Trust in Action

Last week, we began a series we are calling “The Faithfulness of God and Flawed People”

For what it’s worth, it rolls off the tongue easier if you reverse the two, but we worded it this way on purpose.

As we walk through Genesis 12-50, we are going to see plenty of flawed people. We are going to learn from their failures and their successes, but through it all, I want us to keep our focus on the faithfulness of God.

As we began in Genesis 12 last week, we saw that God was faithful to send a man named Abram to a land he would one day give to his descendants.

Abram started out well, going where God told him to go and worshiping God as he went.

However, by the end of the chapter, Abram’s flaws had already come to the surface.

He had gone to Egypt and, out of fear for his life, lied about his relationship to his wife.

While God was faithful to keep working in Abram and the circumstances around him, we saw that his sin in Egypt may have laid the groundwork for some of his later struggles and sins.

So, to borrow a line from old TV shows, when we last saw our hero, we saw that he wasn’t actually the hero of the story—we needed someone greater as our hero.

Abram was still in Egypt and was recovering from his failure.

We want to pick his story back up, and we are going to cover two different episodes from his life this morning, so go ahead and open your Bible up to Genesis 13.

Our goal today is to cover both chapters 13 and 14, so we are going to have to skip around a good bit.

There is one main theme that I want to highlight through both of these episodes. In each one, Abram was faced with a choice. He could either do the thing that the culture would tell him was right, or he could trust in the faithfulness of God.

While he makes a number of mistakes along the way, in both these instances, Abram puts his trust in God’s faithfulness into action.

I want to challenge us to learn from Abram’s example this morning so that when you and I face a difficult decision, we allow the Lord to guide us, even if that means we do things differently than what our culture would expect.

I know that’s vague, so let’s see if it becomes clearer as we go along.

Before we can get to the ways Abram trusted God’s faithfulness, we need to look at one other piece of Abram’s journey.

Pick up in 13:1-4.

Do not miss this critical step.

Remember, when we left Abram in Egypt, he had gotten off track and was trusting himself and his plans instead of God and his design.

What did he do here?

Abram didn’t go straight from Egypt to making these decisions.

Before he could be ready to trust God instead of doing what was expected, Abram had to get back on track in his personal walk with the Lord.

He needed to call on the Lord for forgiveness, for grace, and for wisdom.

Had he not done that, his heart would not have been prepared to see God work the way God was going to work, and he would have continued to make bad choices.

Instead, he was calling on the Lord, seeking to honor him, and that allowed him to see God work like he did.

Maybe for you, this is where you need to start. You need to get back on track and begin calling on the Lord again.

You know you have been saved, but you haven’t been living like it. You’ve been doing what you wanted instead of seeking God, you’ve been trusting in your ability to figure things out and make them work, and like Abram, you may have made a mess of things.

When I say that, though, I want to be clear. Most of us think of someone who has so gotten off track that it is obvious like it was for Abram.

However, can I challenge those who may think they are okay?

I can’t help but think about what Jesus would later write to the church at Ephesus.

They were hard-working people who knew and defended the truth.

Yet this is what Jesus said to them:

Revelation 2:4–5 CSB

But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. Otherwise, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

The lampstand there represents the church, and he is saying that if they don’t get back on track, he will no longer allow the church to be the light it is supposed to be.

For those in this room who know and love Christ, we need to ask ourselves if we have lost the love we once had.

If so, like Abram, we need to go back and begin calling on his name again.

When Abram returned to his relationship with God, he was in a place for God to guide his decisions.

That gave him the wisdom he needed to put his trust in God in action in two scenarios.

First, we see that we can...

1) Trust God instead of focusing on my rights.

Continuing on in chapter 13, we see Abram and Lot at a decision point.

Lot was Abram’s nephew, and it appears Abram essentially adopted Lot after his father died.

They have been moving together this entire time as one family unit.

Now, however, their flocks and possessions have grown to the point where they couldn’t continue staying together.

They each needed more space for their flocks and herds to graze, and it was causing problems between them.

This town wasn’t big enough for the both of them, if you will, and they needed to separate.

Here’s what would have been expected culturally: Abram was the patriarch of the family. That meant he was the respected one and had the right to do whatever he wanted.

Abram would have been well within his rights to say, “Lot, I love you, but you have to go. I am going to set up my flocks here, so you have to go find something else.”

There is nothing in the text that indicates there would have been anything wrong in doing that.

Instead, he allows Lot his pick of the land.

In doing so, he chooses to defer his own rights and what would be culturally expected and instead pursue peace with Lot.

This isn’t saying that Christians should not have boundaries or can never stand up for themselves.

However, I believe God is challenging us to slow down and see whether or not he would cause us to lay down our rights at times for the good of his kingdom.

Several weeks ago, we looked at this passage on Wednesday night:

Philippians 2:3–4 CSB

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.

That’s exactly what Abram is doing here. Instead of resting in his rights and doing what would be expected, he defers and seeks peace.

In part of the verses we skipped over, there is a note about the other nations living in the land.

Commentator Warren Wiersbe points out that the other nations were watching how Abram handled this, because he was claiming to follow the one true God.

When you and I are willing to trust God’s faithfulness instead of doing what our culture expects, it is a powerful testimony to the fact that our God is really worth trusting.

When Abram gives Lot the choice, he makes a bad one.

Lot chooses the land that looked the best and was closest to cities that could make him even richer. As we will see, though, that wickedness cost him dearly.

Lot leaves, and we see clearly God’s hand in it, because he chooses the land that wasn’t what God had promised to Abram.

In fact, after Lot leaves, God reaffirms that promise to Abram.

Read verses 14-17.

Here, God fleshes out some of the major components of the promise he has been revealing to Abram.

He knew God was going to make him into a great nation that would bless the world, and he knew it was going to involve the land.

Now, God makes it clear that all this land will belong to his descendants, and that his offspring will be innumerable.

Abram had returned to the Lord and called on him. That put him in the right place to allow God to lead, which God did.

God put Abram right where he needed to be, and his promise kept moving forward.

Are you willing to lay down your rights when God leads? do you really believe he is faithful and he will make sure you have everything you need?

It will look different than land or offspring for us, but God is always faithful to provide what we need.

Abram finds that out again in the next account we are looking at this morning.

As we get into chapter 14, we see that we can...

2) Trust God instead of getting rich.

Let’s summarize what happens next.

Lot moves near the city of Sodom, and a war breaks out between several kings who were over cities in that region.

In the fray, Lot and his stuff get carried away as spoils of war when the king of Sodom is defeated.

Abram finds out about it and take 318 men with him.

Together, they defeat the opposing armies and rescue Lot, his stuff, and the other prisoners of war and items plundered from Sodom.

Pick up in verse 17-24.

There is a lot going on here.

In the middle of discussing the King of Sodom, we are introduced to a king named Melchizedek.

Although he is briefly mentioned here, he is an incredibly important figure, so we are going to swing back around to him in just a minute.

First, though, let’s look at what happens with the King of Sodom.

Remember, he had been defeated in battle and his people and their possessions had been carried off.

Abram risked himself and his men to go get all that back.

The king of Sodom tells Abram to give him back the people but keep all the spoils for himself.

Just like in our first example, that would be what is expected.

After all, we have a saying that to the victor go the spoils, right?

This is literally that. The king is simply asking for the people back, recognizing full well that the rest belongs to Abram if he wants it.

Look back at verse 22, though, for Abram’s response.

He took nothing for himself beyond what his men had eaten. If the other men who went with him wanted their share, it was up to them.

Did you see why, though? Because he didn’t want the wicked king of Sodom to ever say that he had been the one to make Abram rich.

There are other occasions when God’s people take the spoils of war from godless kings.

However, in this instance, Abram realized that following the expected pattern would be a snare that would cause issues later and dishonor God.

His security was in God’s faithfulness, and he wasn’t willing to compromise his testimony to make more money.

Abram knew that the king of Sodom was incredibly wicked and he didn’t want to give him any reason to be able to take credit for what God did.

Abram put his trust in action and didn’t take the spoils from the king.

In fact, he actually had already gone further than that.

He had a brief but significant encounter with a man named Melchizedek, who was the king of Salem.

Many commentators believe this meant he was the king of Jerusalem, which would be the city where God would one day build his temple and where Abram’s greatest descendant would be crucified to bear the sins of the world.

We don’t know where he came from or how he knew about the One true God, but the text tells us that Melchizedek was both a king and a priest of God Most High.

He came out to Abram and blessed him and blessed the God who had worked so mightily in and through him.

Abram responded by giving a freewill offering of one tenth of everything.

As a quick note, this is the first instance in Scripture of someone giving an offering of a tenth, or a tithe.

While the Law God gave through Moses would prescribe several offerings that were a tenth of this or that, this is an example of someone giving a tenth before the Law is given.

That is part of why we still believe that a great place to start in giving is to give the first tenth of your income to the Lord.

It isn’t because the church needs it, although that is how we are able to do ministry.

It is because we give to demonstrate our trust in the Lord instead of in our possessions.

As Abram put his trust into action, he wisely kept his word with the Lord and trusted in his faithfulness.

He didn’t take; instead, he gave to one who was a priest and king.

Now, I mentioned to you that this priest and king is someone special.

We find him mentioned briefly here and a quick reference to him in Psalm 110, but the writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament spends a lot of time talking about how significant a figure he is.

Melchizedek points us beyond this passage to Abram’s greatest descendant, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Melchizedek is what as referred to as a “type” of Christ.

That doesn’t mean he is one of a variety of Christs. Instead, “types” are Old Testament people who model for us attributes we see in their fullest in Jesus.

In these brief passages, Melchizedek models several attributes that would mark Jesus.

Moses would not have been fully aware of this, but the writer of Hebrews was able to trace God’s hand in orchestrating all this.

Here are a handful of connections, some of which are a little tricky if you aren’t familiar with the Bible:

Melchizedek was a priest, even though he wasn’t a descendant of Levi like the priests God would set up through the Law. Although Jesus was a descendant of Abraham, he wasn’t a Levite either, and yet he is our great high priest who is of the order of Melchizedek, not Levi.

His name means “King of Righteousness,” and he was the king of “Salem,” which means peace. Jesus is the ultimate king of righteousness and our prince of peace.

When he comes to bless Abram, Melchizedek brings bread and wine. These terms would have signified the king’s spread at his table, but they also point to the night before Jesus’s death where he took the bread and the wine and made a new covenant by using them as symbols for his body and blood that were broken and shed on our behalf.

Melchizedek wasn’t Jesus, but you see Abram giving him an offering as a priest of God Most High.

In that, we are reminded of what we said last week: we need someone greater than Abram.

As incredible as he was, and as well as he did in trusting God in these instances, he was far from perfect and knew it.

He recognized and honored God, even giving an offering to one who points us to his best descendant, Jesus.

Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for our sins who took our punishment upon himself, died in our place, and rose from the dead outside the very area Melchizedek once presided over.

He was a priest who didn’t take an goat or lamb and place it on an altar. Rather, he is the priest who put himself on the altar for us.

When we come back to where we should be, our hearts can’t help but be filled with trust for the God who would be so faithful to us in spite of ourselves.

What decision are you facing where you are about to do the expected thing, but you know it isn’t the right thing?

Put your trust in action and let God work it out.