Today’s passage is Romans 4:13-25. With Abraham, we are heirs of God’s promise through faith. Abraham became the father of us all because he believed before there was the law and before there was circumcision. And he believed in God’s promise of descendants despite his old age and Sarah’s old age. Our belief in Jesus’ atoning death and our justification through his death and resurrection makes us righteous before God.
1 (17) What was dead in your life that God raised to life?
2 (14) Do you still try to justify yourself through good works rather than by faith?
3 (17-18) What hope do you still nurture even though it seems beyond hope?
Back to life
I made my first journey to Korea in despair.
My international school teaching career and my university teaching career were dead through my own fault, the consequence of an adulterous affair and making a child outside of marriage.
Those sins led to losing my teaching positions and to bankruptcy. Coming to Korea to teach in an English Village was, in my view, a low level job, but one I desperately needed. It gave me something to do and somewhere to live that was far away from the lands of my failure.
When my first wife died of her alcoholism, I was relieved because of my selfish consideration of me alone, not her and not my children, especially Erika, my youngest daughter at the time, who had just begun college.
I had endured a declining lifestyle and growing unhappiness in my marriage, all of which I blamed on my wife.
I was a victim of bad circumstances.
My first wife’s death freed me to pursue happiness.
I didn’t mourn her well or deeply.
I thought I had buried her and my old unhappy life.
Through a new woman and the new life I was determined to make, I believed I would live happily ever after. But my hope and my belief was in myself and my new relationship, a sinful and sexually immoral one. I did not seek God.
Although I did seek God at that time in my life, God was seeking me through hardship and suffering, bringing me down and down until I felt dead. Although I went to worship, I went to complain to God and to blame him for my dismal circumstances.
I blamed the betrayal of my hopes, the betrayal of my love on the woman I had turned to for happiness. I saw myself as a victim of God and a victim of a woman’s betrayal. I never once saw any wrong on my part.
In my bitterness toward God and a woman, I abandoned all hope of love and came to Korea. I had no hopes of a revived career and I was not looking for love.
Sex would be okay but not love, not a serious relationship with another woman.
I didn’t go to worship, didn’t even look for a church. I was spiritually dead.
That was the point where God made himself known to me again, just as he had 25 years before when he called me to faith out of my poverty and despair.
This time he called me to love and I began to truly know “the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were” (17).
The stump of my life that looked dead my Lord called to life by giving me my new wife and through her Wooridle Church and through Wooridle the tools to interpret my life through God’s Word and begin to see my redemptive history.
My life ever since has been event after event of God calling from me non-existent things, wispy dreams, tiny hopes and, by his grace alone, making them real, things like a precious wife in a happy marriage, stories written and published, a job beyond all expectation and, most of all, a spiritual community to belong to and help me through my never ending trials.
Application: diligently seek to do my part in my trials and trust to God to route the enemy, give me sleep and raise my head in the morning
Lord, inspire me with the questions I need to bring to my QT so that you can guide me through your Word to the way I need to go.
