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If you're going to study a subject or learn a profession, a good strategy is to investigate one of the earliest theoreticians or practitioners. If you study physics, you might start with Albert Einstein. There were others, but he's a good beginning. If you're interested in drama, you could turn to William Shakespeare. Other playwrights are around, but he'll give you a good start. If you're considering nursing, you could read up on Florence Nightingale. The work of other early nurses would benefit you, but she's a helpful start.

If you want to be a medical missionary, David Livingstone is an excellent example in the nineteenth century. He shared some values of his day that seem strange to modern people, but you'll find that he was in many ways far advanced in his own time. He was instrumental in ending slavery in the world, which took our United States quite a while to get around to doing. In reading about David Livingstone, you'll discover a great deal about the Christian faith. You'll learn that Livingstone set out from Britain to Africa clutching only the promise that the risen Christ would never leave him or forsake him. He trusted the risen Jesus who promised that he was with his followers always, to the end of the world.

Livingstone is an example of Christian faith. We see him walking across Africa, struggling over the years and through hardships and tragedies, yet he trusted God's promise. David Livingstone is a modern version of Abraham, living 4,000 years ago, whom Paul, writing a mere 2,000 years ago, holds up as the supreme example of faith.

In our text, the apostle Paul instructs a congregation in Rome that he's never visited. He's explaining faith as the basis of our relationship with God. An example always helps; so, Paul turns to Abraham, father of the Jewish faith, who lived around 2000 BC. Abraham is so important here in Paul's letter that you can consider Abraham as Paul's sermon text. Paul clarifies for Christian converts that faith in Christ sets us right with God. He reaches way back to show that being set right with God by faith isn't something new. It's as ancient as father Abraham.

Step back 2,000 years before Christ and you learn that Abraham, 100 years old, and Sarah his wife, 90, receive God's promise that they'll have a child. In case you don't remember the chronology of scientific progress, they didn't yet practice in vitro fertilization or procedures that would allow a mother to carry the fertilized egg of her daughter and thus to give birth to her own grandchild. The promise to Abraham and Sarah is outside the realm of the possible. Sarah laughs at the idea. One writer called it history's first recorded joke. Abraham has times of serious wondering about this laughable promise, but he trusts God.

Faith in the Bible isn't any old belief in trivial things -- like believing there's a planet, Pluto, or a dwarf planet, Pluto. So what? Will trust in a big rock in space change your life? Faith is trusting that God cares about you, when at least some evidence indicates otherwise. Faith is clinging to God's personal pledge to be with you no matter what you experience as success or endure as failure. Abraham isn't a tired gambler who says, "I'm desperate. I'll put all my chips on this 'God number' and just hope I win." Instead, Abraham throws his life into God's arms and trusts God will catch him. That's what God asks of us, for which Abraham is our example, the father of our faith.

People view examples as differently as they view heroes. One person's hero is another's bum. A recitation by name of our last dozen US presidents and the yeas and boos elicited among us would make such differences obvious. People, likewise, interpret examples differently, especially in sermons. Truth is, people usually remember a sermon's examples (and certainly the jokes) and forget why they're told. So people can disagree on the meaning of Abraham's example.

The majority of Jews in Paul's time considered Abraham an example of obedience. Paul sweeps aside the rabbis' traditional understanding of the Old Testament and points to the Bible's record. Genesis chapter 15 states that Abraham was considered righteous for trusting God. This is nine chapters before the Bible mentions God's pleasure in Abraham's obeying God. Trusting God is central to our living with God.

Faith is a right-now relationship with God. It's a lot like getting married. We promise one another to be faithful and then we trust one another. So it was with Abraham and God. So it is with all who trust that we're now set right with God through Jesus. We trust God's promise that Jesus is the way to forgiveness and to eternal life. People can try to divert or subvert that central understanding, but Paul for one will always bring us back to a relationship with Christ built on promise and trust.

Twice in my ministry, I've had men phone me, anonymously, and say something like, "I've heard you know a lot about the Bible." After a couple responses, their request has come down to, "Would you tell my wife she's supposed to obey me?" Such conversations put me instantly into the serious mode. I stifle my reaction toward humor, even though I could think of a dozen hilarious things to say about such a predicament. Both of these men were in serious trouble in their marriages. The proof was that they thought that they could just command their spouse, in God's name of course, to obey. After each of them had thrown their little tantrums on the phone about their right to be the head of their families, neither of them exhibited an ounce of understanding when I pointed out that Jesus sacrificed himself as the head of the church. I doubt that anything I said helped, but I suggested that if they wanted to consider the Bible as a mere rule book for marriage, they should at least read Ephesians chapter 5 very carefully.

I asked if they'd stay in touch with me, which they didn't. Probably for the best, because my motives were selfish. If they could settle their marriage problems by ordering their wives, I wanted to know so I could submit their marriage for validation in the next edition of The Guinness Book of World Records.

You can't generate love and reconciliation, trust and affection through the principle of law. It's not as though wives won't obey when their husbands order them to do something they don't want to do. I've known women who thought it their Christian duty to live as did all women -- pagan, Jewish, and Christian -- in the first century AD, which meant as legal property of their husband. It's not whether a wife obeys her husband against her will. It can happen. It's whether a wife will obey her husband and then not find a way to pay him back for it. Relating to one another through means of law doesn't lend itself to love and affection. When do married people relate to one another through the law? When they're getting a divorce. If you think that God relates to us only by our obeying the law, how tiny do you think God is? Do parents relate that way to their children? How sub-human do you think God is? Trying to be right with God on the basis of law is as doomed as basing a marriage on obedience.

Paul writes, "the law brings wrath." You can't argue, scare, or threaten someone into a loving relationship. "The law brings wrath." If you want a relationship on a legal, you-obey-me basis, you won't have a marriage. "The law brings wrath." So also with God; God wants us in a loving, trusting relationship. We might want some law to put us right with God, but Paul says that the awareness of law can actually tempt people to sin. A wise, old woman said, "You shouldn't harp too much on the Ten Commandments or pretty soon the children will start trying them out."

Our relationship with God isn't settled on the basis of wages or payment. We don't agree to a trade with God: our good works for God's blessings. Business transactions and laws are for less than intimate relationships. Who'd ever say, "I love you and want to marry you; let's decide on the terms"?

At one time or the other we've all tried to bargain with God this way. "I'll pay you my good deeds and you reward me." Usually we do that when we're younger, but in a crisis the urge to bargain with God pops up like mushrooms after a summer rain. It doesn't get us anywhere, except maybe our offering great terms to God earns God's pity. After all, how good do we think we are? We'd do best to drop our attempts to be right with God by good works and to accept God's terms of a loving, trusting relationship. You want terms? Those are good terms!

If we're trying to get into God's good graces with our excellent deeds, it means we're in control. God, however, wants to be in control, and when you're God you get to be in control. God tells us that if we're trying to secure heaven's attention by keeping the rules, we failed. We tried playing the game by rules that guaranteed we'd lose. God, instead, says, "Forget trying to win the game." God sweeps all the pieces off the game board and says, "Faith is a different game with rules of promise and principles of love. Trust me on this." If you want a deal, this is such a deal! Paul calls this relationship "grace." It is the same way God treated Abraham. Abraham didn't earn it, he just trusted it.

If you must use legal categories to conceive of your relationship with God, then God will just have to surprise you, take you to court, and, despite the stacks of evidence against you, acquit you. That's what Paul says in verse 5, "But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness." "To justify the ungodly" means to acquit the guilty. God chooses, because of our trusting the promise of forgiveness, to acquit us of our guilt and sin. It sounds unjust for a judge to acquit the guilty. But we are guilty and God's forgiving us is unjust.

What an upside-down way to turn us, finally, right side up. Having been acquitted we're going to work for God, but now it's family work. Didn't you work for your family? Did you always get paid? You're not paid to be a husband or wife or child, but you work for one another. It's a relationship that has a different basis than, as Paul would call it, "law." You work for one another in trust, gratitude, and love. So with God. You don't calculate how much excellent activity you must complete in order to buy a ticket into heaven. You trust that God loves you because of what God did for you in Jesus. And then you work, gladly.

Lent isn't a time to work our way into God's good graces, but a time to concentrate on God's good grace working itself out through us. We have Paul's example of Abraham, as he trusted God's grace; or we could focus on the nearer past and remember David Livingstone. Livingstone trusted the promise-maker to be with him always. Then, he lived in such a way that God's grace passed through his life and work to others, thousands of others, by his immediate medical attention and Christian teaching, and millions of Africans who benefit today -- without knowing him -- because of the end of the slave trade.

Livingstone's faith took him on a pilgrimage to portions of Africa least explored by Europeans, to people who most needed to experience the grace of our Lord Jesus through a Christian doctor with modern medicine. God's grace took Livingstone from the northern to the southern hemisphere and then helped him crisscross a giant continent. Livingstone discovered in his own life what Abraham had been promised four millennia before, that through him all the families of the world would be blessed.

The goal of our life with God is others being blessed by our faith. That's Abraham's example in the Old Testament. David Livingstone demonstrated a faith that blessed others in his mission to Africa. It's the central message Paul writes as he instructs new Christians in Rome. Faith, character-transforming, life-centering, gratitude-producing faith is what scripture commends to us today.

Let's give thanks to God for the grace of our Lord Jesus. Let's place our faith in God's promises. Let's now live as those bound to show our gratitude. Amen.