Sermon: God’s Sovereign Mercy, Pt 1

Several years ago, Alexis Gould, a 15-year-old in Magna, Utah was fighting nerve cancer.  The family was trying to figure out how to pay Emily’s significant and growing medical bills when an anonymous local businessman stepped up with a $40,000 donation to help pay those bills.  It seemed too good to be true.  It was.  When the treatments for Emily were to begin, there was no money in her account to pay her bills.  The promised payment was never made.  The businessman was a fraud.

Who does that?  Who makes those kinds of promises to a suffering family and then doesn’t keep them?  It’s maddening.  Until we realize that we also are promise breakers:

It is human nature to break promises. Governments make and break promises.  Advertisers and politicians make and break promises.  Employers and employees, preachers and church members, parents and children, husbands and wives, and friends and relatives all make promises to each other which often are broken.  Some are made with the best of intentions, and some are made in order to deceive and exploit.  But all of us find ourselves both making and receiving promises that, for whatever reason, do not materialize. [MacArthur, Ephesians, 28.]

Because we are the regular recipients of broken promises and because we are so prone to break promises, it is tempting to make the assumption that God also breaks promises.  Especially when we consider that God made a promise to Abraham several thousand years ago about a redeemed nation and that promise is still unfulfilled, it is tempting to think that God also is not faithful.  He also is a promise breaker.

Don’t succumb to that temptation.  As Paul explains in Romans 9-11, God is faithful.  And His faithfulness is demonstrated in His salvation plan for Israel and us.  That plan reveals that —

Salvation is always the result of God’s sovereign, merciful, and faithful choice.

If you are saved from God’s wrath, you are saved as the result of God’s sovereign kindness to choose you.  Everyone you know that is saved from God’s wrath is saved by that same sovereign, merciful choosing.

In verses 6-18, there are five demonstrations of God’s faithfulness; we will look at the first two today:

1. God is Faithful — His Promises Don’t Fail (v. 6a)
2. God is Faithful — His Election Doesn’t Fail (v. 6b)
3. God is Faithful — His Election of Isaac is Typical (vv. 7-9)
4. God is Faithful — His Purposes Will Stand (vv. 10-13)
5. God is Faithful — His Non-Election of Pharaoh is Just (vv. 14-18)

Download the rest of this sermon on Romans 9:6.

The audio will be posted on the GBC website by tomorrow.