Texts for the Second Sunday in Lent: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
Lent confronts us with an uncomfortable truth. The Second Sunday readings press one conclusion: we cannot save ourselves. Abram cannot conjure courage. Nicodemus cannot produce a new birth. Abraham was justified by faith, a gift, not wages. These readings witness to God’s sovereign grace. Salvation is not a human project but divine work God initiates, sustains, and completes.
The Call and the Promise (Genesis 12:1-4a)
God commands Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Abram receives no map or timeline. He only receives a command attached to a promise. God will make him a great nation and bless all families through him.
The promise is extravagant. Abram’s wife is barren, and he is seventy-five. Yet “Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Genesis 12:4). What produced this obedience? The text gives no background. God spoke and Abram believed. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). God’s Word created faith in him. The initiative belongs entirely to God.
Counted as Righteousness (Romans 4:1-5, 13-17)
Paul appeals to Abraham to demolish any claim that justification comes through works. “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). “Counted” is forensic language. God does not find inherent righteousness in Abraham but declares him righteous based on faith. This righteousness is alien, something unworldly and supernatural, that is credited to his account. When Jesus died, God treated Him as if He had lived our life. Now God treats us as if we lived Christ’s perfect life.
To the one who does not work but believes, “his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5). This is righteousness received as a gift. Faith is the empty hand receiving what God gives. The promise rests on grace “so that it may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring” (Romans 4:16). If it depended on human obedience, it would fail. Because it rests on God’s initiative, it stands firm.
You Must Be Born Again (John 3:1-17)
Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel, comes to Jesus by night. Jesus confronts him: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Nicodemus asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?” (John 3:4). His question reveals the problem. Nicodemus thinks in terms of what he can do. Jesus’s answer: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit” (John 3:6).
You cannot birth yourself. The new birth is the Spirit’s sovereign work. “The wind blows where it wishes… So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit gives life where He wills.
Jesus points to the means. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). The Israelites looked at the bronze serpent and lived. They did not heal themselves. So it is with the cross. Christ was “lifted up,” bearing our judgment. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
We are called to believe. To look to Christ crucified. But this belief is not a work we perform to earn salvation. Faith is the Spirit’s gift. The new birth produces faith, which receives Christ’s benefits. When we believe, the Spirit has given us life. When we turn to Christ, the Father has drawn us (John 6:44).
Lent calls us to repentance. True repentance begins with recognizing we are spiritually dead and cannot raise ourselves. It ends with faith. The repentant looking to Christ, trusting that what we could not do, He has done.
Not for our glory, but for His alone.
Jeremy Miller
Church Elder