Walk In the Steps

Almost every day, I walk to the UCLA campus with a crowd of students. Outwardly I walk in the steps of hundreds of people of every kind, but at the same time I have an inward walk. There is something directing the way that I take. Whose steps do you walk in? Whom do you follow? Romans 4:12 contains the phrase “walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham.” To see how we can walk in the steps of Abraham’s faith, we need to look further into his experience recorded in Genesis.

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The Promise and the Purpose

What does “righteousness” mean to us? At first it may be an irritation, an easily-dismissed concept that seems impossible to attain. Who, the world tells us, is to say what is right? In the light of God’s Word, however, we find that Jesus calls His followers to righteousness, even perfection. We also find forgiveness of our sins through His death on the cross. We find, in Romans 3, justification! For a long time, my understanding of justification and righteousness went this far. I was secure in the accomplished fact of Christ’s redemption and rejoiced in God’s grace, but I located justification as something that had taken place, and I had already experienced in my life. There is, however, a wonderful view of justification in Romans 4 that I had never seen! It’s a view illustrated by the example of an impossible promise and an unsearchable purpose at work in the life of Abraham.

Short of the Glory

It’s over. Case closed. After cataloging the evidence against men who reject God, and then describing the emptiness of a self-confident attempt to please God, quoting verse after verse from the Old Testament and keenly describing man’s experience, Paul sums things up in Romans 3:23:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

All have sinned. This is basic to our understanding of the good news of God. It is also a basic challenge to the common attitude of simply trying to do the best we can in challenging circumstances. It is so far removed from our daily experience that it is difficult and in some ways awful to contemplate an entirely righteous Being. Either we reject Him, or we attempt to follow methods and practices that manage God for us, making Him understandable and bearable. However, the sentence quoted above is not finished.