How’s your faith when you face today and tomorrow? Do you trust God in everything? Do you believe God will take care of you? We like to think we do. Hebrews 11:6 (NIV) tells us that “without faith it is impossible to please God.” I think we want to please God. When you think about life, you realize…
One way, which most people live by, is to live by sight—to base everything on what you can see—the things of this world that, according to Scripture, will not last. This way does not please God.
The faith way is to base your life primarily and ultimately on what you cannot see—those things that will last for all eternity.
The Christian way is the faith way. We have never seen God or Jesus Christ. Yet we trust Christ for our salvation. We’ve never seen heaven or hell or the Holy Spirit. But we know they are real. We have never seen any of the people who wrote the Bible, yet the Bible is our guide.
And even though we may see the results of them, we have never seen any of the virtues that God commands or any of the graces that He gives. And yet, by faith, we live with the conviction these things are real.
We bank our lives on them—we trust our eternal destiny on things which we have never seen. For a Christian, this is natural. This pleases God. Abraham’s faith provides some powerful lessons for us in our journey of faith.
The story of Abraham is one of an incredible journey of faith. As a Christian, you, too, are on an incredible journey.
For 75 years Abraham lived in the city of Ur in Chaldea, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the region where we believe the Garden of Eden was located. It was a pagan and idolatrous land. He was 75 years old when God told him, Genesis 12:1 (NIV) "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.”
God didn’t tell him where he was going; He just said go. Leave everything that is familiar and comfortable and go. Abraham couldn’t pull out his Road Atlas and take an interstate.
There was only a caravan trail, filled with twists and turns and dangers. And, at the time of his departure, he didn’t know where he was going.
When God spoke to him, he listened. When God promised, he trusted. When God commanded, he obeyed. Really, the journey of faith is not that complicated is it?
Yeah, right! It’s easy to say, but it’s not always so easy to do. Jesus says, “Come, follow Me.” Listen to Him, trust Him, and obey Him. That’s the start of our Christian journey.
Didn’t Jesus give us the same kind of orders and promise in the Great Commission in Matt. 28! “Go and make disciples in all the nations, baptizing them and teaching the to observe all things I have commanded you, and I will be with you till the end of the age.” (Pastor’s paraphrase)
Still, in spite of all your planning, you do not know what lies ahead or what’s going to happen tomorrow. God said to Abraham, “Go to the land I will show you.” Abraham’s responsibility was to go. God’s was to be with him.
Today God is with you. Tomorrow He will be with you. He never leaves you. When you accepted Christ as your Savior, God came into your life, His Holy Spirit lives with you. You belong to Him for eternity.
The only absolute certainty we have when we begin this journey is the promise of God’s presence with us, and heaven at the end of our journey. Between the beginning and then are a lot of unknowns.
On your journey, you will encounter twists and turns and dangers, just as Abraham. God will lead you from your old pattern of living into a new kind of life. It’s not always easy, and God never said it would be.
Just as Abraham’s faith separated him from paganism and unbelief and started him toward a new land and a new kind of life, faith in Jesus Christ begins our spiritual journey. We can’t stay where we are. All we can do is trust God and step out in faith.
Abraham’s faith in God’s promise was deeply challenged. God told him, Genesis 12:2 (NIV) “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.”
He had God’s promise of becoming a great nation. Now that stuck in his craw. He didn’t have children. He was an old man; his wife an old woman. From the human standpoint, it was impossible for Abraham and Sarah to have a child.
Then God kept upping the ante—in 12:7 He promised Abraham his offspring would inherit the Land of Caanan.
And in Genesis 15:5 (NIV) 5He 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.”
Abraham struggled with this. When he was 85 years old, according to the custom of the time, he slept with his wife’s servant, Hagar, and she bore him Ishmael. Abraham thought he would be the heir.
When God next visited Ishmael was a teenager and Abraham was 100 years old. God reiterated His promises. This time Abraham sarcastically laughed, as did Sarah who was hiding but heard the conversation
He had God’s promise, and when he was 100 years old, Isaac was born. Hebrews 11:11 (NIV) says, “He was enabled to become a father because he considered Him faithful who had made the promise.”
This was good news/bad news. He had a son with Sarah, but he was 100 years old. The point is, in all his struggles, he had God’s promise, he trusted Him, and he put the comfortable and easy way behind him and chose to follow God’s road. His faithfulness allowed him to become the father of the faithful.
Hebrew 11:12 (NIV) 12And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
Abraham certainly wasn’t perfect, but he trusted God. Genesis 15:6 (NIV) 6Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
What impossibilities stand between you and God’s promises? How often are you challenged with God’s ways, but you respond, “That’s impossible!”
Humanly speaking that may be true. But, is God greater than your impossibility? You believe in your mind. But do you believe in your heart?
Too often we claim to believe God, but live our lives according to our own plan. Our actions don’t always match what we say we believe. If our faith doesn’t make a difference how we live our lives, no wonder others don’t see any benefit to Christianity and the Church.
Trust God. Give yourself to God, without reservation, to His promises, and see what He will do in your life—in His time and by His power.
Hebrews 11:8 - 9 (NIV) 8By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.
God promised Abraham to take him to a special land. This was the land of Canaan—the Promised Land where hundreds of years later the Children of Israel would go after their Egyptian captivity.
But Abraham never inherited the land. Nor did his children. He never dug a foundation—he never built a house. Do you think Abraham ever grew tired of living in tents as a stranger in a strange land? Of course he did. Life would have been so much more comfortable back at Ur in a regular house among people who knew him.
Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob never possessed the Promised Land. In fact, it was almost 500 years after Jacob died that Israel first began moving into the land.
These men of faith did not know what was happening. All they had was God’s promises. God didn’t give them any inside information—no word as to when or how the promises would be fulfilled. He only gave them promises, and that was enough.
So they lived in tents in the Promised Land. They raised their kids there and pastured their flocks there. But they never possessed the land. They lived as strangers and exiles among the peoples of Canaan.
They were pilgrims, refugees on their own Promised Land, passing through Canaan, and they didn’t mind, because they had faith in God.
Non-Christians will never understand that the most positive thing about our faith is not what we can see, hold, or measure. It is that one day we will be with our Lord forever.
The lesson from Abraham is to look forward. Don’t live in the past. Some of you have been trapped by memories of another time. It may be keeping you, and this church, from moving forward in trust and anticipation. You cannot recapture what once was?
Yesterday is gone. It probably wasn’t as good as you remember it. Embrace the God of the NOW—the promise of His presence this day and every day—and the promise of tomorrow and eternity.
Are you ready to move out, move on, and move up with God? It won’t happen without a faith vision—that is, without trusting that God can and will be faithful to His faithful people.
Life is short. There is a thin line between now and eternity. Choose to walk with God today so that when life is over—whether today or 60 years from now, you are ready to enter into His presence and receive the reward prepared for you.
Here’s What Faith Does…