FATHER ABRAHAM (pt. 1)

Faith isn’t a straight line of perfect performance; it’s a messy journey of relying entirely on God’s unmerited favor.

What is your most comfortable place to rest, recline, and feel peace?

Grace gives you the security to step into the unknown before you have all the answers.

Grace Interrupts Our Comfort

Grace Ensures Our Future

Grace Initiates Our Obedience

When have you delayed or said no to because you can’t see, or maybe even don’t like, the steps to follow?

“God, I don’t have the answers, but I trust Your grace. I’m stepping out in faith.”

Transcript

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You're listening to the New Beginnings Church podcast from Delaware, Ohio. To learn more about New Beginnings Church, visit us online at Delaware NewBeginnings.com. Today's message is from Pastor David Porte.

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As we start this series with Abraham, Abraham gets called out by God to go and do things just like the Holy Spirit has called us, he's called the church to go and make disciples. And so over the next few weeks, as we just hit highlights of uh Abraham's story, if you will, his life, uh, this is gonna be our theme. Faith is in the straight line of perfect performance. It's a messy journey of relying entirely on God's unmerited favor. Listen again. Especially this first part. Faith is in the straight line of perfect performance. I need to hear this for myself as a perfectionist. Faith isn't a straight line of perfect performance, it's a messy journey. Anybody else have a messy journey this week? I think many of us were on a messy journey this week in one way or another. And in the mess, we want comfort. So, what is your most comfortable place to rest? When life is just hard and you just want comfort, what is your most comfortable place to rest? What is your most comfortable place to recline? What is your most comfortable place just to feel peace? Close your eyes, think about it a minute. Do you see it? Do you feel it? I'm looking, nobody's asleep yet. Good. Now, stay there a second. Maybe it's in your chair, maybe it's in your couch, maybe it's in the hammock outside between two trees, maybe it's at the lake. But now someone comes over and tips you over. And he says, this person says, pack up all you have. We're moving on. How would you feel? So as a 20-year-old, I'd be all about it. 20-year-old me go, okay, let's go. I don't need much. Just just some money. We'll figure it out in the way. 40-year-old me would be like, uh, nope. Uh, not unless you can help me do all this and you know. What about 75-year-old me? Well, I'm not quite there yet. But I I can I can think I would what I would say is going, this is a really bad joke, right? Where's where's the cameras? Candid camera. I'm old enough to remember candid camera. Where's where's the cameras at? Where's the cameras at, thinking it's a joke, right? And yet, God's grace specializes in interrupting our deepest comforts. You ever think of that? We think of grace as saving grace, but in order for us to save us, it interrupts our deepest comforts. And we're gonna encounter that today. For Abraham, who is 75 years old. And uh, we're gonna see this is our point for today. Grace gives you the security to step into the unknown even before you have all the answers. Even before you have all the answers. I want us to see this today, first from our own personal lens, but also from a community lens, a worshiping community lens. For us, it'd be New Beginnings Church. What does this look like for us? Grace gives you security to step into the unknown before you have all the answers. And so before we jump into Abraham here, this is where we are. Uh Genesis chapter 12. It's easier to find because it's at the beginning of the book. We're gonna just read the first nine verses here, but this takes place around 300 years after the flood. In fact, he's Abram right now, he hasn't been renamed Abraham yet. Uh he's part of the line of Shem, and uh we'll hear a little bit about his dad in here, which his name's Taran. Uh, and Taran had uh Abram, Hanor, and Haran at 70 years old himself. Well, here's the other detail, and I'm only putting this out here because next week it's gonna it's gonna be a part of the story, but his soon-to-be wife, Sarai, was his half-sister, sister of another mother. Now we might go, well, wait a minute. At that time, it was completely acceptable. It wasn't until the Levitical law outlawed it. So for us, we go, wait a second, for them, this was completely normal, but we we gotta understand that for next week. So uh just pin that up there right now. But here's the other thing that we hear about with Tehran, Abram's dad, in Joshua 24. Uh, and this is an important piece as well. Uh Joshua said to the people, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. Long ago your ancestors, including Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River, and they worshiped other gods. So they weren't worshiping God yet. Polytheistic, right? Is that is that the word I'm thinking here? I get those big words messed up yet. So, worshiped other gods. So that's just for us to be remembered in the uh where God's grace will interrupt the comfort of Abram's life and what he knows and what he's learned. So let's just uh read the first nine verses here from Genesis chapter 12. The Lord had said to Abram, Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you. So Abram departed as the Lord had instructed, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all his wealth, his livestock, and all the people he had taken into his household at Haran, and headed for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, Abram traveled through the land as far as Shechem. There he set up camp beside the oak of Morah. At that time the area was inhabited by Canaanites. Then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, I will give you this land to your descendants. And Abram built an altar there and dedicated to the Lord who had appeared to him. After that Abram traveled south and set up camp in the hill country with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built another altar and dedicated to the Lord, and he worshipped the Lord. Then Abraham continued traveling south by stages toward the Negev. Grace interrupts our comfort. Hold on here first. When we read this story, Grace interrupts the comfort of Abram. Grace, what's grace? It's unmerited favor, it's undeserved love. It's what God gives us, even though we don't ask for it. Think of your comforts of life. Clothes, nice car, house, beautiful church building with land, right? Beliefs. We have our beliefs. We're comfortable in our beliefs. We're comfortable in our traditions, whether it's a tradition uh spiritually or traditions, family traditions, uh, what are some other comforts? Relationships, we have we're comfortable with relationships. But here's another thing that we have comfort with sin. If sin hurt, do you think we would do it? No, we have comfort in the way and the choices that we make in life, and sometimes those are not pleasing to God. So we have sin is comfortable as well. And grace comes in and it interrupts all of that, and it interrupts Abram and it interrupts his family. In verse 5, it says that he is extremely wealthy, that he has livestock. If you have livestock during that time, you've got money. And he had other household people, which would be servants or slaves that was part of it. So we we know that Abram was wealthy and very well off, and God's grace interrupts all that. God and his life-changing grace has come into Abram's life and they're interrupted his relationships, his beliefs. I mean, if his dad worshipped other gods, I don't want to assume because it doesn't say that Abram does in here, but I'm gonna guess that he maybe practiced it too. But all the beliefs, all the traditions, God's grace has now come and interrupts all that he has. Listen to this again in verse 12, or chapter 12, verse 1. The Lord had said to Abram, Leave your native country, leave your relatives, leave your father's family, go to the land that I will show you. Imagine God would tell you that. Leave your country. We have missionaries that do that. God has said, leave your country, leave your family, leave your father's house. I mean, look at the progression that takes place here and how God uh gives us this command, if you will, this ask. It starts at a place and it increases into intimate relationships. Leave the place that you call home, leave your family, leave your father's house. In the father's house in that time when people married, like if the son would marry, the wife would leave her father's house and come live at his father's house, and rooms would just be built and be a big house, which helps us understand when Jesus says, My father has a house with many rooms. And so God's saying, I want you to leave all this. And here's the kicker right away. God doesn't give him a destination. What's it say? I will show you. He didn't say, Pull out your GPS and put in this address. He didn't say, Here's a map, I want you to follow this map. He doesn't say anything like that. He says, Leave, go. And I think it's hard for some of us because we're like, man, don't tell me what to do. Amen. But so if we see this as just a command from God to Abraham, which it is, but we can fall into this trap of thinking God just wants to tell us what to do. That God's like, I'm gonna just puppet you along through life and I'm gonna tell you what to do. But what if, what if, what if we see God's commands, his commandments, the way he says, This is how I want you to live your life, what if we see those or understand those drenched in his grace? That they're not just commands, but they're commands with with the internal heartbeat of his grace, his unmerited favor, his undeserved love. Then it's God's grace calling out and breaking into his comfortable life. It's God's grace calling out to us and breaking into our comfortable life. In our Wesleyan tradition, we call that provenient grace, the grace that comes before, the grace that God calls out to us. When we don't know Jesus or we haven't made a decision for Jesus, God's grace calls out to us. I believe that even when we say yes to Jesus, his grace continues to go before us and call out to us and say, Here, here I am. Don't follow the world, don't follow this. Continue to follow me. If you know anyone who has said yes to Jesus, even yourself, you know this well. Jesus calls us out of our comforts. Jesus calls us out of our sins and into faith. And he first does this by calling us into a relationship with him. He offers grace to us not because we are already holy, but to make us holy, to justify us, to free us, to sanctify us. And so God is calling Abram out of his comforts by his grace to follow him, to become more holy. To be holy doesn't mean that, hey, I'm good, you're not. It's to be set apart, is what the word holy means. And Abram is being set apart for the work that God, for the plan that God has for him. Grace isn't always the warm, cozy blanket that we want. Grace isn't always being able to sit in front of the fire with a nice blanket and a cup of hot chocolate or coffee or tea or whatever you drink and go, oh, this is God's grace. What I have come to find out in my life is that God's grace can be a loud, comfort-breaking alarm clock. Yeah, that doesn't ring in my room anymore. God's grace interrupts our comforts, our deepest comforts. But it doesn't do it without any type of effect because it also offers us a new type of comfort, a new type of hope, a new type of love, one that the world cannot offer us. Grace ensures our future. Grace ensures your future, your future in the kingdom of God. And Abraham receives this. Abram is called into a journey of hundreds of miles to an unknown place, and God ensures his grace to Abram through a series of I wills. If I would have a map on here, Abraham would start here, and where he was going over here, and he can't go straight across because any of us would go the fastest route, right? Well, that's desert. And so he's got to go up and around and follow the rivers hundreds of miles, not really knowing where he's going. And all he's insured with is these IMs. Let's listen to verses two and three. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you. Leave your country. You see, this kind of like cause and effect, if you will, or this here's what I want you to do, and here's my promise. Leave your country and I will make you into a great nation. Leave your relatives, leave the comfort of your father's house, and I will bless you. I will make you famous, I will bless others, I will bless all the families on earth because of you. And friends, this is part of our gospel message that when we believe in Jesus, we are adopted into the family of God. And not only are we adopted into the family of God, Paul tells us that we become part of the line of Abraham. So Abraham's promises become ours. Galatians 3 says this. It says, the real children of Abraham then are those who put their faith in God. What's more, the scriptures look forward to this time when God would make the Gentiles right in his sight because of their faith. God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when he said, All nations will be blessed through you. And we'll revisit that again in a couple weeks when he's with the stars. Abram's future wasn't secured because he had a good 401k plan, that he had a great job that he could save, or that he worked hard his whole life, so he deserved some peace and quiet. His future wasn't secured because he helped people in need, or he was the perfect leader that lived, that just happened to be born in the in the perfect country in the world. No, his future was secured by God's unmerited love. His grace. By God's grace, Abram would be famous, but not just by name, but what God would do through his generations. The future was not in Abram's hands, it was never in his hands, it is completely in God's hands. Grace ensures our future in the same way. Do you believe God has your future secured in his hands? Because once we realize our future is secured in his hands, the only logical response left for us is to move, to go, to respond to what God has called us to do, to live in faith and obedience. Grace initiates our obedience. Grace initiates our obedience. Some people may mistake it as, oh, I feel guilty. What if we see it as this is grace, God's unherited love, initiating, calling out to us to obey what God has called us and who God has called us to be. And so it initiates Abram's obedience. Verse 4, first part of verse 4 says this. So Abram departed as the Lord had instructed. And then verse 7 and 8, then the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, I will give this land to your descendants. And Abram built an altar there and dedicated it to the Lord who had appeared to him. After that, Abram traveled south and set up camp in the hill country with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built another altar and dedicated it to the Lord, and he worshipped the Lord. Abraham departed. He left. I didn't hear any arguing. I mean, at least it wasn't written. I didn't hear any debates. I've debated with God before. I didn't hear any demands on a five-year budget proposal in order for him to get there. I didn't hear of a 20-year plan that Abraham would know that the next generations and that he would be plan uh famous. I didn't hear him even ask what was in it for his family. He said yes. And he departed. He obeyed. And on this journey, what we hear is Abram doing two things. First, he would make a camp, or other translations would say he pitched a tent. And then what would he do? He would build an altar. The tent. The tent symbolizes that my home is nowhere. The earth is not my home. My home is wherever God is, and wherever God is sending me. And the altar symbolizes this that wherever I go, I belong to God because I'm going to worship God, and this is where I will meet God. I can meet God anywhere. I'm going to build this altar just to give him praise and worship. Abram showed his gratitude to the grace that God had already given to him, even in the unknown. Even in not knowing where God was going to take him or the results of it. I want to see all the scenarios. I want to see all the pros and the cons. Can you imagine if God's grace said, before, before I invade your life, I want to see how this is going to affect you? Grace doesn't do that. Grace doesn't require to see our whole picture first because it already knows us. God already knows us. He already knows who we are. We're created in his image, but we are fallen in that we need to be saved. It requires us to have faith in God and to trust in him and to trust in his ways and the journeys that we are on and the lives that we lead. We have all been called by God in so many ways. Some of us maybe have gone, well, I don't know if God's called me. Well, first of all, if you're here. And if you believe in Jesus, then you've heard that call. But God has called, Jesus has called us to do so many other things. He's called us to be in a relationship with him through through our faith and love. Through faith only, we're saved. But he's also called for us to be holy. God has called us to Be more like him to reflect his image to become who you are today through your faith. You had to one time take a step without knowing all the answers. Grace is what initiates our obedience. Love of Jesus. Jesus Himself initiates our obedience. A couple reflection questions. Where have you settled for comfort instead of responding into what God has for you next? No matter your circumstances. Sit on that a minute. Where have you settled for comfort? Or let's look at it even as a church. Where have we, as new beginnings, settled for comfort instead of responding to what God has for us next? No matter the circumstances surrounding us. Have we settled? How about this one? If your future and the future of our church, New Beginnings Church or any church, is assured by God's I wills, assured by the promises of God, what are we actually afraid of losing? What are we afraid of? How about this one? One more. And this is one I asked myself. When have I delayed or said no to? Because I can't see, or maybe I don't like the steps that are to follow. Sometimes we are our own roadblock in our faith with Jesus. And it's because either we're afraid or we just don't want to do it. And there's times I look back on my life and went, wish I would have done that. I was called into ministry as a kid. Wish I would have gone through with that at 20. But Jesus kept after me. It was 20 years later, but he got me. He got me. I'm not going to ask you to sell your house today. I'm not going to ask you guys to move to another country. But I'm going to ask two things. Allow first one's this, allow your comforts to be challenged. And that's a hard one. Allow your comforts to be challenged. If your comforts are challenged, the question is the next thing you do is then you pray, God, why is this being challenged? Why am I being challenged? Why is our church being challenged? So we allow our comforts to be challenged and then we go to God in prayer. And maybe it's as easy as starting a prayer from this and then building on it yourself. God, I don't have the answers, but I trust your grace. I'm gonna step out in faith. Abraham didn't know the answers. He stepped out in faith. And faith, his faith was revealed. Our faith is revealed when we are willing to trade the comforts of the familiar for the uncertainty of God's calling, only trusting in his grace that goes before us. Friends, grace gives everyone, all of us, the security to step into the unknown before we have all the answers.

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Thanks for listening to the New Beginnings Church podcast. For all our messages, sermon notes, and the latest updates, visit Delaware New Beginnings.com. We'll see you next week.