Taking a Leap of Faith

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Genesis chapter 12 this evening. Genesis chapter 12. We don’t often like the concept of a leap of faith.

I think we’re okay with the faith part, but not always the leap part. We’re okay with saying that we have faith in God, and even sometimes I think demonstrating that we have faith in God, as long as it doesn’t cost us too much or put us in too much jeopardy or cause us too much inconvenience. But there are times when God says, you’re to do this, and we don’t see any way forward.

We don’t see any way how it’s going to work. Maybe for that matter, we don’t see how we’re going to survive doing what he’s called us to do. And yet God calls us to do things.

And our job is not to understand how he’s going to work. Our job is not to understand why he tells us to do the things that he tells us to do. Our job is simply to be faithful and to be obedient to what he’s called us to do.

Sort of like with your children. They don’t have to understand all the physics of why they’re not supposed to run into the street. And the thousand pound vehicle and the inertia of it going 40 miles hour and what it would do to a human body.

They don’t have to understand all that. They just have to know mom or dad or grandma or grandpa, whoever said, don’t go in the street. We have to take God at his word.

We have to obey even when we don’t understand. There’s a reason why Hebrews tells us that without faith, it’s impossible to please God. It’s because without that faith that says, you know what?

I don’t see the whole plan. I don’t see the whole picture. And yet I’m going to take God at his word, we can’t always do what he calls us to do.

We can’t always do the things that are pleasing to him unless we take him at his word and believe what he says, even when we don’t understand. We’re going to look briefly tonight at a story of a man in the Old Testament who I think exemplifies this in a way that, well, that I wish I could. Not only in this story, but in so many others from his life.

Now, I’m not saying he was perfect. There are some other decisions that he made that we won’t get into tonight that I think, how did you bring yourself to do that? That was a bad call.

And yet, we see Abraham held up in the New Testament as an example of faith from the old. Not his works, but his faith. He was preaching through Galatians, preaching a series of messages from Galatians a couple years ago.

And one of my messages, I don’t remember everything about it and I wouldn’t expect that anybody, I didn’t preach it here, so don’t feel bad if you’re thinking, I don’t remember this either. I wouldn’t expect that anybody else would remember all of it, but it was called What They Should Have Learned from Abraham. It’s about the point in Galatians where he’s talking about descent from Abraham.

And there were those in the days of the early churches, from Jewish background believers to the Pharisees themselves or non-believers, who put all their eggs in this basket, as far as salvation was concerned, put all their eggs in this one basket of being descended from Abraham, and said, well, we’re going to heaven because we’re descended from Abraham, and we’ve done this, we’ve done the circumcision, we’ve kept the sacrifices and the festivals, and we’ve done this, and we’ve done this, and everything was about their works of the flesh and their descent from Abraham, where if they had really been looking to Abraham for their spiritual example, they would have known that the whole message of the story of Abraham was faith in God. And Paul tells them in the book of Galatians that Abraham was justified by his faith, not by his works.

Well, we’re going to look at one of these stories, one of the earliest stories of Abraham tonight. Starting in chapter 12, we’ll look a little bit back at chapter 11. But after God dispersed the people from the Tower of Babel and confused their languages so that they would obey his previous command, after they came out of Noah’s Ark, he told them to spread out and populate the whole earth.

Well, after a while, it became apparent that they were not going to do that. They wanted to stay clustered in one place. And the Bible, at the beginning of Genesis chapter 11, says that that place was called Babel in the plains of Shinar, which are in the southern part of modern-day Iraq.

they became a very proud group of people because they realized that clustered together like that there was really nothing they couldn’t do. There was very little they couldn’t do. They became very proud in their own abilities, very proud in their civilization and they even came up with the idea of challenging God.

I still don’t understand in its fullness everything that they meant by the idea of building their tower into the heavens and what they had in mind. And it’s a pretty foolish idea. I was taught as a child that they were planning to build a tower so they could go up to heaven and take it over.

I don’t know if that’s really what they believed or if that’s what I was taught by some confused but well-meaning Sunday school teacher. Because I don’t see that in there now and wonder where she got that. But whatever their plans were for challenging God, we know this, they were outside of God’s will because they had not obeyed the last thing that he told them to do.

And so we know the rest of the story. God confused their language when they realized they couldn’t talk to each other. Have you ever had trouble communicating with somebody?

Maybe you’ve been out of this country and you’ve been to another country and you start to realize speaking English louder and slower does not help. Or sometimes in this country there are foreign people and speaking louder and slower does not help. I could tell you stories about going up north and having to have an interpreter help me order from McDonald’s in Chicago because even within the same country, the Chicago people couldn’t understand the Oklahoma accent such as it was.

But we can’t communicate. We get frustrated and eventually they abandon their plans of building this tower. They abandoned their plans of one world civilization, one world order, and they went their separate ways.

Among the groups that stayed in that area were a group of descendants of Noah’s son Shem, who led all down through their lines of descent to Abraham. Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees, we see at the end of chapter 11. As a matter of fact, let’s start at 1131.

And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife. And they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan, and they came unto Haran and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran.

So we know that they were not too far away from what used to be Babel. This was sometime afterwards. But this particular group, I mean, it’s all right that somebody lived there.

It’s just God didn’t want everybody right there. And so this one particular grouping of families stayed in the area. And after a while, God called one group to come out of the rest and go to a land that he would show them.

And we see in chapter 12, verse 1, Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, and to a land that I will show thee. Now, this has puzzled me for a while, but I think I’ve figured out the explanation here. Because I’ve always taught this before, that Abram had no idea where he was going.

And yet we look back at chapter 11, and it says that they were going to Canaan. How do we reconcile those two things? Because I don’t see any place in here before where God has already promised Abram the land of Canaan.

Now to reconcile this, it’s entirely possible that Abram at this point did not know where he was going. didn’t know where he was headed and Moses as he hundreds of years later writes down the book of Genesis as it was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit he would have seen the end of the story and said oh that’s when Abram got up to head to Canaan now did Abram know that at the time no if somebody were writing if somebody were looking back on my life writing about the last three years I don’t know why anybody would want to do that but if they were they could say, and that’s when Jared left Arkansas to go to Lindsay. I didn’t know at the time I was coming to Lindsay.

And yet looking back from this point now, somebody would say, yeah, that’s the point when he left Arkansas to go to Lindsay. Does that make sense? So it says in chapter 11, he got up out of Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.

I don’t think Abram knew at the time that that’s where he was headed. Now what makes me think that is that God tells him, Get up and go somewhere that I’ll show you. He doesn’t say, Get up and go to Canaan.

He says, Get up and go, and I’ll show you where once you’re underway. But the main part is, Get up and go. That would take a major leap of faith.

Now he’s already left his birthplace, and he’s in the city of Haran, which is in what’s now eastern Turkey, I believe, in that area. And now God’s told him to move again. He’s already moved from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, and God says, get up and go to a land that I will show you.

Leave my family. Now, obviously, he’s going to take his wife and his nephew with him. But leave my father, leave my family, leave my home, leave.

. . I’m supposed to leave all of this and walk away, and you’re not even going to tell me yet where I’m going.

That’s pretty much what God expected him to do. And we don’t know. Abram could have molded this over in his mind, should I do this, should I not?

We don’t know the whole story. But he obviously didn’t argue with God too much, or it would have been recorded in there, I would think. What we see is that we don’t know whether he did it immediately, whether he did it the next morning.

But we know at some point without much hesitation, say without much hesitation, without much argument, without much consideration, Abram gets up and goes. Because God told him, get up and go to the land, or get up, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, and go to a land that I will show you. And he says in verse 2, and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing.

You know what, that was a promise to Abraham. Now there’s a lot that Abraham did to disobey God. There’s a lot that his descendants did to disobey God.

But this particular promise is not contingent on what he does, other than get up and go to the land that I will show you. He promises to make them a great nation, and sure enough, he did. I think all of you have been here on Sunday mornings, and within just, we’ve been talking about the book of Exodus, and within just a few centuries of this, they’re in Egypt.

His descendants are in Egypt, and they’re so numerous that one of the world’s earliest great empires feels threatened by these nomadic tribes. I would say God expanded them and made them a great nation. I was listening to the radio on the way down here this evening, and they were referring to Israel as a country that punches above its weight.

I had to stop and think about that because I’m not real familiar with boxing, but I finally figured out that’s what it was. They punch like a country that’s in a heavyweight division when they’re just a scrawny little thing. And yet God has continued to make them a great nation.

I will bless them that bless thee, he says, and curse him that curseth thee. And in thee all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

Now I know that there are some evangelical Christians who will disagree and say, well, this was not a promise for all time. I don’t see an expiration date on it. I could be wrong.

Folks, I could be wrong in my interpretation of this, but I do not see an expiration date on this. I see where it says, I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseeth thee. And I think there are a lot of reasons why God has blessed America over the last two to three hundred years.

And there are a lot of reasons that he’s blessed us in spite of all the things that we’ve done wrong. And I love this country as much as anybody else, but we have to admit we’ve done a lot of things wrong as a nation. And yet there are some things that we’ve done right.

One of those is that we have tried, I say have tried as a nation, to live up to biblical principles. Even our founding fathers, many of whom were reprobates in their personal lives, at least understood that biblical principles were good for our country. And have we always lived up to those ideals?

No, we haven’t. But we as a nation have tried. We have tried to anchor ourselves to the rock of the Bible.

Another thing that I believe has been a reason for God blessing us as a nation has been our relative tolerance and good treatment of the Jewish people. I say relative because there has been persecution. There have been awful things that have been done to the Jewish people in our country over the centuries.

And yet I don’t think in any country of the world other than Israel itself have they been more tolerated or better treated, have been freer, have been freer to exercise their religion. I can’t remember the exact stats, but I’ve read that there are more Jewish people today in New York City than there are in, what was it, that there are more in New York City than in Tel Aviv. Or maybe behind Tel Aviv, New York City is the largest Jewish city in the world.

Now, we didn’t get that way by persecuting them and driving them out of our country. We were among the first to recognize the state of Israel, and up to now we’ve been one of their most solid allies. And I didn’t come here tonight to preach on foreign policy.

But just to let you know, I believe that our relatively good treatment of the nation of Israel and of the Jewish people is one of the reasons that God has continued to bless us in spite of ourselves. And if that assessment is correct, then it flows directly from what we see here in Genesis chapter 12. some 4,000 years ago where God promised, I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee.

And he says, in these shall all families of the earth be blessed. Well, I could think of one fulfillment of that right off the top of my head. And that is that through Abraham’s descendants, through his family, came the one who gave his life for the sins of all of mankind.

I can’t think of any greater blessing to all the families of the earth than the fact that their sins could be forgiven, that they could have a relationship with the God of Israel through one who came from the family of Abraham. And I would say that through that family line, we have all been supremely blessed. And so God made him these promises.

God made him these promises. And Abram had these promises. He heard these promises, but still there’s no guarantee that these promises even would be fulfilled in his lifetime.

Now I maintain God always keeps his promises. God always, always keeps his promises. But there’s no guarantee in here that the promise would be fulfilled in his lifetime.

All Abram has is the promise that God will bless his family, that he will make them a great nation and make their name great and make them a blessing to the nations of the world, and that he would protect them by blessing those who bless them and cursing those who curse them. And with that, God says, get up and go to a land that I will show you. And Abram is left with a choice.

Do I stay here in the security that I’ve built up around myself, such as it is? Or do I abandon that to go, I don’t even know where for this future promise that will come to pass, but I may not even ever see come to pass. And we see something remarkable happen in verse 4, that he decides to take God at his word.

Folks, that’s all faith is. faith isn’t something incredible and super spiritual that only some of us are capable of. Faith is merely taking God at his word and believing that his word is true.

It says in verse 4, So Abram departed, Abram departed as the Lord had spoken unto him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. Now I know they tended to live longer back then as well.

But by the time we got to Abraham, they weren’t living 900 years like they had been several generations back. And we know that they, in the earlier chapters of Genesis, people were 150 some odd years and then having children. Not so here.

He’s 75 and later on we see he’s 100 and his wife is 90. And they’re saying, how is it possible that we would have a child? Just like we would say today.

So my point to you is that Abram is not a young man at this point. And so many times we get to a point in life where we think, well, I’m past my service to God. I’m too old, I’m too young, I’m too this, I’m too that.

Abram was 75 years old. That’s a point in life where most people, just from being around older people most of my life and most of my time in ministry, that’s a point in life that I’ve learned people are retiring, they’re settling down, this is pretty much where I’m going to be the rest of my life, This is what I’m going to be doing. They’re not looking to start new adventures and move off to other countries.

Of course, there are certain exceptions, not obsessions, certain exceptions. But for the most part, we don’t get to the age of 75 and say, I’m going to chuck everything and move off in search of new horizons. He was not a young man, but that didn’t matter because God had told him to go.

And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all their substance that they had gathered and the souls that they had gotten in Haran. And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan and into the land of Canaan they came. Now they got up and went to a land that God would show them.

And God must have led them and directed them where he wanted them to go. Because otherwise they could have just wandered in some general direction. They could have gone back to Shinar.

They could have gone up north into Turkey. They could have gone any number of directions, but they came exactly where they were supposed to go. And so I see in verse 5 there too that because God led them to Canaan, and they went forth to Canaan, and they came into the land of Canaan, that step by step, day by day, as God led them, they made the decision in faith to go where he led.

Now, is Canaan the best piece of property in the whole Middle East? Is it the best piece of property in the world? No.

No would be my guess because we see later on that when Abram gave Lot, his nephew, the first choice of which side of the Jordan River he wanted for himself, Lot looked out and saw that the east side of the Jordan across from Canaan was much better land than he wanted to take it for himself. And Abram was left with the leftovers. I don’t think they wandered there because it was the greenest pasture.

But I think step by step, day by day, as they went on their journey, God led them and they made the conscious decision to take God at his word and go the direction he led them. Abram very definitely took a leap of faith. In walking away from his home, from his family, from his security, from his stability of knowing what each day was going to be, of where he was going to live out his days, and yet because God had spoken, he said the rest of that doesn’t matter.

And I’ll say the same to you. It doesn’t matter where we are in life or what our circumstances are or what we’ve got to put down or what we’ve got to leave behind. When God has spoken, that’s all that matters.

I say that recognizing full well that that’s easy to say up here. Very hard to do out there. That’s why they call it a leap of faith.

It’s hard, and that’s why it’s called a leap of faith. If it was easy, they’d call it Disneyland. But it takes a leap of faith.

It takes being willing to step out of everything that we’ve built for ourselves and take God at His word and follow where He leads. Now, as hard as that is and as scary as that is, I believe there’s something in every Christian, if we are tuned in to God’s word, and if we are communing with Him daily, and we are listening to the following of the Holy Spirit, I believe that as hard as it is, and as much as we might resist at times, there’s something within each believer that desires that for our lives. desires.

You know, sometimes I’ve not taken that leap of faith, but I very desperately wanted to be the kind of person who could. That’s what I’m talking about. So how do we get to the point of being the kind of person like Abram, the kind of believer who’s willing to say, forget all this back here.

As much as I’d like to stay here, God says, go this way. And so that’s what I’m going to do. How do we get there?

Three things, and then we’ll be done tonight. Three things that I see in the life of Abram that if we emulate, if we imitate, they’ll help us to be the kind of people who will take those leaps of faith when God calls. First of all, forget your own comfort.

Forget your own comfort. I’m sure Abram, as I already said, was comfortable there in his setup there in Haran. 75 years old.

He’d worked a lot of years. He’d built up an immense amount of wealth for himself, and he could have just sat back and enjoyed all of it. And yet God stepped in and said, get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house.

That was not a comfortable step. That was not a comfortable step to say, I’m going to pack all this up and we’re going to go. It’s like every time I’ve moved before.

Folks, I hate moving. I know any of you who’ve ever moved probably feel the same way. You see people on TV and they move to a new city and they’re so excited it’s a new chapter.

That is not reality, or at least it’s never been reality for me. From the day they brought me home from the hospital after I was born until the day I got married, I lived in the same house. And it was the same house that my mother grew up in, the same house that my grandparents bought in 1968 when they moved back to Oklahoma.

In other words, we don’t like to go anywhere. And yet I’ve lost count since I’ve been in ministry how many times I’ve moved. And each time I think this is not what I want to do.

This is not what I had planned. My view for life has always been that God would put me in a church where he wanted me to serve for 30 or 40 years, and I’d stay there. And it does happen sometimes.

God does put some people there. But up to now, it’s been about two and a half years has been the longest I’ve been anywhere. And this is not what I set out to do, God.

This is not what I signed up for. I’m not going to Arkansas, and yet there I was. Sometimes he’ll call us to do things that are not comfortable.

It is not comfortable for me to have to pack up, not just physically pack up and move my stuff, but go somewhere else and start over. I’m kidding, I like it wherever I am. And then I don’t want to go anywhere else.

When I say forget your comfort, that’s an example for me. Now, your comfort may not be that exact thing, But if we’re making our decisions based on what we’re going to do for God, or if we’re making our decisions about what we’re going to do for God, based on whether or not the decision is comfortable for me, we’re not stepping out on faith. We’re not following his leading.

We’re following our comfort. Sometimes our comfort and God’s will may move us in the same direction, but that’s not a guarantee. And if we don’t take our comfort out of the equation, we’re not going to be listening to what he tells us to do.

So when you’re faced with a decision and you know God’s telling you to do something, and you’re having to decide now, am I going to be obedient or not? Don’t let your comfort be the first consideration. What’s comfortable for you?

As a matter of fact, if you can work your mind into it, don’t let your comfort be a consideration at all, let alone the first. So if we’re going to take a leap of faith, first of all, we’ve got to forget our own comfort. Second of all, we can’t demand all the details. We cannot demand all the details from God.

Now, sometimes we can pray and ask God, show me what you’re doing here. And sometimes he’ll show us. But he’s under no obligation to explain to us all the details of his decision making before we’re expected to obey.

We’re expected to do what he says because he’s God, because he’s the Lord and we’re the followers. Not a lot of amens on that one, but we know it’s true. We don’t have to know how the story ends.

You know, I’m the kind of person who will go and read the plot of a movie before I’ll watch it. I know some people that just drives them crazy. You know, you tell them the end of the movie, it just ruins it.

I don’t even need to see it now. For me, I enjoy it more when I know what’s going to happen and where we’re headed with this movie. I know I’m probably in the vast minority in the world here.

But that’s the way I prefer life. I prefer when possible to know what’s going to happen all through the day when I get up. We have to throw that idea out the window when it comes to God.

He doesn’t owe us all the details. And if we’re making our obedience contingent on whether or not we know the details, then we’re not being obedient. All Abram was told was get up and go to a land that I will show thee.

He didn’t have all the details, but he went anyway. And third of all, if we’re going to take leaps of faith when God calls, we have to forget our own comfort. We can’t demand all the details.

And third of all, we have to trust God to keep his promises. We have to trust God to keep his promises. Not only when we take the leap, but when we’re in the midst of the leap as well.

I’ve read through verses 2 and 3 and all these promises that God made to Abram. Abram was able to make the decision. Abram was able to make the decision to obey God and to step out on faith and to go wherever.

Because he believed that what God said he would bring to pass, that he would bring to pass. And when we’re called on to do something hard, we’ve got to remember the promises of God and that he always keeps his promises. We’ve got to trust him in that.

That he’s faithful. That he will uphold us. That he will not let us fall.

Sometimes we get in the midst of the leap. And things get dicey. And we’re tempted to turn back.

Folks, the hard part isn’t over. I don’t care what anybody tells you. The hard part isn’t over when you take that first step and you make the decision.

Because I read all throughout the Old Testament, especially as they are leaving Egypt, there’s the tendency to want to turn back. Say, yes, we listened to God, we trusted His promises, and we stepped out on faith, but now that things aren’t going the way we planned them to, maybe we better go back. Don’t forget to trust God.

Don’t forget to trust God. If you get in the midst of sticky situations, if you get in the midst of turbulent circumstances, and you start to feel that and start to feel like I can’t do this anymore, I don’t have the faith to do this, and you feel your trust in God start to waver, list all the things that he’s done and all the ways he’s been faithful in the past. There’s several examples of him doing this in the Bible. One that comes to mind is in the book of Nehemiah.

They just sort of make a list. I can’t remember which chapter, but they go through, I was preaching through the book of Nehemiah about three years ago on Wednesday nights, and I’m preaching on a particular chapter and they get to where they’re talking about how God led Abraham and how God led them out of Egypt and how God did all this. What is with the history lesson here? Surely they all knew this.

And I got a little deeper into it and realized they were as a nation counting their blessings. They were making a list. Maybe they weren’t writing it down, but they were listing the ways that God had been faithful and the ways that God had kept his promises. Sometimes I get to a point where I think I can’t do this anymore.

Whatever it is, I think I can’t do this anymore. It helps me to think of the ways that God has been faithful up to this point. For Abram to have had this kind of faith, I can’t imagine that this was God’s first interaction with him.

And I don’t know what would have happened before then, but I read this and I sense a familiarity between God and Abram. And to be able to step out on these kinds of promises, you’ve got to have faith. You’ve got to have faith and trust that he’s going to keep his promises.

Folks, don’t forget to trust God to keep his promises. Don’t forget to remind yourselves in the midst of the struggles and in the midst of the strife of all the places where he’s been faithful before. if you start to remember all the places where he’s been faithful before you’ll sort of kick yourself into gear and you’ll remember why am I worried about this one?

what I’m in right now seems so huge but I look back at all the big things he’s taken care of for me before suddenly this one doesn’t seem so bad we can’t take leaps of faith and be obedient if we forget to trust God to keep his promises

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