It’s in our DNA—we all want to fit in and belong to something beyond ourselves.  This need to belong was put into our inmost being as we were being formed by God for God.

“For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.” Psalm 139:13-18, NIV

God made us, we do not make ourselves.  We do not make Him or decide who God is. God is God. He was at the beginning, is now currently, and will be at the end of time.  I am amused and bit perturbed when people remark, “God is whoever you decide him to be for you.”  That is a lie produced by the enemy who wants to take God’s place and rule over God’s creation.  (But the enemy has already been defeated!)

Paul begins his teaching with what his audience already knows—the story of Abraham who was known as the founding “father” of the nation of the Jews.  Abraham believed God and trusted God to do what He said He would do.  The Jews believe currently that you fit it by obeying all the rules and rituals.  They also believe that you do not fit in unless you were born a Jew and do what Jews do—obey the Law.  Paul carefully and compassionately explains God’s plan and promise from the beginning that goes beyond the story of Abraham to the story of God who will save us from ourselves.

Romans 4, The Message

Trusting God

^1-3 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? 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. 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.”

^4-5 If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. 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.

^6-9 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:

Fortunate those whose crimes are whisked away,
    whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
Fortunate the person against
    whom the Lord does not keep score.

Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don’t we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?

^10-11 Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That’s right, before he was marked. That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.

¹² And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the “outs” with God, as yet unidentified as God’s, in an “uncircumcised” condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called “set right by God and with God”! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God’s action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.

^13-15 That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God’s promise at that—you can’t break it.

¹⁶ This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s reading the story backward. He is our faith father.

^17-18 We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”? Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!”

^19-25 Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, “It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up. He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That’s why it is said, “Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right.” But it’s not just Abraham; it’s also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.

WHAT DO WE LEARN—HOW DO WE RESPOND?

Only by God’s generous gift of grace are we made right with God.  That gift is Jesus, God’s One and Only Son, who was sent to seek and to save the lost without God.

We learn that is not what we do for God but rather what God is doing in and for us, as we trust God.

Fitting in means trusting God in faith to do what we cannot do for ourselves—setting us right with God—a sheer gift of His love, mercy, and grace to us—a gift no one else can give.

Abraham “plunged into the promise” by his faith in God.  We learn that it our faith in God that makes us fit for God!  By believing in Jesus, who died and rose again, as a sacrifice for our sins, we fit in!  Finally, a place to belong—for eternity! Abraham was not perfect.  We are not perfect.  But we are perfectly forgiven by Jesus.  Living redeemed builds our fitness of faith!

Think about it…we sing “I’m standing on the promises of God” but don’t you love the more passionate term— “plunging” from the Word today?  This seems to be a more committed demonstration of our faith in God!  When we plunge into the promises of God, we are committed to diving into what God is doing without wondering where or how we will land!  We simply trust that God does know!

Are we ready to plunge in the promises of God and become one of the “whoevers” who believe Jesus and who will not perish but have eternal life? 

Are we ready to embrace what God is doing all round us and in us? 

Are we ready to bow down in humbled praise to the One who loves us most and has a plan for each one of our lives? 

Are we ready to make the shift from merely obeying all the rules and rituals to get God’s attention as a boastful arrogant servant to growing an intimate, holy, loving relationship with God through Jesus His Son? 

Our faith in God, embracing what HE does not what we do, makes us right with God. Believing Jesus died to save us and rose again to give us life forever makes us right with God.  Believers fit in and belong to His eternal family as a child of the Father, God. Our trust and hope is based on nothing else but the blood shed by Jesus who took our place and redeemed us from sins’ punishment.

Believing is belonging to His family as joint heirs with Christ! We fit in because of a fit faith in God.

Lord,

Make my faith fit for you while you make things right between us.  You gave so I give my life to you.  I’m listening.  I’m embracing.  I’m looking around to watch you at work in me and others.  And I’m grateful, oh, so very grateful for a love like yours that allows all of us to belong and fit in by saying yes to you.

In Jesus Name, Amen