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It's great to be with you this morning. I've been looking forward to it very much. Uh, since we went out in nineteen eighty eight, the uh brothers and sisters at Bethany have often prayed for us and uh, and helped us to be where we are, seeking to reach the Kurdish people. And uh, we may not be able to prove it by our letters. Correspondence is not my strong suit, but I want you to know that we have appreciated your interest in our work and your prayers for us. And it's a joy to have an opportunity to minister to you, and I hope and pray that that I may be a blessing to you this morning as as you've been to us as we've been in the field.
Uh, it's interesting that Brad should mention, uh, the issue of someone being unpolished this morning, because we're, we're going to talk about Abraham, look at his life a little bit. But it's interesting to me, the people that, that the Lord has sent us to try and reach are, are very unpolished. They are very rough, they're very basic people, and, uh, we might tend to look down upon them because, uh, they don't have in their society the level of organization that allows them to be, uh, more civilized, sophisticated, and so on. But, uh, it's interesting that the man who is our father spiritually is also a very basic man, lived much the way that the Kurdish people traditionally have.
So we want to look at him this morning. Let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter twelve. As you're turning there, I just want to review a little bit of what has happened in the book of Genesis up to this point. It opens, of course, with the creation of the world, which climaxes in the creation of man and then woman. And then, uh, in the, in the third chapter of the book, we see the fall, the disobedience of, of this, this crowning creation that God has made, a rebellion against God. Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden.
They start to raise a family, and, uh, when they've only had two children, we see already that the results of their disobedience are imprinted upon their children, and, uh, the first two men that are born into the world, one of them kills the other one for jealousy. And things go from bad to worse, and by the time we get to Noah, the Bible says that the heart of man was, was only evil continually. We sometimes think we live in the worst days that the world has ever s- ever seen. I don't think we do. I think they are coming again, but I don't think our day is as dark as as Noah's was, where he says every thought of their heart was only evil continually.
And so God decides to start over. And there are other people in the, there are people in the world who have thought that this might be a solution to evil, you know, if we could just wipe out all the bad people and save the good ones, everything would be all right. That experiment, as it were, has already been tried. God saved the best man and his family. He destroyed all the rest. And then he instituted a new, uh, relationship among them to try and and control the evil that was, that was deep in their, in their hearts. He gave them the responsibility, uh, for governing each other and, uh, instituted human government.
Men were supposed to watch out for each other and keep each other in line. And what do we see happening right away? They used that relationship to form an organized rebellion against God instead of using it to keep each other in God's ways, they shake their fists in his face. And so God comes down and he judges mankind again and scatters them over the face of the earth by confusing their tongues, and he divides them up into many nations. And that's the scene into which Abram is born. Let's start reading in verse twenty seven. We'll read to verse, uh, I'm sorry, chapter eleven, verse twenty seven, just to pick up a little background, and we'll read up to verse eight in chapter twelve.
This is the genealogy of Terah. Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begot Lot, and Haran died before his father Terah, his native land, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Then Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah. But Sarai was barren. She had no child. And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram's wife, and they went out with them from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan, and they came to Haran and dwelt there.
So the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran. Now the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country, from your kindred, and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him, and Abram was seventy five years old when he departed from Haran. Then Abram took Sarai, his wife and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan.
So they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh, and the Canaanites were then in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your descendants I will give this land. And there he built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. May the Lord bless the reading of his word. As we look at the book of Genesis, I think if we were reading it for the first time, it should really arrest our attention when we get to this chapter, because the first eleven chapters of the book have covered a period of time, uh, referring to to the human history of it of about two thousand years, and all of a sudden here the pace almost screeches to a halt, and now we're looking in very, uh, close detail at the passage of time, and not just the time, but also the focus goes from, from looking at the whole
world, zooms in onto one man, and for the rest of this book, we're looking at this man and his descendants. That alone should tell us that this man is important in God's plan. But we don't have, uh, to rely upon that alone. We also have the witness of the Holy Spirit working through the writers of the New Testament who tell us that Abraham is the father of all who believe. And so, if that is true, then Abraham should be a person of great interest to the believer in Christ, and we should find in his life lessons that will help us in our walk with the Lord.
As I was studying this recently, I began to wonder, why is it Abraham who was called the father of all those who believe? Maybe it's so obvious to you that you've never asked that question, but I started to wonder because we have, we have Abel, who by faith offered a sacrifice, and we have Enoch who walked with God, and we have Noah, who, uh, by faith built the ark, reading the, the list of, of names from the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. These were all men of faith. They were justified by grace through faith, just as Abraham was. Why is it Abraham who is the pattern, the paradigm for us?
Well, of course, it is the promises that God gave to him, which were unique to Abraham, which didn't belong to the other, other patriarchs, and we, we see them here. We don't have time this morning to look at all the, the, uh, passages where, where God gives a promise and makes a covenant with Abraham, but we can see, even in his initial call, the things that make him unique, the things that set him apart, the things that give him this title as the father of those who believe. God promised him three things. He promised to give him a land, and he promised to give him a seed, descendants, which he didn't have yet, and he promised to bless him.
And in each of those promises, there is a physical or an earthly fulfillment, but there is also a spiritual fulfillment, and it's that spiritual fulfillment that links us to Abraham. We want to look at those things this morning, and I'd like to start, if we can, with the last one first, and look at the blessing that God gave to Abraham. God blessed Abram or Abraham, forgive me if I, uh, switch back and forth between those, those two names. He's later called, called Abraham, of course. God blessed him, and what does that mean? Well, we see the results of that blessing as we look at his descendants today, as we look at the nation of Israel, the Jewish people.
It is remarkable to see the, the level of, shall we say, success that is evident among them, of, of, uh, enduring efforts of people to wipe them out of the world. There's no other nation that I know of on the face of the earth that has endured, uh, the kind of attacks that, that Israel has, and still they are there. And when you look at the prominent places in the world, uh, in the areas of business, of science, of, uh, music, performing arts. It's incredible to see how many of them are Jewish, a disproportionate amount.
And though they are still a- a small nation compared to the rest of the world, they're one of the most influential on the face of the earth. That's because of the blessing that God gave to Abram. But the most important aspect of the blessing was spiritual. God gave to Abram the relationship with God, the closeness with him, a personal, intimate, spiritual relationship that carried over into his descendants. That doesn't mean that that all of them were believers, because certainly they were not. But it was through his descendants that God worked to communicate with the rest of the world from this point on.
But God gave to Abraham the, the title, and to Abraham alone, as far as I know, the friend of God, that opportunity to be close with God. Even the Muslims know him by that name. They call him Ibrahim al-Khalilullah, Abraham, the friend of God. So this was the, the spiritual blessing that was given to him. But it was not for Abraham alone. God said to him then, at the end of verse three, in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
God blessed Abraham, but he was blessing Abraham to bless others. That doesn't mean that Abraham was a missionary in the sense that we are, in the sense that you are. He did not have a gospel to preach to the nations at this point, but God worked through him and through his descendants to give us the gospel, to give us the word of God. It's through the descendants of Abraham that we have the scriptures. It's through the descendants of Abraham that we have a savior, and therefore it is through the descendants of Abraham that we experience the blessing of God. And when we believe, and we turn to God, and we receive salvation through faith in Christ.
We are experiencing the fulfillment of this blessing that he gave to Abraham. Like Abraham, we are also blessed to be a blessing. And maybe we understand the blessing better than he did, because we do have the gospel. We do have the message that he began to preach here, but was fulfilled through his son, Jesus Christ. And it is up to us to take that message to all the peoples of the earth, that they also may be blessed. But I appreciate what our brother said this morning as he was talking, uh, about Pergamum and about the mission field.
If you are in America, this is your mission field. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get tired of all the emphasis on globalism this day. You hear about global this, global that, and it affects the way we think about evangelism, and we think about reaching the nations. And we're so busy thinking about reaching the nations that we don't think about reaching our neighbor. How do you reach all the peoples of the earth? You do it one person at a time. You start with your neighbor, and you keep going. We are also blessed to be a blessing. God told Abram that he would make him a great nation, and he did that.
He had no children at this time. It took a lot of faith to believe this promise, because he was quite old even when he was called. But God gave him a son, and through that son he brought forth the nation of Israel, again, through whom he has blessed the rest of the nations. But there's also a spiritual nation. As, uh, as First Peter, Peter tells us in First Peter chapter two, you don't need to turn there, I'll just read it to you. He says, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people, but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.
God chose the descendants of Abraham out of the world, and he made of them a special people, a holy people, a people of his own. That was worked out in the, in the physical sense. In the spiritual sense, he's doing that with us. He created another nation, not to confuse it with the nation of Israel on this earth, but has created a new thing, the church, and puts us together and makes us a special people unto himself. And so again, we are the children of Abraham, because we are part of that nation that he began, that God began through him.
And then we have the land. God told him to get out of his country, from his kindred, from his father's house, to a land that he would show him. Again, this has a physical fulfillment. He gave the descendants of Abraham the land of Canaan. They were driven out of the land, they were scattered in judgment over the face of the earth, and now we see many of them back in the land again. This promise is still being worked out over that little patch of ground at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. But notice that there is another land involved here.
When God spoke to Abraham initially, he didn't tell him that he would give him the land. He just said, get out to a land that I will show you. And he didn't tell him where it was, and he didn't tell him what kind of land it was. He didn't even know if it was better than the one in which he was living. He only knew one thing, that that's where God would meet him. And so he was going out not to receive the land, but he was going out to be with God. That was his focus. Let's look at Hebrews chapter eleven together briefly. Hebrews chapter eleven, verse eight, we read, by faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would afterward receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was going.
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Jumping down to verse thirteen, It says, these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, were assured of them, embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly, if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return.
But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Abraham was looking for heavenly country. He was looking for that country where he might dwell with God. And therefore, again, Abraham is our father, because his call is like ours. He was asked to leave something that he could see. He had a home, he had a place, presumably he had a job. He had a family.
God asked him to leave the things that he had in hand, the things that he could see, for something that he had never seen. The only thing he had was a promise from God. And so it is with us. We, when we respond to the call of God in Jesus Christ, we, we turn our backs on the world. Not that we leave this place, but we leave this system, and we leave the way of life that we knew before. And in so doing, we are walking in the footsteps of Abraham, and we go out looking for a place that we have never seen. And the only reason we think that it's there is because God said so.
But that's a pretty good reason. Abraham thought it was, and he went out. He was chosen by grace. There's nothing in the scriptures to make us think that Abraham was a good man before he was called, or even a believer. His father was an idolater. Probably he was too, or at least walked in that way until God revealed himself to him. He was chosen by grace. So it is with us. Why did God choose Abraham out of all the people on the face of the earth?
Because he wanted to. Why did he choose me of all the people on the face of the earth? For the same reason. There's no room for me to boast and say it was because I was this way or that way, more responsive or whatever. No, he grabbed me, he changed me. So all the glory is his. He was called to leave family ties. He was supposed to leave his family behind. I don't know to what extent it was Abraham's fault that Terah came along with him. In the Mideast, you've got to respect your father, and if he told his dad, I'm, I'm leaving.
Where are you going? Well, I'm going to another land. Why? Because God told me to. Well, all right, if you're going, we're going too, and, and the whole, the whole family left because it says that, that Terah took him and his family. It doesn't sound like it was Abram's decision. But when he got to Haran, he stayed there for five years. Whether it was Abram's choice or not, it seems at that point that it was. He should have left him and gone on where God had, had called him to be. The terror was a weight to him, a hindrance, a delay. If you're hearing the call of God this morning and you're delaying because of family ties, those are some of the strongest things that keep us from coming to Christ sometimes.
Don't put it off. Don't wait for God to take your family out of the way like he did with Abram. If he wants you, he's gonna, he's gonna have you. Do your family a favor and go to him now. Then Abram went out to the land that God called him to, and he wandered in it as a foreigner. He never owned an inch of it, except the cave where he buried his wife. He was called to be a sojourner, a pilgrim. I was worried for a moment this morning, my brother started to talk about pilgrims, that, uh, that he was going to give the same message, but it was perfect.
It was just an emphasis, an encouragement that this is what God wanted us to consider this morning. But Abram was called to be a sojourner. He was in the world, but not of it, and that is our call also. And as he was a sojourner, his life then is an example for us, not only of justification by faith, but also of living by faith, also the life of faith. And we see a nice little summary of this, I think, in verse eight. He moved from there to the mountains east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east.
There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. Abraham pitched his tent, but he built his altar. Abram's tent speaks to us of his attitude toward the things of this life. His altar speaks to us of his attitude toward heavenly things. Tents are, by nature, temporal, temporary dwellings. That's the reason you build a tent instead of a house, so that you can move it some other time. It doesn't mean necessarily that it's smaller or less comfortable or anything else.
It just means that it's temporary. Uh, it's something you can pick up and move somewhere else. And pitching a tent is not that big of a procedure compared to building a house. You find a flat spot and you just put it up, you pitch it. You don't engineer it, you don't lay foundations, you don't get building permits. It doesn't require that much attention. But building, on the other hand, requires planning. It requires that you pull together the necessary materials and put them together carefully so that they last a long time.
Protect it so that, so that it will stand against the elements. Abram's tent speaks to us of our dwelling, perhaps, our house, maybe our job, or maybe our money, in general, our possessions. And what is our attitude to be toward those things? We need to use them. We need to have some of them. It's not wrong to have them. Abraham had quite a lot of them. But what was his attitude toward them? He used them. He didn't love them. And that's what we should do too.
God puts things into our hand to use. Let's use them for his glory, for his work. Let's not treasure them, for they will pass. They're tense. They're going to go away. Even the body he has given us is referred to as a tent. It's temporary. We're going to wear it out. We're going to use it up. That's okay. Let's not get too worried about it when it gets broken. But the permanent structure that he built, the only permanent structure we see him building, is his altar. That speaks to us of of his relationship with God. Of course, we're not into building altars because, uh, the sacrifice is finished.
We don't offer sacrifices anymore. Jesus Christ is our sacrifice, but it speaks to us of our worship to God. It was that that Abraham put the thought and the planning and the effort into making solid and permanent and lasting. After we're gone, what will people remember about us? Will it be our tent or our altar? Are we building in the relationships that we have with people a legacy of worship to God? Appreciated what Mark had to say this morning in the Breaking of Bread, as he sang that song, The reason I live is to worship thee.
That should be. Is it? We always need to examine ourselves and tune up our hearts according to the pattern of the Word of God. When the people of the land of Canaan looked at Abram, they saw the tent, and they knew that he was a pilgrim. They knew he didn't belong to the land. He was going somewhere else. May it be so that when people look at our lives, they will see the same thing. Here's a man who's living for eternity, not for this life's temporal pleasure. And may they then want to join us.
Let's look to the Lord in person. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for Abraham, our father in the faith. We thank you for calling him by grace, making him into a great nation, blessing him. We thank you for his pilgrimage, the land where you dwell. We thank you for calling us to the same pilgrimage. We pray that you would help us to pitch our tents and to build our altars.
Help us, Father, to devote ourselves to worship and to your service. Continue to be with us as we visit with each other. Let us be a blessing to one another. We ask it in Jesus' name.