The Promise

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Sunday to you. It’s good to see you all here together in worship.

I have a few announcements I’d like to mention as we begin our service.

The men’s group will meet tonight at 6:30.

We’ll also be having our monthly deacon meeting tomorrow night. If you’re a deacon, please try to attend.

Don’t forget we’ll be having a very short business meeting after today’s service to approve our Nominating Committee report. I’ll go ahead and offer the closing prayer and benediction for those who wish to leave, then we’ll gather right here afterwards for just a few minutes. If you’re a church member, please try to stay behind for that.

We’re still collecting arts and crafts items this month for Operation Christmas Child. You can leave those in the shoebox room down the hallway. And we’re also taking donations for Stump Elementary’s WRE program. You can leave those in Randal’s Sunday school classroom, or see Della.

We’ve had several people over the past few weeks come down with Covid, though thankfully they’ve all been pretty mild cases — Steve and Ann, Jack and Sharon, and this week Mildred Almarode and Judy Burritt, along with Fred and Betty Taylor. Molly came down with it this week at college too, but she’s doing fine. Please keep them all in your prayers, though, and reach out to see if they need anything.

And finally, Kenny and Linda Almarode are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary (congratulations to both of you). They’ll be celebrating their life together here at the church on October 7 from 4-6, and their church family is invited. Please RSVP to the phone number listed in your bulletin.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we praise You and love You for the gift of Sunday, and for the time to gather together to worship You. We pray for the strength in this hour not to lay aside those things we fear, but to look at them through Your eyes. To see them as they truly are and then to hold up beside them Your love, Your protection, and Your perfect and holy will. Let us remember the promises You have given us, promises that will never be broken, and the trust in You that we are called to have. For it’s in Christ’s name we ask it, Amen.

Sermon

We’ve been spending these past few weeks talking about how important trust is in the life of faith.

Last week we looked at Psalm 23 and talked about why that’s maybe the best chapter in the entire Bible to know who God is and how He takes care of you.

Knowing Him is the most important step to trusting Him — that’s how you trust Him. But today we’re going to talk about why.

Why should you trust God? And especially, why should you trust God when everything inside you says you can’t, when your fears start overcoming your faith?

The second most repeated phrase in the Bible is “Praise the Lord.” You would think something like that might be first. After all, if you boil scripture down to just a few words from creation to the prophets to the birth and death and resurrection of Christ to the end of the age, all of it could be summed up pretty well with “Praise the Lord.”

But that’s still number two. The most repeated phrase in scripture is actually “Fear not.” In fact, “Fear not” occurs about a hundred times more in your Bible than does “Praise the Lord.”

When God calls people, He says, “Fear not.”

When angels appear, they say, “Fear not.”

Often times just before Jesus heals or teaches in the gospels, he says, “Fear not.”

Have you ever wondered why God goes to such great lengths to tell us we shouldn’t be afraid? I think the answer to that one is easy.

I think He tells us “Fear not” so often in the Bible because He understands the power that fear can have over us. Because fear is something we all live with.

Fear of death, fear of our loves ones dying. Fear of sickness and sickness without cure. Fear of growing old and losing our independence. Fear of passing through this life without making a difference in the world at all. If we’re honest, part of every day we live is spent trying to wrangle our fears over something.

God says the secret to overcoming fear is faith. And the essential ingredient of faith — the thing that makes your faith so powerful — is trust. You have to have both. In order to believe that something is true, you have to trust that it’s true.

That’s why the very heart of Christianity is trust in God and in Christ’s resurrection. Living the Christian life means learning to live out that trust every day.

But there’s still all of those fears that nag us. There’s that dread we feel that something awful’s going to happen. When everything starts going wrong in your life and the world starts feeling like it’s spinning out of control, that dread comes in and says, “You might think that God’s there, and you might even think that God loves you, but deep down you just don’t trust that He’s going to make everything okay, do you? You don’t trust that God’s going to see you through.”

So what are you supposed to do when you start feeling that way?

If you listen to a lot of Christians these days, they’ll say, “Well, you just have to take God’s word on faith.”

To some extent that’s true. But you also have to be careful there, because telling yourself that you just have to take God’s word on faith sometimes sounds like you have to believe without good reason, and that comes awfully close to saying that you have to have blind faith. Let’s get this out of the way right off: the faith that God calls you to have is never, in any shape or form, blind faith.

Your trust and faith in God is rooted in absolute and concrete reasons. That’s why most of the time when you see the words “Fear not” in the Bible, the word “for” comes right after.

“Fear not,” God says, or the angels, or Jesus, and then usually right after that they say, “and here’s why you don’t have to be afraid.”

If we believe that God is real, and that He’s all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-good, then what we’re saying that is God is completely trustworthy. So why don’t we trust Him? When God says “Fear not,” He’s not just trying to put your mind at ease, He’s giving you a command. But for most of us, there’s no command that’s harder to obey than that one.

But we have help here, and that help is found in one of the Old Testament’s most powerful but overlooked stories, found in Genesis chapter 15, verses 1-17. Turn there with me now.

And this is God’s word.

This can be a tough bit of scripture to understand because everything seems so strange on the surface. But we need to understand it, because what God does here for Abram here isn’t just almost beyond comprehension, it also shows that a Christian, fear has no place in your life.

First, notice what’s happening in verse one. Abram is still Abram, he’s not Abraham yet. And the Lord comes to him in a vision.

This is not a dream. The Bible talks about visions and dreams as two different things. Dreams come when you’re sleeping, but visions come when you’re awake and when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.

Abram is fully awake — that’s very important. What’s getting ready to take place is really happening.

God’s word comes to him, and what’s the first thing God says in verse 1? “Fear not.” There we go. There is God’s command to Abram, and there is God’s command to us. We are not to fear.

But again, it’s impossible for us to let go of something as powerful as fear unless we have good reason. We cannot have true faith unless we have a reason for that faith. God calls Abraham to live by faith, but it’s not a blind faith. Instead, God gives Abram the reason why he can let go of his fears in verse 1: “Fear not, Abram; I am your shield . . . ”

If you know without question that God is your shield, you shouldn’t be afraid of anything, should you? You’d have absolutely no reason at all to be afraid of anything if you knew beyond all doubt that God was shielding you.

But God’s not done. He doesn’t just say to Abram, “I’m your shield,” and leaves it there. That in itself is amazing. If God’s your shield, that’s all you need. But then God takes it further and says, “your reward shall be very great.”

Now, this is exactly what God will do to you a lot of times. He’ll tell you to not be afraid, and you’ll say “Yes, Lord. I believe you. I will not be afraid.”

And then He’ll say, “You don’t have to fear, because I’m your shield.”

And you’ll say, “I believe you, Lord. I have faith that You are my shield.”

And right after that, God will say something that seems so ridiculous, so impossible, that all the faith and trust you thought you had disappears, and all that doubt and fear rushes back in.

That’s what happens to Abram in verse 2. Fear comes back in. Doubt comes back in. And the reason it does is because Abram doesn’t have a child. God’s promised Abram a son for years, but Abram still doesn’t have one.

That’s why Abram responds in verse 2 by saying, “A great reward, Lord? What reward can you possibly give me that would be better than the son You keep promising but won’t give? Because right now, everything I have won’t go to my family, it’ll go instead to Eliezer of Damascus.”

And who is Eliezer of Damascus? He runs the household. He’s a servant. In modern terms, he’s Abram’s butler.

But God says no, that man won’t be your heir. Then in verse 5, God takes Abram outside the tent. And remember, Abram is not dreaming. The Spirit of God has come upon him. He’s fully awake. This is actually happening.

God takes him outside in verse 5 and says, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be.”

Now comes the big verse, verse 6: “And he” — meaning Abram — “believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”

Abram’s entire life is in verses 6-8 of Genesis chapter 15. I’ll go further than that and say your entire life is in verses 6-8 of Genesis chapter 15. Because here’s what happens.

Years ago, God called Abram out of the land of Ur and said, “Go where I tell you, do what I tell you, trust and have faith in Me, and I will make you a great nation.”

And Abram believed. But God didn’t fulfill that promise right away. Abram had to learn what faith means. He had to learn what trust is. Over and over again in Genesis we see this battle between Abram’s faith and Abram’s fear, each one taking turns ruling his heart.

But here, underneath so many stars that he can’t count them all, Abram finally comes to believe. He believes truly and completely. So much so that in Romans 4, Paul refers to this verse right here, verse 6, as proof of what’s known as the doctrine of free justification.

That’s a fancy phrase, but all it just means is this: It is not what you do that makes you right before God. It’s what you believe.

From all the time before this moment under the starts, Abram was a holy man who always proved his faith by his works. But only under the stars when he truly believed what God told him did God called him a righteous man.

It’s an amazing thing that Abram learns right here. But in the space of a single verse, in just the 20 words that God speaks in verse 7, Abram’s fear returns.

Look at verse 8: “But how will I know, God? How will I know that You’ll do what You say?”

In other words, Abram’s saying in verse 8, “I know You’re the God of all, I know You know everything and I know You love me. But Lord, how can I trust You?”

It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. This is one of the most human questions in the entire Bible. “I hear Your promises, Lord,” Abram says. “But how do I know You’ll keep them?”

We ask God the very same thing. We know who God is. God is truth. God will not break His promises. God does whatever He says He’ll do. But even with all that we know of Him, we still doubt Him. Even with all we know of Him, we still give ourselves over to fear.

That’s Abram. He wants to have faith. Abram wants to trust that God’s going to do everything He promises He’ll do. But Abram’s life keeps getting in the way.

And here’s what’s happening all through Abram’s life, even though he doesn’t realize it yet. He’s always struggling between trust and doubt, but whenever Abram puts his eyes on God, he believes. Whenever Abram takes his eyes off God and puts them on his circumstances, he doubts. So what’s the solution to that, you think? It’s to keep your eyes on God.

But think of verse 8 from God’s perspective. God should blow his top at this point, shouldn’t He? Abram just believed, truly believed, but in the next breath he doubts. How often does He have to promise Abram? How often does God have to say “Fear not, trust Me” before Abram finally gets it?

But this is important: God understands that Abram wants to believe, he’s just struggling. He’s struggling to live by faith and to trust that God’s going to do what he says.

Remember the father in Mark 9 who brings his son to Jesus for healing? Jesus says, “All things are possible for one who believes.” Do you remember what the father says? “I believe; help my unbelief.”

That’s us. That’s Abram. “I believe, help my unbelief. I trust, but I’m scared.”

God says, “I’m going to bless you.”

But we don’t answer, “Thank you.” We answer, “But how can I be sure?”

God has to deal with Abram’s fear. So He deals with it in a way that’s almost unbelievable, in a way that settles Abram’s fears forever. And the best part is that through what God does here, He settles your fears once and for all too.

What’s God do? He says to Abram, “Go kill some animals, and then cut the animals into pieces, and then arrange the pieces in two rows with space so you can walk through them.”

That makes total sense, doesn’t it? Actually no, that makes no sense at all to us. But Abram understands exactly what’s happening here. God’s asking him to perform a covenant ceremony.

In those days, when a great master — like God, for instance — wanted to make a covenant with a lesser person — like Abram — the covenant ceremony was done exactly as verses 9 and 10 lay out.

Animals were killed, the pieces were arranged, and then the servant would take an oath of loyalty to the master by walking between the pieces.

Abram does what God says, and then he waits until God tells him to fulfill the ceremony. But then night begins to fall, and what happens in verse 17 is to many Bible scholars the most shocking words contained in the entire Bible.

We have a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. Now, what is that? It’s called a theophany. It’s God making Himself visible in a way humans could understand.

And in the Old Testament, God most often appeared as some form of fire. The burning bush was one, the pillar of fire was another.

You can read verse 17 a thousand times and still miss what’s happening and what it means. But it’s so important we understand this, because this verse describes exactly why you have every reason to let go of your fear once and for all and live by real, true, genuine faith and trust.

When two people completed a covenant ceremony, they didn’t say, “A covenant is now made between us.” What they said instead was, “A covenant is now cut between us.” Because that’s what the ceremony involved, walking in between those animals cut in half.

Think of it in terms of the rite of circumcision. Two chapters over in Genesis 17, Abram and his household and his descendants are commanded by God to circumcise themselves as a way of marking themselves as a people who have been cut between a covenant with God.

There was both a positive and a negative part of this. The positive meaning of circumcision was as a symbol of being cut off from the evil in the world and set apart as holy before God.

But the negative meaning was that the one being circumcised was pledging to God that if he didn’t do as he promised, then he would be cut off from God’s presence. He would be cast off into outer darkness from the kingdom of God.

That’s how serious the rite of circumcision was. But not even that comes close to the seriousness of what God’s telling Abram to do in verses 9 and 10. A covenant ceremony was the most serious ceremony a person could perform. Because it’s a vow. It’s an outward act from a servant to prove his undying loyalty to his master.

A servant would take a heifer and a goat and a ram and cut them in half. You he’d lay them out in a line, one here and one there, and by walking between them he would say, “I swear my loyalty to you, O Master, and if I don’t keep my promise, if I don’t stay loyal to you in every way, then may I be slaughtered. May I be cut into pieces like these animals.”

Abram knows how he’s struggled over the years with God’s promise of giving him a son. First he believes, then he doubts. Then he believes again. And right now he’s thinking that God’s getting ready to put an end to all this waffling back and forth between faith and fear once and for all.

God’s finally had it with him. He’s going to make Abram go through with this ceremony. He’s going to make Abram swear his faith and trust by making him walk through these butchered animals.

And to Abram’s credit, he obeys. He gets the animals, kills them, divides them, lays them out, and then waits for God to tell him to get walking. And he waits. And waits. Just as he’s waited all these years for a son, right?

And what happens? Dreadful and great darkness comes down in verse 12. It’s the darkness of judgment. And in the midst of the darkness is God Himself.

But God doesn’t say, “Walk through these pieces and swear your love and loyalty to me, Abram my servant.” Instead,in verse 17, God walks through the pieces Himself. God is the one who swears His love and loyalty.

Do you see how amazing verse 17 is? It’s not Abram who has to pledge himself as a servant. God’s doing it for Abram.

God passes through the pieces, and this is what he’s saying to Abram: “If there is one promise to you and your descendants that I fail to keep, Abram, then may I, the Lord your God, be cut in half. May the indivisible God be divided. May the infinite God be destroyed.”

Abraham is shocked, just like every biblical scholar and commentator who’s ever tried to understand Genesis 15 is shocked, because God’s not just saying, “I will bless you.” God is promising to die if He doesn’t bless Abram. He’s promising to be torn to pieces if he doesn’t bless Abram.

On that day, God said to Abram and to all those who would come after that He keeps His promises. God swore it, and He swore by the highest and holiest and most powerful authority possible: God swore it upon Himself.

And as amazing as that is, that isn’t all. That’s just the first shock of watching God move past those pieces. The other comes in the next verse, verse 18: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram … ”

God makes a covenant with Abram, and then he ends the ceremony. That’s it, and that was unheard of.

Because it’s amazing for the master to come and walk through the pieces instead of the servant. And it’s even more amazing that the master in this case is the Lord and Creator of all. But for the lesser of the two there to not even have to make an oath? Abram can’t believe it. God makes the oath and then ends things. He doesn’t make Abram swear to anything.

Abram doesn’t understand how this can be, but he does understand what it means. It means that God is making the promise for both of them. God is taking on both meanings of this covenant ceremony. He was taking on the promise and the curse.

In other words, God is telling Abram, and God is telling you, “Not only will I be torn to pieces if I don’t keep my promise, I’ll be torn to pieces if you don’t keep yours.”

And that’s exactly what happened on the cross, isn’t it? Because try as we might, we can’t keep all of our promises. We’re broken. Sinful. And so God was torn to pieces on the cross, so we wouldn’t be. God endured the punishment we deserve.

One final point I want to make here. We can look at this story and we can even appreciate the untold power of it, we can understand what it means, and still miss the point because we can say, “Well, that’s amazing. But God did that just for Abram and his descendants, not for me.”

Okay, so who are the heirs of this promise God makes to Abram?

In Genesis 17, God gives Abram a new name — Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.” God says, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.”

A multitude of nations. Meaning more than one. The heirs of Abraham won’t be limited to the Jewish nation. That matches with what God tells Abram in Genesis 12, where he says that in Abram “all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

And then we come to Paul, writing in Romans 9, verses 6-8:

“But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but ‘Through Isaac your offspring be named.’ This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.”

Paul’s saying that this promise God made to Abram, this covenant ceremony, wasn’t made to every physical descendant of Abraham. Otherwise Ishmael would have been as blessed as Isaac, and Esau as blessed as Jacob.

It’s not the human family of Abraham who are heirs, Paul says, it’s the spiritual family of Abraham.

It’s the people who don’t necessarily share Abraham’s blood and ancestry, but do share his faith and obedience.

In other words, this room is filled with the descendants of Abraham.

When God walks through those carved animals and vows his vow, when he says may I be torn into pieces of one word I say doesn’t come true, he’s making that vow to you.

If you understand Genesis 15, you understand the heart of what the Bible is all about. If you understand Genesis 15, you realize that fear has no place in your life. God is your shield, and that shield is His promise. That shield is His vow.

“Oh Abraham, Abraham,” he says. And to all of us, “Oh world, Oh world. You can trust me because I will bless you no matter what.

“You can trust me because I will bless you even if it means that my immortality must become mortal.

“You can trust me because I will bless you even if my glory must be drowned in darkness.

“You can trust me because I will bless you even if I have to literally be torn to pieces.”

Does that sound like blind faith to you? No. That is as far from blind faith as it can be. Because our God is completely trustworthy.

People will risk what they own for us. They’ll risk their reputations for us. They’ll even risk their lives for us. But God risks His eternal being. God vows all that He is and all that He has as proof that He keeps his promises, every one.

That’s why you don’t have to be afraid. Not for today. Not for tomorrow. Not for what is happening or for what could happen, not for what people are saying or what the world is looking like.

Every moment when fear takes hold, what does God tell you? “Fear not, I am your shield.”

We look at stories of these heroes of the faith like Abraham and we say, “I wish I could be like them. I wish God could do things through me the way He did through them. I wish my life could be one of miracles and meaning.”

Do you know what those great heroes had but you don’t? Nothing. Not a thing. They were broken, fragile people like you, and God gave them the same promises that He gives you.

The only difference is they leaned on those promises. They used those promises as a shield to fight off their fear. If you do that, God will work in ways you can’t imagine.

All through scripture we see how God’s servants believed in and depended upon God doing the impossible — Moses leading Israel out of Egypt, Joshua bringing the people into the Promised Land.

And they did it by trusting in the God who will not break His promises. The God who took an oath to always be trustworthy. The God who chose to be torn into pieces rather than let you down.

That is the God who lives today, and this God is the God of every child of His, including you. And if you’re struggling with fear right now and need prayer, I’ll invite you up front as we sing our closing hymn. If you’d like to join a church family who will support and love you, I’ll invite you up here as well.

Let’s pray:

Father we are so thankful for so many of your blessings, but today and everyday we are thankful for your patience. Patience in the face of our sin. Patience in the face of our worry. And patience in the face of the many fears that present themselves to us every day. Help us to remember, Father, that fear has no place in the Christian life, because you are our shield. Because you are the God of the unbroken promise. Because your word is holy, and pure, and completely trustworthy. Help us to remember that you are the friend who will never turn away, the Savior who died for us, and the Father that will never allow his children to know the pain of being alone. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Business meeting:

Thank you all for staying behind. I’ll call this business meeting for Sunday, September 24, 2023 to order with prayer:

Father I thank you for the people of this church, Your church, and for the hearts each of them have for You and to see Your kingdom strengthened and grown. Be with us now as we conduct this business, and grant us the blessing of Your mercy and grace. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

You should have a copy of our 2023-24 officers and teams report. If not, you can grab one in the foyer or along the front windows here.

I have two small edits to make to that listing. Lisa Brooks should be listed as part of the personnel team, and Tom Wagner should be part of the counting team.

If you haven’t had the chance to look over those, I’ll give you a few minutes now to do so before we vote.

Is there anyone to make a motion to adopt this teams report in full as listed?

Is there a second?

Any discussion?

Would all those in favor please raise your hands?

Any opposed?

The motion carries.

Is there a motion to close this business meeting?

I’ll close with prayer:

Father thank You for the gift of this time to gather here today in worship of You. We pray that You go with us now and return us safely to our homes, and that in this coming week You help us to be the blessing to others that You are to us. For it’s in Christ’s name we ask it, Amen.