Imputation

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Today we're focusing on what we did last week was we talked about the atonement. Today we're going to kind of do the flip side or the other side of the coin called imputation. But it's an important teaching that the New Testament talks about. Imputation, it means basically you get the status, the credit, the rights. It's credited to you from someone else. It's imputed to you. It's counted to your advantage, okay? And it's really how you gain someone else's status. And you might go like, status? We live in an egalitarian society. We don't need no stinking status. I think it's kind of like a couple of fish speaking to each other saying, water? We live freely swimming in this lake. What do we need water for? You kind of don't realize it, but David Zoll says those of us in the United States currently live in a deeply status conscious culture that avoids openly discussing the subject. In every part of society, it's like where do you fit in? Who are you going to be hanging out with? What neighborhood you're living in? I mean everything that we do in the back of the mind is status. An extreme example, someone, I don't know who it was, you might know, bought the first Birkin bag this week, that right there, for you know how much? $10 million. Someone cares about status. That's an expensive purse, isn't it? Do you know all the buildings at FDCU, by the way, have a person's name attached to them? Somebody cares about status. We walk around, by the way, I think this is the next slide. We walk around as billboards, so many of us wearing some name brand on our chest, advertising for the world to see. That's all about status. We seek Ivy League school admissions. We become a fan of a team when they're winning. That's when we start becoming a fan and wear their jersey because somehow we think, when I wear this jersey of the winning champion Tampa Bay team, then that somehow transfers to me. Doesn't that make sense? Society is not just divided into social classes based on race and ethnicity, but really on status, regardless of income. Now, you might be expecting me at this point in time to say that's just, I'm going to castigate everybody who thinks about status and is trying to deal with status and look for status, but I'm not, because I think it very well is a true thing that we all yearn for meaning, significance, our place, where we fit in. We hunger for importance and significance. The problem is not the desire for status, but where we're trying to find it. All the remedies that most people are chasing, like the ones that I've shown, are the wrong place, and you don't have to be in the gilded age or in this, as some call the new oligarchic gilded age of all the tech bros that are running things to be caught up into status. Isn't it interesting, what's your family worth? The double entendre that the money somehow equals as well value? I don't know, we've been kind of sucked up into watching this. Anybody else watching the gilded age? It's kind of a fun soap opera, isn't it? We all want it. We all want this. And what this is really, we want imputed to us, credited to us, something that we don't have. So we're in the book of Romans, chapter 4, and you go like, what has Romans to do with this? Well, Rome itself, the culture that Paul, when he wrote to the Romans, in the city of Rome specifically, it was a hyper-status conscious society. Romans is dealing with two huge issues, the whole book, and they are power and privilege, which is another word for status. And there is one group against another, and the entire hierarchical, and man, it was a ladder that you couldn't climb, actually, in Rome. The emperor was at top, and then come like the equestrians, and then all of these other groups under it, the equites, and 90% were slaves, and you were stuck there. But everybody was seeking status. Everybody was seeking favor from the group above them. Everybody was hoping for something to get them out of the place they were in. Everybody was looking for something to be imputed to them because of who they were connected to. And so we see in the book of Romans, if you read the whole thing, you're going to see the weak versus the strong, the Gentile versus the Jew, men and women pitted against each other. And Paul says all of these divisions that the world wants to create, all of these status symbols that the world wants to create are mended through Jesus Christ and the status that he gives to each one of us so that we are all equal at the foot of the cross with a status you can't find anywhere else. You're given the righteousness, the merit, the perfection of Jesus. And I guess I could end the sermon there, right? But I won't. Because I don't know if that really sinks in for us. So we're going to be reading in Romans 4, verses 1 through 5, and then skip down to 13 to 16. And then we're going t...