Therefore, when Paul says, God reckons Abraham's faith as righteousness.

He doesn't mean the faith is the righteousness.

He means Christ perform the righteousness.

It is perfect. It is outside. It is pure grace.

And God looks upon our faith as the uniting element.

What is the faith by which God justifies us?

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper looks at Romans 4, 22 to 25, to explore the nature of the faith that is counted as righteousness.

The sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on

October 17, 1999.

When Paul says faith is credited to you as righteousness, he does not mean that your faith is your righteousness, which is the foundation now of your getting right with God and your justification.

That's not what he means. Rather, I believe he means that faith unites you to Jesus so that

when Christ or God, the Father, looks upon your simple childlike resting in Christ.

What he sees is a union, faith is the union of the soul with Christ.

He sees a union, and in the union he sees what is true of Christ as true of you and Christ wrought a perfect

righteousness and satisfies the Father and therefore he sees Christ's

righteousness as your righteousness and since faith is the unifying element of that, he

says I count the faith as the righteousness but the faith isn't the

righteousness Christ has the righteousness the right just

Christ has the righteousness and it is imputed to you through this unifying element

called faith.

Now the question is, is that so? I said it was so. You don't believe it because I say it's so. You should believe it because the Bible says it is so and so we'll put four foundations under it.

For those readers in the crowd, you might want to go to John Owen, volume five and look at

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