Please turn with me in your Bibles to Romans chapter 4 verses 16 through 21. For this reason

it is by faith in order that it may be in accordance with grace so that the promise will be

guaranteed to all the descendants not only to those who are of the law but also

to those who are of the faith of Abraham who is the father of us all.

As it is written, a father of many nations have I made you.

In the presence of him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.

In hope against hope he believed so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken,

so shall your descendants be.

Without becoming weak in faith, he contemplated his own body now as good as dead since he was about a

hundred years old and the deadness of Sarah's womb. Yet with respect to the

promise of God he did not waver in unbelief, but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being

fully assured that what God had promised, he was able also to perform.

Father, we're aware from this text and from our own experience that apart from the kind of power that was exerted on Abraham's behalf in order to bear Isaac, we would be dead.

Spiritually lifeless, insensitive to all the moving of the Holy Spirit in the world,

without joy, without hope, without faith. And so we reckon ourselves

utterly dependent on you in this moment because our desire in being here is to see

you and love you and praise you and savor you and delight in you and enjoy you and bank our hope on you and walk out of here a friend of yours

conscious of your sweet grace in our lives, all of which is beyond us and is

supernatural. So I ask for you to come and to shed abroad the love of God in our hearts and to awaken the dead and to bring forth from slumbers, vital, joyful, alert, God-sensitive faith.

Oh God, let none be callous now as you work. Your work is mighty. It

shatters stone and it melts

cuts to the dividing of soul and spirit bone and marrow and reveals the secret of the heart. It never returns void. It accomplishes what you appoint and I beg of you that you would

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