The Call of Abram

[Music] This is the account of Tara's family line. Tara became the father of Abram, Nehore, and Haran, and Haran became the father of Lot. While his father Tara was still alive, Haran died in the ear of the Caldeans in the land of his birth. Abram and Nehore both married. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nehore's wife was Milka. She was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milka and Iska. Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive. Tara took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from the ear of the Caldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Tara lived 205 years, and he died in Haran. Then Yahweh had said to Abram, "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." So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. Abram traveled through the land as far as the side of the great tree of Mora at Shechem. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. Yahweh appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring, I will give this land." So he built an altar there to Yahweh, who had appeared to him. From there, he went on toward the hills east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and eye on the east. There, he built an altar to Yahweh and called on the name of Yahweh. The Abram set out and continued toward the Nagev. This is the word of the Lord. Good evening, family. Hey, Tyler. Thanks. The church is this really beautiful and mysterious people, where almost all of the words and moments that shape us most in the church don't come from the front of the stage to people seated. And yet this gathering is very formative in our lives. It's important ritual that we hold together each week, and that is the relationship developed through gatherings like this one, then in up forming us in the secret and hidden moments of our lives. And so the greatest gift that we bring to the church is our life of a apprenticeship to Jesus, lived and shared with a body of believers. And an elder in our church, Peter Quint, who's been here for a long time, deeply shaped my life and his wife Stephanie, who have been in my home, we've taught so many of us to pray, are here with us tonight. And this is the day that they're celebrating 42 years of marriage tonight. So we just want to say as your family, we honor you, we thank you for the gift of your lives and your life together, and we are so grateful to be father and mothered by you and this family believers. Anyway, Tim, what are you doing here, man? Why don't you start a sermon that we'll do together? Yeah, do a lot, just to follow that. Hi, friends. My name is Tim. I'll follow with a confession. That's all right. Like you, I enter these doors, you know, my Sundays to come to the gathering. And I'm first greeted at those doors by these really friendly people, honor hospitality teams. Thank you so much for just welcoming us every week. I really feel welcome when I come in. And then what I sometimes do is make my way through the hallway, that's right back there, to the friendly people on hospitality team who stand against this wall by the little table, you know what I'm talking about. And sometimes it's to say hi to those people, but sometimes it's because of the little basket that sits on that table. Because sometimes a guy wants a breath mint. And there are these little lifesaver candy breathments always there. They might need stock more after I draw attention to them all this Sunday. But there you go. So sometimes I grab one of these and sometimes I want a breath mint. And sometimes it's because of a memory that I'm so attached to and fond of that I just, it's like for old times sake. And the memory slash confession is this. When I was 12 years old, my family attended a church about a mile from here. And there was also a welcome team and a table, a welcome table with breathments. And in fact, these very ones, a much larger basket and like a huge number of breathments in that basket. And when I was 12, my friend Teddy and I negotiated with our parents the freedom to sit by ourselves and the Sunday gathering and we'd often sit up in the balcony. And at first we would just like doodle on comment cards and make fun of the schmucks giving to sermon and like probably having some 12 year old up there right now. But then it might be one of your sons. It's just possible. I did tell them I was going to be telling the story today. So one of us came up with the idea, I'm not sure which one of us it was, that we could sneak out mid way through the gathering and go stuff our pockets full of those breathments. And hide under the stairway that went down to the lower floor where we knew they stacked chairs and there's a sweet little spot who crawled in and nobody would see us. So we pulled this off, multiple Sundays in a row. A lot of breathments. Do you give you the sugar rush in case you're wondering if you wait too many. So one Sunday though, the day when it all ended was when we were spotted by the lead usher Carl. And Carl knew who we were and he saw us there pocketing the breathments. And so we did what occurs to a 12 year old to do which is run. And we did, there were like a loop, you know, went down and then crossed to evade him and then hid under the stairs at our breathments in secrecy. So we thought, but Carl found the wrappers underneath the stairs. And so later that day my family got a call and so did Teddy's parents. And later that week I found myself in a room with me and Teddy with my parents, with Teddy's parents, with Carl. And with one of the pastors. Because this is what pastors do during the week. Yeah, people often wonder, what do you guys do not on Sundays, mostly breathment conservation meetings with families? Yes. So what truly made it awkward was that my parents had just been commissioned in front of the church as deacons to become like mentors of new married couples in our church. And to teach this marriage and family curriculum that they wrote themselves from the experience of raising their kids and being married. So needless to say, this was a moment where my decisions put my parents in a supremely awkward scenario. Yeah, as kids we tended to get our parents into all sorts of complex messes, didn't we? I remember one time as a child myself picking up an umbrella and sword fighting my younger brother through a dillard while my mom was shopping. Only on the way out the door my brother returned to his umbrella and I sheathed mine only to unholstered in the minivan when he was least expecting it and continue the sword fight. And that's when my mom marched me back into the dillards to return the umbrella and apologize to the store clerk for being a thief in the mall. Now as a parent of three rim bunches little ones myself, I've got personal experience with both the covenant love between parent and child and the other embarrassment that our kids bring on us sometimes, which occasionally can be comical like we're saying it right now. But the unflattering truth is that in our worst moments our children can bruise our egos as parents, their mistakes get internal hot as a reflection on my parenting, turning a chat with the teacher or coach or principal into judgment on me in the home that I'm keeping or a wrong against another child turned into a wrong that I stop at nothing. to distance myself from or absolve myself from. A strikeout or a failed exam or stolen umbrella, somehow internalized as a prick on my unprocessed pain. And in our worst moments as parents, we can vent our shame back on our children in a way reflective of our own pain that hasn't healed, not so much of what they're going through in any given moment. Every parent in the room knows the tension that I'm talking about, attention as ancient as God's covenant with Abram on the early pages of the Bible's first book. So we're picking up today on a teaching series through the Book of Genesis. And we're picking up exactly where we left off in this book nearly a year ago at this time, at the end of last summer, with the introduction of a central but very complex character named Abram and later renamed by God himself as Abraham. And today I have the honor of introducing the next major chunk of the epic drama at the beginning of our Bibles with the co-founder and voice of the Bible project. One of our family members here, one of my very closest friends, Tim Mackey. So welcome to the party, Tim. (audience applauding) And just to jog your memory or catch you back up if you missed part one of our journey through the Book of Genesis. We said last summer that we were going to work our way through Genesis in three parts, over three consecutive summers. But the truth is that we've gotten so fascinated with this book that we're just gonna start today and not stop working our way through Genesis till we get to Advent this year. So we are putting roots down in Genesis from now all the way up until early December. So get comfortable. This might be my fault. It's almost entirely Tim's fault. Genesis begins with a perfect, painless paradise called Eden, a very short-lived paradise from which Adam and Eve would then exile following the serpent's deception, the whole forbidden fruit fiasco. Corruption, they got multiplied through their family line and their children can't enable. Corruption then continued through Noah and his family after the flood. Corruption that ultimately culminated in the construction of the Tower of Babel, all of which brings us to God's long, slow play to redeem all wrong and renew all of creation through love. And it is that long, slow play of redemption. We really wanna focus on tonight because that promise begins with something that God said back in page three when he was informing Adam and Eve of the sad consequences of their foolish choice. And the promise of redemption that he gave was that from Adam and Eve would come a child who would overcome evil at its source. The image is of the seed of the woman crushing the head of that deceptive snake. But that victory is gonna cost something because what we're told is that in the very act of crushing the snake, this snake crusher will himself be crushed by the snake and this bite that's done in return. And it's a riddle on purpose. And its meaning is very dense and you're just supposed to hold it in your mind as you encounter all of the stories to come throughout the rest of scripture. But one thing that it least means at this point is that God is going to make his long, slow play of redemption in and through the drama of life and death and joy and tragedy in the life of his people here outside of Eden. Not in spite of their pain, but precisely through their pain of being bitten and wounded by evil and death. But at the same time, as much as death might try to get its fangs into God's promise, it cannot defeat the purpose of God's love. And that is the essential tension that we're gonna be tracing in the weeks to follow through the next main characters that we're introducing today. A guy named Abram and his wife named Sarah. - Yeah, a tension that this couple holds together as we're introduced to them as those who are set apart, carrying the blessing of God for the whole world. And yet doing so amid a battle with infertility within their own family. So I wanna chop up the way these characters and that tension are introduced into these three parts. Chaos, blessing, and then gardening with God. So up first, chaos, look back to the eight-year Bible's Genesis chapter 11, verse 27. This is the account of Tara's family line. Tara became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Heran, and Heran became the father of Lot. While his father Tara was still alive, Heran died in the ear of the Caldeans in the land of his birth. Abram and Nahor both married. The name of Abram's wife was Sarah. I, the name of Nahor's wife was Milka. She was the daughter of Heran, the father of both Milka and Iska. Okay, so we have to stop already 'cause there's too many interesting things happening. I bet you were so interested by that riveting reading. And so, wait, we need to stop. This is too fascinating. Okay, no, man, I'm serious. Okay, there's a lot going on. A lot going on, trust me. So this is right after the scattering of Babylon, right? The city and the tower and the languages are confused. And so, imagine yourself, there's a moment, in ancient history, in Mesopotamia, of all of these families scattering in different regions across, essentially, Middle East and Asia. And the story is zero's then on one family in particular, this guy named Tara. And the one thing we're told about Tara is that he has three sons, which you might think look cool, great for this guy. But man, since we left Eden in Genesis chapter three, there has been a lot of people dying. Violence unleashed in the world. And every time a family celebrates the gift of new life, in this case, three times over, this is reason to celebrate. This is a family that is experiencing that gift, that God gave to creation in Genesis chapter one, when he blessed it, and said, be fruitful and multiply. So creation is packed with this ability to imitate God's infinite life, as God infused it with this like auto-generating power. And so the vines and the plants and the animals and the rabbits, and the humans, making more of themselves, is a truly a miracle of life where there once was no life. So we've got this celebration of life on the brain, and then immediately, the next thing that we're told is that joy is met with tragedy. One of those sons dies. The story doesn't give details. We don't know how old. We don't know how long he lived. But just try to imagine yourself into a parent's mixed experience of joy and grief, celebrating the life of their children, but also losing a child, a child who dies before his own father and mother, the ultimate heartache. It's very infinite, even though it's only briefly described. And if you're not dizzy yet from this juxtaposition of life and death, then like the pendulum swings again to joy, because we're told of the two remaining sons, they get married. And they get married to some really classy ladies. Milka's name in Hebrew means queen. And Sarah means princess. Abram means exalted father. It's a pretty rad name. Nachoar, Tyra, you got the short end of the stick, man. Nachoar means one who snorts. The snorcher. I don't know how that ended up on a boy name list, but there you go. Anyhow, the boys marry up, and this is reason to celebrate. You got wedding bells in the air and then look it again. All of it, right as the bells are ringing, you're given this really sad note that Abram and Sarah are not able to have kids. In fact, Sarah, it's never going to be able to have kids. So it's like dizzying zigzag of the beauty and the horror and of the pain and of the joy that one family experiences back and forth in life here outside of Eden. That's the tension where this family finds themselves. Yeah, if you recall the Genesis blessing back in Eden was be fruitful and multiply and hear this story opens by introducing this one family line full of fruitful multiplication. We're tracing the blessing of God through generations and then suddenly it's interrupted. This one couple, Abram and Sarah, seems cut off from the blessing of God. That has been traced through their family lines. It's a story of blessing and suffering living side by side in a human life. It reminds me of the first night of my four-year-old son, Amos's life. Amos, as many of you might be aware or remember, was diagnosed in utero with a very rare and debilitating heart condition. All of which meant his life was something of a coin toss for the first month or so. required multiple open. and heart surgeries and both survival and the quality of life if you were to survive were very much in question. I'm the father of three boys and my wife works in childbirth. So I've got plenty of experience with welcoming new life into the world. But the night Amos was born, Kirsten was recovering on one floor of the hospital, and I was alone with Amos in the NICU, another floor. Little Amos, his body swollen up like an inflated infant as he recovered from having his chest cut wide open in the first few minutes of his life. Nurses coming in and out to check his vitals every 15 to 30 minutes. It was supposed to be a celebration, right? I was meeting my son on the day of his birth, but that celebration, the very one I'd had over my other two children was overshadowed by the death that loomed over my third. And so alone in that hospital room, I was at a total loss for what to do, how to feel. Do I weep grieving the violence of the way my son has come into the world? Or do I laugh, delighting over the miracle of new life lying here right next to me? What do I do in this tension between blessing and suffering? I'm like, I got my story and you've got yours. My point is that every last one of us has personal experience with the setting of Genesis chapter 11. All of us live east of Eden, meaning all of us live glowing in the blessing of God and shattered by the loom of suffering and trying to make sense of our lives in that tension. As is typical of the tension, of living outside of Eden, one set of life tensions might increase or decrease, but it's never just an all or one. It's always many tensions simultaneously overlapping at the same time. And that's true of what happens in this family story. If you glance down, back at verse 31, you see a whole new vista opens up because dad, for some reason we don't know why, has the desire to and dream to take the whole family on a really long road trip, like a 600 plus mile long migration north and then west. So if you like maps, there's one right there. They begin and we're the Caldees, essentially what's in modern-day Iraq, and then they go north and end up in a region that's essentially kind of like north of Iran and Syria up there in the town called Iran. I grew up playing Oregon Trail, I don't know if you did. So was there a dysentery involved on this trip? We don't know, dangerous animals. - Yeah, who hasn't lost a sister to a rattlesnake fight on the Oregon Trail, right? - So it was dangerous to travel, but Tara took its family on this long journey. They were aiming, actually, at going the full way over to Canaan, which would have been almost a thousand miles, but they stopped for unknown reasons halfway. And then as they stopped, what we're told is that at some point after arriving, dad dies. Like the guy who's the reason why we all went on this migration like now he's gone. And so really pondered what it was like for Abram, specifically, to lose his brother, to get married to a woman named Princess, but then you discover you're not able to have kids, and then you go on this huge migration and face the dangers involved, and then your dad passes away. I mean, this is just a really low moment for this family. This is a moment where it looks like there's no future for this guy and for his family. - Yeah, this passage opens by talking about the blessing of God running through this family line and suddenly, Baroness is introduced. This is a family facing no future. People living in a story they thought they understood and even liked most of the time, and suddenly, their plot is way off script. The pins been ripped out of their hands and they're left with no future. Do you know what that feels like? To be living a story, thinking you know where it's going and then suddenly the pins ripped from your hand? Do you know what it feels like to have no future or at least feel that way? The day you find out about your wife's affair, I thought I knew where our marriage was going and now, the day your boss told you that corporate's downsizing, your apartment's being, departments being dissolved. I thought I knew where my career is going, but now I've got no future. The day your mom told you that your father's not well, the day your daughter's blood work required to follow up the day your roommate or friend or sibling needed a little bit of time and space, the day your fiance got cold feet, the day your pregnancy test showed up negative again and again and again. You see, we are reading a story of chaos. Chaos interrupted by blessing. Look back here, Bible's with me, the top of chapter 12. The Lord had said to Abram, "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." This speech is so important and so beautiful and it is such a surprise after this zig-zag back and forth between joy and tragedy for this family. This speech, this promise of blessing from God it really should feel like you're just leaping into a whole new moment in the story. It should send our minds back to a moment on page one of Genesis when God addressed the empty nothingness and the darkness and spoke His word and woven to existence the garden of life and blessing and flourishing. And so in a similar way, and it is very dark, empty moment in Abram and Sarah's life, God unleashes a word of creative blessing for them. This little paragraph I hear verses one through three, this is one of the most important paragraphs in the entire Bible. If you envision the story of the Bible like a house, this is like a load bearing pillar that holds up part of the whole structure of the coherence of the whole story, this cosmic. And God is committing to do now something that He's going to accomplish for all humanity, all nations, but He's going to do it through this one family, this one couple even who's been going through hell here outside of Eden. There's three big ideas here. Let's take them slowly here. There's just one big idea in each verse. And this little statement by God is worth many, many hours of pondering and meditation. The first thing Abram is told to do in verse one is to leave. Do you see that? Leave your family. Leave your land. Leave what has become familiar. So God is going to do something like cosmic, remarkable through this couple. And it is going to genuinely recreate his whole identity. He and Sarah are going to walk away with new names and new futures. They're going to become the patriarch and matriarch of a whole network of families and tribes and nations. But before any of that happens, it's as if Abram has to detach himself from all of the current ways that he's defined his identity and defined his value and his worth. So he has been formerly known as Son of Terra, citizen of Ur of the Caldeans. He is going to be renamed Father of a multitude and friend of God and covenant partner with the creator God most high. But it involves a leaving, a waving goodbye to the previous definition of his identity. And what that does is that it opens them up to the next kind of big idea, which is verse two, that allows his identity to be recreated and redefined purely by God's word of blessing. So notice, if you just look at verse two and then even down to verse three, the most repeated word there is blessed. It appears five times in these short sentences. And this has to be intentional as a counter or like an inversion to the five times that the word curse has been used ever since humanity left Eden and Genesis, chapter three to 11 up to this point. It's as if God is turning back the clock or he's reversing all of the tragedy in the pain that has hit the human family. And he's going to do something with all of that pain as the soil as it were to grow. a new promise of hope. Notice also that this blessing is about abundance. So, you know, Abram and Sarah are going to apparently have a huge family. But it's also about their name. Do you see that? It's about honor. So a Babylon, you might remember in the city and the tower of Babylon was going to raise this like eternal civilization up to the skies. They said, "Let us make a name for ourselves." And God scatters that name building project. And then almost, you just have to see the smile on God's face. As in one moment he scatters, but in that scattering, he decides to bless and pick this known name guy you've never heard of before and give him, and his wife, a great name and exalt them as the surprise father and mother of a miraculous people group that's going to come from them. It's as if this is the kind of God who loves to take the people who are at the last of the line and put them in the first position and take the people who want to put themselves in the first position and put them in the end. Jesus. I think somebody said something about that one time. Now, at least to the third big idea here, it's in verse 3, what God is going to do through this couple is what he's going to do for all of the nations. Those who bless you will find themselves blessed. So when the nations look on and they recognize like holy, mully, like this is somebody who's infused with the very life and abundance and the blessing of God and they like attach themselves to God's chosen one, it creates this like infinity loop of reciprocal blessing, those who bless you become blessed. But it's also really dangerous here outside of Eden. We're like killing each other all over the place out here. And so anyone who tries to harm God's blessed one, they will find that curse coming back on their own heads as it were. And the whole goal, it's saved for the final sentence here, is that in and through Abraham and Sarah, their seed and their family, God is going to do something to restore blessing to all of the nations. And this is truly remarkable because I guess God is theoretically capable of just parachuting down the gift of life and blessing to everybody individually. But instead, he chooses to do it in this really long, slow, inter-personal, relational way by doing for one couple what he intends to do and through them for all the families of the earth. And this is why the rest of the biblical story just focuses on this family. Now, Abraham will get renamed Abraham. He'll become the grandfather of a guy named Jacob who gets renamed Israel, who becomes the father of 12 sons, who become 12 tribes. And one of those tribes is a guy named Judah. And this is the family into which Jesus is born, the one through whom God spreads that blessing to all of the nations of the earth. This is one of these like hinge, all the traffic of the biblical story, all of its momentum and energy moves through as it were the little narrow tunnel of these three verses right here. It's truly a pivotal moment in the biblical story. You know what I find interesting, there's this pattern in scripture to him, where we are introduced to human beings in real life circumstances and then their lives are introduced by these cosmic promises of God. But then those cosmic promises, it's so important that we remember who they're coming to in the circumstances that they're in. It's so important that we see what they do immediately and what they don't do immediately. So take us back to this couple. God's making this huge sweeping promise to this one guy Abram, remind us of where he is. Well, he's at the darkest moment of his life after that point. His dad's gone, father's gone. We can't have kids. And that's pretty cool. I guess that a God I've never met before just promised me cosmic blessing, you know, and a huge family. But those words don't actually solve this problem, not quickly at least, and not immediately. But what those words do is offer hope and offer him at least someone that he can begin to trust. Do you know what it's like to have no future or at least feel that way? Where do you go when the pen seems to be ripped out of your hand and the plot you were thought you were in as far off-script? Most of us instinctively either catastrophes or control. Meaning either we are paralyzed in the sorrow and cannot move beyond the trauma of the intrusion into our lives or we act and act and act. We are scrambling to regain some sense of control and order to get back by our own effort to the life that we had before. And you likely don't have to think very hard to determine which is your instinctive response. You probably immediately know whether you're more of a catastrophized or controlled sort of person in your response. But what is the biblical invitation to us in moments when darkness looms largest over our lives? It's to listen. God specializes in creativity in chaos. New life spoken into lifeless places. Light breaking darkness. That's a theme of God's renewal on every page of the Bible. And it's a theme of God's work in your life provided, of course, that you lift your weary head, quiet your busy mind, still your scrambling hands, and listen. God specializes in bringing life out of death, creativity, out of chaos. With God, your tragic endings become your most precious new beginnings. But God doesn't yell. It's not a style. He's a whole lot more understated than that. God whispers. And to hear a whisper when you are fighting for your life amid a storm. To hear a whisper when you have the cacophony of a catastrophe, self-narrative, already screaming in your head, to hear a whisper when you are scrambling for order and control. That's hard. It's unnatural. It's counter intuitive. It requires a daily patience and practice. And to those who do, perceive the spirit's whisper in their own long dark night. It's almost always underwhelming at first. It's like God says something like, "Throw a single mustard seed on that well-tilled field." And you're going, "What's a mustard seed going to do when we need a harvest here?" But of course, that's how the kingdom grows, isn't it? To hear the spirit's whisper is like an instruction to take just a single step. When you know you need to go a whole pilgrimage. But of course, every journey starts with just one step. And the spirit doesn't draw a smile. The spirit will be the guide of anyone willing to follow one step at a time, behind a cloud by day and a fire by night. To those who perceive the spirit's whisper in their catastrophes, you are controlling. You will receive eternal blessing on that you are present, personal chaos. And the blessing of God will almost certainly not fix your every problem or cure your every ill. But it will do for you what it did for Abraham and Sarah. And that is give you hope. Hope to those who have lost hope in their own future. You see what I'm trying to say is that the blessing of God is always an invitation to trust, not to control. The Oxford English Dictionary describes or defines control as the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events. The American Psychological Association defines control authority power or influence over events, behavior situations or people. And those definitions are helpful, but I also find them to be incomplete because of course control is also about a feeling. It's about our emotional world. It's about the empowerment or lack thereof. We feel over our own lives. I like the definition Jennifer Dukes Lee, a journalist gives to control. She says it is the belief I'm safer and more secure if I'm in charge. That's what control feels like. I'm safer and more secure if I'm in charge. Trust then one way to define it at least is this. I'm safer and more secure if God's in charge. Easier said than felt. Easier thought than embodied. Easier believed in my head than in my gut, in my emotions and in my bones. I tell you Jesus said in the sermon on the Mount. Do not worry about your life, which will eat or drink, which will wear. Why do you worry about tomorrow? Every day has enough trouble of its own. Jesus takes aim at the very control that makes most of us feel safe and secure apart from Him. The certainty to know what tomorrow is going to hold in my life or at least be prepared to face it whatever it might hold. It sounds as if Jesus is asking me to give up the very thing that makes me feel safe. a part from Him. It sounds that way because that's exactly what He's asking of me. Well, what should I do instead? But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. And all the rest of that's going to get taken care of too. Instead of control or catastrophe, both of which are active conscious efforts, trust Jesus says, which is every bit as active and conscious of an effort. And I'm not going to pretend that's easy or simple. I am well aware that that is going to cost each of us something different. But I do know that there's a common place for each one of us that blessing is found. And that is the end daily embodied choice to re-up on trust. But again today, I am safer and more secure right now with what is stressing me, worrying me in this very moment. I am safer and more secure if the pen is in God's hand. And He is in charge of the story that I am living in. Every one of us struggles to trust. And what we love so much about how the story finishes is the way that the story follows this cosmic promise of blessing. And how Abram actually embodies these very small steps of trust. In fact, a lot of steps, like hundreds of miles, of more steps. If you look down, actually here, you tell us the story at this point. So Abram went as the Lord had told him and lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he set up from Iran. He took his wife Sarah. He has left few lots and all the possessions they accumulated and the people they had acquired in Iran. And they set up for the land of Canaan and they arrived today. So Abram, son, he finishes the trip. The dad began. Like a long time ago. And this is another, it's not as long as dad's trip. Here's another map because maps are cool. He goes south and back to the main highway along the river and then he goes west and then starts going south. We're talking like 400 miles here. And while it's just in one sentence, you have to imagine every one of those steps, every morning that they got up and like broke camp and started traveling again. There was something happening in his heart and his mind, the struggle, the struggle to trust. And he made the trip, we know. So at least he made the decision to take steps to embody that trust in the blessing of God. And then some remarkable things happen once he gets into the land. Look down at verse 9 and you'll see he lands at this Canaanite town called Shaken. And then he just happens upon this tree called the Great Tree of Mora. And Mora means a Hebrew seeing or appearing. And that's exactly what happens to him because God becomes seaable to him. God appears to Abram and he repeats the promise but he also deepens it. Because he repeats that you're going to have a family like two year offspring but also he deepens the promise because it involves this land. Now that Abram's like coming and journeying in this land he discovers his descendants are one day going to till these fields and plant vineyards and call this land their own. He builds an altar as a response. This is so cool. Altars are really important in the Bible. In the ancient mindset these were symbolic mountains as it were, high places where heaven meets earth. And so you take what is most precious to you. So for Abram it's like the life of one of his animals. He's a herdsman. So these are very, this is like his livelihood. And he takes one of these animals and he surrenders it to God in gratitude as a gift. And God becomes seaable and visible to him. It's very briefly described. We get more descriptions later. There's usually like fire and like shining light involved. It's remarkable experience that he has with God's presence by this sacred tree of sea it. And I don't know if you have the garden of Eden ringing in your ears but you should because here at this tree Abram experiences the visible presence of God and he sees God. And he hears the promise of being fruitful and multiplying once again. And this clearly like did something for the guy's face because it got up and he kept trekking. He went south and another map. He goes down further south and what you'll notice is that he starts tracking this ridge line. What he's walking is like this zig-zagging ridge line that runs the hills, right? Up and down the north and the south of the land that's going to become the borders of the land of the 12 tribes of Israel later on in the story. And he lands another really important place near a town called Bethel which means House of God, like the place where God takes up residence. And he meets God on a hilltop there and he builds another altar and he calls on the name of the Lord and he pitches his tent there by the presence of God. So what we're seeing here are these little echoes of Eden. These little experiences or tastes of blessing in a very tangible and a concrete way. The bless just like trying to imagine. He could have responded to the blessing when he was up in Haran and just said, "Wow, what a remarkable word from God." I mean you could have just settled right there and just then contemplated prayer the rest of your life and thought about the blessing. But what he does is he takes steps. And what I'm trying to get out here is that this is a picture of what it looks like to garden with God as an act of trust. When God speaks a word of blessing into your life, a word that doesn't solve my problems but it does open up hope. And just like a gardener can't control photosynthesis, you can't control the weather. But a gardener can prevent a garden from growing by doing nothing. And the work that a gardener does do is indispensable. You have to plant the seed. You have to create conditions for life to grow even though the essence of growth is beyond the gardener's control. And I think it's exactly what we're watching. Abram do here. Every step taken is an act of trust. And as he acts in trust, God meets him in these surprising places with these little gifts, like little oasis of Eden. And this becomes the soil from which the garden begins to grow in Abram's life. Gardening with God means receiving the word of God's blessing but then also entering a partnership of trust that is apparently very slow and full of surprises. So Tim, what I hear you saying is that chaos becomes paradise by perfect trust, not by perfect order. And that perfect trust in God does not dictate a predictable, like return on investment. It's more like scattering seeds. Perfect trust in God. The daily choice of I'm safer and more secure if God's in charge. That fills me with God's blessing, His authority, His ruling and raining image He gave me at first. It doesn't just restore my inner world to God's Edenic design but it begins to restore the outer world around me by the same design. But that perfect trust has to be lived out actively on the days that I feel perfectly naturally at peace and the days that I'm struggling and choosing to trust. It's a in and out of season active kind of way of living. And my guess is that if Abram and Sarah started with this kind of perfect trust, they probably just never struggled with their trust in God again. Which is why we're going to end the story here today on a high note because there are some truly beautiful high notes in the story of Abram and Sarah to follow. But it is much more like a comedy of errors or actually a tragedy of errors that is to follow. Abram and Sarah will prove not to be very reliable partners in God's desire to bless them and bless all nations through them. And what this means is that week after week of the series that goes on through the summer is just going to become like these case studies of how not to be a human being. Case studies of how not to receive the blessing of God or how to ruin your life when you act out of fear and self-preservation. And so what they're going to do is create a whole bunch of messes for God to have to get involved in. And what's remarkable is that God consistently involves himself and recommits himself to this couple. There are many meetings at the moment. head of Abraham and Sarah with Carl the lead usher that are that are ahead and God is not embarrassed of his kids. He stays in it with them. Yeah I'll land here tonight a couple of years ago. I watched this mini series called Your Honor starring Mr. Walter White himself, Brian Krannstein. In this show he plays an upstanding well-respected judge maintaining order over the city of New Orleans only in the opening minute of the very first episode. The judge's teenage son is driving through a really rough part of town and gets spooked and floors it while still looking out the passenger window of his car and he hits a skateboarding pedestrian right in front of him with his car and that pedestrian's head hits the pavement hard enough to end his life and so this teenage kid jumps out of the car scrambling for order that he just lost the future that he thought he was living into taken from him in an instant and so he turns to control. He tries to cover the whole thing up and it looks at first like he got away with it. No one sees what he did but then his father the judge begins to put the pieces together after his son returns home and so here is this judge vested with the power and authority to oversee a society with order and justice blessing. Only that very order justice and blessing is being massively complicated by the very character that he has coven into himself to in love his own son and that's more or less the plot of Genesis. The most common misconception about the Bible's first book is that it is the introduction of a story of heroes the truth is. That the latter 38 chapters of Genesis tells the epic story of a series of tragedies and the unstoppable nature of God's love to overcome every last tragedy. The glue that holds this whole story together is not the heroic nature of human faithfulness. It is the character of God. The glue that holds my life together is not the heroic story of my faithfulness. It is the character of God's love working its way out through my struggle to trust him and as a pastor tonight in particular has been teaching. I've been looking at faces in this room and I have the great honor of knowing so many of your stories and I'm just looking at face after face of a story that has been interrupted by pain. Of a future I thought I was living into and the illness tragedy, loss, something big or small taken from me. The future that I thought I was almost guaranteed that I was blissfully dancing my way into and suddenly I'm flat on my face. And I think if there's a theme of the whole book of Genesis, it's probably introduced us to us in Hebrews chapter four. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. I just wonder if you're sitting in this room tonight and you find yourself in a time of need and sometimes that that need comes in by an outside force, right? There's nothing you did. There's nothing Abram and Sarah did wrong to struggle with infertility. There were just outside forces in their life here East of Eden that came wrestling them to the ground in that form at that moment in their stories. Has that happened to you? Do you find yourself sitting in this room tonight going, you know what? Darkness looms larger than the glow of blessing in my story right now. And that just happened to me. It came and found me in the form of an accident, the form of an illness, the form of a choice someone else made that hurt me, the form of a trail, the form of loss, the form of manipulation. I've been lied to, I've had something taken from me. And other times we find that darkness looms larger in our life because of a choice we made or were at least complicit in. The truth is that I stepped outside of trust. I acted on my own and so here I am standing in the presence of the God who loves me. But I feel more aware of my failure than of his love. I feel more aware of my shame and my incompetence than I do of his mercy and his grace. Can I just be honest that life is really, really hard. But here is your hope. You are in a community of people who stubbornly believe that the glue that holds our stories together is the character of the God that we are worshiping tonight. And so that means when you come into this family you are invited week after week to approach God's throne of grace with trust. To find grace and mercy to help you in your time of need. Are you in a time of need tonight? Holy Spirit, would you come? Thanks for joining the Bridgetown family as we engage in this teaching series. To learn more about the life of our church and how you can get involved, visit Bridgetown.Church/Welcome. If you're interested in contributing financially to Bridgetown Church and to our ministry, you can do that at Bridgetown.Church/giving. Wherever you're joining us from, we hope this resource blesses you and encourages you to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did.