I don’t know how true it is, but I’m told that U2 liked to record in Hamilton with Daniel Lanois because we’re such a down-to-earth town that people wouldn’t mob them like they would in places like, say, Toronto. Being mobbed is one of the side effects of being a celebrity. Celebrities are people who are instantly recognisable. If Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts were to walk in here this morning, most of us would know who they were.
This morning
we’re beginning a new series called, “Celebrities from the Hall of Fame.” The
celebrities we’ll be talking about are well known to some of us, but may be a
little obscure to others. That’s because the Hall of Fame I’m talking about
isn’t in
In this morning’s reading we heard the names of some of the inductees to that hall of fame; Abel, Enoch, Noah and Abraham. We stopped there but the list goes on; Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses, Rahab and a whole bunch more. Now some people here can probably tell you all about what these people did, in the same way that a hockey fan can tell you the story of how Gretzky came to be known as “The Great One.” But for others of us it’s a little like me arriving in Canada, knowing nothing about hockey (I still know very little) and having to learn at least something about Gretzky to make sense of people’s conversations.
So that’s our goal over the next six weeks, not to become experts in the details of the lives of these celebrities of faith, but to get the general idea of why some of them are famous; why the writer of Hebrews included them in his list of the “Great Ones.”
We’re going to start with the man called The Father of the Faithful, Abraham. And we start, not in Hebrews 11 but in Genesis 11, Gen 11:31:
31 Terah took his son Abram, his
grandson Lot son of
32 Terah lived 205 years, and he died in
12
The Lord had said to
Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to
the land I will show you. 2 “I
will make you into a great nation / and I will bless you; / I will make your
name great, / and you will be a blessing. / 3 I will bless those who bless you, / and
whoever curses you I will curse; / and all peoples on earth / will be blessed
through you.”
4 So Abram left, as the Lord had told him
Close your eyes for a moment and try and put yourself in Abram's shoes. It's about 4000 years ago. You’re living in a city where everybody, possibly even your own family, worships the Moon. Like everybody else, you’re aware that there’s a creator God but he seems so far away that it’s much more sensible to deal with the lesser gods, like the moon god, that you can at least see and that seem to have a much more active part in your life.
Then, perhaps one night in a dream, you realize that God, the creator God, is talking to you. He says, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you." There's a promise too, one that seems too great to be true. What do you do? Do you put it down to the Chaldean equivalent of last night's pizza? Or do you believe that it is God and act on it. (You can open your eyes now.)
God said, "Leave...go...” and verse 4 says, “so Abram went..." Abram took that step. He believed that it really was God that was speaking to him and he obeyed. How many of us, with all of our knowledge about God and his ways from the Bible, with our books and commentaries, and TV shows about Christianity, how many of us would just pick up like that and leave? Considering his background, that first step alone might qualify Abram for a place in the faith hall of fame.
That first step started Abram on a journey,
not just a journey through the ancient
And so Abram journeys with God. As soon as
he gets to
And for the first few chapters of Abram’s
life that pretty much sums up his relationship with God. God tells him to do
something. Abram does it. God says “Well done.” Like the relationship between a
master and his servant. However, pretty soon after arriving in Canaan he's on
the road again; leaving the land to go to
Well, it seems that whenever God’s people
head down to
There’s a lesson for us here. God used a
pagan king to rebuke the person he had promised to make the father of a great
nation. Just because we’re Christians doesn't mean that we’re always right. God’s
the only one who’s always right. Sometimes his people blow it. Abram blew it in
[God knows how quickly we forget his blessings and how often we need to be reminded of his love and care for us. We get busy and we forget to read our Bible and pray and it doesn't take long before we start hearing the devil's voice telling us that God doesn't really love us after all. Like Abram, we need to hear God’s voice of encouragement, reassuring us that he has called us, we are his, he will not forget us, and he is faithful.]
However, even while the Lord is encouraging Abram, Abram's mind is on something else. How is he going to have all these descendants without a son to get things started? 15:3-6 Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.” 4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
This is Abram's second crisis of faith. It’s
been 11 years since he left his homeland. He’s been wandering around this
[Is there something that the Lord has promised to you? Do you believe that he will do it? Are you trusting him, even if the evidence is against it? All the evidence seemed to be against Abram having a son, yet it says that he believed God.]
Although Abram believed God, he was still a bit foggy on the details of how God works, because almost immediately he decides to give God a hand and have sex with his wife’s maid in order to have a son. It's a common mistake isn't it? Not having sex with your wife’s maid – stepping in to give God a hand when he’s told us to just trust him.
You’d think that now God would
decide he could find better material than Abraham. If I were God I would have
said, “You went
What does God do? He reaffirms his promise to Abram, yet again! And, just to show how serious he is about this, God makes a covenant with Abram, and even changes Abram’s and Sarai’s names to Abraham and Sarah to underline the promise.
[I started off saying that Abraham is in the Faith Hall of Fame, but the story isn’t really about Abraham’s faith is it? It’s really about God’s faithfulness to Abraham and to the promise he had made to him.
Our faith in God is only ever a response to his faithfulness to us. It isn’t something that originates with us. It isn’t something that we have to drum up in ourselves. It is a response to God’s gracious faithfulness towards us.]
It took time, another 14 years in fact, but eventually Sarah did have a son in her old age and they called him Isaac. He was the promised one. All their hopes were pinned on this boy… and then came the final test…
22 Some time later God
tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. 2 Then
God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the
region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the
mountains I will tell you about.”
3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his
donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut
enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about.
4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the
distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey
while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back
to you.”
6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and
placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As
the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his
father Abraham, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where
is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb
for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
9 When they reached the place God had told him about,
Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son
Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he
reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the
angel of the Lord called out to
him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do
anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld
from me your son, your only son.”
13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a
ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed
it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that
place The Lord Will Provide. And
to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
I can’t imagine what was going through Abraham’s mind as he walked into the mountains with his son. I think he was telling himself, “He’s never let me down yet. I don’t understand this, but I will trust him.”
One way of looking at Abraham's final test is to ask the question "Was he more committed to the promise of God or to the God of the promise?"
Almost thirty years before it had it seemed
that the promise was the important thing and he was willing to go along with
Sarah's suggestion to make the promise come true by means of her maid, Hagar. When
he took Isaac up to
He had learned his lesson well. If you can trust the one who made the promise then the promise itself is secure. Abraham had learned to trust God, and from that act of faith the covenant grew to include first Abraham's family, then the nation that grew out of his family, then through the Messiah, Jesus, to include a great body of believers from every nation.
God kept his promise.
So what can we take away from a story like this that will help us in our own faith journeys?
1. Well, Abraham was not a ready made spiritual hero. He didn’t come onto the scene as the guy most likely to found a new dynasty. He seriously blew it more than once.
And yet, he grew from the time of his first call by God to the point where he was willing to entrust his son, on whom all of God's promises rested, back into God's hands. In the process he provided us with one of the most beautiful OT pictures of Christ as the sacrificial lamb that the Lord himself provided.
2. And although we may talk about our faith journeys as if we are the main actors, Abraham would be the first to say that it’s really about God’s faithfulness to us, not our faith in him. Because our faith is sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but his faithfulness to us never varies.
3. Finally, we live in an instant society
and I think that we’d like to believe there is some shortcut to spiritual
maturity. The reality is that, in many ways, we go through similar stages to
Abraham in our own experience with God. There's a line from an old song that
says "Learning to trust is just for children in school". That's not
true. Learning to trust is a life long adventure. Abraham learned to trust God
in moving to
If we'll let him, if we'll respond to his leading, the Lord will teach us to trust him more and more.
Abraham trusted the Lord for a son. What are you trusting him for?
So Abram left, as the LORD had told
him
Abram
knew very little about God, yet he trusted him.
We
have a lot more information about God. Do we trust him as Abram did?
As
Abram travelled, sometimes his faith grew, sometimes it failed. But God
remained committed to him.
Our
faith is only ever a response to God’s _____________ to us.
Almost
40 years after the original promise in Gen 12 (when Isaac is in his teens) came
the final test.
One
way of looking at Abraham's final test is to ask the question, "Was he
more committed to the promise of God, or to the God of the ____________?"
So Abram left, as the LORD had told
him
Abram
knew very little about God, yet he trusted him.
We
have a lot more information about God. Do we trust him as Abram did?
As
Abram travelled, sometimes his faith grew, sometimes it failed. But God
remained committed to him.
Our
faith is only ever a response to God’s _____________ to us.
Almost
40 years after the original promise in Gen 12 (when Isaac is in his teens) came
the final test.
One
way of looking at Abraham's final test is to ask the question, "Was he
more committed to the promise of God, or to the God of the ____________?"
So Abram left, as the LORD had told
him
Abram
knew very little about God, yet he trusted him.
We
have a lot more information about God. Do we trust him as Abram did?
As
Abram travelled, sometimes his faith grew, sometimes it failed. But God
remained committed to him.
Our
faith is only ever a response to God’s _____________ to us.
Almost
40 years after the original promise in Gen 12 (when Isaac is in his teens) came
the final test.
One
way of looking at Abraham's final test is to ask the question, "Was he
more committed to the promise of God, or to the God of the ____________?"
1.
Abraham was not a ready made spiritual __________.
2.
We are not the main ___________ in our faith journeys. It’s really about God’s
faithfulness to us, not our faith in him.
3.
There is no shortcut to spiritual ______________.
1.
Abraham was not a ready made spiritual __________.
2.
We are not the main ___________ in our faith journeys. It’s really about God’s
faithfulness to us, not our faith in him.
3.
There is no shortcut to spiritual ______________.
1.
Abraham was not a ready made spiritual __________.
2.
We are not the main ___________ in our faith journeys. It’s really about God’s
faithfulness to us, not our faith in him.
3.
There is no shortcut to spiritual ______________.