The Difficult Journey of Faith

Well this morning our scripture meeting reading will be woven into the to the sermon itself.

So I would like you to invite you to go ahead and turn ahead of time in your Bibles to the Old Testament, to the book of Genesis, Genesis chapter 15.

Genesis 15 · chapter mention

While you're turning there, I'd like to ask a question.

What goes through your mind when you learn that a well-known believer, maybe some famous person in the past, or maybe someone in the present, fell into significant lapses of sin in their life?

Even if they were only momentary.

What goes through your mind?

Shock?

Disappointment?

Maybe condemnation?

I think our reaction will likely betray how well we know our own hearts.

And now there's a second question I think that's even more important.

What goes through your mind when you are that person who experiences a lapse in faith?

It's going to happen to all of us many times in our life.

Fear, terror, condemnation of self, or maybe a sense of penance and a desire to work yourself back into God's favor.

I think more than likely our reaction will be related to how we perceive the consequences of our lapse.

Relatively minor or something major.

Well, this morning we're going to take a bird's eye view, one that takes into account over 25 years time of the faith journey of a model man of faith.

And the question we're going to be addressing is why is sustained faith so difficult?

And what is the Lord's reaction to our many temporary lapses?

We're going to be looking at three passages from the book of Genesis, which record some key events in the life of Abraham and his wife Sarah.

Both of these saints, these Old Testament saints, are described as faithful in the New Testament.

And Abraham himself, in a dramatic passage in Galatians chapter 3, is actually called the man of faith.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

The man of faith.

Well, I'd like to navigate the verses we're going to look at with three questions for us to keep on our minds throughout this time.

First of all, why is it so hard for us to trust the Lord?

Secondly, how does our faith so easily get sidetracked?

And finally, should our failures have the last word?

Should our failures have the last word?

Boy, I'd like to begin with the first.

Why is it so hard for us to trust the Lord?

Let's look, if you will, I'd like to just read this text.

The first of our passages, Genesis 15, 1 through 6.

After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram.

Now, Abram's name later gets changed to Abraham, and his wife Sarai, her name gets changed to Sarah.

I'll just be referring to them for simplicity's sake as Abraham and Sarah.

The Lord, the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision.

Fear not, Abram, I am your shield.

Your reward shall be very great.

But Abraham said, O Lord God, what will you give me?

For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.

And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.

And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, This man shall not be your heir.

Your very own son shall be your heir.

And God brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able to number them.

Then he said, So shall your offspring be.

And Abraham believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

I'd like to start with maybe a few key thoughts about faith and trust.

First of all, is that faith, when we think about what faith is, faith is deeply connected with our inability and our desperate need.

We trust God to do for us what we can't do on our own.

And I think right here we are at the core of why faith is difficult.

We don't really get our need early in life.

It takes us an entire lifetime to get our arms wrapped around our need and our desperate plight in this broken world.

I think only for a moment the prayers we offer at our times of meals.

We try to focus and have a sense of thankfulness for the food God has given us.

But I think it's rare that we really feel how desperate we are that unless God provided our daily bread today, we would have nothing.

Secondly, faith is only as good as the object in which it trusts.

I don't know, we hear a lot in our culture about the nobility of being a person of faith.

Kind of in a general sense, of being a person of faith.

Well, having faith in my six-year-old son to drive us home from church safely today is not a noble thing.

Having faith that I can go out in nature and learn all I need to know about myself and how to be right with my creator is not a noble thing.

Because in the end, it will not go well for me if that's what I'm trusting in.

But in the scriptures, faith is an attitude of trust and loyalty in the person of God, in the absolute truthfulness and reliability of his word.

And for us humans, trust is something that comes in layers.

Trust is something that happens over time.

It's not something we just switch on and we have it, have it all at once in its deepest form.

It's something that grows.

It starts small and it grows stronger over time.

Those are some preliminaries about faith and trust.

Why is it difficult though to trust God?

If God's word is absolutely reliable, if it's absolutely true, and if God is the person he says he is through that true word, that he's good, that he is good, why is it so hard to trust him?

Well, I think there's a lot of reasons.

A couple of them are important.

The first is that when it comes to God, faith, faith is wholly trusting in the unseen.

We are called to put all of our eggs of our life in his basket.

When God calls us to himself, he's not asking us to give up a few bad habits, he's not asking us to just come to church occasionally, to become a Christian, to put our faith in Christ is a call to give our whole selves over to him.

He wants us all.

He's going to remake us over time.

And he's asking us to do that though we haven't seen him.

He's asking us to stake our limited life and all the potential that we can do with it.

He's asking us to bank that on a hope that is yet unseen.

We read about this tension in Scripture in Hebrews 11.

The writer says, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we haven't seen.

But now I want us to think back to our text in Genesis 15 and begin to engage it at this point.

Because there's another reason why trusting God becomes so difficult, and that's that God seldom works on our timetable.

He just makes us wait.

In the story about Abraham, and sometimes let me just say this: sometimes when you're studying Scripture, it's important to be in a particular text and to just sit and soak in that particular text.

Sometimes it's very helpful to get a bird's eye view, to step back, to take in a large section of text.

And today we're going to be looking at the life of Abraham over his entire period of the record that we have.

And when you see the whole record of his life, there are some very important lessons that emerge.

And these lessons emerge around this common theme of waiting.

Of waiting.

We learn, if we were to begin back in chapter 12, that Abraham, when he was 75 years old, God appears to him and calls him to leave his home, leave his family.

Can you imagine?

Leave Grand Forks, get on the road and go to a place that I'm going to show you.

Not going to tell you what it is.

You'll get there.

I'll let you know along the way.

Trust me.

Trust me.

This will be good for you.

Not only that, but God gives him amazing promises.

He promised that he's going to give him a land.

He's going to give him a country.

He's going to give him a seed, an offspring.

Through whom he's going to bless the entire world.

And through whom he would make Abraham into a great nation.

And he also promised him a blessing.

He promised that those who bless you, I'll bless, and those who curse you, why, I'll be their enemy.

I'm going to be with you, Abraham.

And Abraham believed God.

And Abraham gathers a nephew, and he gathers his servants, and he gathers his wealth.

He's a very wealthy man.

He just takes off like a nomad, homeless.

And so years begin to go by.

And I'm quite certain Abraham is like us, and he's thinking, any day now, any day now, Sarah is going to have a child.

The problem is that Sarah was barren.

They were unable to have children to this point.

She was 65.

The window was all but gone.

At least in that at that time.

In our day, maybe you're laughing at me.

Things were a little different back then.

Abraham lived to be much longer than we do, than we do at this time in history.

But the window for her was closing.

And Abraham was beginning to struggle with this promise.

Where is this promise?

And in our text, God appears to Abraham at some time in some kind of vision.

And he says, Abraham, your reward is going to be great.

Hearkening back to that first promise.

And Abraham begins to wrestle with God.

God, what are you going to give me?

I don't even have a child.

My heir is Eliezer, my servant.

What can you do for me?

Abraham's beginning to wrestle with how long this thing is taking.

And I love how the Lord deals with him.

The Lord brings him outside in this vision somehow and has him look up into the stars and see if he could count them.

Have you ever looked at the starry night in the dark?

Way out in the country, and just been blown away by the sheer volume of stars.

And so God uses this object lesson to impress upon him, Abraham, that's how many your descendants will be.

And Abraham believes God.

He believes again, there's a fresh affirmation of faith from Abraham.

He believes God that he's going to have a son and that he is going to have many descendants, and that the blessings of God will prove true.

And the text gives us this amazing verse, which the New Testament makes so much of that on the basis of Abraham's faith, he's justified.

He is acquitted.

He's made right with God through believing and not through his doing or his being circumcised or anything else.

But God has a lot more waiting for Abraham to do.

A lot more waiting.

So now this brings to the second question.

How does our faith so easily get sidetracked?

And here I'd like us to look over to the next chapter, Genesis 16, and I'd like to read verses 1 through 4.

Now Sarai, Abraham's wife, had borne him no children.

She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.

And Sarai said to Abram, Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Go into my servant.

It may be that I shall obtain children by her.

And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abraham's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife.

And he went into Hagar and she conceived.

And when she saw that she had conceived, Hagar looked with contempt on Sarai.

And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you.

I gave you my servant to your embrace.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.

May the Lord judge between you and me.

Waiting.

Waiting is so hard.

Our text gives us a classic pattern of how our faith so easily gets sidetracked.

It begins with a circumstance that seems to challenge the truthfulness and the reliability of God's word, of his having our back.

Circumstances challenge that.

Does God really care?

Our desires aren't being met, and God's like people.

Deep down in our hearts, somewhere, God's like people.

He's letting us down.

For Abraham and Sarah, the waiting was excruciating.

It was ten years.

Ten years God gave this promise, and he still hasn't brought it about.

Why is he making them wait so long?

The next phase in this pattern is amazing.

If you can't wait for God, we reason, let's go with the flesh.

One pastor calls this our shadow missions.

And a shadow mission is what goes on deep below the surface in our hidden heart.

It's below our awareness oftentimes, and it springs from dark desires within us.

We might even call this managing, trying to manage our situation.

It's identified in verse 2 as listening to the voice of Sarai in this case, instead of listening to the voice of God.

What do you think Abraham and Sarah's shadow missions were?

You think they were aware of them?

The ongoing shame of being barren in that kind of culture was massive.

No heir to pass on their wealth and family name to?

Sick and tired of being homeless day in and day out?

Maybe a lustful desire for another woman.

After this comes the rationalizing or the self-justifying.

You know, this isn't quite as shocking, I'm sure.

It wasn't as shocking in Abraham's time as it is to us.

When we read this text, it's appalling.

In that day, in the cultural, there was a cultural custom of this kind of thing.

Men did have more than one wives, they did have concubines, and they did have children through servants and through other means.

And who knows they must have rationalized.

Maybe God intended to fulfill his promises in the way our culture does things.

I mean, we can't just sit on our duffs and do nothing.

And then finally, there's another stage of the pattern here, of how our faith gets so easily sidetracked.

There's the consequences.

The consequences of acting out our shadow missions, of following the flesh, of trying to manage our sin in our life, pain and suffering, simply put.

Imagine what this did to Abram's marriage.

Notwithstanding the culture at the time.

Imagine what it did.

You can see the bitterness in Sarai already in the text.

And this isn't the first time that a shadow mission has sidetracked Abraham and Sarah's faith.

Back in Genesis 12, we didn't read this, but there's another very important circumstance that happened.

There was a severe famine in the land right after God calls Abraham.

And this homeless, wealthy guy is traveling around in strange towns, and he has to enter with a beautiful wife.

And he's afraid of the practice.

At that time of kings and cities who would just take a guy and kill him and take his property and take his wife.

And so the circumstances are there.

And God had promised him, but here he be, he shows up down in Egypt for food, and he's afraid.

And so he comes up with a shadow mission.

They're going to lie.

They're going to lie.

Abraham tells Sarai.

In fact, he tells her over a long period of time, over years, that he makes her promise that every place we go, promise me, you will tell them that you're my sister.

So that way they won't kill me.

What about that promise that God made him?

And then there's the rationalization.

When he's confronted by the king of Pharaoh, when God puts the hurt on him, Abraham starts rationalizing.

Well, you know, it's not really lying.

She's actually technically, she is.

She was his half-sister.

And I can only imagine the consequences of having your wife be taken into the king's harem with full intent that he might actually lie with her to preserve your skin.

And they were willing to do that.

I just would like to pull up here and ask us, is there an area in your life in which God is calling you to trust his word right now?

Rather than managing it by self-effort.

Are you living out some shadow mission right now in your life?

Where God is calling you in one direction to trust Him.

And you have a sense way back there that you're really just rationalizing.

And following after some deep desire in your heart that comes from the flesh and not from the Spirit of God.

This can be a real tricky business.

Trying to figure out what's a shadow mission and what's not, what's the way of wisdom and prudence and what's not.

We're hopeless if you're going to try to figure that out on your own.

We need to be people who can just come before the Lord and be honest with him and open up our heart.

Ask him to open it up.

What grief Abraham might have saved himself had he laid this shadow mission with Hagar before the Lord and ask him, is this a good idea?

In fact, everywhere where we read Abraham kind of arguing with the Lord in his prayers, the Lord is clear and gives him another word and steers him in the right direction.

Well, one final question.

Should our failures have the last word?

I'd like you to turn to Genesis chapter twenty-two.

We're gonna read verses one through eight.

After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham! And he said, Here I am.

And God said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains on which I shall tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac.

And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.

And on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.

And he said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey, I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife.

And so the both of them went together.

And Isaac said to his father, Here I am.

I'm sorry, my father.

And Abraham said, Here I am.

He said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?

And Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.

So they went, the both of them, together.

One of the things that is amazing when you look at Abraham's life in a bird's eye view is how things begin to change at the end of his life.

First of all, we find that in those shocking, small, temporary lapses of faith that Abraham and Sarai had, and they had several of them.

At one point, each of them engaged in a kind of cynical laugh before God, that God could really do what he said he would do when they were as old as they were.

It turns out God made them wait twenty five years before he fulfilled what he said, and Isaac was born to them.

But even in those passages that I read and referred to, there's no condemnation from God on Sarah and Abraham.

I find that remarkable.

Abraham and Sarah were not rebuked, and it's not that they necessarily weren't worthy of that, but God doesn't rebuke them in those passages.

In fact, when you look at Abraham's life, you see this pattern of God testing Abraham over and over again throughout his whole life.

And Abraham has times when he's wonderfully valiant and bold, and he trusts God and he does what God says.

At other times, he fails.

He follows his shadow missions.

But as you get to the end of Abraham's life, in the passage that I just read, and there's one even beyond it, you find Abraham remarkably learning from what happened in the past.

He's learned.

God is growing him and stretching him.

This time you have an amazing statement from him.

God's just going to provide.

God's going to take care of it, my son.

He says to his servants, we're going to come back from this mountain.

I don't know how it's going to happen, but we're going to come back.

Not only that, but in the New Testament.

When the New Testament looks back at Abraham and Sarah, there's a remarkably good reputation that's given of them.

In fact, in Romans 4, this is what God says about Abraham.

He says, in hope he believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told.

Abraham did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old.

Or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.

No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness.

Abraham is the man of faith.

But being a human and being a man or woman of faith does not mean you don't have temporary lapses of faith.

And we can be so hard on ourselves.

I know we can be way too easy on ourselves, too, but we can be so hard on ourselves.

We can be overcome with guilt and shame and at times have difficulty for years even forgiving ourselves.

How could we have done what we did?

I wonder, are you struggling today with a lapse of faith that you haven't yet forgiven yourself from?

That you think somehow because you had this lapse, that somehow God has abandoned you and He's done with you.

I'd like to close our time with a reading from an encouraging event that happened recently in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, Christians are under assault.

They're praying for God to intervene and to give them safety and to protect them.

But in God's providence, there are hard things happening, and God seems more intent right now to be testing their faith and to some, in some cases, to make the ultimate sacrifice for their faith.

But sometime recently we read in this journal from The Voice of the Martyrs, masked men carrying assault weapons abducted Naomi and her daughter Ruth from their home in the middle of the night.

Judging by the brutality of their abductors, Naomi was sure they were members of Boko Haram, a militant group trying to take over territory in northern Nigeria and to expel all Christians.

Naomi knew that Christians were a primary target of Boko Haram.

And she'd heard repeated stories of how they'd entered Christian villages and killed everyone.

She was afraid that she and Ruth were next.

The kidnappers had marched them for hours through the bush until they reached their camp.

Then they had assaulted both Naomi and Ruth.

And now their kidnappers were demanding that they convert to their faith.

Naomi knew they were very serious about killing them.

Fearing for her life and that of her daughter, Naomi said the words that denied her faith in Christ.

Ruth, her daughter, repeated them after her.

Satisfied, their kidnappers sent them to work with other women who were serving in the camp.

Thankfully, Naomi and Ruth didn't have to wait months for their nightmare to end.

After about two weeks, some of the Boko Harem wives helped them escape.

Although they were free, they felt enormously ashamed.

They had denied Christ, and they weren't sure they could ever forgive themselves or that Jesus would forgive them.

Several months after Naomi and Ruth escaped, the voice of the martyr Nigerian workers asked them to share their story with others from the United States.

When we walked into the room, they didn't look at us, one of them said.

They kept their eyes down.

The visitors knew a little about what had happened to Naomi and Ruth, but they weren't sure how best to help them.

Wanting to serve and honor these two women who had suffered, Denise, one of the ladies, asked if she could wash their feet.

Naomi and Ruth were surprised.

In their stratified society, they were near the bottom, and they would normally be serving their foreign visitors.

But instead, this Christian woman poured out water and washed her callous feet.

The water seemed to open up the floodgate of their emotions.

The women tearfully poured out their story and all that had happened to them.

They admitted that they didn't feel like they could ever be forgiven for denying Christ.

They weren't sure Jesus could ever accept them again.

Dennis and Simon, two of the Christian workers there, told them the story of how Peter was forgiven after he had denied Christ in the high priest's courtyard while he was being questioned.

It was an unforgettable ministry and fellowship, Simon said.

We were able to minister to them and reassure them about the Lord's forgiveness.

As the women wept and prayed with the workers, they realized that the question they had been already, they had been asking had already been answered.

They were forgiven by a Savior who knows their humanity and promises to never let his followers go.

I know there is a denial of Christ that will bring his denial on the last day.

But you and I and our brothers and sisters will have many lapses of faith.

And our Lord calls us to come back to him.

I think he'll be a lot easier on us in one sense than maybe others of us will be on you, on him.

May the Lord give us grace today to know that our faith journey is going to be a lifetime of testing, a lifetime of trials, and that God has our back in them.

Will you join me in prayer?

Our Father, as we close our time together, we we thank you for the scriptures, for the encouragement of them.

Thank you for the encouragement of even these disappointing times in the life of Abraham and Sarah, who are of the flesh in one sense, just like us, frail, weak people.

We thank you for a strong Christ who is stronger than our flesh.

We thank you for the way you shepherd us in this life.

And Lord, we ask that today that you would meet each of us where we are, and that you would bring us to yourself and increase our faith.

For we ask it in Christ's name.

Amen.

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