Navigating Life's Challenges: Embracing Faith, Commitment, and God's Divine Plan

We'd like today to have a very special guest.

While Randy is away at our marriage retreat weekend, we're delighted to have James Pope coming to preach with us, so let's give him a warm Somerville Baptist welcome as he comes to lead us.

Can I begin with a confession?

I started preaching in 1974.

As a matter of fact, the day I surrendered to preach was the day that Richard Nixon resigned to presidency.

I guess he saw what was coming and he thought he just needed to go in and move out.

So I've been.

August celebrated 49 years of preaching for me, but I can tell you, preaching at my home church, the Somerville Baptist church, is intimidating to me, for whatever reason, and it could be because I spent a lot of years.

I planted a church in 1993 in Maryland and we reached an unchurched group of people.

Some of them had never been in church in their lives.

I lived on the dark side and so I had fellowship and interaction with them, and so it's like I couldn't get it wrong for them.

You're not that crowd.

As a matter of fact, I sort of speak to the issue.

About three weeks ago it was when Pastor Randy approached me and said would you be willing to supply for me while Sherry and I go to the marriage retreat that weekend.

And I said certainly.

And he said and here's what I would like to do.

We're doing this series called Mountain Men and apparently he's a fan of the reality TV show.

Any of the rest of you do that.

My DVR records that every week we have our favorites and it's a series about six weeks long about people who had some sort of spiritual experience on a mountaintop.

It's pretty simple, mountain Men.

And he said so I'm supposed to be preaching.

I was planning to preach on Genesis, chapter 22, verses one through 19, about Abraham taking Isaac up on the mountain to offer him.

Genesis 22 · chapter mention

And he said and I've created an outline for you if you would like to use it.

So use as little or as much of my outline as you would like.

So here's my agreement with you this morning.

That is, if the sermon is bad, it's because he left me really bad notes.

If the sermon is good, then he left me good notes, but if the sermon is great, I discarded his notes altogether.

I really am honored.

You know, one of the challenges as we move into this is the language that we use in this environment and other environments.

It needs context, it needs a dictionary, it needs a thesaurus, it needs something, because we all don't mean the same thing by the same words that we use.

It's like you can't use the word Christian anymore and really understand what that means, because all kinds of people call themselves Christians, wouldn't you agree?

I love the fact that here people refer to as Christ followers an entirely different animal there, because that says something about the relationship with God, and so when we come to the concept of faith, that's another one of those words that we'll be looking at today within this context, and so I want to set up today's message by talking about a man by the name of David Ring.

He will be a familiar name to some of you if you've been in Baptist circles very long.

David Ring was a preacher's kid.

He was born on October, the 28th, 1953.

He's essentially six months older than what I am, but he was dead when he was born and it took 18 minutes before the doctors could revive him, and as a result of that experience, he has grown up with cerebral palsy, which affects how he walks and how he moves and how he talks.

His dad, who was a preacher, contracted cancer and died when David was 11 years old.

Devastating, I think about these little kids down here on this front row.

Last time I preached here there were five fifth graders sitting down here.

I was sweating bullets the whole time during that service trying to keep their attention.

So at 11, his dad died and his mom was his world and his life.

He was the baby and she babied him, but when he was 15, his mom died with cancer as well.

He admits that he was emotionally devastated and from that time for the next few years he actually was suicidal, wanted to take his own life.

He had a sister that sort of loved him and took him in and he eventually had an encounter with Christ and he put his faith in Jesus Christ.

Now I want you to hear the rest of the story.

This is a brief clip from one of his testimonies that sort of sets up today's message for us.

So listen to this brief from David Ring 1971, god called me to preach.

I was laying in bed.

When I'm under my own business, you've been there, you do, huh?

And God said, david, I want you to preach.

I said, oh me.

I said you understand me, come on now, lord, I have cerebral palsy.

Or are you sure you want me to preach?

Take a second look and then call me.

He took that second look and I highly knew you.

He still called me to preach and I got out of my bag, got my mother.

Then they opened up a book and I said I can do all things through quite rich, storing the man.

But then look at me, I'm not going to let that cerebral palsy, but it's slowing down for bragging on Jesus.

I have cerebral palsy.

What's your problem?

That's just not fair, is it?

How many of you have heard Him before, seen Him this familiar?

Yeah, you need to look up on YouTube and find His whole testimony because a great many of the times he would end His sermon by singing.

You have a box of Kleenexes, you'll need it to watch Him.

A man who was thought less than a man because of his condition, and yet he was willing to put his trust in God's calling on his life.

I was first exposed to Him back in the 80s, when he first emerged on the scene and began to share His testimony and made the circuit.

So I got to wonder, because I hadn't seen Him in a long time.

In fact, this is a clip from sometime in the 90s.

I thought I wonder what David looks like these days, and so I found this picture of Him, put this up.

This was last month.

It's happened to the rest of us too.

He got old.

He shared in this event preaching at a church about his call to ministry, and he said I have preached in over 8,000 churches in my time of ministry.

Not many preachers can actually say that.

I want you to look at today's text.

This is taken out of Genesis, chapter 22, verses 1 through 3.

Genesis 22:1–3

We're just going to simply set up this whole passage with these words.

Now it came about after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him Abraham, and he said here I am.

He said, take now your son, your only son whom you love, isaac, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son, and he split wood from the burnt offering and arose and went to the place that God had told him.

In all fairness, I have a younger brother that's also a preacher.

He's been at his church now 30 some odd years, so between the two of us we almost have 100 years of preaching in us, and we will admit to each other that when we listen to somebody else preach, our mind is constructing a sermon in that moment.

And if we're asked on the spot, can you bring a word?

We already have three points of employment and outline in our mind.

It's not hard anymore.

I remember being told that by my spiritual mentor all those years ago, and he was correct.

And so when Randy asked me three weeks ago to share this passage, I've had three more weeks to stuff stuff into my brain and into my heart that I didn't need to start with.

And so my challenge is how do we do justice to this mountain man, abraham, in this scene, in this scenario, which is one that, frankly, you and I just can't relate to?

Instead, telling Abraham, take this promised son, and taking up on a mountain and sacrifice him there.

A week ago, friday, I got to play golf with our pastor and with James Lawson and with another local pastor, and I was hoping to gain a little inspiration from them in preparation for today's message.

But their golf wasn't inspiring to anything, and so I was sort of like.

But I asked the question.

I said what do you do with this passage?

And my wiring through all these years of preaching is that I want a text to really answer a question that somebody's asking, because if you're asking the question and we're speaking to your question, you're likely to pay attention because you want to know what the answer is.

But I realized in talking to Randy and James and the other pastor that their brains didn't work that way, because when I said what's the question that this answers?

It's like, well, that's not how I do this.

They said what is the question?

I said, well, that's the question.

What is the question?

And the other pastor said the question is why would a man be willing to offer his son?

And I'm thinking, well, that is a question, but I'm not sure that's this question.

And so I stepped back and I look at this and I said so what do we do with this in Somerville in September, the 17th 2023, that speaks to where we are and who we are and what we're supposed to be about.

Because in this room there's this spectrum of humanity, different ages, you know, looking, I was on this road down here with all these kids thinking would I want to be that age again?

Anybody here want to be that age?

No, not on your life.

I'm glad to be the old man sitting at the end with them, but I know that some of you, some of you, actually grew up here.

This is like your home church.

You were born into a family that were believers, christ followers.

You grew up in Sunday school and vacation Bible school and you went to revival meetings back when the church did those kind of things, and you've been here.

You've sat through Sunday school week by week.

You love your pastor, you love your staff.

You love, and that's been your life, because that's how you're wired and that's how you think and that's how you feel and that's how you process the life that we're in.

But then, with this many people in a room this size, there are some of you that that is not your story.

You didn't grow up in that context.

Matter of fact, you probably grew up in this dysfunctional home, if not a single parent home.

Some of you, back during the 70s, don't remember the 70s for conspicuous reasons.

No testimonials here.

This is okay.

We're all about grace and somewhere along the way you had a spiritual encounter and you met Jesus.

Or, for some of you, there actually may be somebody here that hasn't had that encounter yet.

And so I'm thinking about in this challenge this morning how do we speak a word, what is the question for the person who's been in this their whole lives and the person who's still just looking for the answers to the question, and they don't really understand that question.

So I'm gonna give you a series of images, because this is based on observation studying the scripture for all these years, preaching it, building relationships, sharing the gospel with people, that I'm convinced, that all of us.

This is about faith choices.

That's the reason we entitled it faith choices, because, whether you know it or not, every decision that you make in life is a faith choice.

Whether you think it's spiritual or not, it is a faith choice, and so we need a framework to understand how this is supposed to work.

So here's a series of images to help us understand rapper minds around this whole concept.

The first of these is we have these two circles I created all right, put these up here and the one on the left.

I put that in gray and I used the letter N for the natural man.

I borrow from St Paul's language.

There's the natural man.

That is the person we're born, as that's how we come into this world.

We come in it without a relationship with God.

We're the natural man, we're five senses and then learning and growing from life and taking those in and processing those, and that's how we come into life.

On the other side is the spiritual man, and you notice I used the Somerville Baptist Church logo for the spiritual man.

Y'all good with that.

Let's hope it's accurate.

We're born where these two are not connected, they're actually disconnected, and this is how everybody starts their lives.

Now, depending on how you've been raised and the life you've lived, as to whether you were made, even made aware of the other one, because for a lot of people, this is how it still exists, whether they're 20 years old or 80 years old, that the two never are in contact with each other.

From the extreme on one end that says there is no such thing as the supernatural, there is no such thing as God, there is no such thing as eternity, there is no such thing, and so for them, it's simply an idea.

That's a foolish idea.

Now I watch and I read a lot of atheists, because I have people in my life and my family that claim not to be people of faith, and I want to understand them, I want to know how to communicate with them, I want to know how they think and how they process life, and, in all honestly, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

You probably don't either, because what it requires you to believe in the absence of belief in God, and so this is entirely separate, until something happens, and now there are a lot of people that aren't atheists that this is how their lives live because the two they're in proximity to each other but they're never in contact, they never share a common space.

So that's the first one how we start life.

The second one is where we have a slight overlap.

Give us a second image there.

That's where the spiritual and the natural man just sort of overlap just a little bit and that's where the natural man is at least aware of something spiritual and at some point it touches their lives but is a very minor part of life.

And so when we talk about, when we use the word faith or trust or believe in God, they're aware of it, but it's not a controlling influence in their lives.

I'm not really sure whether this is that category where we can say this is somebody that has too much religion to ignore it and too little to enjoy it, but it's there.

It could be that person that you've been made aware of some spiritual truths and you have moments in life when you have that you know the demon on one shoulder and the angel on the other and you're not sure what to do.

It's present but it's not dominant and it's not controlling and you never get to have the full benefit of it.

You've at least been exposed to it and there may be somebody in the room that this represents this whole thing of Christianity being Christ follower maybe a new and novel idea to you and yet you've been around long enough that you get bits and pieces but you don't get the big picture.

You're certainly not a place where you say I'm willing to trust God with my everything.

But I'm aware of people talking about that.

I'm not sure I completely understand their language, of their meetings.

The third image let's put this one up there.

This is probably representative of more people and that's where this is an overlap.

It's like 50-50.

And I'm thinking, you know I probably have met more people who claim to be Christ followers that are represented by this overlap because it's half and half and any given moment they can be in this side and the next moment they can be in this side.

They easily move back and forth between the two.

I can remember in, back in I guess it was middle school that a group of boys be it out and these boys would start talking.

And you know what middle school boys are like.

They're all mouth and it wouldn't be spiritual stuff.

Until somebody said, hey, I'm a member of this church over here and just like that man, they could flip it over, and they were church people too.

Now we know it's not just true of middle schoolers, it's true of adults In the workplace.

I would say the average Christ follower is not conspicuous in the workplace for whatever reason.

Now, if push comes to shove, when I was in college, I worked at a savings and loan and I went to work there right before the end of the year.

So when the Christmas season rolled around, I hadn't been there a month yet, and so they locked the doors early on that evening and they had a big inside thing.

So they started pouring the booze and so people were lining up eating whatever there was to eat and having a good old time, and I said, no, thank you, that's not for me, and so I'm standing by myself.

I'm the only one without a cup or a can in my hand, and this isn't to condemn that on you.

Please understand me.

This is about the distinction and sense of a calling of God in your life and what you choose to do or not do by faith and simply.

I didn't say anything to anybody about what they should and shouldn't do, and it was funny how many the older women, of course, when I think older women, I don't think they were as old as I am now.

Well, back then they were older.

Women would come over and talk to me and they'd set their thing down and said I really don't like this stuff either and I'm going.

Isn't that strange?

I didn't tell them not to do it.

I didn't tell them it was wrong.

I just chose not to participate because that's who I was in my faith journey.

So this represents where a lot of people are.

You can simply sort of straddle it, and being on the fence is never a good place to be.

But this probably represents more people who claim to be Christ followers than the others, and the last one is this one, and that is where the natural man is completely encompassed by the spiritual man.

And when I created this image, this is the passage I thought of.

This is out of Colossians, chapter three, verses one through three, where Paul writes these words Therefore, if you've been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

I thought doesn't that depict that when you make that faith commitment to Christ and you've died with Him, then your life is hidden with Christ in God.

And when this becomes the configuration in your life, there is no escaping it.

You're the David ring saying I was minding my own business.

When God says I have a job for you, and when we finally say yes to that calling, then we're enveloped in that.

So there's never any doubt in our minds as to who we are and who we're supposed to be.

Now there's just one problem with this scenario, in this context and the texts we're dealing with today Christ hadn't been sacrificed when Abraham was around.

You and I were 2,000 years removed from the crucifixion.

The crucifixion was 2,000 years removed from Abraham.

And when you contextualize the story of Abraham, we're talking about the beginning of the book.

I mean, we're only.

You know he appears at the end of the 11th chapter.

We're only 11 chapters into the story of humanity.

There's not a whole lot been said and there's more not written in this passage about how Abraham ended up being who he was and doing what he did than he's actually written.

We're left to wonder.

So there's that framework for which this concept of faith is set in one of those scenarios of who we are and our relationship between our natural man and our spiritual man.

If we are in Christ, then what does the you know?

The second thing is that faith choices have repercussions.

Whatever you choose to believe, it has repercussions.

Whatever you choose to put your faith in has repercussions.

Whatever you choose to put your trust in has repercussions, and it's a distinction we have to draw.

It's you know.

It's easy.

Whether they say talk is what Cheap it's easy to say I believe.

It's like how many of you college football fans believed that Georgia was gonna lose yesterday?

Anybody no.

Or the week before that Clemson was gonna lose the CSU?

I had a friend, a pastor friend, that posted on Facebook early in the game CSU is ahead of Clemson and I went, wow, they were up like 16 to nothing.

I went, wow, well, I didn't look at that Facebook post until it was a few hours later and so I thought, oh, I wonder how the game turned out.

You know how the game turned out.

Csu didn't score another point, clemson scored what?

66.

It's one thing to say I believe, but that doesn't affect anything.

Saying you believe, let's just talk.

It's a whole different thing to say I trust or I'm putting my trust in something that's the notion that scripture's talking about with this man, abraham.

So faith choices have repercussions and I've broken these down into three in the time we have allowed it.

So the first is it's where we go when you go back, and the story of Abraham runs from the end of chapter 11, really through chapter 25, that portion of Genesis, and there are three different sort of expressions of how faith stands out in his life in the word trust and confidence in God.

That the first is in where we go.

In where we go, if you go back and you read the story, we actually have to look at the book of Acts to get the commentary on the book of Genesis.

Charles Ferdin used to say the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible.

This is a good example of that, because it's in the testimony of Stephen that we have told us that God appeared to Abraham when he was still in Ur of the Caldees and said I want you to go to a land I'm gonna give to you.

You don't read that.

You read it in Genesis that his daddy and his uncle and his nephew and the family moved from Ur of the Caldees down here, up the Fertile Crescent.

They were all making their way to the Promised Land.

So God says I want you to go.

And he went.

And then they got to Huron and it was there that Tyra, his Abraham's father, died, and he was still there.

And then God appeared to him.

And now we don't.

Well, again, we don't have an explanation of how God did it.

We don't have an explanation how God spoke to him, but it was clear to Abraham that he was hearing from God.

Now I have been to Huron.

Huron is in the eastern part, the southeastern part of modern day Turkey.

It's 12 miles from the Syrian border.

Folks, there is nothing out there, it is a desert.

There's not an oasis, there's not a pond, there's not a lake.

There's a little dusty village, because it was a crossroads of trade in those days and simply happened to believe where they landed.

And God says and I want you to go from here.

And Abraham got up and went where God said to go.

Now, that was faith.

He had never been to either one of those places and yet he put one foot in front of another, or put one camel foot in front of another, and he went from one place to the next simply because God said to do it.

Now that's what faith in the Bible is about.

It's not about saying I believe.

It's saying I believe enough to do what God says I should do.

Now, is that familiar to any of us?

If we're clear on what God says we ought to do, are we willing to put feet with our faith and act upon it?

So there are repercussions, because the whole story of Abraham would not have occurred if he had stayed in Ur of the Caledys, down at the mouth, down at the top of the Persian Gulf.

And God says here's what I want you to know.

So it affects where we go.

Faith affects where we go.

I'm in South Carolina now because I think this is where God told me to come to Start out in Texas.

How about them cowboys Start out in Texas and spend almost 20 years in ministry there.

And God sent us to Maryland.

Listen, we tried to go to Africa, we tried to go to Asia, we tried to go to Canada, we tried to go anywhere.

But God says no, no, no, I want you to go to Maryland.

And God made it clear.

He made it more clear to me than he did to my wife and that was that you can go one of two ways you can go and be happy or you can go and be miserable.

But you are gonna go, you been there.

So it affects, the repercussions are in where we go.

And then what we say and this is a part of the challenge with the story of Abraham, because he's held up as this role model of faith and faithfulness and yet when you know his story is that he didn't always get it right.

You know, they didn't stay long, that first trip from Heron down to Canaan, but there was a famine in the land.

It says what.

They went on down to Egypt.

Now they're not kids, you know, they're old.

Abraham is 75 at this point in time.

Sarah is 65.

But what does Abraham say to Sarah?

Listen, they're gonna think you such a beautiful woman, they're gonna kill me to take you.

So tell them you're my sister.

Now, what kind of faith is that?

You see, he was putting his faith and his ability to deceive the people in that context.

How'd that work for him?

Well, pharaoh did take her to make her a part of his harem, and God didn't like that.

He inflicted some health issues on the Egyptians and Pharaoh figured out something's wrong with his picture and he confronted Abraham and said take your stuff and leave.

You lied, you see.

He put his faith in something other than God's ability to sustain him but protect him.

He did it again and when he did it the second time it was a different place, but it was exactly the same story.

And what is bizarre, that second time in chapter 15 is where we have that account where God comes to Abraham and says listen, you're gonna have descendants more numerous than the stars in heaven, the sand by the seashore.

And Abraham's question was how's that be?

I'm old and she's old.

How's that work?

We know biology, how's that work?

But scripture says that passage and Abraham believed God in what it was imputed, or it was counted to him as righteousness.

It says that he fully embraced that possibility that God was going to provide an offspring, and then it was.

After that he goes someplace else and says to Sarah hey, tell them, you're my sister.

I don't know if that's disconcerting to you that someone has held up.

Abraham has mentioned three hundred times in scripture.

He's called the father of faith and the faithful, and yet the repercussions of his faith in those moments about what he said was that he wasn't trusting in God to sustain him and meet his needs.

At that point he thought it necessary to, let's say, stretch the truth, because in his mind that was what he was doing, because she was his half-sister.

Don't think too long on that, it'll mess you up, but anyway it was the reality, the repercussions in what we say when it comes to faith.

You have to reconcile that in nineteen, I think of seventy eight, I was passing a small town in South Texas, little dusty town of about eight hundred people, and there weren't a lot of young adults there, and my wife and I before we had kids and there were.

And so I want to do something that's going to engage the few to, so we can reach that generation of folks.

And so I started a Bible study for those young adults and I'm trying to fish for ways to engage them and get them interested so they're just not bored to tears and this kind of thing.

And so we started just doing a study in the book of Genesis and the most amazing thing happened when we got to the story of Abraham.

It's like they came alive.

You know why?

Because Abraham was such a screw up that it encouraged them, because in their minds and the minds of a lot of people who've grown up in church, the people that we read about in here.

They're bigger than life, they're super saints and somehow we like that because that means that there's something that we can never be, so it lets us off the hook.

But when you read about a lying, cheating, conniving person that God blesses, it means that God can bless you too.

You're not beyond His grace and His power to do that.

So there are repercussions in what we say.

But then, finally, there are repercussions in what we say and finally there are repercussions in what we do.

We don't have time to go in this, but in that 15th chapter of Genesis where God says you know you're going to have a son in your old age, what was it that they did to help God?

Sarah I'm not blaming her, don't get me wrong.

Sarah said I've got an idea, abraham, I have a handmaid who can bear that child for us, since evidently I'm not able to have children.

And Abraham agreed.

Footnote men and every text in the Bible where a wife proposes to her husband that he take additional wives to have children by, the men never objected, amen.

What did they say about his faith.

In that moment, I believe God can do anything.

But here's plan B, just in case he doesn't come through.

You don't want to know what biblical faith is.

It's when we are willing to commit to what God calls us to do, that if God doesn't show up, we fail.

You know, I'm learning this in retirement.

Every time I try to help God, help me, it just messes things up.

I'm gonna figure out one of these days.

I'm still working on that but it affects their repercussions in what we do.

And then finally we get to this account here.

I promise Randy we would get to Mount Moriah.

So on this occasion they finally they get past the having another son, ishmael, to find a getting around where Isaac is born.

Isaac is weaned.

We don't know how old he is.

It's speculated he was probably a young adolescent at this point in time.

And God says to Abraham okay, if you really trust me, this is what I want you to do.

I want you to take your only son and I want you to go to the country of Moriah and I want you to sacrifice him.

Now.

There's just too much with this passage.

My question is did he tell Sarah what he was doing?

If he was a smart man?

He probably didn't Because we don't have the context of that conversation but it said Sarah, we'll be gone for a couple of days and we'll be back.

Took a couple of servants, took Isaac, took the donkey, took firewood and they went to the region there and he left the two servants, took his son, went to the place, built an altar, split the wood, put it on there and the son said dad, here's the altar, here's the wood, here's the fire, but where's the sacrifice?

Something had happened in Abraham's life on his journey.

He'd gone from a place where he had to lie to help God, to try to protect him, to where he didn't blink an eye in that moment of the journey.

When God says this Now hear me out on this God did not want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

What he wanted Abraham to do was to further his understanding that God is his sufficiency in every set of circumstances and God can be trusted.

Because Abraham said God will supply the sacrifice.

And then he tied that boy up and he laid him on that pile and he pulled out his knife and he was going to do the deed and the angel of God stopped him and said don't.

And he said that Abraham looked behind him and he saw the ram caught in the thicket and God says there is your sacrifice.

When the writer of Hebrews comes around to write about this, there's more of that Hebrews chapter 11 about Abraham and Sarah in that journey than any other character.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It said in that moment that Abraham reasoned.

That's one of the translations.

Abraham reasoned, one of the reasons he was willing to do that.

He reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead, and that word reason is where we get our word logic from, which meant that in his spiritual growth journey, abraham had arrived at a place where it was spiritually logical to do anything that God said to do and anything that God asked him to do, because his reasoning was God would come through and take care of it.

You put up this next picture.

This is a scene from the Mount of Olives looking back at Jerusalem.

I've not been there yet.

In all my years of pastoring.

I had people willing to buy me a one-way ticket, but not a round trip ticket, so I never made the trip.

There are in the region of Jerusalem.

There are actually 69 things that are named mountains.

Now, most of them are just molehills.

They're just little rises.

They're called mountains.

There are 69 of them, seven right in Jerusalem proper, and the best that scholars know is that this place of Mount Moriah, where Abraham was willing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, was a sacrifice set where the dome of the rock is, where the temple was built and where this Islamic holy structure was.

That was the place that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac.

But just beyond that, a stone's throw away, is a place called Mount Calvary, and Pastor Randy's mind, he said, I think Abraham could probably see Mount Calvary from that place of being willing to sacrifice his son, because in that providing that ram to him, we have the introduction to the concept of substitutionary atonement, that God is making somebody else pay for the sins of a person, and in this case the ram was the substitute for Isaac.

In our case, on Mount Calvary, not far from the place where the dome of rock sets, is God provided the sacrifice for us, which is the ultimate expression of faith when we're willing to say that I know that I need God, I know that I'm a sinner, I cannot save myself and, except for the grace of God, I'll never spend eternity with him.

Put up this next picture, cs Lewis.

There we go surprised by joy.

I read this years and years and years ago.

It's his spiritual autobiography where he talks about his whole life and it's got a lot of British concepts in there that stretch in American mind.

But anyway, through his whole life there were moments when something came through and touched him that he could never hang on to, and it was something that was just right, but it eluded him, and so when he finally came to faith he was an atheist.

Many of you know that.

A literary scholar, he was an atheist who had an encounter with God.

Listen to what he writes.

He said you must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him, who I so earnestly desired not to meet, that which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.

In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed.

Perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England, I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing, the divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.

The prodigal son at least walked home on his own feet, but who can duly adore that love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape?

The words compel and trar compel them to come in have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them.

But, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the divine mercy.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.

I thought about that when he described himself in that moment of surrender, his eyes darting to the left and to the right, and I asked myself was Abraham doing that when he was taking his son to that place?

Was he looking for that out?

It doesn't sound like he was.

At that point in time.

He was fully committed to God, to trust him for what needed to be done.

Which brings the conclusion here.

The conclusion is that the greatest repercussion is in how we will face eternity.

If you want to know what faith is, faith is, are you putting your trust in what God has done for you to secure your forgiveness and His grace and abundant life?

Let me pray for us as we process what God is calling us to do.

Father, we're so grateful that you were patient with Abraham, who could get it so right and so wrong at the same time, and to leave us this example.

That was a foreshadowing of what you would do for us in Jesus Christ.

And so, father, as we examine which scenario the natural man and the spiritual man we are, that if we're not in that last one, where we're hidden in Christ, in you because what you've done then bring us to that place right now that we can fully experience what CS Lewis described.

In God's grace to him.

Thank you for this holy privilege.

It's in Jesus' name we pray these things and for His sake, amen.