050320 Abraham
Abraham M4 Transforming Worship
On Saturday October 1 of last year baseball fans from around the world were watching the Seattle Mariners play the Texas Rangers. Ichiro led off the third inning. The count was 3 balls, 2 strikes. The Texas pitcher wound up threw and Ichiro hit the ball up the middle for single--his 258th hit of the season, breaking the 84 year old record for hits in a single season.
Ichiro has been described as one of the most consistent hitters of all time.
What are the dynamics make him great?
Ichiro is not very large professional athletic standards, he’s about my height, he’s slender. What is it that makes him a great batter?
Part of what of what makes him great is the way he has trained his eyes to see the ball. Sports commentator have said no one is baseball sees the ball better than Ichiro.
Abraham is a great man of faith; he’s greater in relation to faith, than Ichiro is to baseball.
Abraham occupies the most space in the famous Hall of Faith chapter in Hebrews in 11. In that chapter he is described as a man who is looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. In Romans 4 we are told that Abraham did not waver in unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. At various points, in the Hebrew Scriptures, God will approach someone and say I am blessing you for the sake of my promise to your forefather Abraham, who was obedient and faithful to me.
What are the dynamics that make Abraham a great man of faith?
Today we’re going to look at one of those central dynamics that enables Abraham to become a great person of faith.
We get a window into this dynamic in Genesis, 12, 13 as we see Abraham building altars to the Lord.
Please turn in your Bibles to Genesis 12:6-8.
Abraham has been called out of Ur and Haran with his wife Sarah… and we read
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD , who had appeared to him.
8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.
Then he went to Egypt and was afraid men would kill him to get his wife Sarah and he caves in. He doesn’t trust God to protect him, he doesn’t build altars, he doesn’t call out to God.
But God miraculously delivers him and his wife Sarah from the clutches of pharaoh and he returns to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram calls on the name of the LORD.
In this place we see Abraham following God again and as we see in chapter 13 vs. 18 Abraham, he again builds an altar to the LORD .
According to respected Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke says the key to Abraham’s spiritual triumph is his building of altars. Waltke argues that Abraham’s worship of God and his calling out is what makes him a spiritual giant.
What is that causes Abraham to build these altars and worship God and call out to God?
In both chapter 12 we read of the Lord appearing to Abraham and saying I will give you this land and multiply your offspring. Then we see Abraham builds an altar and worships God. Then in 13 chapter after Abraham allows his nephew Lot to take the best, most fertile land, God comes to Abram, after Lot leaves, and says do a 360 degree turn, I will give you all of the land you see.
And in the next verse we see Abraham builds an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him.
We see that Abraham builds an altar and worships God in response to discerning the presence and the voice of God.
We also see this pattern in the lives of his son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob. God appears to them in some way and they build altars and worship God.
True worship occurs when we discern the presence of God in our lives, in the world and respond to God by acknowledging his greatness and calling out to him.
In order to become worshippers of the living God, we must become people who are able to discern the presence of God…
What makes Ichiro a great batter is his ability to see the ball, what part of what will make us people of greater faith is learn how to perceive the presence of God in our lives and in the world and learning to respond in thanksgiving and worship.
We see in Scripture there are times when God is present, but people haven’t perceived God.
We read about a young boy named Samuel (in 1 Samuel). God calls out him several times, but he has no idea it’s God whose calling out to him and then with the help of his mentor Eli, he’s able recognize God’s voice.
Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a dream in which God appeared to him and Jacob wakes up and says surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it.
There are have times in my own, life when God has spoken to me and I was not aware of it at the time. One Sunday when I was about 20 years old, I attended a worship service here with my sister. I remember the sanctuary was sparsely filled with mostly senior citizens. At that time I was not planning to be a pastor. But as sat here, I had strong impression that one day, I’d be back as senior pastor. I thought, “yeah right, what a strange idea.” Now in looking back, I see that the Holy Spirit was speaking to me.
It’s possible for God to speak to us and for us not be aware of it.
How can we become people who learn to listen to God’s voice?
Exploring the answer to that question could easily be a sermon series in and of itself.
There are many things that could be said, may I list one.
Slowing down. Believe me, I say this as much to me as to anyone here.
A professor I’m acquainted with named Mary-Kate Morse points out a phenomenon described by the scientists as “inattentional blindness.” Scientists have wondered how people can miss seeing something plainly in front of them.
Often after an accident preoccupied with the next activity or a cell phone conversation will say, “I never saw her step out in front of my car” or “I didn’t see the cyclist on the side of the road” or “I never noticed the stop sign.”
“Inattentional blindness” occurs when people are so focused on one task that they miss some obvious event occurring in front of them.
This apparently is actually very common. Scientists taped a video of a team of persons passing a ball between themselves, and at some point in the video another individual dressed in a gorilla costume would walk through the middle of the players. This experiment and others like it found that 25-50% of observers would miss the gorilla. By attending to one group of stimuli, the eyes often do not see other obvious stimuli even in the same field of vision.
Whatever we focus on becomes the center of our reality. If this is the case it is easy to see how we could miss God’s presence in our lives.
Part of what it means to live by faith is learning to see… learning to pay attention to God…
The French mystic Simone Veil has that attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives us access to God.
Part of what enables us to pay attention and see is slowing down…
Not long after moving to a newcity, Pastor John Ortberg called an older wiser mentor to ask for some spiritual counsel. John described the hectic pace of his life and work. John told him about the condition of his heart, as best he could discern it. John asked, “What do need to do, I asked him, to be spiritually healthy?”
Long pause.
"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," he said.
Another long pause.
"Okay, I've written that one down," John said a little impatiently. "That's a good one. Now what else is there?"
Another long pause.
“Nothing else. That’s it.” His mentor said.
John says he’s come to believe hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry destroys souls.
Thomas Merton has said the most a pervasive form of contemporary violence is overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life is most common form, of its innate violence.
The Chinese character for busy is the figure of a heart along side the symbol for destroying. So busy literally means the heart is destroyed.
The rush of our busy lives can numb our hearts so that we unable to discern the presence of God. Many of us must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.
In bygone eras, there were church bells as we see here in famous painting the The Angelus caused people to actually stop and pray.
Part of what it means to slow down is to establish a rhythm for our lives that allows us to create “bells” in our life to slow down enough to focus on God.
I try first thing in morning and before I go to bed to pause and focus of God: as kind of bookends to the day. Part of what I use to do this in addition to Scripture is John Baillie’s little book Diary of Private Prayer. I want to add one more “pause” during the mid-day.
In the Benedictine monasteries, monks are called by bells to pray at various times throughout the day to pause and worship God. Most us are NOT likely to end up in a monastery, but Corinne Ware in her wonderful book Saint Benedict on the Freeway has written how we can incorporate these Benedictine pauses in the rush of our modern everyday lives (Show the book).
As Abraham perceived, God’s presence and God’s voice… what he did he do? He built altars and worshipped the living God and called out to him.
It’s as we slow down and establish the kind of rhythms in our life to enable us to perceive the living God that, like Abraham, we can become people who worship God.
As this happens our heart will grow closer to God and as heart grows closer it will be transformed.
Slowing down and focusing will help us better perceive the presence of God, but that doesn’t necessarily always result into gratitude and worship.
Jesus healed 10 lepers. Out of the 10 only one came back and gave thanks to him. At the risk of sounding cynical, I’ve notice over my life time that there are certain people who will make contact only when they need something and then they get what they want and there’s no acknowledgement or thanks for the help. It’s that they are bad people, they have a need, they surface, but they’re busy and so they dive into their busy lives and they don’t have the time to say thank you.
Expressing gratitude and worship is not something that comes naturally to most of us. It is something that must be learned and cultivated.
When I was growing up one of the things my mom forced us kids to do was to say thank you. Whenever my dad would drive us somewhere, my mom would ask, “What do you say?” Whenever as kids we got a gift from our grandma—whether a toy or cash gift before we could play with the toy or use the money, my mom make us sit down and write out a thank you letter. I remember at the kitchen table as 9 or 10 year resenting the fact that I had to struggle to write out a letter…
As my parents devoted their lives to Christ when I was young person, they encouraged us kids to give the first tenth of the money we got as a way of thanking and honoring God.
I didn’t like being forced to say thank you as child, but as I look back I’m so grateful for my mom inculcating this habit into our lives at a young age.
Last month, when I was in Hawaii teaching at our U.S. partner church, I called my Aunt and Uncle who live in Hawaii. When they found out exactly where we staying, my uncle and aunt, said we want put you up somewhere nicer. I said, where we’re staying is fine for us. I said I’m a missionary, sort of, I can stay anymore, the place is fine. A day or two later, my aunt and uncle told it, we’ve found a place, it’s all paid for, you’d offend by not staying in this place. They ending taking to hotel in Waikiki with big Rainbow painted on the side, called Rainbow Tower in the Hilton Hawaiian Village. As we rolled up, Sakiko said this is hotel our family stayed at during our one vacation here as child. We ended up room near the top of the tower over looking the ocean and Diamond Head mountain…
When I got home, I had a lot of calls to respond, 200 new emails, a lot of catch up. One first things we did was to take time to write my uncle and aunt as we did that a new sense of gratitude and connection to them and God…
As we perceive the work of God and learn to give to thanks to God… we connect more deeply with him.
Some of you may be saying, “If I had been Hawaii, had my aunt and uncle put in best rooms in the Hilton on Waikiki Beach…” I’d be willing thank God to, BUT my life SUCKS!
I really while, it can be more natural to thank God blesses he blessed in overt or forgives our sins, but in terms of spiritual health, it may be more important to learn to thank God in hard times.
When Gordon Smith (who was pastor here while he was teaching at Regent College) was living in the Philippines, he was went through a depressing season he decided he need to thank God anyway. So he cup of coffee walked about the block and named10 things he was thankful to for (one was the cup of coffee), and then he had another cup of coffee and walked around block thanked God ten more times, cup of coffee being one and he did a third time—which became difficult… to find 10 more things that he was thankful but he did it…
The prophet Habbakuk in time of real desolation and doubting God prayed in Habbukuk 3
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD ,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
We want people become people of enduring faith like Abraham, we must slow down enough to see God, and learn to praise him in both good and difficult times…
Knowing that today would be Palm Sunday, this past week flipped over to the New Testament to read about what Jesus did on Palm Sunday… I read about Jesus’ triumphal entry in Jerusalem on a donkey and how Jesus then entered the temple and turned over the money tables in anger and drove out the sellers and buyers and “My father’s house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.” Jesus is very gentle, so when you see him getting really angry it’s a clue to what’s most important to him. There were many things that were really important to Jesus: he was concerned that poor and oppressed would be treated with justice, he was concerned that people would understand the mystery of the Kingdom of God that was being ushered in through his personhood... But the place he gets most angry is in the temple, when people have converted the temple from a being a place of worship to a house a place of commerce…
Jesus is passionate about many things, but perhaps the one thing he is supremely passionate is the worship and honor of his Father…
Paul tells us that as we enter into the presence of the living God that we transformed into his likeness, with an ever increasing glory (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Being transformed into the likeness of God, doesn’t happen so much as we “try through self-reformation or self-help” to become like God…
It is as we slow down enough to see God and consciously enter His presence in worship and adoration that our hearts become like His.
Benediction:
Encourage people to focus on the cross…. Mention Darrell’s class:
On Saturday October 1 of last year baseball fans from around the world were watching the Seattle Mariners play the Texas Rangers. Ichiro led off the third inning. The count was 3 balls, 2 strikes. The Texas pitcher wound up threw and Ichiro hit the ball up the middle for single--his 258th hit of the season, breaking the 84 year old record for hits in a single season.
Ichiro has been described as one of the most consistent hitters of all time.
What are the dynamics make him great?
Ichiro is not very large professional athletic standards, he’s about my height, he’s slender. What is it that makes him a great batter?
Part of what of what makes him great is the way he has trained his eyes to see the ball. Sports commentator have said no one is baseball sees the ball better than Ichiro.
Abraham is a great man of faith; he’s greater in relation to faith, than Ichiro is to baseball.
Abraham occupies the most space in the famous Hall of Faith chapter in Hebrews in 11. In that chapter he is described as a man who is looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. In Romans 4 we are told that Abraham did not waver in unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. At various points, in the Hebrew Scriptures, God will approach someone and say I am blessing you for the sake of my promise to your forefather Abraham, who was obedient and faithful to me.
What are the dynamics that make Abraham a great man of faith?
Today we’re going to look at one of those central dynamics that enables Abraham to become a great person of faith.
We get a window into this dynamic in Genesis, 12, 13 as we see Abraham building altars to the Lord.
Please turn in your Bibles to Genesis 12:6-8.
Abraham has been called out of Ur and Haran with his wife Sarah… and we read
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD , who had appeared to him.
8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.
Then he went to Egypt and was afraid men would kill him to get his wife Sarah and he caves in. He doesn’t trust God to protect him, he doesn’t build altars, he doesn’t call out to God.
But God miraculously delivers him and his wife Sarah from the clutches of pharaoh and he returns to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram calls on the name of the LORD.
In this place we see Abraham following God again and as we see in chapter 13 vs. 18 Abraham, he again builds an altar to the LORD .
According to respected Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke says the key to Abraham’s spiritual triumph is his building of altars. Waltke argues that Abraham’s worship of God and his calling out is what makes him a spiritual giant.
What is that causes Abraham to build these altars and worship God and call out to God?
In both chapter 12 we read of the Lord appearing to Abraham and saying I will give you this land and multiply your offspring. Then we see Abraham builds an altar and worships God. Then in 13 chapter after Abraham allows his nephew Lot to take the best, most fertile land, God comes to Abram, after Lot leaves, and says do a 360 degree turn, I will give you all of the land you see.
And in the next verse we see Abraham builds an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him.
We see that Abraham builds an altar and worships God in response to discerning the presence and the voice of God.
We also see this pattern in the lives of his son and grandson, Isaac and Jacob. God appears to them in some way and they build altars and worship God.
True worship occurs when we discern the presence of God in our lives, in the world and respond to God by acknowledging his greatness and calling out to him.
In order to become worshippers of the living God, we must become people who are able to discern the presence of God…
What makes Ichiro a great batter is his ability to see the ball, what part of what will make us people of greater faith is learn how to perceive the presence of God in our lives and in the world and learning to respond in thanksgiving and worship.
We see in Scripture there are times when God is present, but people haven’t perceived God.
We read about a young boy named Samuel (in 1 Samuel). God calls out him several times, but he has no idea it’s God whose calling out to him and then with the help of his mentor Eli, he’s able recognize God’s voice.
Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a dream in which God appeared to him and Jacob wakes up and says surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it.
There are have times in my own, life when God has spoken to me and I was not aware of it at the time. One Sunday when I was about 20 years old, I attended a worship service here with my sister. I remember the sanctuary was sparsely filled with mostly senior citizens. At that time I was not planning to be a pastor. But as sat here, I had strong impression that one day, I’d be back as senior pastor. I thought, “yeah right, what a strange idea.” Now in looking back, I see that the Holy Spirit was speaking to me.
It’s possible for God to speak to us and for us not be aware of it.
How can we become people who learn to listen to God’s voice?
Exploring the answer to that question could easily be a sermon series in and of itself.
There are many things that could be said, may I list one.
Slowing down. Believe me, I say this as much to me as to anyone here.
A professor I’m acquainted with named Mary-Kate Morse points out a phenomenon described by the scientists as “inattentional blindness.” Scientists have wondered how people can miss seeing something plainly in front of them.
Often after an accident preoccupied with the next activity or a cell phone conversation will say, “I never saw her step out in front of my car” or “I didn’t see the cyclist on the side of the road” or “I never noticed the stop sign.”
“Inattentional blindness” occurs when people are so focused on one task that they miss some obvious event occurring in front of them.
This apparently is actually very common. Scientists taped a video of a team of persons passing a ball between themselves, and at some point in the video another individual dressed in a gorilla costume would walk through the middle of the players. This experiment and others like it found that 25-50% of observers would miss the gorilla. By attending to one group of stimuli, the eyes often do not see other obvious stimuli even in the same field of vision.
Whatever we focus on becomes the center of our reality. If this is the case it is easy to see how we could miss God’s presence in our lives.
Part of what it means to live by faith is learning to see… learning to pay attention to God…
The French mystic Simone Veil has that attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives us access to God.
Part of what enables us to pay attention and see is slowing down…
Not long after moving to a newcity, Pastor John Ortberg called an older wiser mentor to ask for some spiritual counsel. John described the hectic pace of his life and work. John told him about the condition of his heart, as best he could discern it. John asked, “What do need to do, I asked him, to be spiritually healthy?”
Long pause.
"You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," he said.
Another long pause.
"Okay, I've written that one down," John said a little impatiently. "That's a good one. Now what else is there?"
Another long pause.
“Nothing else. That’s it.” His mentor said.
John says he’s come to believe hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry destroys souls.
Thomas Merton has said the most a pervasive form of contemporary violence is overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life is most common form, of its innate violence.
The Chinese character for busy is the figure of a heart along side the symbol for destroying. So busy literally means the heart is destroyed.
The rush of our busy lives can numb our hearts so that we unable to discern the presence of God. Many of us must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.
In bygone eras, there were church bells as we see here in famous painting the The Angelus caused people to actually stop and pray.
Part of what it means to slow down is to establish a rhythm for our lives that allows us to create “bells” in our life to slow down enough to focus on God.
I try first thing in morning and before I go to bed to pause and focus of God: as kind of bookends to the day. Part of what I use to do this in addition to Scripture is John Baillie’s little book Diary of Private Prayer. I want to add one more “pause” during the mid-day.
In the Benedictine monasteries, monks are called by bells to pray at various times throughout the day to pause and worship God. Most us are NOT likely to end up in a monastery, but Corinne Ware in her wonderful book Saint Benedict on the Freeway has written how we can incorporate these Benedictine pauses in the rush of our modern everyday lives (Show the book).
As Abraham perceived, God’s presence and God’s voice… what he did he do? He built altars and worshipped the living God and called out to him.
It’s as we slow down and establish the kind of rhythms in our life to enable us to perceive the living God that, like Abraham, we can become people who worship God.
As this happens our heart will grow closer to God and as heart grows closer it will be transformed.
Slowing down and focusing will help us better perceive the presence of God, but that doesn’t necessarily always result into gratitude and worship.
Jesus healed 10 lepers. Out of the 10 only one came back and gave thanks to him. At the risk of sounding cynical, I’ve notice over my life time that there are certain people who will make contact only when they need something and then they get what they want and there’s no acknowledgement or thanks for the help. It’s that they are bad people, they have a need, they surface, but they’re busy and so they dive into their busy lives and they don’t have the time to say thank you.
Expressing gratitude and worship is not something that comes naturally to most of us. It is something that must be learned and cultivated.
When I was growing up one of the things my mom forced us kids to do was to say thank you. Whenever my dad would drive us somewhere, my mom would ask, “What do you say?” Whenever as kids we got a gift from our grandma—whether a toy or cash gift before we could play with the toy or use the money, my mom make us sit down and write out a thank you letter. I remember at the kitchen table as 9 or 10 year resenting the fact that I had to struggle to write out a letter…
As my parents devoted their lives to Christ when I was young person, they encouraged us kids to give the first tenth of the money we got as a way of thanking and honoring God.
I didn’t like being forced to say thank you as child, but as I look back I’m so grateful for my mom inculcating this habit into our lives at a young age.
Last month, when I was in Hawaii teaching at our U.S. partner church, I called my Aunt and Uncle who live in Hawaii. When they found out exactly where we staying, my uncle and aunt, said we want put you up somewhere nicer. I said, where we’re staying is fine for us. I said I’m a missionary, sort of, I can stay anymore, the place is fine. A day or two later, my aunt and uncle told it, we’ve found a place, it’s all paid for, you’d offend by not staying in this place. They ending taking to hotel in Waikiki with big Rainbow painted on the side, called Rainbow Tower in the Hilton Hawaiian Village. As we rolled up, Sakiko said this is hotel our family stayed at during our one vacation here as child. We ended up room near the top of the tower over looking the ocean and Diamond Head mountain…
When I got home, I had a lot of calls to respond, 200 new emails, a lot of catch up. One first things we did was to take time to write my uncle and aunt as we did that a new sense of gratitude and connection to them and God…
As we perceive the work of God and learn to give to thanks to God… we connect more deeply with him.
Some of you may be saying, “If I had been Hawaii, had my aunt and uncle put in best rooms in the Hilton on Waikiki Beach…” I’d be willing thank God to, BUT my life SUCKS!
I really while, it can be more natural to thank God blesses he blessed in overt or forgives our sins, but in terms of spiritual health, it may be more important to learn to thank God in hard times.
When Gordon Smith (who was pastor here while he was teaching at Regent College) was living in the Philippines, he was went through a depressing season he decided he need to thank God anyway. So he cup of coffee walked about the block and named10 things he was thankful to for (one was the cup of coffee), and then he had another cup of coffee and walked around block thanked God ten more times, cup of coffee being one and he did a third time—which became difficult… to find 10 more things that he was thankful but he did it…
The prophet Habbakuk in time of real desolation and doubting God prayed in Habbukuk 3
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD ,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
We want people become people of enduring faith like Abraham, we must slow down enough to see God, and learn to praise him in both good and difficult times…
Knowing that today would be Palm Sunday, this past week flipped over to the New Testament to read about what Jesus did on Palm Sunday… I read about Jesus’ triumphal entry in Jerusalem on a donkey and how Jesus then entered the temple and turned over the money tables in anger and drove out the sellers and buyers and “My father’s house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.” Jesus is very gentle, so when you see him getting really angry it’s a clue to what’s most important to him. There were many things that were really important to Jesus: he was concerned that poor and oppressed would be treated with justice, he was concerned that people would understand the mystery of the Kingdom of God that was being ushered in through his personhood... But the place he gets most angry is in the temple, when people have converted the temple from a being a place of worship to a house a place of commerce…
Jesus is passionate about many things, but perhaps the one thing he is supremely passionate is the worship and honor of his Father…
Paul tells us that as we enter into the presence of the living God that we transformed into his likeness, with an ever increasing glory (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Being transformed into the likeness of God, doesn’t happen so much as we “try through self-reformation or self-help” to become like God…
It is as we slow down enough to see God and consciously enter His presence in worship and adoration that our hearts become like His.
Benediction:
Encourage people to focus on the cross…. Mention Darrell’s class:
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