From Abraham’s Call to the Believer’s Rebirth

What God began with Abraham, He fulfills in every believer who comes to Christ.
In this compelling fifth episode in the series, Beloved: The Journey of Leaving Egypt, Entering Wilderness, and Awakening as New Creation, our host, Donald E. Coleman, draws a direct line between Abraham’s awakening and the believer’s rebirth—showing that the same Agape that called Abraham out of his old life now calls each of us into new creation; the beloved state.

Through Scripture, spiritual insight, and contemplative reflection, Donald unpacks the truth that rebirth is not simply a moment but a divine summons into belonging, belovedness, and transformation.

This episode is a clarifying and empowering invitation for anyone longing to walk deeper into their identity in Christ.

This podcast is a production of The Center for Biblical Coaching and Leadership. If this episode has been useful or inspiring to you in any way, please share it with someone else.  Lastly, please follow the show and write a review.

If you want to go deeper on this journey, visit www.tcbcl.org to learn how we’re walking this path together through biblical coaching, spiritual formation, and the ROOTED Global Movement. 

Transcript

Donald E Coleman 0:22

All right. Welcome. Welcome back. I should say welcome. Happy New Year's 2026. I'm excited to just pick back up. We've had a couple of two-week breaks here because of the holidays, but I've been anxiously waiting to get back to talk to you because we've been on this journey. We started on a beloved journey, and then we took a detour, and we're in our fifth episode on this detour where we were talking about the wilderness and the desert, the importance of a wilderness and a desert, and what is what goes about being in the wilderness or the desert. And I don't want you to miss that because it's extremely important that we understand the wilderness within our lives and how things, how God aligns things in our lives through the wilderness and the desert places. So when you when I say wilderness, I'm meaning wilderness and desert. It's the same. And I want you to grab a hold of that because there are times in our lives where we will go through seasons where we will feel like we're in a desert or in a wilderness. And I've come to learn that the this is an invitation from God for us to tap in, to really settle in and to be presence with it. Now I said welcome to 2026, and I hope by now you've had an opportunity to listen to the 2026 Akyros Invitation. And I say, when time becomes sacred, I recorded that episode especially because I wanted to get it out, and I want us to really grab a hold of what I believe is transpiring in 2026. We've been functioning, and I say we humans and the church has been functioning on chronological time for too long. We've set our schedules by it, we've set, you know, goals and objectives and everything by chronological time of what in the Greek it's called Kronos time. But chronos time is not God's time. And I want us to grab a hold of this because 2026 actually reveals to us a very special number, which that number is 10. So if we add up 2026 2026, it becomes the number 10. Why that's important to understand that because from a Hebrew perspective, every letter in their alphabet had a numeric value. But yet we don't understand this because we haven't dived into the fullness of converging the old, the Hebrew, with the Greek. So listen to that episode because it's important because 10 is a representation of fullness and completion in divine timing. And it is a double portion of grace. So it is we're we're entering into a year of exponential amount of grace. And I've called it that we're entering into a season. I don't know when that season is going to begin, but I I've expressed the sense of a tsunami of agape is coming. An outpouring of God's love is coming, and it's been already working, but more of that, more of the visible manifestation is going to be revealed as we continue moving forward. And if you want to get a vision of what that is, just read Ezekiel 47, I very verses 1 through 12 or so, and you'll get a revisual of how that water started to increase. All right. I want to make sure you got that. But let's jump back in to where we are. We're on, this is episode five in the series, and I'm calling this episode because I want you to get it. It's from Abraham or Abram's call to the believer's rebirth. So he was Abram first. So God called Abram, someone that was outside of the covenant. Actually, there was no covenant when God called Abram. But this calling of Abram actually is the call of all believers' rebirth. And I want to break this down. I want you to see this. And Abraham was what? In the desert. He was on a journey, and God calls him among the journey that he was in. So let's jump in because the most important thing I want you to grab out of this, and I'm going to start these episodes now. I want you to get accustomed to hearing beloved. As I start this year, I want you to be accustomed to hearing beloved. Why? Because we as believers are the beloved. We're beloved of God. And I want that to settle in our spirits. We're not trying to achieve or win God's love. We already are beloved by God. And this position, this understanding is going to shift our walk, our daily walk with Christ. It's going to open up more dimensions for us to understand the depth, the width, the height of God's love for us. And that's what this year is going to focus on. We're going to go all in on understanding agape and our belovedness and our ability to receive agape and agape to flow out of us. But we got to get through the understanding of the purpose of the desert or dry seasons in our journey with God. So the call to Abraham or the call Abraham received is the same call that brings every believer to Christ. And if you haven't listened to it in episode three of this series, I mentioned, I talked about the spiritual journey begins with leaving Egypt. Right? So I'll put a link in this episode so that you can get to it. But if we can truly go back and understand Abram's call, we'll see how that call is on every believer. And it's the call happened in Genesis 12, where God said, Abram, I want you to leave your country, well, leave your father's house, leave your family and your country to the place where I will show you. Right? So he's saying, leave all of the cultural attachments, the inner, inner attachments to family and all those things to the place where I will show you. He's saying, I want you to separate yourself as you separate yourself. I'm going to take you to a place where there will be an inheritance. And through your obedience, Abram, the whole earth will be blessed. So God, when he called Abram, he had humanity in mind. Lots of people do not talk about this. They try to really zero down on the fact that he was called, like the Israelites were the chosen people. Yes, they were the chosen people, but I said this in another episode. The Israelites did not exist when God called Abram. God made something new out of what already existed. And that is what God is attempting to do with every single believer. He is making us a new creation in Christ. So I hope I got your attention now because that's where I want you to stay with. Because Abram's story or Abraham's story prophesies about our rebirth, or it speaks to the rebirth of believers. It speaks to the New Testament before the New Testament was even thought of, thousands of years before God is actually setting this thing up for us. And the beautiful thing about this is through Abraham's story, we get a currency within the kingdom. And we that currency within the kingdom is not works. And it's important to understand that because the lie is that we work for belovedness, we work for acceptance, we work to receive God. No, that's what the whole New Testament, that's what Paul was saying. You don't receive belovedness, you don't receive Christ's love, God's love through the working of the law. You receive God's love through the currency that Abraham introduced. And I know you're wondering what that currency is, right? But let me read Galatians three. I want to read a little bit of Galatians three, and I'm going to get to verse seven, but I want to read Galatians three. I'm going to start with, I'll read verse five just so that you can understand it from this perspective. Verse five says, So again I ask, does God give you his spirit and work miracles among you by works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? You get a glimpse of what the currency is. So also Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Verse seven here's what I want to get to. Understand then that those who have faith are children of Abraham. I want you to get that again. I want you to, I want you to grab this, grab a hold of this. Understand then that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Now, verse eight, look what it says here now. Verse eight says, Scripture foresaw what God would justify. Or I'm sorry, scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith. I want you to really understand what the Bible is saying, what Paul is saying here. God, when he saw called Abraham, it's Paul said here that God foresaw, right? Scripture foresaw that God would justify us. All non-Jewish people, God would justify us by faith. So the currency in the kingdom is faith. I want you to grab a hold of that. The currency is faith, it's not works. So let me finish. He said, and announce the good news, the gospel, in advance to Abraham. He said, All nations will be blessed through you. Verse nine says it this way He says, So those who rely on faith are blessed among along with Abraham, the man of faith. I want you to, I just want you to sit in that. So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. So the scripture tells us that if we, as a believer, we accepted Jesus Christ, the finished work, that Christ's atoning work for us, we all have accepted it by faith. We believe that God sent Jesus for our sins, and that his death on the cross paid the final penalty of our sins, and that God raised him from the dead. And by accepting Jesus, God's free gift of atonement to the world, by us accepting it, we are engrafted into the family of God. We are the seed of Abraham. So now this brings so much more depth into the understanding about from Abraham's call to the believer's rebirth, right? Because once we grab this, we can see that God had us in mind all the time. We are not a second thought. God had humanity in mind when he called Abraham, all of humanity, and it's important to realize this because the key here is God was thinking about everyone. So God, when he called Abraham, God forms a nation through a calling, not a bloodline. So when God called Abraham, he was forming a nation or a people, not just bloodline. It had nothing to do with bloodline. So God forms a nation through calling. I want you to get this: a nation, a people, not a person, a people through calling, not bloodline, and God forms the church the same way. This is why it's so important for us to acknowledge the global aspect of the church. For a moment, if you're listening to this, I want you to think about putting aside all denominations. That means from a from Catholic, Protestant, all denominations, let's just sum it up with Catholic and Protestant, which represents all denominations. I want you to put all of that aside for just a moment. Because in that moment, the global church, God is forming us the exact same way. There is no separation based on denomination or belief systems within the church. Every person that has accepted Jesus Christ is in the body of Christ, is in the church, the global church of God. And that's what's so important because Abraham is making it clear for us. Abraham becomes the father of faith. And as a result of that, believers become Abraham's children. I just want you to understand that. I want that to settle. Because the same blessings that's on Abraham's children are the same blessings and the same provisions that are on every believer. Why is that important? It's important because now we get to see and understand that there is no inequality inside of the gospel. God is no respecter of person. Did not Paul say male, there is neither male, female, bond or free? Right? Greek or barbaran? That's what God is sharing with us. We've allowed our saboteurs and our false self and our protective self to separate us with inside of the body. But to God, we're all one. And it's about time for us as a body, as the global church of God, to converge, to flow into what God is doing, versus trying to separate, oh, my big toe is better than your pinky, or my brown eye is better than your left hand, or whatever that is. The world doesn't get to see the glory of God if we keep operating from that perspective. So I'm declaring to you, I want this podcast to be a place where all believers and seekers can come and experience the visible manifestation of agape. I want you to experience the true agape of God. That's why we're here. Why is it called daily living for Christ? So that every day when we go on our way, people will see Christ flowing out of us and not our old self. They will see the new creation in Christ walking amongst us. Or let's put it this way: they will see the incarnation of the word of God in your life and my life and all of the listeners' lives. And this is a key point here because once we get this, we'll understand. Jesus says in the New Testament, in the Gospels, Jesus says, follow me. What is that indicating? That's God's call to us in the same way that he called Abraham. Jesus says, follow me. This is the new birth. It's not an altar call. It's not, I don't want to say it's not just an altar call. It's not just for you to come up there. God is actually saying, like he said to Abraham, leave your country, leave your father's house, leave the territory which you are to the place I will show you. Abraham was on a journey physically and spiritually. Today we are on that spiritual journal. And in some journey, in some cases, some of us may need to leave our family. We have believers that are that are leaving religion and leaving, yeah, let's just say religion that actually did not honor God. And they're leaving everything like Abraham. And for those that are doing that, I want to pray that you be encouraged. And I want to pray that God's protection be with you because you are living what the Bible says. You're getting away from all of the cultural connections. And it's important for us as a church to acknowledge those that are under those situations that have to leave families in order for them to express their love for God through Jesus Christ. But Jesus is saying, follow me. This is the new birth. It's not an altar call, it's not an emotional moment, but it's a divine summons. Did we ever realize? Did we ever take those words when Jesus said, follow me? Did we take that as a divine summons or a divine invitation? I know we we dress it up when we're preaching, but in reality, every time we preach and that altar call goes forth, God is saying, Will you join me? Will you leave? Will you follow me? You know what? I'm gonna go. Let me let me go to Genesis really quick. I'm gonna go to Genesis 12. I think I need to read this. And I want you to put your name in when I read this, and I want you to see what God is saying. And the Lord God said to put your name there. Go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation. 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 the people on earth will be blessed through you. I want you to settle this now. Do you see here? The Lord God said to, Your name is there. That's what Jesus is saying, follow me. So in the Old Testament, the Father made the invitation. In the New Testament, Jesus is making the invitation. Same, same. God the Father, God the Son, same invitation for us to follow. And why is this so important? Because it is not an achievement. The rebirth is a call, not an achievement. Believers are reborn in the same way that Abraham was reborn through hearing the voice of God internally within our hearts. We heard it and we acted on it and we followed. And this is why this is so important. Because we've actually, in some cases, we've made the gospel a form of godliness. But God is saying, no, this is not a form of godliness, this is godliness. Accepting Christ, following through that invitation, we are walking with God in the desert, in the wilderness, in the plentiful season, it doesn't matter. We are walking with God. Now, why is this important? Because when Jesus is making the call, we are introduced to agape, the two derivatives of agape, right? So I want you to grab this because the awakening with the call, when Jesus says, follow me, we are awakened as the beloved. So the beloved in Greek is agape ton. Right? So here's the key. In order for us to receive agape, love, the love of God, right? We must be awakened to the God of love. So we are first beloved. That's why in Matthew 317, God said, This is my son. He said, This is my son in whom I am well pleased. Right? He says, You are beloved. This is my, I'm sorry, this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. I want you to get that, in whom I am well pleased. So God revealed Jesus' belovedness in Matthew three. Why is this important? Because God revealed his belovedness and his pleasure for him before he did anything in ministry, anything in the kingdom of God. And the same way, when we accept Christ, I know they they tell us that heaven is standing and rejoicing for every person that gets saved. Yes, but on more important than heaven, rejoicing, God is declaring, This is my beloved son or daughter, and in them I am well pleased. And now we become a vessel that can receive agape. And our journey of walking with God, our daily living for Christ and in Christ, we receive agape. And out of our belovedness, it leads to becoming love, agape tos. So we receive love that love may flow out of us to another. Isn't that beautiful? Look how God has done this. God has completely set it up, as in the same way that he did it with Abraham. As Abraham, watch this now. You see the connection here. As Abraham became a blessing, right? Everybody that was attached to Abraham became blessed. So as Abraham became a blessing, believers become extension of divine love wherever we go. And why is this important? And why is agape pivotal for us to understand? Because agape is the sustaining force and energy of all things, including our life. That's what Paul said. Paul said, from you and through you and to you are all things, and without you, nothing would exist. Have you ever considered yourself as being a container for agape? I'm pausing because I want that to sit in. I'll be real with you. I didn't until this season in my life where God revealed to me that I am a container for agape. And why is it important to understand that? Because a container must remain empty in order for agape to fill it. I want you to think about Jesus' first miracle. I know there's a lot in that miracle, but it's important to understand something. The wine ran out. We got it, right? So there's no more wine. Mary comes to Jesus and said, they've run out of wine. We got we, everybody gets that point.

unknown 32:49

Right?

Donald E Coleman 32:50

And Jesus said, It's not my time. Get the point. Then Mary says, Whatever he says to you to you, listen. But I want you to pay attention to now what was next available. There were twelve empty canisters or jugs, ceremonial jugs, empty jugs standing by. What now? It's just amazing that there were twelve. Yep, I want you to just allow yourself to imagine and think about that. Twelve. What's the number? Right? Twelve tribes, twelve apostles. There were twelve empty. I want you to get this now. They were empty ceremonial vessels on standby there. They were just standing there waiting to be used or waiting to be filled. Now, what did Jesus instruct him to do? He instructed them to take the empty vessels to be filled with water. A type and shadow of God's presence is water. From the beginning of Genesis to the last promise and revelations, water is present. And I've already talked about the hidden river of God's agape, the flow of God. So that water also represents cleansing, represents nourishment, represents life. It's constantly flowing. And that water also represented the fact that there was an end of what they thought was possible. The ending, the wine went out. And God took water and said, in God's hand, water, the refreshing of life, says what's possible and what's not possible. All this is tied in the miracle. And it's important for us to grab a hold of this because I want you to really dive in and understand this. Because that call that we've all accepted, and those that are seekers that are listened to it, you're sensing that there's something deeper inside that's calling us not to religion, not to rules, but it's calling us into a relationship. It's calling us into something intimate. So when you think about this, I want you to where have you heard God's call? Want you to take time and silence to think about this. Where have you heard God's call? Or where are you sensing in your current situation, in your wilderness or in your desert, or even in your plentiful? Actually, I don't think you're in plentiful. I think you're in a wilderness. Internally, there is a dryness, there is a longing that there is more. And God is drawing you in the wilderness. He's drawing you there. Why? Because in the wilderness there's not a lot going on, and God has the ability to get your attention in the quietness of the wilderness. So the next question is where is God inviting you to trust like Abram? Where is He inviting you to trust like Abraham? Let me say it that way, the father of faith. Where? Where do you see God inviting you? Where do you see God saying, follow me here? Go to this place, sit there, don't move, stay in that job. Remain steady in that church, sit there, listen to this podcast, do that, do this. Where do you see God inviting you to trust like Abraham? And here, what does rebirth mean to you today? What does it mean to be born again? What does it mean, truly mean to be a son and a daughter of God? So I want to close out with a prayer. Father, you've declared that we're the beloved, you've called us a new creation. Father, I pray that you would awaken their faith like Abraham, that they would have the trust and the confidence to follow you. And there will be ups and downs and in-betweens, and there will be mistakes, but your grace we know is available, and your grace will be there the same way it was with Abraham. Form us as your sons and daughters, that we may be the vessel of agape that you've invited us to be. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Hey, thank you for joining me again on this episode. And I look forward to next week when we're going to jump into another part of the the series here. We're getting close. And in next week's episode, we're going to talk about the desert as God's transforming room. Until then, keep living daily for Christ.