God's People Birthed: Abraham

Hello and welcome to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

We're Startup Church.

We just planted in September, 2020 and at the Kalamazoo church, we believe that Christianity is done best when it is done together.

And so if you live in the Kalamazoo area, we would love to connect, be it coming to a Sunday service, one of our small groups, or even just grabbing coffee with a member to learn more.

You can visit kalamazoo.church in order to do that.

We pray that you are inspired by what you hear today.

You know, Mother's Day is a, it's a joyous time, but Mother's Day brings about nuanced feelings inside of some of us, especially for those who are estranged either from their mothers or their children, those who have lost mothers, those who have lost children, for those who are trying to conceive, but have not yet been able to.

And so I realize, and I understand, I see you, we see you, that there's a feeling of, there's joy for others and yet inside of you, there's something, there's a longing that is missing.

And then there's a guilt that can be brought up of, I'm happy for some people, but I feel bad for feeling this way.

And I would say, I would say this morning, don't feel bad about that.

Right now, we are, we are going to take a moment of silence for anybody in this room who's in a difficult situation with their mom or their children or anything like that, or again, who's lost a mother, a child who's trying to conceive and has not yet been able to.

We're going to take a moment of silence, and I'm going to pray, and then we'll get into the lesson.

Dear Lord, Father, you, you, you bind up broken hearts, Lord.

You provide us with, with peace that is inexplicable, Lord.

There's a peace that we, it feels like that we can be grasping for, and we just can't get it, Lord.

And yet I realize that, that you have it in abundance.

You say that we ought to take your yoke upon us because your yoke is easy, your burden is light.

And Jesus, we want to do that this morning.

Lord, we realize in order to do that, we've got to give you, we've got to let down, but then give you our burdens and our stressors and our discouragements and our entire, our entire beings.

Lord, we know that in order for us to feel this peace, in order for us to be able to walk as close as you want us to walk with you as possible, we're going to have to give up some things, Lord.

We just ask this morning, I want to pray that wherever we are, Lord, I pray that you will mend broken hearts as you promise to do.

Lord, we love you.

Lord, thank you for allowing us the chance to worship you this morning.

This is in your son, Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

You know, it's especially relevant in this time and even in lieu of what we just discussed for the last couple or for the next couple of Sundays, we're going to talk about Abraham.

And one thing that you should know about Abraham is that he, we're not going to read all of the backstory.

So in the last, I think it's three months, we've gotten through 11 chapters of the Bible.

And so we're not going to make it to the finish line unless we, we're going to speed things up just a little bit.

So we're not going to read all of the narrative of Abraham, but we're going to spend a couple of Sundays doing it.

But you know, Abraham, he had, he had troubles in his life.

He was like any of us, that there was some difficult challenges that occurred after God called him.

There was difficult challenges that happened before God called him.

The goal over these, this next really eight weeks is that we're talking about God's people birth.

And so what is, what do God's people look like?

And we're going to look at just the line of Abraham and how it continues to grow and how we have the opportunity to be shaped by his faith.

If I had to ask you, who is Abraham, what would you say?

And this is a rhetorical question.

You might, if you grew up going to church, there's a kingdom class song, Father Abraham had many sons and many sons had Father Abraham.

And then you put your hand out and you, you might say that.

You might identify that he had a child when he was old.

That's true.

Maybe if you were extra spiritual, you'd say, well, he obeyed God.

And that's, that's the heart of what we're looking at this, this morning in, in, in the midst of what was inexplicable, it didn't make much sense.

He decided he obeyed God.

We're going to, we're going to look a little bit about Abraham and some of the routines that he built up.

And I hope that we feel challenged and we feel called to, to build up routines and patterns in our life that allow us to worship God everywhere we go.

Amen.

Abraham worshiped wherever he went in the extraordinary, he decided he was going to worship God in the trials.

He worshiped God on the mountain tops.

He worshiped God in the mundane and normal.

He also worshiped God.

We ought to do the same.

We're going to, we're going to be in Genesis 12.

And so there's, when you see in the Bible, Abraham, this is, it's not a, it's not a typo.

So Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah.

And you can look at some of the backstory if you, if you care to, but I guess for our purposes, just understand as we read Abraham or Abram, Abraham, we're talking about the same person.

Alec didn't know that, I guess.

That was just for Alec.

Everyone else knew it.

The Lord said to Abram, go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land.

I'll 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 all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

So Abram went as the Lord had told him and Lot went with him.

Abram was 75 years old when he set out for Haran.

He took his wife, Sarai, his nephew, Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, they set out for the land of Canaan and they arrived there.

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Mora at Shechem.

At that time, the Canaanites were in the land.

The Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring, I will give this land.

So he built an altar there to the Lord who would appear to him.

We'll pause there and we'll keep going.

But Abraham and Sarah, they were people.

They were people who had people problems.

So they were aging.

We understand Sarah was barren.

We understand that they were following God and yet God had promised them something that had not yet happened.

They couldn't see a way for it to happen.

You've got Abraham's nephew, Lot, tagging along.

And so you've got all of the family drama that's there that we're not going to read about this morning, but that's there.

They're shepherds.

There's a constant need to move or to be aware in order to provide your animals the best situation, but in order for a livelihood as well.

They cannot just sit down, eat, drink, and be merry.

We've got these problems too, though.

There's family problems.

There was probably family stuff that came up this week.

You probably had to work this week.

If not, you took vacation and you don't get any more vacation the rest of the year.

You might be going through a difficult family situation.

Perhaps you're looking at God's promises and saying, I know you promised me this.

Where are you, though?

I don't see it.

I believe it's true.

I'm not going to stop following, but are you sure?

Maybe it's a different promise that you gave me.

There's nothing outrageously exemplary about Abraham, except for one thing, though.

The writer of Hebrews says, by faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called.

This word obey is one that we, in our beings, do not like.

You know how I know that we don't like it, that it's not in our nature to obey?

Because of what just occurred when we just sent the kids off.

There's chaos all of the time.

Even when your kid obeys just a little bit, you feel like we're taking a victory and we're going to magnify this victory, because in their nature, they don't want to obey.

We're kids, so in our nature, we don't want to obey.

And some of us, still, if you'll be real with yourself, when your boss tells you to do something that you think doesn't make much sense, you don't want to obey.

And when your boss tells you something that makes sense, you already thought about it first.

And so you're not listening to your boss.

You're just doing what you already knew you were going to do anyways.

Abraham's obedience, it allowed him to be a blessing to so many nations, though.

And then it says that he built an altar, right at the end of verse seven, he built an altar to the Lord.

I learned this week, I understood a bit about what an altar was, but there's a book that I'm reading called Simply Christian, and it fit alongside this really well, and it's really that one of the promises is that God is going to dwell with his people, and this is one of the ways, especially in the Old Testament, the early part, that God was able to do that.

What an altar was is you would set something up, basically, and it was a place that God would be worshiped with prayer, sacrifice, just this connection and this communion.

It was understood that this would have been, God dwells in the world, but it was understood this is a special place for God's dwelling, and this is a great opportunity for me to give honor and praise and glory to God in this one location.

That's what an altar was.

And you would sacrifice, just so I'm going to be reliant on you, you would give up your time and some of your energy to gather and to set up, and you would go through the work in order to say, God, you're bigger than me, you deserve more than what I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you this, though.

And Abraham, we understand he did this time and time and time again, we're going to read in the next little bit about even in everywhere he went, he decided he was going to do this.

But this idea of obedience, I want to hash out a little bit more.

You know, I think obedience, when you think about obeying, and especially obeying God, we can go to places that thinking, okay, obeying God is, I just can't sin.

If I just don't sin, then I'm pretty obedient to God.

But there's a relationship that would permeate between us and God that would just occur all of the time, that just deciding I'm going to not sin doesn't do that.

You know, it's similar, this is cheesy, but you guys know those, those what would Jesus do, those WWJD, those wristbands.

You know, I have a love hate with those wristbands, because a lot of times when you're in that, you know, you're like, what would Jesus do?

Well, he wouldn't be in the situation that I'm in right now.

He wouldn't have, you know, Jesus, he wouldn't have met with these people.

He wouldn't be in this location.

He wouldn't be up this late.

He wouldn't be doing whatever I'm in the middle of doing.

The question, what would Jesus do?

You're like, well, I, there's nothing in the Bible that necessarily communicates what he would do if, you know, it was this late and I had this situation, it doesn't, it doesn't really say.

So what do you have to do?

How are you going to obey Jesus?

If you don't have this roadmap of in this exact situation, what do you do?

Well, you have to be walking with God.

This is the obedience that, that Abraham, he was, he was continually walking with God.

It wasn't, it wasn't just, I'm going to not do these things.

I'm going to do these things.

There was this constant relationship that was occurring.

And so, and so for us, the same ought to be true as we think about, well, what would Jesus do?

Or we, as we think about being obedient to God and you think about, we'll talk about this just for a little bit and we're not going to get super deep, but a question I want to ask is how obedient to God are you financially?

Wow.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not just talking about contribution.

I am talking about contribution, but not just about contribution.

How obedient to God are you financially?

How do you, and how do you know?

I'm obedient to God.

Well, who knows?

Who's to say, do you consult God with your financial decisions more than that?

Are you obedient to God with every decision of consequence in your life?

Work with me here.

God, I really believe that God cares about everything you do.

Every single thing.

He, this is, and now work with me here.

I think he cares about what you watch on TV.

I think he cares about what you do on your commute.

I think he cares about how you interact with people of importance and with people of little importance.

I think he cares how you interact with people you're never going to see again.

You kind of know that.

And so if you're going, if we're going to be obedient to God, then we have to be constantly walking with, talking to, and interacting with God, right?

I think he cares about what we eat.

You know, this is interesting.

You know, I, I, this is my, my, this is my view and somebody could call me, tell me I'm wrong.

And I don't know though, I, in small matters.

So what are you going to eat?

You know, what, what are you going to, let's, let's assume that, you know, are you going to watch this game or the other game or what are you going to do?

And, and I think in small matters, there's probably a pretty wide road of what we, what is appropriate to do and what, what God would, you know, he's like, I don't do this and don't do that.

But there's, there's a wide road.

I think as, as matters grow, the, the road narrows though, and into a bit of a path as you decide on what you should do for your career.

I think it's a, it's a wide road as you decide how high up in your career and how much energy you should strive to and put forth to climb the corporate ladder.

I think, I think the path does narrow.

As you, as you look at your life and you decide, well, I, I want to, I want to get married.

I think the roads, you know, it's, it's, it's a little bit wide, you know, there's, there's some, there's some bumpers, but it's a little bit wide, but then you decide, okay, this is who I want to marry.

And this is more than just an, you know, an interaction with, I think the road becomes pretty narrow then.

Small matters, there's a wide road, but, but there is still a road though, right?

And so, and this, I don't know, I mean, if you, if you guys tried it, so I said, are you obedient to God with every decision of consequence?

Really we can ask, are you obedient to God with every decision?

We start with those of consequence, and I think we're going to work, work towards the, the smaller matters though.

Yeah.

Let's keep reading.

Genesis 12, it says, from there he went on toward the hills of Bethel and 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.

Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev.

So Abram keeps going and he, he finds some spots.

He sets up his tent and what, and he, he, he keeps on moving along and moving along and moving along and along.

And we can surmise that he's, he's building an altar everywhere he goes.

He's, I'm going to worship God.

I don't understand what to do next.

I'm going to worship God.

I'm going to call on him.

He's going to make sense of what I really am not sure about.

His home, so wherever he dwelled, that was a place of worship.

Wherever he helped tended that, you know, these, these sheep, wherever he acted as a shepherd at his work, he was worshiping, you know, wherever, whenever he was interacting with his spouse, he was worshiping.

When he was with family, he was worshiping.

When he was seeing people out there and passing by, he would, he would worship.

When he was in foreign lands and uncomfortable spots, he would worship God.

Abram was always worshiping God.

You know, our, our box, the longer that you've spent inside, just understand this to be true.

The longer you've spent inside of a church or Christian setting, the greater tendency you have to put God in a box.

Not saying you're doing it, but I'm saying the longer you've spent, especially in, you know, especially in, in Western culture, or maybe it's in every culture, but there's just a, this tendency that I've spent years of my life and there's nothing to be ashamed of.

I'm very proud that I grew up in a Christian home.

My tendency though, is to put God in a box.

That's not what we ought to do.

We ought, we ought to worship God wherever and everywhere we go.

What would it look like in your place of work if you decided not, not, not to be a light, but yes, to be a light.

But if you just decided, I'm going to worship God when I go to work, I'm going to be a light, of course, but I'm going to be a light because I'm worshiping God.

Like let's make that the thing.

I'm going to, I'm going to honor God.

Whatever that looks like, I'm honoring God when I go to work.

There's a fear.

If you'll be real, there's a fear inside of all of us, not only in our work, we can take going out to the store, anything.

We can take being at home for sure.

There's, there's a fear of projecting our faith.

Some of it, there's a fear that I'm going to be looked at differently.

Some of it, there's a fear that I'm going to be judged now by a different standard.

There's some that, that it's couched in a fear that says, I don't want them to know that I'm a Christian or that I'm a strong follower because I'm not really living up to it.

I don't want to set for them a bad example.

I'd respond.

We'll just, we'll just repent, you know, let's change.

Let's do it together.

We've got this fear and it's happened to me more than a few times.

I'm sure it's happened to you is that when you tell people, when I share with people that I, that I'm a minister, that I'm a pastor, I try to, I'm working, especially in 2024 to to be flagrantly offensive.

I trust that I'll be able to relate with people.

That's, that's a trust that I have.

I believe I'm able to do that, but let me, let me lead from a place of spirituality and then see what else happens.

But I'm trying to make a point that I'm going to tell people I am, I'm a, I'm a pastor.

At least I'm going to tell people I moved here to help plant the church.

Maybe, maybe when they see me on Sunday speaking, they might feel like, oh, I, they, I didn't know that.

But at least, and that's happened a couple of times, like, I thought you were doing AV.

Well, I do that too sometimes.

And, uh, but you don't, you know, the fact when, when somebody, when you, when you finally share your faith with them and they say, I didn't know you were a Christian, uh, that's not a compliment.

It's not something to be proud of.

I related with them.

At least this is the conviction I'm coming to is I, I don't feel proud of that anymore.

At one point I did.

That means I'm connecting.

That means that I'm with them.

That means I'm not proud of that anymore.

Do you think about worshiping God wherever you go?

What if you had a habit of praying for your coworkers for a couple of minutes before you walked into work, praying for your coworkers?

What have you decided that you were going to use, uh, this, the thread app that is widely accessible to anybody who is a part of this church and wants access to it?

Uh, what have you decided?

I'm just gonna, there's, there's some pretty cool questions in there.

There's some, there's some questions that I can ask, uh, people and get a conversation started.

What if you decided you were, you were, we were just going to do that.

What if when you prayed at the dinner table, uh, you, you talked about God during dinner instead of just praying for it, for it during or praying, thanking God for dinner.

What if you decided I'm bringing God the next conversation that I have with my spouse, I'm bringing God along with me.

One other thing we're going to, we're going to look at, then we're going to wrap up here.

It's in Genesis 13.

So the, the Lord said to Abraham after Lot had parted from him, look around from where you are to the North and to the South, to the East and West, all the land, uh, yeah, Genesis 13, 14, all, all the land that you see, I will give to you, to you and your offspring forever.

I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring offspring could be counted.

Go walk through the length and breadth of the land for I am giving it to you.

So Abram went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he pitched his tent there.

He built an altar to the Lord, a little bit, a little bit of context, um, that Abram, he just parted ways with Lot.

There was some infighting with their shepherds and Abraham said, you choose whatever side you want to go on.

Uh, I'll, I'll take the other one.

Um, Lot takes this fertile, what appears to be really fertile plane.

Abram takes what appears to be a lesser plane and, and God decides I'm going to bless you.

This is, I promised you and I'm going to be faithful to my promises.

And so there's, there's a bunch of good happening right now.

You read the life of Abraham and you would see that there's, there's conflict.

A lot of times this, this bit though, there's not, there's a lot of good stuff that's happening.

Things are going well.

There's peace.

Uh, there's not going to be peace for a long, there's not going to be peace forever, but right now there's peace, uh, for, for you and I, we have to realize maybe you are in a season where there is peace and I don't know exactly what peace looks like for you.

Perhaps things are going well at work.

Perhaps your relationship with your spouse is going awesome.

Perhaps your roommate relation, everything's going well and you feel connected to God and you're walking with God and you feel like there's hope.

In these times, it can be a little bit difficult for us to, uh, to worship God.

I found, you know, in, in the middle of great sorrow, great strife, great difficulty, uh, it's easier, it's easier to bow because we're already almost on our knees, right?

In times when things are going well, it's quite difficult to give glory and praise to God.

If you try to explain to somebody who's not a follower, and this is, I saw it with, uh, there, Bianca's, uh, Bianca's friends, uh, she's a couple of, she had a couple of really good friends growing up and, um, I, it was so interesting because Bianca passed, uh, this nursing exam that she had studied a bunch for to become an RN and she had worked really hard and her friends wanted to celebrate her.

And so I remember one of them came and, uh, and, and, you know, Bianca's like, oh, glory to God.

Oh my gosh.

I don't know how.

And, and this, this, this woman, great, great girl, she just, yeah, but you worked so hard for it though.

It was, you put forth the effort and Bianca at every point, it was so interesting to see this tension that was like with smiles, but we all understood what was going on that Bianca was like, no, no, no.

It's, it was all God and, and this, this, this, this woman's like, no, no, no.

You put the work in, of course, God blessed you, but you had to do a lot of the work and you made it happen for yourself.

And, and, uh, when, when things are going well, it's just tough to praise God.

You know, there's, there's a concept here.

I please, I don't want to, I don't want to lose you.

Or if I lose you, let me lose you for a couple minutes and then, and then follow me here at the end.

But I want to talk just a little bit about the NBA playoffs or any kind of playoffs.

All right.

All right.

If I, I, I've worked on, I've worked on some of these illustrations, like I feel like I can make sense of it to even somebody who's like, I don't care and I don't know about sports.

I'll, I'll make it make sense for you.

Okay.

So the NBA playoffs, this is to get to, to win the title.

There's 16 teams that go into this tournament and this tournament you have to play when they decide who you play, you play the same team up to seven times.

It's the first team to win four games advances to the next round.

And so it's easy at times if you, if you are just playing a one-off tournament, you can do one strategy and beat the team.

But in the course of winning four times against a team where it's the playoffs, everyone's pretty, pretty good because there's teams that don't make it the lesser teams.

So everyone's pretty good.

It's quite difficult to beat these teams.

And there's one thing that I've listened to a bunch of podcasts and they, every player and every coach will tell you that it's tougher to watch film.

Like you'd watch film after the game.

It's tougher when you have your players to watch the film, when you win by 25, then to watch the film when you win by four.

And so, because if you win by 25, what went well, well, everything went well.

What do we have to change?

We don't have to change it.

We did so good.

We did amazing.

It was, this team is much lesser than us.

They're not very strong.

We just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

And we'll be fine.

If you win by four points, we made a few mistakes.

It was a couple of shots different.

If we, we need to make this adjustment, if we are going to succeed and beat them more and more times.

And so, and you see, and you'll, you'll find that the teams that win the championship, they're the ones that have enough discipline in their lives and enough discipline and team culture to make changes when they win by a lot of points.

And so maybe this morning you look at your life and you feel like I'm winning by a lot of points.

Life is, life is going pretty well for me right now.

What I would say is we still need to worship and honor God.

What I would say is perhaps you need to make adjustments even in your success.

If you are going to worship God for the next six months, not just the last six.

Our relationships with God, they need to be those who call on him when things are going extremely well.

And when things are not going well, this is what Abraham did.

And he was blessed through it because the reality is there's going to be a trial that comes up.

There's going to be a difficult situation and you don't want to look back and say, well, I just, I don't have the faith for it.

This is your opportunity perhaps to build up the faith for what's going to happen later.

Yeah.

You know, I want to, I want to close with this, this last concept, you know, we talked about the, that Abraham set up places to worship, the great truth, the great reality, the great joy that we have as followers post Jesus's death, burial and resurrection is that we, we don't have to set up physical altars and we don't have to, we, we, we understand we don't worship God in a proximal location.

We worship God wherever we go.

And so there's an opportunity then to always be worshiping God.

There's an opportunity to put up an altar inside of our hearts that, that allows us to constantly be praising the Lord.

Paul says in first Thessalonians five, he just says, pray without ceasing.

I want to read this, this little excerpt from an article and I'm going to read a little bit more than just this, but this is some of the meat of it that I hope communicates to us.

The, maybe, maybe you feel like my prayer life is one that I'm always calling out to God.

Or maybe you look and say, I don't know how often I think about God on an average week.

There's hope though, is what I would say.

It says, to pray, I think does not primarily mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people.

Rather it means to think and live in the presence of God.

Although it is important and even indispensable for the spiritual life to set apart time for God and God alone.

Prayer can eventually become unceasing prayer when all our thoughts, beautiful and ugly, high and low, prideful and shameful, sorrowful and joyful can be thought in the presence of God.

What I mean is that we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer when we move from a self-centered monologue to a God-centered dialogue.

This requires that we turn all our thoughts into conversation.

The main question therefore is not so much what we think, but to whom we present our thoughts.

To pray unceasingly is to lead all our thoughts out of their fearful isolation into a fearless conversation with God.

Jesus' life was a life lived in the presence of God his Father.

He kept nothing, absolutely nothing, hidden from his face.

His joys, his fears, his hopes, and his despairs were always shared with his Father.

Therefore he could indeed say to his disciples, you will be scattered, leaving me alone and yet I am not alone because my Father is with me.

Thus prayer asks us to break out of our monologue with ourselves and to follow Jesus by turning our life into an unceasing conversation with our Heavenly Father.

Let us work towards the goal of becoming men and women who do just that.

It's great to set goals and times of prayer.

It's even greater to make a decision that every day is going to be spent worshiping God and maybe that sounds terrifying for you.

And I would say it probably is a little bit terrifying.

Whenever you give up the reins and control of something and you decide I'm going to talk to God and then I got to follow what he says, I got to walk in obedience, that is terrifying.

But there's great growth, there's great peace, there's great happiness that is promised on the other side of what is difficult for all of us.

Amen?

Amen.

Thank you.

Have a great Mother's Day.

You are dismissed.

Fathers, why don't you go ahead and pick up your children.

Let's let the mom spend a little bit of time with them.

Thank you so much for listening to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast.

If you're in the Kalamazoo area, we'd love to get connected.

Please go to kalamazoo.church and fill in your information to come to a Sunday service or any other event that we have going on.

In any case, you'll be hearing from us next week.