Romans 4:1–25 Study Guide — Agape Fellowship

Introduction: Putting Abraham on the Witness Stand

Romans 3 ended with the thunderclap of the gospel: God is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:26), and therefore “a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (3:28). That claim invites one enormous objection, and Paul knows it: this is new. If justification by faith alone is true, then Israel’s entire story has been misread, and Paul is preaching a novelty invented in the last twenty years. Chapter 4 is Paul’s answer, and it is not a fresh argument so much as a courtroom exhibit. He calls two witnesses whom no Jewish reader could dismiss—Abraham, the father of the nation, and David, the king after God’s own heart—and shows that both of them were justified precisely the way Paul says sinners are justified now. Far from being an innovation, faith-righteousness is the oldest thing in the Bible.

The chapter turns on a single word. Eleven times in twenty-five verses Paul uses the accounting term logizomai—“to count, reckon, credit, impute.” It is a bookkeeper’s word, the language of ledgers and accounts, and Paul builds his whole case on where God writes the entry. Righteousness is not earned in the left-hand column and paid out as wages; it is credited to an empty account as a gift. Luther and Calvin both saw that everything hangs here: if righteousness is credited to us on the basis of Christ’s work received by faith, then a sinner can have peace with God today (5:1) without waiting to become good enough—which he never would. Watch also for the chapter’s quiet climax: what looks like ancient history turns out to be about us. “The words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also” (vv. 23–24).

Historical Background To feel the force of Paul’s argument you have to know how enormous Abraham loomed in the Judaism of Paul’s day. He was not merely a revered ancestor; he had become the model of the obedient man. The Jewish book of Sirach, written roughly two centuries before Paul, praises Abraham as one who “kept the law of the Most High”—centuries before there was a law to keep—and 1 Maccabees, recalling the binding of Isaac, asks, “Was not Abraham found faithful when tested, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness?” Later rabbinic tradition went further still, teaching that Abraham observed the whole Torah before it was given. In other words, the standard reading of Genesis 15:6 in Paul’s world was: Abraham was so faithful under testing that God rewarded him with a verdict of righteousness. That is exactly the assumption Paul dismantles. He goes to the same verse his opponents quote, reads it with the calendar in one hand and a bookkeeper’s ledger in the other, and demonstrates that Abraham was declared righteous before he had done anything at all—before Isaac, before Moriah, before circumcision. If the greatest man in Israel’s memory was justified as an ungodly man who simply believed a promise, no one else may claim a different route.

Section 1 — Two Witnesses: Abraham and David (vv. 1–8)

¹What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? ²For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. ³For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” ⁴Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. ⁵And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, ⁶just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: ⁷“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; ⁸blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.” Romans 4:1–8 (ESV)

Study Notes

The question and the concession (vv. 1–2). Paul begins where his readers live: “our forefather according to the flesh.” What did Abraham gain—what did he find, discover, obtain—in this matter of being right with God? Then comes a devastating concession. If Abraham were justified by works, he would have grounds for boasting—“but not before God.” Paul does not deny that Abraham was, by any human measure, an extraordinary man. He denies that any such record can be produced in the one court that matters. Before God, the ledger of human achievement is not slightly short; it is worthless as a basis for acquittal. Calvin observed that boasting is the instinct Paul must kill first, because as long as a man has anything of his own to plead, he will never take righteousness as a gift.

The text that settles it (v. 3). “For what does the Scripture say?” Paul does not argue from experience or logic but from the text—Genesis 15:6—and this is a model for us: the final court of appeal in any theological dispute is what stands written. And the verse says exactly what Paul needs. It does not say Abraham achieved righteousness or demonstrated righteousness. It says he believed, and righteousness was logizomai—credited, posted to his account. The word is a commercial term for entering a figure in a ledger, and it appears some eleven times in this chapter (vv. 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 23, 24). Paul is hammering one nail: righteousness comes to the believer as a credited entry, not an earned balance. Theologians call this imputation. Note carefully what is imputed and what is not: it is not that Abraham’s faith was such a fine achievement that God graciously accepted it instead of righteousness—that would make faith the one work that saves. Faith is the empty hand that receives; the righteousness credited is God’s own, revealed in the gospel (1:17; 3:21–22), and finally named in this letter as the obedience of the one man Jesus Christ (5:18–19; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21).

Wages or gift (vv. 4–5). Now Paul presses the ledger image into a workplace. Pay an employee at the end of the week and no one calls it generosity; the money is “his due”—literally, a debt owed. That is precisely why salvation cannot work that way: a God who owed us heaven would not be gracious, and we would not be saved sinners but paid contractors. Then verse 5 lands with a shock that many readers hurry past: God “justifies the ungodly.” In the Old Testament that phrase describes a corrupt judge (Prov. 17:15; Ex. 23:7). Luther was arrested by this all his life—the gospel is not that God accepts good people, but that God pronounces the ungodly righteous, and does so justly because His own Son bore their condemnation (3:24–26). Calvin puts it just as bluntly: the man who comes to God bringing nothing but faith comes as one who has nothing else to bring. This means the qualification for justification is not improvement but bankruptcy—which is why proud people find the gospel so hard and desperate people find it so sweet.

David’s testimony (vv. 6–8). Paul’s second witness quotes Psalm 32:1–2, and the choice is pointed. David wrote that psalm as a man with blood and adultery on his record; if anyone knew what it was to be justified apart from works, it was he. Notice how Paul reads it. David never uses the word “impute righteousness,” but he says God does not count sin—and Paul treats the negative and the positive as two sides of one transaction. This is the double blessing of justification: our sin is not counted against us, and a righteousness not our own is counted to us. MacArthur underlines that both halves are necessary; a debt cancelled still leaves the account at zero, and God does not merely clear the record, He credits it. And the psalm’s first word is “Blessed”—happy, to be congratulated. Forgiveness is not a grim legal technicality; it is the happiest condition a human being can be in.

John Calvin “Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.11.2)

Historical Insight The verse Paul builds on, Genesis 15:6, sits inside one of the strangest scenes in the Old Testament. God tells the childless Abram to count the stars, promises him offspring beyond numbering, and Abram believes—and then God ratifies the promise with a covenant ceremony (Gen. 15:7–21). Animals are cut in half and laid in two rows with a path between them. In the ancient Near East, the parties to a covenant walked that bloody path as a self-curse: may it be done to me as to these animals if I break my word. But Abram never walks. He falls into a deep sleep, and a smoking fire pot and flaming torch—God Himself—pass between the pieces alone. The covenant is one-sided by design: God swears, God guarantees, God assumes the curse. That is the very shape of the argument Paul is making. Abraham’s part in Genesis 15 was to believe a promise he could not secure; the securing was God’s from the start—and the curse would one day fall on God’s own Son (Gal. 3:13–14).

Discussion Questions

Paul’s whole case rests on a bookkeeping word: righteousness is credited, not earned. In your own words, what is the difference between God accepting you because you have improved and God crediting Christ’s righteousness to your account? Which of those two do you functionally live out of on an ordinary Tuesday?
Verse 5 says God “justifies the ungodly.” Why is that phrase so offensive to human instinct—and why is it the only news that could ever save us? Have you ever caught yourself trying to be justified as the godly instead?
Verse 4 distinguishes wages from a gift. Where do you notice yourself treating God as an employer—expecting a return for devotions, service, or a good week? What would change if you truly received His acceptance as a gift already given?
David describes forgiveness with the word “blessed” (vv. 7–8). Read Psalm 32:1–5 together. Why does the man who has sinned most grievously so often understand grace most deeply, and what does that suggest about how we handle our own failures?
Paul answers a theological objection by asking, “What does the Scripture say?” When you face a hard question of faith or conscience, where do you actually go first for the answer? What would it look like to build that instinct this week?

Section 2 — Before the Sign: Father of All Who Believe (vv. 9–12)

⁹Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. ¹⁰How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. ¹¹He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, ¹²and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised. Romans 4:9–12 (ESV)

Study Notes

An argument from the calendar (vv. 9–10). Paul’s next move is almost breathtakingly simple, and it is unanswerable: he asks when. Genesis 15 records the crediting of righteousness; Genesis 17 records the institution of circumcision. Between them lie the birth of Ishmael and roughly fourteen years—Abram was eighty-six when Ishmael was born and ninety-nine when he was circumcised. So the verdict came first and the rite came later, by more than a decade. Whatever circumcision was, it cannot have been the ground of Abraham’s acceptance, because he was already accepted. This is careful, unhurried Bible reading, and it is worth imitating: Paul answers a burning contemporary controversy by noticing the order of two chapters in Genesis. Details of the text are not trivia; they are load-bearing.

Sign and seal (v. 11). Circumcision is called two things. It is a sign—a marker pointing to a reality outside itself—and a seal, a confirmation and authentication of “the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.” A seal does not create what it certifies; it certifies what already exists. Abraham did not receive righteousness by being circumcised; he received a visible confirmation of righteousness he already had. This is the historic Reformed understanding of the sacraments, drawn straight from this verse: baptism and the Lord’s Supper are God’s appointed signs and seals, given to strengthen faith’s grip on a promise already made—means of grace, never mechanisms of merit. Calvin insisted on both halves of that sentence: never despise the sign, because God gave it to help our weakness; never trust the sign, because it points away from itself to Christ. The application to our own hearts is not far off. We may not be tempted to trust circumcision, but we are perfectly capable of resting in a baptism, a membership, a raised hand at a meeting, or a family heritage. Every one of those is a sign; none of them is the righteousness.

Father of two families that are really one (vv. 11–12). Paul now shows why God ordered events this way: the purpose was to make Abraham the father of every believer, uncircumcised and circumcised alike. Because he was justified as a Gentile—an uncircumcised man—the door stands open to the nations; because he was afterward circumcised, he remains father to Jewish believers too. But notice the qualification in verse 12: he is father of the circumcised “who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith” he had. Physical descent settles nothing. The family likeness in Abraham’s house is faith, and the mark of a true child is not a ritual on the body but a footstep in the same direction. This is the same point John the Baptist made when he warned the crowds not to say “We have Abraham as our father” (Matt. 3:9), and the point Jesus made to those who claimed the same pedigree (John 8:39). It is a searching word for any of us raised in the church: the question is never whose family we belong to, but whose faith we share.

John Calvin “It seems to me that a simple and proper definition would be to say that it is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.14.1)

Historical Insight The word translated “seal” in verse 11 is sphragis, and in the ancient world it was an everyday object with serious legal weight. A seal was pressed into wax or clay with a signet ring to close a document, mark a jar of wine or grain, or stamp a bale of goods. It did three things at once: it identified the owner, it authenticated the contents as genuine, and it guaranteed that nothing had been tampered with since. Roman wills were sealed by witnesses; a broken seal on a shipment meant the cargo could not be trusted. Paul reaches for that image deliberately. Circumcision was not the transaction—it was the wax pressed on a document already written, God’s public certification of a righteousness Abraham already possessed. The same word carries over into the New Testament’s language for believers: God “put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:22; cf. Eph. 1:13). The Christian’s seal is not a mark on the flesh but the Holy Spirit Himself.

Discussion Questions

Paul settles a huge controversy by noticing the order of two events in Genesis. What does his method teach us about reading Scripture carefully rather than proof-texting? Where might slowing down change a conclusion you hold?
A seal confirms something that already exists; it does not create it. What are the modern equivalents of circumcision—the outward markers people quietly rest in for standing with God? Which one has ever been a temptation for you?
If baptism and the Lord’s Supper are signs and seals meant to strengthen faith, how should that shape the way you come to the Table? What is the difference between treasuring a sign and trusting it?
Verse 12 says Abraham’s true children “walk in the footsteps of the faith” he had. What footsteps of Abraham’s faith can you actually see in your life right now? What would someone who knows you well point to?
Paul says God arranged history so that Abraham could be father of believers from every background. How does this passage shape the way our group thinks about people whose upbringing, culture, or church background is nothing like ours?

Section 3 — Promise, Not Law: Guaranteed by Grace (vv. 13–17)

¹³For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression. ¹⁶That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, ¹⁷as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Romans 4:13–17 (ESV)

Study Notes

Heir of the world (v. 13). Paul now shifts from the word “counted” to the word “promise,” and he summarizes God’s pledges to Abraham with a sweeping phrase: he would be “heir of the world.” Genesis speaks of a land, a seed, and a blessing that would reach “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:3); Paul reads the whole trajectory and calls it what it is—a global inheritance, ultimately fulfilled in a renewed creation shared by all Abraham’s believing children (cf. Rom. 8:17–21; Matt. 5:5). And that promise, he insists, did not come “through the law.” The observation is again chronological: the law arrived at Sinai some four hundred and thirty years after the promise (Gal. 3:17). The inheritance was pledged to faith long before the commandments existed to be kept.

Why law and promise cannot be mixed (vv. 14–15). Paul now argues that adding law to promise does not strengthen the promise—it destroys it. If the inheritance belongs to law-keepers, then “faith is null and the promise is void”: emptied of content, cancelled, made inoperative. Why? Because of what the law actually does to sinners. “The law brings wrath.” A perfect standard given to imperfect people cannot produce heirs; it can only produce transgressors and the wrath their transgressions deserve. The law is holy (7:12), but it is a mirror, not a medicine—it shows the disease with terrible accuracy and cures nothing. Luther put the point in the sharpest possible terms: the law says “do this,” and it is never done; grace says “believe this,” and everything is already done. Anyone who tries to hold both as the ground of acceptance ends up with neither.

“That it may rest on grace and be guaranteed” (v. 16). Here is one of the most pastorally precious sentences in Romans. Why does God make the inheritance depend on faith? Not arbitrarily, and not because faith is a superior virtue—but so that the promise may rest on grace and therefore be guaranteed. Trace the logic: a promise conditioned on my performance is only as secure as my performance, which is to say not secure at all; a promise resting on God’s grace is as secure as God. Faith is the only instrument that can receive a guaranteed promise, because faith contributes nothing to it. This is where assurance comes from. If you are looking for certainty in the quality of your obedience, you will oscillate between presumption and despair for the rest of your life. If your certainty rests on grace, it is as unshakeable as the character of the One who promised. And notice the reach of it: guaranteed “to all his offspring”—Jew and Gentile together, “the father of us all.”

The God who raises and creates (v. 17). Paul anchors the promise in the character of the Promiser, quoting Genesis 17:5 and then describing the God Abraham believed in with two staggering phrases. He “gives life to the dead”—which for Abraham meant a body as good as dead and a barren womb, and which for us means an empty tomb. And He “calls into existence the things that do not exist”—the God of Genesis 1, who speaks to nothing and something appears. This is the God Abraham trusted: not a God who helps those who help themselves, but a God who works where there is nothing to work with. Piper has pressed this repeatedly and rightly: faith is not a leap in the dark or a mood we generate, but a resting on the specific character of a God who is both able and utterly reliable—and that is exactly why faith glorifies Him rather than us. Luther saw the same thing from the other direction in his Heidelberg theses: God’s love does not discover something lovely and respond to it; it creates something lovely where there was nothing. Justifying the ungodly (v. 5) and calling into existence what does not exist (v. 17) are the same divine habit.

Martin Luther “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.” (Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, Thesis 28)

Discussion Questions

Verse 16 says the promise depends on faith “in order that” it may rest on grace and be guaranteed. How does that single sentence speak to a Christian who lives with chronic uncertainty about whether God still accepts them?
Paul says mixing law into the promise makes faith null and the promise void. In practice, what are the ways we add conditions to grace—in our self-talk, in our parenting, in the way we treat struggling believers?
“The law brings wrath” (v. 15). If God’s law cannot make us heirs, what is it good for in the Christian life? How do we honor the law without leaning on it for our standing?
Abraham’s God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (v. 17). Where in your life right now is there nothing to work with—a dead situation, an empty account, a relationship past reviving? What would it look like to believe this God about it?
If your assurance rests on grace rather than performance, how should that change the way you respond to a week in which you have failed badly? What is the difference between that and taking sin lightly?

Section 4 — Hoping Against Hope—and Written for Us (vv. 18–25)

¹⁸In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” ¹⁹He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. ²⁰No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²²That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” ²³But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, ²⁴but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, ²⁵who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Romans 4:18–25 (ESV)

Study Notes

Hope against hope (v. 18). The phrase is a deliberate paradox: against every ground for hope in himself and his circumstances, Abraham hoped in God. Biblical faith is not optimism, which reads the situation and expects the best; it is confidence in a Person over against a situation that offers nothing. Abraham had one thing to go on—“So shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5)—a word spoken by God under a night sky full of stars, with no child in the tent. When faith has a promise, it does not need probability.

Facing the facts without weakening (vv. 19–20). Notice that Abraham’s faith was not denial. He “considered his own body, which was as good as dead… or… the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” He looked squarely at two impossibilities and did not pretend they were otherwise, and still he did not weaken. That is a crucial pastoral correction to a popular counterfeit: faith is not refusing to name the diagnosis, the debt, or the estrangement. It is naming them honestly and then setting the promise of God beside them and finding the promise weightier. Then verse 20 makes an astonishing connection: “he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.” Faith and worship feed each other. The way faith grows strong is not by straining harder to believe but by turning to consider who God is until He looms larger than the impossibility. Piper has made this the hinge of his whole treatment of the chapter: unbelief robs God of glory because it treats Him as unable or unreliable, while faith glorifies Him precisely by banking everything on His power and His word.

“Fully convinced that God was able” (vv. 21–22). Paul locates the content of saving faith with precision: not that God would do whatever Abraham wanted, but that God was able to do what He had promised. Faith is only as good as its object and only as reliable as its warrant. And verse 22 returns us to the refrain—“That is why his faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness.’” Not because his faith was a magnificent achievement that earned the credit, but because this is the kind of faith that receives a promise: empty-handed, God-focused, resting on the word of the Promiser.

Written for us (vv. 23–25). Now the chapter turns and looks straight at the reader. Genesis 15:6 was not archived for Abraham’s benefit; it was written “for ours also.” The same accounting entry is made for “us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord.” Observe how exactly the object of our faith matches Abraham’s: he believed in the God who gives life to the dead (v. 17), and we believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead (v. 24). It is the same faith in the same God, now with the promise fulfilled in the open. And verse 25 gives us the two-line summary of the gospel that the whole chapter has been building toward: “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” The cross dealt with our sin; the resurrection is God’s public receipt, His declaration that the payment was accepted and the verdict stands. Do not miss what this means for assurance: if you want to know whether God will count you righteous, look at an empty tomb outside Jerusalem. Your justification is not a hope you are working toward but a verdict already announced in history.

Martin Luther “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times.” (Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, 1522)

Leader’s Note Someone in your group will almost certainly notice the tension between Paul’s portrait here and the Abraham of Genesis, and it is far better to raise it yourself than to let it sit unspoken. Genesis records Abraham twice passing Sarah off as his sister (Gen. 12, 20), fathering Ishmael through Hagar rather than waiting (Gen. 16), and laughing on his face at God’s promise (Gen. 17:17)—while Sarah laughed behind the tent flap (Gen. 18:12). Paul is not rewriting history or pretending Abraham was flawless. He is describing the settled direction of a life, the deep grain of a man’s trust across decades, not a record of unbroken perfection. This is enormously freeing for anyone in the room who concludes from a bad month that they must not really believe. Faith that stumbles, argues, waits badly, and repents is still faith—and it is still counted. If it were otherwise, the man who received the credit in Genesis 15 would have forfeited it by Genesis 16.

Historical Insight Paul’s parenthesis—“since he was about a hundred years old”—is not rhetorical exaggeration but Genesis arithmetic, and the timeline is worth laying out for the group. Abram was seventy-five when God first promised him a great nation and he left Haran (Gen. 12:4). He was eighty-six when Ishmael was born (Gen. 16:16). He was ninety-nine, and Sarah eighty-nine, when God appeared again and renamed him Abraham (Gen. 17:1, 17), and Isaac was born when Abraham was a hundred and Sarah ninety (Gen. 17:17; 21:5). That is roughly twenty-five years of waiting between the promise and the child—a quarter of a century in which nothing visible happened and every passing year made the promise more absurd, not less. Abraham was not asked to trust God for a delay of a few months. He was asked to keep believing while the biological window closed, opened not at all, and then closed again with a slam. When Paul says “he did not weaken in faith,” he is describing endurance measured in decades.

Discussion Questions

Abraham “considered” the impossibilities honestly and believed anyway (v. 19). What is the difference between faith and denial? Where are you tempted to think that admitting how bad something is would be unbelief?
Verse 20 says he grew strong in faith “as he gave glory to God.” If faith grows by worship rather than by straining, what practically would strengthen your faith this week—and what have you been trying instead?
Abraham waited roughly twenty-five years. What promise of God are you currently waiting on where the circumstances say it is impossible? What would “fully convinced that God was able” (v. 21) look like in that specific situation by Friday?
Given the Leader’s Note on Abraham’s lapses, how do you handle seasons when your own faith looks nothing like verse 20? What does this chapter say to a believer who feels unworthy of the righteousness credited to them?
Verse 25 says Christ was “raised for our justification.” How does the resurrection function as God’s receipt for your forgiveness? Who in your life needs to hear this week that acceptance with God is a verdict already announced, not a score still being tallied?

Bringing It Home

Big idea: Justification by faith alone is not a Pauline novelty but the way God has always dealt with sinners—Abraham was credited with righteousness while still uncircumcised and still ungodly, and David sang of the man whose sin God refuses to count. Righteousness is posted to an empty account as a gift, never paid out as wages, so that the promise rests on grace and is therefore guaranteed to everyone who shares Abraham’s faith. And that faith has always had the same object: the God who gives life to the dead, who called a nation out of a dead body and a barren womb, and who raised Jesus our Lord—delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. The words “it was counted to him” were written for us.

Prayer focus: Begin by thanking God for a righteousness you did not earn and cannot lose, and confess honestly the places where you still try to pay for what has been given. Pray for anyone in the group living under a vague sense of unworthiness, that verse 8 would become personal—the Lord will not count their sin. Bring before God the impossible situations your group is facing and ask Him to be, in those places, exactly the God of verse 17. Ask that your faith would grow strong the way Abraham’s did, by giving glory to God. And close by praising Christ, delivered up and raised, whose empty tomb is the receipt for your acquittal.

Memory Verse “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
— Romans 4:5 (ESV)