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| Sermon Date: |
February 3, 2008
(Redeemer, Sanford) |
| Sermon Text: |
Genesis 12:1-3; 15:1-21 |
| Church Calendar: |
TKC Week 5 |
| Delivered By: |
Rev. W.M. Arp |
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"Believing in the Face of Unbelievable Circumstances"
Greetings from your brothers and sisters in Christ at
Oviedo and Chuluota!
It’s a joy and a privilege to be with you this morning as
Pastor Roberts takes a turn in the pulpit at Oviedo. We’re
not quite a year into our “dating” relationship as I
mentioned in the state of the church presentation a couple
weeks ago and I am very excited about our work together as
the people of God living in the story of God in this place
and time – that’s what I want to talk with you more about
this morning through the account of the covenant promise
of God and the faith of Abraham.
Before I begin though I wanted also to share with you that
this past week I was able to spend some time with the President
of our Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Jerry Kieschnick. I
took the opportunity to talk with him about what we are trying
to do together here at Sanford. He was very interested and
enthused. I hope in the next several months to be able to
share with the leadership of Synod the work you’ve been doing
with the very real possibility that it may be of use elsewhere
in our church. These are exciting times to be about the work
of God’s coming kingdom!
I’ve entitled today’s episode of Thy Kingdom Come – “Believing
in the Face of Unbelievable Circumstances.” With today’s story
we step over from what might be called the “pre-historic”
portion of God’s story to the time of Abraham. By that I
simply mean that the events we have witnessed so far – the
Creation, the Fall, the Flood cannot be dated precisely, but
when we get to Abraham, we have entered the time frame of
about 2800 years before the birth of Christ. With Abraham
the story of God’s salvation starts to take on much greater detail.
I encourage you this week to take up your Bibles and page
through Genesis 12-24. Refresh your memory or maybe witness
for the first time God at work as he calls Abraham at the age
of 75 in chapter 12 and sets him off on a hundred year journey
of faith.
The key to this whole section is in our reading for today:
Genesis 15:6. “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to
him as righteousness.” It’s one of those verses you should
highlight or underline and put an exclamation point next to
it in the margin. “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited
it to him as righteousness.”
Abraham’s faith begins, if you will, at 12:1 with a Word from God –
a call to action with a promise attached to it. First the call
to action: “Leave your country … and go to the land I will show
you.” Then the promise: “I will make you a great nation…I will
bless you…and you will be a blessing…and all the peoples on
earth will be blessed through you.”
Did you hear it? Very subtly, very quietly, the promise of
Jesus is whispered in the ear – “all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” Faith, my friends, begins with
the Word of God speaking the promise of a Savior and calling
us to action – to live by faith in the face of our own
unbelievable circumstances.
It is the power of God’s Word that is the most remarkable
thing here. You remember that it was by His Word that God
created the heavens and earth. God spoke, “Let there be…”
and there was. And now that same Word creates in the heart,
the mind, the body, the soul of Abraham a life long passion
to go wherever God commands.
“Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household
and go.” Can you translate that into your own life? It is I
believe a 1st Commandment call. What is the 1st Commandment?
“You shall have no other gods.” And what does this mean?
Martin Luther taught us to say in the Small Catechism, “We
should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.”
Faith begins with God’s call to put Him first in our lives.
“Leave your country, your people, your father’s household,”
we might say, “your comfort zone, your security, whatever
it is that you cling to as your source of strength and
confidence.” Who knows what that might be for you? For me
it is the lure of the safety of what is familiar and relatively
risk free. It would be so very much easier to not push so
hard as a pastor – St. Luke’s is big enough, there’s more
than enough work to do without dreaming up crazy schemes
of becoming a multi-site church and expanding Christian
education to include a high school.
Faith ushers us into a whole new world – it is a different
way of thinking and seeing everything that is going on in
our world and in our own lives. When faith takes hold of us –
God’s Word wraps His strong, tender, loving, motivating
fingers around our hearts and gently begins to squeeze
and there comes a deep, burning desire to act. And that
action my friends, is not necessarily anything grand or
glorious by any human standard, although it may be that
as well.
But I tell you it is more often than not a very subtle shift
in doing the very same things that you’ve been doing – going
to school, or work, caring for your family, serving your
neighbors, volunteering, praying, listening, encouraging –
all of it, your whole life, lived with a bold confidence
that there is a living God whom you trust to know what he
is doing, using the seemingly insignificant details of your
life to do what He promised to Abraham – to be a blessing
through which all the peoples on earth will be blessed!
What an astounding thought that is! Somehow, by faith, the
mundane, ho-hum, everyday routine of your life is in the hands
of a merciful and mighty God who is working out the salvation
of the world! You are every bit as much a part of the story
as Abraham!
But look what happens. Abraham had his ups and downs between
chapters 12 and 15 and all the way to his death in chapter 24.
Do you know how much time passes from Abraham’s first encounter
with God in chapter 12 to the next conversation with Him in
chapter 15? It’s been twenty-five years! This great, mighty,
and merciful God seems to be very slow in keeping His promises.
My, my, my, how we struggle with time. Baptized as an infant,
or maybe as a young person, or as an adult. The Word of the
Lord comes to us in the water and the power of God creates
new life in us, the life of faith, the eyes and the ears to
live with passion in full awareness of God’s plan of salvation
at work in and through us. But we crave the miraculous, the
visible, observable movement of God to prove to ourselves
and to others that we’re not crazy or stupid for being a
believer, for coming to church, for trusting and obeying
even when things go terribly wrong in our lives.
Abraham is now 100 years old, but he and Sarah are still
childless. Faith is believing in the face of unbelievable
circumstances. According the custom of the times, Abraham’s
entire estate will be passed to the chief servant in his
household since there are no children to inherit it. And
it looks like the promise of being a blessing to all the
peoples on earth was an empty promise.
Once again we discover that God’s ways are not our ways.
To demonstrate that every single part of the promise is
the work of God and not of man God waited until it was
impossible for Abraham to take any credit for what happens
next. He takes him outside. He lifts up his eyes toward
heaven. He asks him to count the stars. And then gives
him an unbelievable restatement of the promise, “so
shall your offspring be!”
And once again the power of God’s Word fans the smoldering
fire of Abraham’s faith back into a flame. Abraham believed
the Lord, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Then
Abraham does what all of us have done or wanted to do – he
asks the question – v. 8 – “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know!”
Yes, Lord, how can we know that by faith you consider us to
be righteous, holy, and sinless in your sight in spite of
our fears and our doubts and even our times of wandering
and disobedience?
And so, God opens his servant Abraham’s eyes to a glimpse of
the future. In that day when two parties made an agreement with
each other – a covenant – a contract if you will – the agreement
was “signed and sealed” by means of the ritual you hear described
in the text. The animals were killed and torn in two and laid
either side of a path. Then each party would walk between the
torn animals as if to say, “may this same thing happen to me
if I fail to keep my part of this promise.”
Amazingly God uses this image to reassure Abraham. At verse 17
Abraham witnesses God’s presence in form of smoke and a blazing
fire – an image of God’s presence that will be repeated over and
over again – the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke that led Abraham’s
descendants out of slavery in Egypt – that frightened them at Mt.
Sinai when God gave them the 10 Commandments – that occupied first
the Tent of worship they called the Tabernacle and then the Temple
in Jerusalem – and all the way into the New Testament with the
tongues of fire at Pentecost!
God makes His presence known to Abraham, but note carefully that
only God passes between the torn pieces of the animals. God’s
promise is all grace, undeserved, with no strings attached. God
passes through death and destruction to sign and seal the promise
with Abraham – saying in effect “may this happen to Me if I fail
to keep my promise to you.”
How can we know that by faith God considers us to be righteous,
holy, and sinless in His sight in spite of our fears and our
doubts and even our times of wandering and disobedience?
Can you sense it in the image of the torn animals? It is only a
shadow faint and indistinct at first. Think about that for a
minute. As the son rises it casts a shadow that is very long.
You can barely tell where it begins. But as the sun rises
and you move closer to object that is casting the shadow
the more distinct and clear it becomes. This is the shadow
of the cross that you are seeing as God passes through the
torn pieces of the animals.
It is in fact what God will finally endure to make the promise
to Abraham and to us a reality. He is torn in two in the person
of Jesus on the cross. Jesus is the descendant the offspring of
Abraham promised to Adam and Eve in the Garden.
God gives us a glimpse into the past to sign and seal His
promise that He is still at work. By faith your life is woven
into this incredible story that God's plan all along was to
take on human flesh and blood to restore us to righteousness,
that is, to a right relationship with Him, like Adam and Eve
had before they rebelled, when God would come and walk with
them in the cool of the day and they would eagerly share their
lives with Him. By His life and death God fulfills the promise
of blessing all peoples on earth through Abraham!
But the road is long. We have much to learn about living by
faith. God showed Abraham a mere 400 years of the future of
his family. The way seems dark and dangerous. But God is
working the work of faith in us. The cross and empty tomb of
Jesus are the light, the beacon that keeps us from throwing
up our hands in despair. Forgiveness and eternal life are the
promise of faith that keeps us going one more day.
The apostle Peter put it best: (2 Peter 3:9) The Lord is
not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand
slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish,
but everyone to come to repentance.
Faith cannot be learned by copying Abraham, not by imitating
others, not by mastering some basic “faith-skills.” Uniquely
created by God we are all originals when we live by faith. And
by that faith, given and renewed again this very day, you are
called to believe in the face of unbelievable circumstances
that you are an integral part of God’s work of salvation.
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