Abraham & Sarah
Notes
Transcript
Intro
Intro
We are not those who shrink back from God and are destroyed, but those who have faith and preserve our souls.
So what is faith? What does it look like?
Well it’s not blind hope, i can tell you that much straight up. This si not the soppy “just gotta have faith” of a poorly written movie. This is assurance & confidence of something we are guaranteed, but haven’t received yet.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.
This is assurance, this is conviction. And these are based on tangible realities, namely the promises and proclamations of God.
God has always delivered on his promises - even through death. He is reliable - so now we can rely on him by faith, living by faith. We can have assurance, we can have confidence in things we haven’t received of experienced yet because with God these things come to pass.
Now we’re looking at Stories of that faith fleshed out.
Today we have 3 examples or stories of faith from the life of two people: Abram & Sarai, who would later become Abraham & Sarah.
Abraham’s Journey of Faith
Abraham’s Journey of Faith
From Ur - ancient city in southern Babylon. Now Iraq.
Moved with his dad Terah to Haran. Up the Euphrates river - norther Syria.
When he was 75 God called Abram forth from Haran with these words:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
He and his wife Sarai and the household (including Lot) head south
They lived nomadically with herds of animals and tents, moving around the countryside.
They camped out in Canaan, where all the canaanites lived. Yet God promised the land would one day be his.
Other than a trip to Egypt, Abraham basically spent the rest of his life nomadically camping on the land that didn’t belong to him.
He bought a small plot for a family graveyard, but otherwise he didn’t not get any of the land. He lived as a sojourner in his inheritance.
Yet he was not bitter and disappointed - he was looking forward in hope and faith. And this is what the writer to the hebrews taps into:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.
How many of you would be willing to do the same thing? When we moved to Sale from Queensland it was a bit scary, going to an unknown place. But even then we came here and had a look, an then organised to rent a house and had somewhere to live.
I can’t say we would have been so eager if we had no real idea where we were going nor indeed if we had no specific place to live!
But this is the faith of Abraham - he was called by God and he went without full knowledge of how it was going to work out. His confidence and assurance was in YHWH, not in his own ability to make it work.
Abraham went forth to a foreign land to live as a stranger, yet he was living in his inheritance. And his descendants would live in the same way for 2 more generations - no ownership of what was promised. Living in hope.
This is what it is like for us as Christians as we live in faith. We have been promised a great inheritance - we will inherit eternal life, the Kingdom of Heaven, a new heavens and a new earth that will be ours. We have been promised, yet we have not received it yet!
Generations of Christians have lived and died with the promise of Christ’s return and our receiving a new world, yet we have died in the midst of this world that is our and yet not ours. It is a world at war with God and under the power of the prince of the air - yet we have such faith that it will not always be this way, and that we will receive what was promised through Jesus Christ.
We must take up the faith of aAraham who...
For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.
The Writer to the Hebrews does some theological interpretation for us - Abraham was not trusting in earthly mechanisms to bring about the promise, instead he was looking to God to deliver.
As we go out into this world you should seek to make it a better place - you should love your neighbour as yourself and seek justice and peace. You should build homes and settle down, you should build businesses and schools and charities. You should seek legislative and political gains, you should in-so-far as it relies on you seek heaven on earth. But you must never forget that this is not the eternal state, this place is not our hope. We haven’t received the fullness of our inheritance yet.
We long for the day that baby-murder is once again outlawed. But even if God were to bless us with that reality tomorrow, it would not mean that we have arrived. Our hope is not in this world, this life.
We’re are looking to the New Jerusalem, a city that has deep and everlasting foundations, a city that will come to earth, a city whose designer and builder is God.
Sarah’s Child of Faith
Sarah’s Child of Faith
But Abraham was not alone. He had a wonderful wife who was also an example of faith.
Sarah was barren. She was infertile.
This is an experience that many couples know. Though there are advances in human health and medicine, even still this is a pain well known. While the monthly cycle continues there still remains some glimmer of hope, however small, yet one day that comes to an end.
Sarah was old enough that any hope of a change on that front was lost. Sarah was past menopause and having a child was now a distant dream.
Yet,
God promised that Abraham would be a great nation, that his descendants would be innumerable, yet he and his wife could not have even one child.
Yet God promised.
Sarah did try to take matters into her own hands ans convinced Abraham to take her servant as a second wife so that Sarah might have children vicariously.
That was a relational disaster, unsurprisingly. Surrogacy has always been a bad idea.
Yet God would still deliver on his promise. He said that it would be through Sarah that the promise would be fulfilled.
Now even though Sarah struggled to believe this, she had faith that it would come to pass somehow, some way. Not a blind faith, but a faith based on the promises of God.
It says it right here:
By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised.
She considered him faithful who had promised. God is faithful! His promises come true!
Despite the odds, despite the pain and suffering she endured, despite nature, God delivered and he faith was made concrete.
Sarah trusted God's word and in that she received blessing, and received what was promised.
She and Abraham were as good as dead they were that old, yet the promise was fulfilled:
Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.
The crazy impossible promises of God were realised through faith!
Some of the things God promises are unbelievable, yet he who promises is faithful!
It may seem wild and crazy that God promises to rescue you and raise you from the dead, yet he will follow through.
Abraham’s Sacrifice of Faith
Abraham’s Sacrifice of Faith
Despite the great blessing that the child Isaac was to Abraham and Sarah, they only really had a foretast of the fulness of the promise.
Great nation
Bless all the peoples of the world
They died having not inherited the land, or had lots and lots of children.
Yet, they could see the promise and longed for it’s fulfillment:
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.
The greeted the promise from afar - Abraham would inherit the land, but he himself has not experienced the fulness of that yet.
Instead he was a sojurner - a traveller.
He was not attached to where he had come from, instead he was looking ahead. He could have gone “home” if he wanted to:
If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
They’re looking for something better. yes the land, but something even more.
And we get a tast of this something more when Abraham offers up Isaac, even though God promised to use Isaac for the blessing, he asked for Isaac as a sacrifcie.
Abraham then had such faith that he trusted that God would even rais him up from the dead.
By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.
resurrection from death - yet we have not received it yet!
So What?
So What?
