050226 Abraham Unknown
Adventure into the Unknown
Main point: He leads from the known to the unknown, so that he can make our name great (character) so that we will be a blessing to others.
Several years I ago with a couple of friends, I did something that I wanted to do for a long time. I went skydiving.
We went up in this rickety twin engine plane, and some slides the door open, the wind comes blows into the little plane and when it’s your turn, it’s really quite the rush to free fall, then at the right time you pull open your parachute, it’s huge relief when it opens and you know you’re live to see tomorrow.
We love adventure--whether it’s adventure through sky-diving or snowboarding or traveling or the adventure of a relationship or pursuing or art…
But, the greatest adventure we can experience is the adventure that begins when we step out in response to God’s call upon our lives.
This morning we’re going to look at the nature of that adventure through the life of Abraham…
If you Bibles to Genesis 12… (first book in the Bible).
Abraham’s adventure begins with a call from God.
In Genesis 12 we read 1 The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household (in Ur, Southern Iraq) 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; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran…
Our adventure or our journey with God doesn’t begin with simply a personal resolution become a better person, it doesn’t begin with simply a personal resolution to improve by exercising more, reading more and a little splash of spirituality. Our journey with God begins as we respond to call from God…
Abraham begins his journey of faith at age 75—ten years after modern retirement. (It’s never too late (or too early) to begin a journey with God.)
God says to Abraham I will make your name great. Part of the call of God is a call to greatness.
In the preceding chapter of Genesis we see how people were seeking to build this great tower, The Tower of Babel, in order to “make a name for themselves.” But their project failed miserably. When we try to make a name for ourselves we will ultimately lose our name…
Abraham did not have any ambitions to make a “great name” for himself. But God says to Abraham, I will make a name for you… When you think of Abraham, we think of a famous name. We think perhaps of the man who was a founding father of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Or perhaps, we think about the fact God, himself, doesn’t being publicly associated with Abraham. God calls himself the “God of Abraham and Isaac.”
In our culture when we think of having great name, we think of a name that’s well known or famous… Paul Martin or Wayne Gretzky or Oprah but in this ancient near eastern culture, name was more than simply a label, but a revelation of character.
And God calls us to have a great name--not necessarily a famous name—but he desires us to have a truly great character… so that we would be a blessing to others… God wants to bless us so with a great character so that we will be blessing to others…
God calls us and wants to make our name great… but how does he call us and how does he make our or character name great?
Abraham’s call begins with a call to leave… When God calls us and when God wants to make our name or character great his call always begins with a call to leave something.…
As teenager what was most important to me was have fun and being part of the cool and popular crowd.
So I played on cool sports team: football and basketball (though my body was better suited for badminton!) I drank alcohol and using drugs, before I turned 16 I was into temporarily borrowing people’s cars without telling them—joy riding.
My parents, understandably, grew concerned about me. My dad decided to expose me to Christianity. He took me to seminar… one of the final days of the seminar the speaker asked, "If you were to die tonight, would you know for sure that you would go to heaven?" I hung my head, thinking that although I had been to church all of my life, I had turned my back on God. The speaker went on to explain that because Christ died and rose again, we could have a new start, we could be forgiven. But even as in the moment as I was thinking about the possibility of giving myself to God, I thought to myself, I’m going to lose something, perhaps some of the crazy fun of my life, perhaps popular friends… but I also knew I would beginning a new and greater adventure with God.
Every call involves some of call to leave. What did Abraham and Sarah leave?
Abraham and Sarah leave their familiar surroundings. Abraham and Sarah had lived in their community of Ur, a leading metropolitan city for the time (map). Abraham had lived in this city for 75 years (Sarah 65). They knew the city. They knew the roads. They new the markets They had supportive families. They had a home decorated as they wanted it.
(crmfh)
Yet God called them out of this familiar place to the unfamiliar… In. 12 vs. 1 he says leave or as the old King James get thee out and go to a place a I will show you. He doesn’t Fed Ex Abraham and Atlas and this is where I going to send you. It’s about 1000 kilometers and it will take you about 14 hours by car. He says to to the place I will show you.
And as was true for Abraham, God will call us from known to unknown, from the secure to the insecure…God says, along unfamiliar paths, I will lead you…
God does this so we can learn to trust him and so God can make our name (i.e. our character) great.
When I finished undergrad… I went to Tokyo because I had an informal offer to work for a corporate conglomerate… But I had no place to stay… The first Sunday in Tokyo I was asked to share briefly at a church in Tokyo to a group of young adults. The man who was supposed to be my interpreter was too tired too busy so on the spot he asked someone else to translate, I looked the translator, I thought this guy doesn’t speak Japanese…
He did and afterwards we out for coffee with Sakiko—this first time I ever met Sakiko… and she suggested that he and I live together, I ending serving at his small home church as a volunteer preacher, getting some of my first back to back preaching experience…
As I look back at Tokyo and other places where God has led I see how he has provided…
Sakiko, my wife who was born and raised in Japan, had a been magazine editor and a book publisher in Japan. Part of “her” call to marry me, involved her leaving her country of Japan, which, of course, meant leaving her family, her church, her job, and her language, and her culture….
She was being called to leave Japan for a land unfamiliar and unknown to her…
In response to God’s voice it may mean leaving a place of security, it may involve an actual physical, geographic place we leave or may be about leaving a person or a group of people or a position, a job.
Sometimes the leaving of one place for another is very clear and concrete leaving Tokyo for Vancouver—clear and concrete.
Other times our “leaving” one is more of a metaphor or symbol. E.g, the journey into the unknown, may be a journey inside our souls.
When Abraham left his place of safety Ur… he faced temptations he had never experienced before.
His wife Sarah 65 was attractive (pre-botox)… he sensed powerful men would want to take her sexually and kill him so they could add Sarah to their harem (if they discovered he was her husband).
So when he was in the presence of a certain powerful men, he told Sarah to lie and say she was his sister (a technical half-truth, but a half truth with the intent to deceive which is a lie).
Abraham succumbs to both the temptation to lie and the Abraham’s and to put his on wife body on the line on the, so he could save his own skin… line
Sometimes when leave the places of safety and security… we face pressures temptations that reveal dark-side of our character, part of ourselves that will not willfully trust God…
Perhaps the journey into the unknown that God is calling us to is a journey to explore our darkside and deal with that stuff there…. Perhaps with a help of a psychologist, counselor or friend…so we can experience healing and in some case perhaps break the cycle of brokenness that gets passed on from generation to generation…
There is a man in his early 50’ whose come from a Chinese culture where it’s considered a stigma to counsellor or therapist. But, in the last couple of years person has decided to hire a counselor to explore issues from his childhood that still affect him today… Why? He says so that in the second half of his life he can be used as more effective instrument of God.
It takes courage to leave the safety of ignorance or denial about ourselves, and to confront the unknown places inside us.
He is seeking to make a journey to the unknown regions of his soul…
Moving from the known to the unknown, may involve leaving something concrete a place, a people, a position it may involve an inward journey… The unknown may even involving feeling like we’re not moving, like we’re stuck… and waiting.
Part of the journey with God involves waiting on a promise from God.
God promised that Abraham would have a child, the name Abram means father, his name will later change to Abraham, which means father of many. Abram means daddy, Abraham Big Daddy. God has promised Abram a child.
and if you read Genesis quickly because it doesn’t take long to read a 8 pages (10 chapters), it may seem like God fulfilled his promise to Abraham—quickly.
But do you long it took Abraham to receive the promise of a son?
He received the promise that he would have a child when he was 75 years old.
He waited 25 years. Abraham was 100 and his wife was 90 when they had their child.
The second promise that God gave Abraham and Sarah was the promise that God would give land of Canaan to his family. That promise was never fulfilled in Abraham’s lifetime.
Abraham likely assumed that the promise that his family would receive the promised land in his and Sarah’s lifetime (as we would have assumed if we were in his shoes), but God’s promise of Abraham receiving the land isn’t fulfilled for Abraham in his lifetime…
Part of our journey with God involves waiting for a promise to be fulfilled or a dream to come to pass. Everyone one of us has unfulfilled dreams. Everyone has something we’re longing for…
Being in a place of waiting can be frustrating. That feeling that we’re not moving ahead!
Sometimes God wants to be involved, as someone has said in, “Waiiit training”…
But waiting is part of God’s strategy to make our name, i.e. our character great.
WAITING… WAITING…. WAITING For someone… or something…
John Ortberg… says what God does in us while we’re waiting for is just as important as what we’re waiting for… 2x.
So we develop our trust in him.
Abraham is considered a man of great faith. He made it into the Hall of Faith, but he had his down turns, his failures… he was very human… but he kept him going, as Darrell Johnson has said sometimes, up some times down, but always forward. What kept him going?
In Hebrews 11 we read that Abraham was looking forward to the city whose architect and builder was God.
He kept his eyes on the unseen promises of God.
Where do we get that faith?
The book of Hebrews tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God.
Faith comes as we receive and nurture the words that God gives in Scripture or the words that we sense God has given us directly.
It’s was focus on the call and the word of God that we can keep going.
George MacDonald wrote a book called the Princess and the Goblin. In this book there is a little princess who is 8 years old who has a fairy grandmother, who at one point says to the little princess, you’re in a great deal of danger and the goblins are coming to get you. When the goblins come to get you, I want you to come find me. The little princess says, it is a little hard to find you, grandmother. Here is what I want you to do, says the grandmother, she brings out a ball of thread, gives the Princess a ring and puts the ring on the princesses finger and attaches the thread to the ring and she puts the other end of the thread to her own, i.e. the grandmother’s cabinet, and the fairy grandmother says, when you are in real trouble, take off your ring and put it under pillow and you will be able to feel the thread. Nobody else will able to feel it, but follow the thread to me, the thread may take you directions that seem dangerous and wrong, but whatever you do follow the thread. If you leave the thread you will be lost. If you hold onto the thread, you will be lead to me, I will be at the other end. One time princess was in danger, she puts the ring under her pillow felt the thread but instead of leading her to grandmother, the thread led her out the door, up the mountain to the Goblin’s den, I don’t get this said, this must be some mistake, and she tried to go back and the thread disappeared. She follows the thread and ends up meeting the hero Curdie. She did not even know he was there in the den and was in danger. How did you find me? He asks. I followed the thread. But, he can’t see the thread. How do we get out of here? She says I have to follow the thread. When she tried to go a certain way to escape, he said you cannot get out that way, I tried it and could not escape, but she, she says I have to follow the thread, even when it looks stupid or that we’ll die, I have to follow my thread and then she breaks down and cries, he says alright, alright, already and they follow the thread leads them to her grandmother.
We are the follow the string… the string for us are the words of God in Scripture, the words he has given us to follow him.
Those words and that call will lead us to the unfamiliar, unknown places… sometimes into places of vulnerability, danger, loss and but we’ll meet God in those places…
And the string of God word and call will ultimately lead us to himself.
As it was for Abraham, our great reward and our shield is God himself.
Dietrich Bonhoffer said in the Cost of Discipleship, following this call of Christ is costly grace… costly because it will cost our lives, but it is grace because that it will give us our only true life… 2x
Jesus said, if trust him enough to allow ourselves to lose our live in response to his invitation to follow him, then, we would find them.
-----------------------
Prayer…
Is God leasing to unknown place, outer or inner, wait…
Trust… him enough to follow… Jesus let the security of heaven to come for us…
Pray: like Abraham and Sarah, to help us follow you into the unfamiliar places and through place lead us to you. Amen
Main point: He leads from the known to the unknown, so that he can make our name great (character) so that we will be a blessing to others.
Several years I ago with a couple of friends, I did something that I wanted to do for a long time. I went skydiving.
We went up in this rickety twin engine plane, and some slides the door open, the wind comes blows into the little plane and when it’s your turn, it’s really quite the rush to free fall, then at the right time you pull open your parachute, it’s huge relief when it opens and you know you’re live to see tomorrow.
We love adventure--whether it’s adventure through sky-diving or snowboarding or traveling or the adventure of a relationship or pursuing or art…
But, the greatest adventure we can experience is the adventure that begins when we step out in response to God’s call upon our lives.
This morning we’re going to look at the nature of that adventure through the life of Abraham…
If you Bibles to Genesis 12… (first book in the Bible).
Abraham’s adventure begins with a call from God.
In Genesis 12 we read 1 The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household (in Ur, Southern Iraq) 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; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran…
Our adventure or our journey with God doesn’t begin with simply a personal resolution become a better person, it doesn’t begin with simply a personal resolution to improve by exercising more, reading more and a little splash of spirituality. Our journey with God begins as we respond to call from God…
Abraham begins his journey of faith at age 75—ten years after modern retirement. (It’s never too late (or too early) to begin a journey with God.)
God says to Abraham I will make your name great. Part of the call of God is a call to greatness.
In the preceding chapter of Genesis we see how people were seeking to build this great tower, The Tower of Babel, in order to “make a name for themselves.” But their project failed miserably. When we try to make a name for ourselves we will ultimately lose our name…
Abraham did not have any ambitions to make a “great name” for himself. But God says to Abraham, I will make a name for you… When you think of Abraham, we think of a famous name. We think perhaps of the man who was a founding father of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Or perhaps, we think about the fact God, himself, doesn’t being publicly associated with Abraham. God calls himself the “God of Abraham and Isaac.”
In our culture when we think of having great name, we think of a name that’s well known or famous… Paul Martin or Wayne Gretzky or Oprah but in this ancient near eastern culture, name was more than simply a label, but a revelation of character.
And God calls us to have a great name--not necessarily a famous name—but he desires us to have a truly great character… so that we would be a blessing to others… God wants to bless us so with a great character so that we will be blessing to others…
God calls us and wants to make our name great… but how does he call us and how does he make our or character name great?
Abraham’s call begins with a call to leave… When God calls us and when God wants to make our name or character great his call always begins with a call to leave something.…
As teenager what was most important to me was have fun and being part of the cool and popular crowd.
So I played on cool sports team: football and basketball (though my body was better suited for badminton!) I drank alcohol and using drugs, before I turned 16 I was into temporarily borrowing people’s cars without telling them—joy riding.
My parents, understandably, grew concerned about me. My dad decided to expose me to Christianity. He took me to seminar… one of the final days of the seminar the speaker asked, "If you were to die tonight, would you know for sure that you would go to heaven?" I hung my head, thinking that although I had been to church all of my life, I had turned my back on God. The speaker went on to explain that because Christ died and rose again, we could have a new start, we could be forgiven. But even as in the moment as I was thinking about the possibility of giving myself to God, I thought to myself, I’m going to lose something, perhaps some of the crazy fun of my life, perhaps popular friends… but I also knew I would beginning a new and greater adventure with God.
Every call involves some of call to leave. What did Abraham and Sarah leave?
Abraham and Sarah leave their familiar surroundings. Abraham and Sarah had lived in their community of Ur, a leading metropolitan city for the time (map). Abraham had lived in this city for 75 years (Sarah 65). They knew the city. They knew the roads. They new the markets They had supportive families. They had a home decorated as they wanted it.
(crmfh)
Yet God called them out of this familiar place to the unfamiliar… In. 12 vs. 1 he says leave or as the old King James get thee out and go to a place a I will show you. He doesn’t Fed Ex Abraham and Atlas and this is where I going to send you. It’s about 1000 kilometers and it will take you about 14 hours by car. He says to to the place I will show you.
And as was true for Abraham, God will call us from known to unknown, from the secure to the insecure…God says, along unfamiliar paths, I will lead you…
God does this so we can learn to trust him and so God can make our name (i.e. our character) great.
When I finished undergrad… I went to Tokyo because I had an informal offer to work for a corporate conglomerate… But I had no place to stay… The first Sunday in Tokyo I was asked to share briefly at a church in Tokyo to a group of young adults. The man who was supposed to be my interpreter was too tired too busy so on the spot he asked someone else to translate, I looked the translator, I thought this guy doesn’t speak Japanese…
He did and afterwards we out for coffee with Sakiko—this first time I ever met Sakiko… and she suggested that he and I live together, I ending serving at his small home church as a volunteer preacher, getting some of my first back to back preaching experience…
As I look back at Tokyo and other places where God has led I see how he has provided…
Sakiko, my wife who was born and raised in Japan, had a been magazine editor and a book publisher in Japan. Part of “her” call to marry me, involved her leaving her country of Japan, which, of course, meant leaving her family, her church, her job, and her language, and her culture….
She was being called to leave Japan for a land unfamiliar and unknown to her…
In response to God’s voice it may mean leaving a place of security, it may involve an actual physical, geographic place we leave or may be about leaving a person or a group of people or a position, a job.
Sometimes the leaving of one place for another is very clear and concrete leaving Tokyo for Vancouver—clear and concrete.
Other times our “leaving” one is more of a metaphor or symbol. E.g, the journey into the unknown, may be a journey inside our souls.
When Abraham left his place of safety Ur… he faced temptations he had never experienced before.
His wife Sarah 65 was attractive (pre-botox)… he sensed powerful men would want to take her sexually and kill him so they could add Sarah to their harem (if they discovered he was her husband).
So when he was in the presence of a certain powerful men, he told Sarah to lie and say she was his sister (a technical half-truth, but a half truth with the intent to deceive which is a lie).
Abraham succumbs to both the temptation to lie and the Abraham’s and to put his on wife body on the line on the, so he could save his own skin… line
Sometimes when leave the places of safety and security… we face pressures temptations that reveal dark-side of our character, part of ourselves that will not willfully trust God…
Perhaps the journey into the unknown that God is calling us to is a journey to explore our darkside and deal with that stuff there…. Perhaps with a help of a psychologist, counselor or friend…so we can experience healing and in some case perhaps break the cycle of brokenness that gets passed on from generation to generation…
There is a man in his early 50’ whose come from a Chinese culture where it’s considered a stigma to counsellor or therapist. But, in the last couple of years person has decided to hire a counselor to explore issues from his childhood that still affect him today… Why? He says so that in the second half of his life he can be used as more effective instrument of God.
It takes courage to leave the safety of ignorance or denial about ourselves, and to confront the unknown places inside us.
He is seeking to make a journey to the unknown regions of his soul…
Moving from the known to the unknown, may involve leaving something concrete a place, a people, a position it may involve an inward journey… The unknown may even involving feeling like we’re not moving, like we’re stuck… and waiting.
Part of the journey with God involves waiting on a promise from God.
God promised that Abraham would have a child, the name Abram means father, his name will later change to Abraham, which means father of many. Abram means daddy, Abraham Big Daddy. God has promised Abram a child.
and if you read Genesis quickly because it doesn’t take long to read a 8 pages (10 chapters), it may seem like God fulfilled his promise to Abraham—quickly.
But do you long it took Abraham to receive the promise of a son?
He received the promise that he would have a child when he was 75 years old.
He waited 25 years. Abraham was 100 and his wife was 90 when they had their child.
The second promise that God gave Abraham and Sarah was the promise that God would give land of Canaan to his family. That promise was never fulfilled in Abraham’s lifetime.
Abraham likely assumed that the promise that his family would receive the promised land in his and Sarah’s lifetime (as we would have assumed if we were in his shoes), but God’s promise of Abraham receiving the land isn’t fulfilled for Abraham in his lifetime…
Part of our journey with God involves waiting for a promise to be fulfilled or a dream to come to pass. Everyone one of us has unfulfilled dreams. Everyone has something we’re longing for…
Being in a place of waiting can be frustrating. That feeling that we’re not moving ahead!
Sometimes God wants to be involved, as someone has said in, “Waiiit training”…
But waiting is part of God’s strategy to make our name, i.e. our character great.
WAITING… WAITING…. WAITING For someone… or something…
John Ortberg… says what God does in us while we’re waiting for is just as important as what we’re waiting for… 2x.
So we develop our trust in him.
Abraham is considered a man of great faith. He made it into the Hall of Faith, but he had his down turns, his failures… he was very human… but he kept him going, as Darrell Johnson has said sometimes, up some times down, but always forward. What kept him going?
In Hebrews 11 we read that Abraham was looking forward to the city whose architect and builder was God.
He kept his eyes on the unseen promises of God.
Where do we get that faith?
The book of Hebrews tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God.
Faith comes as we receive and nurture the words that God gives in Scripture or the words that we sense God has given us directly.
It’s was focus on the call and the word of God that we can keep going.
George MacDonald wrote a book called the Princess and the Goblin. In this book there is a little princess who is 8 years old who has a fairy grandmother, who at one point says to the little princess, you’re in a great deal of danger and the goblins are coming to get you. When the goblins come to get you, I want you to come find me. The little princess says, it is a little hard to find you, grandmother. Here is what I want you to do, says the grandmother, she brings out a ball of thread, gives the Princess a ring and puts the ring on the princesses finger and attaches the thread to the ring and she puts the other end of the thread to her own, i.e. the grandmother’s cabinet, and the fairy grandmother says, when you are in real trouble, take off your ring and put it under pillow and you will be able to feel the thread. Nobody else will able to feel it, but follow the thread to me, the thread may take you directions that seem dangerous and wrong, but whatever you do follow the thread. If you leave the thread you will be lost. If you hold onto the thread, you will be lead to me, I will be at the other end. One time princess was in danger, she puts the ring under her pillow felt the thread but instead of leading her to grandmother, the thread led her out the door, up the mountain to the Goblin’s den, I don’t get this said, this must be some mistake, and she tried to go back and the thread disappeared. She follows the thread and ends up meeting the hero Curdie. She did not even know he was there in the den and was in danger. How did you find me? He asks. I followed the thread. But, he can’t see the thread. How do we get out of here? She says I have to follow the thread. When she tried to go a certain way to escape, he said you cannot get out that way, I tried it and could not escape, but she, she says I have to follow the thread, even when it looks stupid or that we’ll die, I have to follow my thread and then she breaks down and cries, he says alright, alright, already and they follow the thread leads them to her grandmother.
We are the follow the string… the string for us are the words of God in Scripture, the words he has given us to follow him.
Those words and that call will lead us to the unfamiliar, unknown places… sometimes into places of vulnerability, danger, loss and but we’ll meet God in those places…
And the string of God word and call will ultimately lead us to himself.
As it was for Abraham, our great reward and our shield is God himself.
Dietrich Bonhoffer said in the Cost of Discipleship, following this call of Christ is costly grace… costly because it will cost our lives, but it is grace because that it will give us our only true life… 2x
Jesus said, if trust him enough to allow ourselves to lose our live in response to his invitation to follow him, then, we would find them.
-----------------------
Prayer…
Is God leasing to unknown place, outer or inner, wait…
Trust… him enough to follow… Jesus let the security of heaven to come for us…
Pray: like Abraham and Sarah, to help us follow you into the unfamiliar places and through place lead us to you. Amen
posted by Shigematsu at 10:13 PM
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