The Story: God Builds A Nation
Chapter 2, pp. 13-28
April 14, 2013
Regards to Jeff Walling, Providence Road Church of Christ, Charlotte, NC
God builds a new nation to reveal Himself to the world and His plan to get us back.
Intro: Last week we left off after the flood. Through the story of Adam and Eve and continuing with the story of their descendants, and even into the life of Noah, we see a cycle. God loves us. He has a GREAT plan. He says, “I’ve got a plan, trust Me.” But we’d rather do it “our way.” We mess up His great plan. God loves humanity, and humanity continues to rebel.
All of the people lived in one area and spoke one language. They rejected God’s original command to increase in number, to fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28). Together, the people built a tower of Babel (Genesis 11). God confused their language and the nations began to scatter across the earth. God chose to create a new nation with foundations right here.
On the map in the front cover of your copy of “The Story,” find the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Follow them down and to the right and find Ur. Ur is where God found the next step in His Master Plan, the next development in His Great Story. There, a seventy-five-year-old man named Abram and his sixty-five-year-old wife Sarai—an old, childless couple—were chosen by God to be the foundation of a new nation. God’s promises. Genesis 12:1-3, page 13.
“Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Quite a promise to the old man, isn’t it? A big bunch of blessings for him.
The Abrams are not the most likely candidates. If we were going to choose a starting point for a new nation, we wouldn’t have picked them, would we? We’d pick a young, strong, healthy couple, a new husband and wife who are deeply in love, full of energy,full of hormones, tanned and tough. Why would He choose them? To make sure that everyone could see and would know that God is the source of everything that happens. He does this over and over again all the way through His Story. Moses? David? Jonah? Mary? Peter? Paul? God uses the unlikely to accomplish the unthinkable.
Faith of Abraham. Here’s how we get it.
1)See the Dream.
a)God begins with a dream.
i)God will make the nation of Abram great.
ii)God will make Abram’s name great.
iii)God will bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him.
iv)God will bless all the nations of the world through him and his people. God will use this new nation to reveal His heart and His plan to win us back.
b) “Can you imagine this?” Could Abram imagine a zillion descendants? Dreams are a big deal to God and to us. But they get beat down in us, don’t they? “Be realistic! Get your head out of the clouds!” The voice we should listen to is God’s, “Imagine this with me, now be faithful.” Can you dream of something different?
2)Obey the Call.
a)Three important words on page 13. “So Abram went.” Circle those words. First beg verb of Abraham’s journey of faith. Abraham’s answer wasn’t, “You want to do something great with me? Awesome. Let me know how it works out.” God shared the dream, he called Abraham to follow, and Abraham obeyed the call of God.
b)Was there a Nike swoosh on Abraham’s sandals? “Just do it.” You’ll find that same spirit of obedience on page 14, too. “Abraham, when called, obeyed and went.” The middle of the page, there it is again, “So Abram went.” When God called Abraham to go, Abraham obeyed and went. He followed God’s vision and dream.
c)What do you dream about? A better marriage? A better family? A better relationship with God? A healthier you? A dream is not enough. Catching the vision is not enough. When God gives the dream, our part is to pack up, to step out, and to obey His call.
d). “I’ll follow You, God, wherever I want to go.” In my senior year of college, there were lots of options open to me for ministry. I had some dreams. Europe was high on the list. “I’ll go wherever you want me to go, just make it clear.” Eight years later “I’ll go wherever you want me to go (I’m pretty sure it isn’t here anymore), just make it clear.” Dreamed about Arizona, but the plan was Utah two years later. The wise prayer is, “God, I’ll go wherever You want me to go,” and the wise move is to follow the plan.
e)Obeying the call means trusting the One who is leading you.
3)Trust the Enabler.
a)Things don’t happen immediately. They moved almost 800 miles once they got the dream and the call. Once they arrived, a famine struck and then the couple followed God to Egypt for a while before returning to the land promised them and their descendants. More than 20 years later, Abraham and Sarah are still waiting for the son promised them in Ur.
i)Sarah was tired of waiting and pushed the agenda. She’d heard the part of the promise that Abram would be the blessed and exalted father of the new nation, so she offered her servant girl to him as a means of creating a family. Unwisely, Abram fathered a child with the servant Hagar named Ishmael. God reiterated the promise when Abraham and Sarah were 99 and 89, that together, they would have a child. Sarah laughed, but months later, she was rocking and nursing a newborn boy named Isaac, “laughter.”
ii)How many of us pray, “God, I trust You, and I trust Your timing.” Right? We love RIGHT NOW. We don’t wait well, whether it’s for microwave popcorn, the cable guy, or doctor’s reports.
b)See the dream. Obey the call. Trust the enabler.
c)There is a section from Romans 4:18-19 herein the middle of Chapter Two, page 15. Abraham “faced the fact that his body was as good as dead.” Circle, “faced the fact.” Here’s the actual fact: Sometimes, the Father changes the facts. He believed in the One Who made the promise. What are the “facts” of your life? Your age? Your health? Your addiction? Your finances? Your education? Your disability? We have a God who is greater than all of your “facts.” Don’t trust the facts; trust God’s truth. The fact is you are a mess; the truth is you are God’s beloved child.
d)But that’s not all of Abraham’s story. Seeing the dream, obeying the call, and trusting the enabler are big steps in the journey of faith, but it has one more step.
4)Keep Trusting When Tested.
a)God will see His people through. God will provide for His people if we will be faithful. We see it clearly in the next part of this story.
b)God spoke to Abraham (page 19): “Take your son, your only son, whom you love and . . . sacrifice him.” The promise was made almost forty years before. Abraham and Sarah had waited a quarter of a century for it to be fulfilled. And now God asks Abraham to give it all up? “Early the next morning, Abraham got up and loaded his donkey.”
i)Isaac was probably a teenager and old enough to understand what was happening. Abraham’s response to Isaac’s question: “God will provide.”
ii)How could he do this? Why would he do this? In Hebrews 11:17-19, we read that Abraham obeyed and offered his son as a sacrifice because he believed that God could raise his son from the dead.
c)Father Abraham took his son to sacrifice him, and in the end, God provided a sacrifice, a ram caught in a thicket. A father was committed enough to give up His beloved Son.
i)Listen to the words God spoke to Abraham (page 19): “Take your son, your only son, whom you love and . . . sacrifice him.”
ii)Sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Here is more foreshadowing, a spoiler to anyone paying attention of what is coming. In John 3, Jesus says, “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son” (page 327).
iii)In the region of Moriah, a city was eventually built called Jerusalem. In this same city, some twenty centuries later, our Father took His only Son and sacrificed Him there, a lamb caught on a tree.
Application: By choosing Abram and Sarai as the foundation of His new nation, God reveals a pattern. God always chooses the unlikely candidates. He always picks those who are not the smartest, the most beautiful or handsome, those whose resumes are sketchy at best. He always picks ordinary people—not the superstars—to unfold His story to others. Regardless of what you’ve done, you are not disqualified from participating in God’s great Story. God can and will use you if you will see His dream, obey His call, trust Him as the enabler, and keep trusting when tested.
Chapter 2, Page 1 of 3