By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9
By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.10
For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.
Last week we began looking at the life of Abraham and how it is that we are taught the nature of the Christian faith and the Christian life. We noted how every Christian
life begins with the sovereign call of God. This morning I want to point out how it is that God’s call never leaves a man or woman where it finds him or her.
Abraham had no knowledge of God, he was raised in idolatry. Those around him and in his family worshiped many gods who thought they would have hotly denied it, were
creations of their own imaginations, gods of their own minds. And then somehow, we do not know how, God spoke to this man and everything suddenly was different.
And now Abraham opens his eyes to a whole new world, God’s world, and he sees things quite different than he did before. He sees that his idols are nothing at all,
that they cannot hear and cannot speak, but that was only the beginning.
Then God said it is time to go, time to leave the old and travel to the new that I will give you, that I will show you. He called him to leave all he had and follow
him. He told him in effect, that he had to leave family, friends, home and wealth, that only the one who left all was worthy to follow the Lord. Sound familiar?
This is what Jesus said, this is the essence of following the Lord. A heart that has no second place, but that is consumed with the glory of God, that seeks nothing
but the Savior, believing that as he seeks the kingdom of God, the Lord will take care of the rest.
God’s voice, God’s sovereign call, picked him up and put him down as a different man in a different place with a different life. His nice tidy world was in shambles
as off he went following the Lord. And so it must be, will be for every Christian. God will not leave you where he finds you. Some of you might be digging your heels in pretty deep, you do not know what to change, you do not want a cross, and perhaps for most
of us, we know exactly what the Lord is seeking to change in us.
God is interested in taking you places and in doing things with your life you never thought of. The Christian church is literally full to the brim with people who
are doing things with their lives they never could have imagined themselves doing before they heard the voice of God calling them to leave Ur and serve the King.
I know women, now happily the mother of a number of children raising warriors and fair maidens for the king of kings, who once hated the very idea of motherhood but
God spoke to them and things changed. Or Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones who left his lucrative position as a medical doctor to be a pastor.
There is the account of Eta Linneman, the German professor of NT, the only woman in that very exclusive fraternity back in the 1960’s. She had reached the pinnacle
of her profession and then God called her. A few years later she was a missionary in Indonesia, telling everyone who asked to burn the books she had written in the German university. Could she ever have imagined what God was going to do? Leaving her homeland,
friends, family the old way of life and at such cost in the academic world? No more than Abraham could have imagined himself whistling as he walked toward Canaan.
Do not be surprised that your life is often turned upside down, that God takes you across difficult country and through deep water. Do not fret when he forces you
to leave behind much that was once important to you, and do not cling to it, let it go.
And all of that…without you ever having to leave home!
Put yourself in Abraham’s situation, place yourself in this text for in reality you are in this text, in the same place as Abraham. God speaks to you and you are to
go, but God does not say where you are to go, just that you are to go. And for Abraham he is told he will be the father of many nations, that the world will be blessed through him and yet he has not even one child, not one, for his wife cannot conceive. And
he goes, he leaves all that he has in Ur.
The bible has a word for this, for this, “Take God at his word” lifestyle and it is called faith. And it is what guides not only Abraham but you and me. It
is from the beginning of Chrisian life and without which there is no fellowship with God.
And here is the power and the glory of God’s sovereign grace and his calling of us to himself, look what he makes of a person! An early church father put it this way:
“Give me a passionate man, a hot-headed man, and one that is headstrong and unmanageable; and with faith the size of a mustard seed, I will, by degrees, make that
man as quiet as a lamb. Then give me a covetous man, a miserly man and with a little faith working like leaven in his heart, I will make him a perfect spendthrift for the church of Christ and for the poor…
…then give me one who is mortally afraid of pain and one who all his days is in bondage through fear of death and let the spirit of faith once enter and take its
seat in his heart and in his imagination and he shall, in a short time, despise all your crosses and flames…then show me a man with an unclean heart and I will undertake by his faith in Christ, to make him whiter than snow, until he will not know himself to
be the same man.”
Prayer: Father, in Your mercy hear my prayer, open my lips and my heart that I might know that my help comes from You the maker of heaven and earth. Help me to
have the kind of faith that Abraham had, willing to do whatever You say and willing to go wherever You send me. May I recount the goodness of my God to my own soul, calling myself to faithfulness, joy and peace that I might honor my King and Savior through
Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.