Dear Church Family,
We need one another and it’s important to stay in touch. Even though we can’t gather physically just yet, we can still gather spiritually. This is the 49th in a series of weekly devotions focused on faith, hope, and strength during hard times. We hope you find them meaningful.
Today we have a message from Gerald Williams. We invite you to submit your devotion to be used in upcoming weeks; please email the Church Office.
The Faith of Abraham
There is an obscure legal doctrine known as the fertile octogenarian rule. It states that any living person is capable of having children. Although the concept is now largely obsolete, such a rule was once important.
If an attorney is drafting a will for someone, in theory, it should be written with the assumption that additional heirs are always possible. So where is there support for a belief that it is possible for people born 80 or more years ago to still have children? The answer is in the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of the book of Genesis.
God made an unlikely promise to a 99-year-old man. He promised Abraham that through his descendants he would be a father of many nations. His wife, Sarah, can be forgiven for initially laughing at the news.
In Romans 4:19-21, Paul explained that Abraham did not consider that his own body was too weak to fulfill God’s covenant. He did not waver in his belief. He was fully convinced that what God had promised would occur.
Perhaps few have the faith of Abraham, but Abraham’s faith can serve as a model for us. Martin Luther wrote about what he called “grasping faith,” meaning that a genuine and personal trust in God takes hold and results in an intimate union between Jesus Christ and a believer.
Hopefully, we will soon have the ability to worship together. Until then, we can feel secure that we are correct in clinging to our core belief that faith in Jesus Christ, and acceptance of His grace, is the path to the forgiveness of sin and to salvation.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord!
May your hearts live forever!
Posterity shall serve him;
men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation,
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
that he has wrought it.
–Psalm 22:26, 30-31, RSV
