Good evening and welcome to tonight's edition of the Sunday Bible Study. I know the sounds somehow but I'll clarify as we go on. We're gonna be reading a long passage from the Bible but I promise it's worth it.
So what is favour?
I'm certain we all have our definitions but I'll define favour as 'getting something desirable that you don't deserve or work for.'
Our first passage is from Gen 18:10-15
10 One of them said, “I’m coming back about this time next year. When I arrive, your wife Sarah will have a son.” Sarah was listening at the tent opening, just behind the man. Abraham and Sarah were old by this time, very old. Sarah was far past the age for having babies. Sarah laughed within herself, “An old woman like me? Get pregnant? With this old man of a husband?”
God said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh saying, ‘Me? Have a baby? An old woman like me?’ Is anything too hard for God ? I’ll be back about this time next year and Sarah will have a baby.”
Sarah lied. She said, “I didn’t laugh,” because she was afraid. But he said, “Yes you did; you laughed.”
What actually happened here was that Abraham entertained three divine visitors and then this happened.
Before we go on, please note, favour doesn't really appear in the New Testament, only in the Old Testament. What we have in the new is Grace which encompasses favour and other things such as goodwill and the likes.
Now, the singling out of Abraham by God initially can only be defined as an act of favour
Everything Abraham enjoyed were all favorable acts of God, in essence he didn't work for any of them.
Our next passage explains it best. Roman 4:1-9, 13-25
*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.” 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. 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 carted off, 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 embrThat 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.
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.
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!”
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.*
The lesson today is this.
We are already God's favorites, every believer is, everyone that believes in God is his favorite. We did not get saved by obeying rules or abiding by laws, we got saved by believing and we are gonna live this Christian life only by believing in God
Be it in your search for job, your application for admission to schools both home and abroad or even scholarships, many people will be applying and you'll need God's grace (favour), the way to acquire this is to relax on God and let the attention be on him and not on your qualifications.
But please note:
Favour is not and will not a substitute for PREPARATION.
You must prepare for you to maximize every opportunity that comes your way, just that that won't be your focus. This is why I said favour : not by works but by works. It is not by what you do or can do, but by what God did and can do.
Some wait till there's enough money before they start planning their business, footballers train every day whether there's a match or not. So favour is not a substitute for PREPARATION. Thank you all for your time.
Sweet spirit of God we bless you for your word tonight and of course for the vessel used, we pray that these words will have positive impacts in our lives and we pray that as we step out this week, men will stumble upon themselves to favour us. Amen.