week in all of chapter 4, Paul has had his back to us. He's been scratching out all what happened in the Old Testament, explaining it, and now he turns here dramatically in verse 24 and he uses that first person.

Plural, including us now. It's not just third person indicative of these truths. It's now us. This is what it means for us. The Old Testament was literally written for our sake.

All this discussion of the Scriptures of Abraham and David is not just for Old Testament scholars and Bible nerds. It will be counted not just to Abraham, but to us. To us. Again, Romans 10:9, if you confess with your mouth.

That Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. You will be saved. This is why we have tithings, the songs this time of year use. News of great joy. Peter says in 1 Peter 1:21, We Christians are those who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead.

Belief, the same means that justified Abraham, is the means for our justification as it lays hold on the righteousness of Christ. So we look back and we see what God has done and we trust him, we believe him, and so we look forward and we trust his promise that on that last day he will find us accepted, good, righteous, not because we have been perfectly, but because of Christ's righteousness given to us as a gift. So you see the relationship of believing to waiting?

They're not opposites. How many times has one of us said, oh, I prayed about this, wanted this, this isn't happening. And you wonder, Is that the opposite of faith?

No, friends, continuing to believe, to rely on, to trust that God whose promise is not yet visibly fulfilled because of things what you have seen him do in the past is the very essence of faith. Paul says that you and I right now as Christians are standing in that same kind of spot that old childless Abraham and Sarah were in when they had been promised offspring that they hadn't yet received.

That promise was in no doubt of being unfulfilled though they hadn't yet received the answer.

And friends, our waiting never ceases in this life, does it?

It is the nature of Christian faith in a fallen world because this is not simply our faith in the sense of our desire, what we want.

It is faith in the one true God and in what He has truly promised us in His Word.

And all of those promises will not be fulfilled finally until we are with Him. And so we believe.

And what you see, you don't believe. You wait.

Number five, last question, what happens to us? Well, that's how this phrase begins there in verse 24, It will be counted to us. It will be counted. This is the idea that we've seen before in this chapter of imputation. It's the idea that God reckons us righteous.

So, by believing, we will be counted as righteous and so accepted by God. Christ's righteousness, God's righteousness, will be credited to our account. It will be considered as ours by means of this faith that we've been considering. What Paul is doing here verbally, if you just look at the sentence, he's paralleling this with verse 22 and what we see in Genesis 15:6. Abraham believed God and it, Abraham's belief, was credited to him as righteousness.

He's shown us in this chapter that Genesis 15:6 was written for us who believe in the God who raised Jesus. And if Abraham's faith is presented as a model for our own, we have nothing to boast about. Friends, all of this is gift, including even such verses about Abraham being counted as righteous. Paul writes a little bit later in Romans 15, For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. So what is our hope today?

Our hope is that the righteousness of another will be counted to us, to those of us who believe in God. It is raising Jesus from the dead. God had promised Abraham that He would give him a son. God has promised us that He has given us His only Son as our substitute and Savior. Abraham was called to believe that God would bring life out of death and barrenness.

We're called to believe that God has and will give us new life through the life and death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. Dear brothers and sisters, join us tonight in our feast of the imputed righteousness of Christ accounted to us by faith alone. We'll be joining Christians from around the world and down through the ages as we assemble in the presence of God to obey Christ's command to take His supper together, being reminded that His righteousness is not from us. We are guests. It is from outside of us.

It is given as a gift and comes to the empty hand of faith. So come back and rejoice in our glad and joyful news tonight as we proclaim it through our obeying Christ's command to do this remembering Him. Brothers and sisters, we are counted righteous only because Christ was counted as a sinner for us. We are a group of guilty people being treated as if we're innocent. Look at us gathered here today in the sight of God, in the face of this company, praying to a holy God, daring to sing His praises, to present ourselves as members of the spotless bride of Christ, as those redeemed from sin.

How can you know your own past? And seriously be here and sing these songs. Friends, this is the reason we never find a Christmas which we don't celebrate out of the joy of what we've already been given. 10,000 times more than out of any thought of what we may be given by somebody on December 25th. Sinners that we are, sincerely repentant, trusting in Jesus only, are counted okay by God, are accepted by God.

So if you're here today and you're not normally religious, you just got trapped into loving family and friends coming along with them to church, welcome, we're glad to have you. This is a good time to simply understand that if God uses church services and sermons and Sundays and churches, Thanksgiving and Christmas to teach you anything, I hope that he's teaching you that what matters most is not what other people think of you.

Friends, it's what he, your Creator and Judge, thinks of you. He is the only one who will have a final evaluation that matters for any of us. And he already knows the truth. He will be unerring in his judgments. This is why we Christians can be so full of thanks, not just one time a year, but all the time, because of what God has given us in Jesus Christ.

And we want you to know this same gift, that God sent his Son to live a perfect life and die on the cross as the central part of his substitutionary work, substituting for the deaths that you and I have deserved by our sins. But if you will trust in him, that death is for you. That death is taking the punishment we have deserved, all of us who've sinned, but who will turn and trust in Christ alone. And then God raised him from the dead, fully revealing his identity, showing that he was accepting this sacrifice that was offered. I don't know where you stand with your sins.

In your mind today, your sin may be really looking small compared to somebody else's sin. I want you to know God will deal with that other person's sin much more thoroughly than you ever will.

And yet there's still the matter of your own sin. Friend, you need a Savior. Jesus Christ is presented by God as that Savior.

Santa may look at whether you've been naughty or nice. God looks at who you truly trust in your heart. Are you trusting in Christ? If so, you will be counted as righteous in His sight. So having considered Romans 4:24, I hope you now have a clear answer to these specific questions.

Let me just review them. You can check your own mind, see how your answers are coming. Who is Jesus Christ?

What happened to Jesus?

What did God do?

What should we do?

What happens to us?

We should conclude, which for visitors that means it's time for Mark to share a little history with us.

Some acts we only understand the significance of in hindsight.

250 years ago, this very day, 250 years ago, this very day, the American Continental Congress passed a bill which in hindsight would lead to countless families being split apart. It would lead to great destruction. It would lead to a delay of the ending of slavery by at least a generation and well over 90,000 deaths. The Continental Congress passed a bill which started a trade war 250 years ago today when Congress banned the sale of all British goods in the American colonies. It wasn't that vote alone, but that vote was a crucial step in the escalating hostilities that were already brewing.

Several years earlier the British government had sent troops to help the royal governor of the Massachusetts colony keep order. But with the passage of this bill on December the 1st 1774 matters quickly escalated. By February the British government declared the colony of Massachusetts in open rebellion. And in April of 1775 when a detail of 700 British troops went to secure a weapons cache in Concord on April the 19th, 1775, they met armed resistance so strong and organized that the regular British army retreated into Boston and never came out again. A year later, they deserted the city, surrendering it to the Continentals.

All of that issuing from a vote taken 250 years ago today.

Whether we're talking about nations or companies or your favorite football team or individuals, choices are made which prove to be decisive for the life which is to be lived.

As we enter the last month of this year of 2024, is there some decision in front of you that you should make?

Is there some accounting that you should give?

Is there some resolution you should pass in your own heart? Is there some way that you have misunderstood God?

Or misunderstood Jesus or misunderstood yourself, that you're beginning to understand better now? Who is Jesus? What's he done?

What should you do in response?

Believe in God who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord.

In his commentary on Galatians 3:13, Martin Luther wrote, if I examine myself, I find enough unholiness to shock me.

But when I look at Christ in me, I find that I am altogether holy.

You know what he means?

When I look at myself, I don't see how I could ever be saved.

But when I look at Christ, I don't see how I could ever be lost.

Let's pray together.

Holy Spirit, we thank you for inspiring this Word.

Lord God, we thank you for sending your only Son. God, we pray that you'd send your Spirit now to convict us.

Affirm in us the truth. Dissipate illusions. Draw us close to yourself. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.