Isaac's Fear & Blessing

Good morning.

This is from Genesis 6, or 26, 6 through 13.

So Isaac settled into Gerar.

When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, She is my sister, for he feared to say my wife, thinking, lest the men of the place should kill me because of Rebecca, because she was attractive in appearance.

When he had been there a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of the window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebekah, his wife.

So Abimelech called Isaac and said, Behold, she is your wife.

How then could you say she is my sister?

Isaac said to him, Because I thought lest I die because of her.

Abimelech said, What is this you have done to us?

One of my people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.

So Abimelech warned all the people, saying, Whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.

And Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold.

The Lord blessed him, and the man became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

I've got a couple of announcements before we get into our text for today.

Today, right after the service, we've got our Become a Member class.

What is membership?

And this is a great way to learn more about the church.

If you come here frequently, if this is the church that you attend and you consider this your home church, I really recommend that you become a member.

Membership is the main way that we uh really do discipleship here at RCD.

It's the way that we establish the relationship in an explicit, formal way between the uh members of the church and the eldership of the church.

And so that we can really form the community in alignment with the way that the Bible describes the church should operate.

So, in order to uh uh become a member, this membership class is one of those uh ways to do it.

So uh it's right after church.

It'll be about an hour, hour and 15 minutes.

And uh when the preacher says an hour, hour and 15 minutes, it means an hour and 15 minutes.

And we'll uh um go over uh what membership means and uh the things that we hold central as a church here at RCD.

Uh second, uh tonight at 7 p.m.

at Trinity Church, which is downtown right next to the Capitol building.

Um actually, this is kind of a funny thing.

You know the it any L2 folks here?

Yeah, like okay, yeah, like half.

So um that's the church, it's a long story.

But we um uh the the the folks that built Trinity Church actually built the old L2 building as well.

Isn't that weird?

Like in history in the past, which is where history takes place.

We're meeting in that building for a uh a lecture uh that sounds not fun unless you're like me and you like that sort of thing, uh, from uh this this lady Nancy Pearcy, who, and she's uh touring around lecturing on her book Love Thy Body.

Um this is a book that really hits on some of the most fundamental questions that people have with regard to their faith today, especially um in the culture at large.

These are questions of sexuality, questions of gender, questions of humanity and abortion, things of that nature.

So uh it's really important to be able to speak to those in and understand how a Christian worldview informs our perspective on those cultural issues.

And she does a wonderful job at speaking to that.

Um so uh that is free tonight at 7 p.m.

at Trinity Church Denver.

Um I'll be there.

Uh anybody else planning on going?

Yeah, check it out.

Look at that.

So it'll be it's really gonna be a party.

I think it's gonna be a great event.

Um uh so yeah, right after the membership meeting, you can go home, watch the Daytona 500.

Just me.

And then go to uh the uh um Nancy Pearcy event.

Uh also, lastly, right after the service, during communion, actually.

So during the service, we've got a prayer team that just started.

So if you would like prayer or need to be prayed for in some way, just head uh to the back of the chapel right after communion in in the foyer right there.

Let's call it the narthex.

I like ship terms for church buildings.

In the narthex, uh, you can uh uh gather and uh um be prayed for.

Okay, let's pray and get into today's text.

Hear from the helm.

Holy Father, we praise you for the completeness of your word.

How you teach us about yourself, and in doing so, you show us who we really are.

Lord, in your scripture, we have the opportunity to feel more known than than anywhere else, I think.

Lord, and we just praise you for your honesty, your clarity.

I pray that you would give us a sense of the reality of how deeply you know us, and that we might live as the people you have made us to be, in truth and honesty and sincerity.

And Lord, that as we live in that way, we might gain a confidence in your grace towards us as we are.

Lord, lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Last year we covered, so we're moving through Genesis right now.

So we're just preaching through the book of Genesis, and we're doing about 10 chapters a year uh for throughout like the kind of winter, the first half of the year.

And then in the fall, we're going through the book of Mark, one of the Gospels.

So we are in our third year of moving through Genesis, and last year we preached through Genesis chapters 12 through 22, and we saw the story of Abraham.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

How Abraham was called out of his homeland, and he was called to go to a place that he'd never been, but he is given a promise, a promise that through him all the nations of the world will be blessed, that he will receive offspring and he will receive the land of promise, Canaan.

So we saw this story of Abraham going out, and we see this event repeat itself in Abraham's life.

Twice it takes place.

That's where it repeats.

The first time he is told to go out from his homeland, and then he goes down to Egypt, and he tells Pharaoh this lie.

He says that his wife, Sarah, is his sister, so that uh it Sarah ends up actually being taken from him, but his purpose in doing that was so that he wouldn't be killed, so that Sarah was taken, because Sarah was very beautiful.

And then later on, in dealing with this other king named Abimelech, he tells the same lie.

And in both instances, he is found out.

In both instances, we see Abraham risk the promise and risk his own wife in order to protect his own skin, because he had no faith that the Lord would actually protect him in a foreign land.

Today we are in the story of Isaac, Abraham's son, and we see the exact same pattern repeat itself.

Isaac is in a foreign land, and actually with the son of Abimelech, the previous king, it must have been like a family name, like Caesar or something.

It's a name and a title.

Abimelech, uh uh once again, it Isaac is living in Abimelech's territory, and he lies, saying that his wife, Rebecca, is his sister, in order to spare his own skin.

So the the main principle that we're going to see today, and that we'll see take place in Isaac's life, is that if you're Isaac, you can't hide that you're Isaac.

If you're Isaac, you can't hide that you're Isaac.

This is a really important principle for just how it is that we live as mature Christians.

In order to live as mature Christians, we cannot adopt any sort of strange posture or put on some sort of hypocrisy.

The only way that we can live as true Christians is if you're Isaac, you have to live as Isaac.

So as a Christian, you must live as a Christian in all that that means.

All right, so we're going to see Isaac get called out for not living as Isaac.

And then we're going to see the strange kindness of God in the midst of that.

Let's jump in.

Genesis 26, 6 through 7.

So Isaac settled in Gerar.

When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, She is my sister, for he feared to say, my wife, thinking lest the men of the place should kill me because of Rebecca, because she was attractive in appearance.

That little phrase, settled in Gerar, at the very beginning of this story, is actually really important and something that Jacob covered last week, because it's a sign of incredible faith.

At this time, there is a famine in the land.

And everyone, when there's a famine in the land, where do you go?

Egypt, yeah, where there's food.

That's the best answer.

I like the idea of teeing up things where it's like, how would everybody know this?

It's funny to me.

But when there's a famine in the when there's a famine in ancient Canaan, where do we all go?

You go to Egypt, and the reason that you go to Egypt is because they have something called the Nile.

The Nile floods, and so there's consistent agriculture in Egypt, even in the midst of a drought.

And so everybody heads south to Egypt, where the beer flows like wine.

And so on uh, but Isaac is told by God, stay in the land of promise.

Stay in the land of promise.

Even though there's a famine here, stay in the land of promise.

And so Isaac settles.

Isaac settled in Gerar, in Canaan.

Now, this is incredible faith because he's saying the promise of the Lord is more important than food.

The promise of the Lord is more important than the immediate provision.

It's more certain than the floods of the Nile.

And that incredible faith that Isaac demonstrates is part of what makes the rest of this story so frustrating.

Because as he settles in the land, he repeats the exact sin that his father repeated.

Well, they when they ask him about Rebecca, he says, she is my sister.

Because he was afraid that they might kill him.

Because she was attractive in appearance.

So he lies about his wife, but we've got to understand what the shape of this is, why it is so particularly wrong.

Because it might just seem practical, but it's so particularly wrong for Isaac because what he's doing is he's putting his own risk onto his wife Rebecca.

And he's saying, instead of me bearing the risk for being Isaac, I'm going to put that risk onto you.

So there's an abdication of his own responsibility by denying his own identity.

And then secondly, it's an abandonment of the means of the promise.

Because what is the promise?

It's a very practical one.

You'll get the land and you'll get offspring.

And you know where offspring comes from?

You know, husbands and wives.

It comes from men and women together.

His wife is so absolutely, that's going to be talked about in Love Thy Body, where humans come from.

It's going to be a big night.

Where do humans come from?

So there's this, so what he's doing is he's saying this very means of the promise, he's he's risking.

Because this is a royal lineage, you see.

And so this is like having the queen guarded by people that aren't eunuchs.

You know, this is this is exposing the royalty, the royal promise of God to this danger of corruption.

And he's basically saying that he would rather, in the same double act, he is showing an incredible faith in the promise by staying in the land, and then simultaneously, in the same Isaac, he is saying, but the promise isn't worth enough to trust that the Lord would protect me.

And the promise isn't actually even worth more than my life.

See how strange this is?

In the same person, we see this incredible act of faith, and then this awful, dangerous for his own wife act of faithlessness.

Commentator that I've been uh leaning on really heavily for this whole series, who I've grown to really love, his name Derek Kidner.

He's dead now, unfortunately.

But um uh he he comments this on this section.

He says, typically human, Isaac mixes faith and fear, an incompatible combination, which can give a special quality of meanness to the sins of the religious, and nowhere more so than here.

The mixture of faith and fear gives a special quality of meanness to the sins of the religious.

Come on.

That's true, isn't it?

Why is that?

It's because there's always this, there's this sense in the sins of the religious of the self-righteousness of the sin.

And we can see it right here.

I mean, oh gosh, because what is what is the what's unique about the sins of the religious and the self-righteous quality about the sins of the religious?

It's the it's the certainty that we know we're right and we know we're better than the people who are wrong.

And so we just it gives this quality to it of just being able to do and treat and call the people who are wrong however we would like to treat them, however we'd like to call them.

There's no courtesy.

And in fact, there's there's almost a necessity of no courtesy towards those who are wrong.

There's a necessity of meanness.

Why?

Because we're standing up for what's true.

We can justify almost anything.

So it gives it this special, this unique quality of meanness, and it's worse than regular meanness because it's a self-justified meanness.

The meanness is part of the rightness.

We see it here.

We do this with non-Christians.

You know, it just on the outside, you know.

There's a uh it it's it's okay to have tones of just uh to it's okay to adopt the tones of culture when we're calling out something for its wrongness.

And look, this isn't just unique to what takes place inside the church.

It does take place inside the church, but it's it's not like we have a corner on it.

It's it's whenever we begin to see things develop in a religious way.

And so that we have these clear divisions of insiders and outsiders.

And we know that one of the ways that we maintain the integrity of the in-group is by speaking badly about those in the out group.

Our culture is awash with terms for developing in-groups and out-groups.

It's because we all take on a self-righteous, religious tone.

It's gross because of the mixture.

It's an absolute faith in our correctness, and with that it joins up into a wicked, it's driven by this wicked fear, which amounts to a tremendous meanness.

How does it look in this particular sin?

Why is it that it's a self-righteousness that's driving this sin of Isaac?

Because think of what he's doing.

He's saying, Abimelech is not like us.

Abimelech is not a child of the promise.

He doesn't know the one true God.

He's not somebody who I could trust.

Because he's not like us.

And so because he's not somebody that I could trust, I am justified in lying to him.

Do you see all the mix-ups that are in that?

He's thinking of himself as someone who has the promise of God because of his own righteousness.

Which means he's thinking of Abimelech as someone who doesn't have the promise of God because of Abimelech's unrighteousness.

But why does Isaac have the promise?

Is it because of Isaac's own righteousness?

No.

It's because of the grace of God that Isaac has the promise.

It's because of the family he was born into that Isaac has the promise.

Can Isaac point to anything in himself as the reason why he has and is carrying and is able to hold fast to the wonder and the glory of the promises of God?

He can't.

He can't point to anything in himself.

But we see it come out in this self-righteousness because he says, because the way that his thinking unfolds is it's okay for me to sin against evil people.

So long as they're evil, it's okay for me to sin against them.

He's made himself judge, jury, arbiter.

He's made himself the one who stands on the side of the righteous because of his own righteousness.

He's completely lost grasp of why he is a child of promise.

That is by the grace of God alone.

And because he has lost grasp of the grace of God, he loses total ability to show grace towards others.

He loses his own faith, which allows him and would equip him.

Imagine if he trusted in the promise of God right here.

He would be able to say, look, there is this incredible risk.

Rebecca, you know, they would sit down and talk.

Rebecca, there's this incredible risk that we're taking, settling here in Gerrar.

You know it.

All your friends have left to go to Egypt.

And they're sending you, you know, you're watching their Instagram stories.

And it looks incredible in the Nile and the reeds and rushes, and it's beautiful, especially this time of year.

And yet we're staying here.

And I and we're staying here out of this faith.

And look, it's not just that we won't get to experience that greatness and the leisure of being in Egypt, it's also that we're incurring this incredible risk by staying here because you know you're a vulnerable person.

And I I I I am no king.

I can't, I can put no walls up to protect you.

Instead, we'll just be at the mercy of the place that God has called us to stay.

But we're going to stay here in the promise.

We're going to stay here as the people that God called us to be, as Isaac.

And Rebecca, the ones who hold the promise, the ones who are married, who see the hope of the world to come, and will trust that just as God will protect us from that famine, so too will He be able to protect us from the wickedness that surrounds us.

And then they would have shaken hands and sat back down and had dinner.

And Rebecca would have said, Great speech, Isaac.

They would have sayed.

But instead, they thought, well, we'll have faith over here.

Faith amid the famine.

But we won't have faith that God will honor his promise even in the midst of these wicked people.

Instead, that's where we will draw the line.

Their faith was a mixture.

Genesis 26, verse 8.

Genesis 26:8

When he had been there a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebekah, his wife.

There are two details that make it just particularly kind of gross.

They'd been there a long time.

You know, Sarah, Abraham's wife, when Abraham lied, on both occasions she was taken by the king.

They had been there a long time in Abimelech's court.

Rebecca was never taken.

So they're gaining repeated evidence that the wicked people that they were around, it wouldn't have been foolish to trust them.

And then the second little detail that we see here is Abimelech, the king of the Philistines, looked out of a window.

That means they were close.

It means they lived right next door to the king.

They could have gotten dinner together.

They're probably having a Daytona 500 party.

Like we are.

Abraham laughs because of the wonder.

And then when she's finally, uh when Isaac is finally born, they name him laughter to kind of show their humility at their humiliation at the laughter that they had, and then the joy of God still following through on his promises, and how he becomes a joyful representation of God representing his promises.

And so Isaac uncovers himself by being what?

Isaac.

And man, isn't it like that?

Like when your sin gets uncovered?

Isn't it like that when it really happens?

And your sin, the real sin in your heart, gets uncovered?

It's not like, oh man, the ones that hurt aren't like, oh man, I can't believe this.

This is so out of character for me.

Those aren't the ones that hurt.

The ones that hurt when your sin is uncovered is, man, I'm Isaac and I'm acting just like Isaac.

You know, this actually feels like something James would do.

And I'm doing it again.

And here I am in this sin again.

And you know what it's exposing?

It feels horrible and wicked, not because it's exposing some lie about me, but because it's exposing the truth about me.

Because I'm laid bare before Abimelech.

And so what am I caught doing?

What am I caught being?

Isaac is caught being Isaac.

It's it in Hebrew, it's like you you read it and it's like he caught Isaac Isaacing with Rebekah.

Yeah, that's probably him then.

You know, it's pretty on the nose in the in the Hebrew.

This is kind of what I was praying in the beginning when I was uh for our service, of just what hit me so much about this text is like, what book is more honest than scripture about what the human condition is really like?

About what it's like when we get found out.

You know, when we when we get found out, it really is us getting found out, and that can be one of our greatest fears of being known and exposed, the facade being broken down.

And all of a sudden, all of the self-righteousness that we thought created a true dividing line between the wickedness over there and the righteous that we could stand in over here, we realize, you know, like Solzhenitson, it runs right down the middle of our own heart.

And as much as our acts of faith seem and feel wonderful, they are so often tainted by this terrible mixture.

Verse 9, so Abimelech called Isaac and said, Behold, she is your wife.

How then could you say, She is my sister?

Isaac said to him, Because I thought, lest I die because of her man.

So he's just on, you know, he just comes clean, which is good.

But he also exposes just how how direct at Abimelech the lie was.

You know, because I thought lest I because I thought lest I die be because of her.

Why don't excuse me, why did I lie to you, Abimelech?

Because I thought you were a murderer.

And I thought you were the type of person who would murder me to take my wife for yourself.

Because that's what I thought of you.

Now, the what look at the kindness of Abimelech.

Here's the kindness of Abimelech.

Verses ten through eleven.

Abimelech said, Wow.

Can we give Brandon a round of applause?

I couldn't take back that Daytona 500 party joke anymore.

So Abimelech called Isaac, excuse me.

Abimelech said, water.

The next part is about digging wells, so it's very this is an object lesson.

Abimelech said, What is this you have done to us?

One of the people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.

What is Abimelech concerned about?

Being guilty before the Lord.

This isn't totally absurd because Abimelech is in the lineage of Abimelech.

And Abimelech's father, when he when this happened between Abraham and Sarah and Abimelech, God came to Abimelech in a dream and said, What are you doing with Sarah?

She's another man's wife.

The reason that you haven't slept with her is because I prevented you from sinning against me.

And if anything happens to Sarah, then I will uh bring a curse upon you.

And Abimelech Sr.

was like, whoa, I didn't know she was somebody's wife.

But you're right, it is out of character for me not to have, you know, taken her for myself.

And so it makes sense that you are the one who prevented me.

And then we see that somehow that event, it seems, has become a culture.

You know, it would have been the night that uh dad had a dream from the living God that revealed the truth of this woman who he had taken from a stranger, and it terrified him so much that he repented, and then it gave honor to this person who lied to him, that, you know, that was probably a known story in the family.

And so in The Sun, it's demonstrated where it became a culture because of God's intervention among these people.

So we have a lineage, right?

Abimelech Sr., Abimelech Jr.

Think of it in terms of like Earnhardt.

And then we have Abraham and Isaac, these two lineages.

One, we see the righteousness develop among the ones that don't have the promise.

In the others, we see the unrighteousness continue among the ones who do.

And look at the kindness.

Abimelech doesn't curse him.

Instead, he protects Isaac and Rebecca's marriage.

Warning all the people: whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.

God is forcing a humility onto Isaac.

Where he's saying, Remember, I am the one who makes you safe, I am the one who makes you righteous.

I am the one who draws the dividing lines.

So seek me.

Now look at the kindness of God upon Isaac.

Genesis 26, 12 to 13.

And Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold.

The Lord blessed him, and the man became rich and gained more and more until he became very wealthy.

What's the passage before?

It's a document of Isaac's sin.

The passage right before that was God promising Isaac that he would make him fruitful in the land.

So promise, I will make you fruitful in the land.

Follow me.

Isaac sins.

Next thing, Isaac plants and reaps a hundredfold.

Now why can Isaac say that he reaped a hundredfold in the land?

Was it because of his own righteousness?

He can't say that.

He must say, God continued to honor his promise.

I reaped a hundredfold in the land.

Why?

Because God was faithful to me, even when I was faithless towards him.

Because God took this little seed of faith that was even mixed up with all this wickedness, and he honored the seed of faith.

Because God is the one who is faithful.

So Isaac reaps in the land.

The man became rich and gained more and more until he became very wealthy.

Those are the stages.

You can talk to your wealth manager.

First, you're rich.

Keep going, and you're very wealthy.

And his wealth, well, let's look at the story as it unfolds.

In verses 15 through 16.

Now the Philistines had stopped and filled with earth all the wells that his father's servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father.

Okay, so you look out onto the land, all those wells that were once there, they're filled in.

No wells, dry and barren land.

And Abimelech said to Isaac, Go away from us, for you are much mightier than we.

Basically, the king now comes to Isaac and is like, You've got to leave.

You know, you're too powerful.

You're you're disrupting the integrity of my kingdom.

And you have to leave.

Now, why is that such bad news?

Because what did we just learn?

Where is Isaac gonna go?

There's no place with water, and he can't go down to Egypt.

So Isaac is stuck between a hostile nation and waterless land.

And that's where he is.

And he's in this strange position that the patriarchs, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, often find themselves in.

And it's a position that's directly analogous to us as Christians.

They have the blessing.

They've got nowhere to put it.

They have the blessing.

You know, Isaac can look out and see the blessing.

He's surrounded by flocks and herds.

You know, he reaped a hundredfold, like one seed, and now there's a hundred of that crop.

He's got he's surrounded by blessing.

He can look out and see it.

The Lord blessed me, he's with me.

And then he's not in the promised land.

The promised land doesn't belong to him.

So he's got nowhere to put it.

This is just like us.

We've got this blessed assurance from the Lord of a righteousness.

And what is it?

It's stored up for us in heaven.

We know we have it, right?

We know that the righteousness of Christ is ours.

It's given to us.

It's certain.

Just by faith alone we can receive it and own it as ours.

And yet it's like, where do we put it in this world?

It's too mixed up right now.

But it's certainly stored in heaven for us.

And so how do we live?

How do we live in this strange moment where we have the blessing, the assurance from Christ, and yet we're not in the promised land yet?

We start digging.

We march forward, trusting and acting as though the promise will be fulfilled.

And we seek to be more and more living in line with the promise of God.

So Isaac starts digging and he digs one well.

The story becomes basically Goldilocks now.

He digs one well, and the people quarrel with him.

He discovers that it that it's like an ever-flowing well.

And so the the people of that area come in and they're like, hey, you know what?

Now that you found that well, I think I remember that's ours.

That's our well.

And they quarrel with him.

And so he has to leave.

And so he names that well quarreling, which is Esek.

And then he goes and digs another well, and they quarrel with him again, or they contend with him again at that well, and so he names that well Sitna, which means contention.

And then finally this happens, and he moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it.

So he called its name Rayaboth, saying, For now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.

Isaac here demonstrates just a glorious picture of the Christian life.

So, what do we have in Christ?

We have his righteousness, and yet we experience this mixture in ourselves, and yet we labor so that our righteousness might be more completely realized.

And what happens?

Often we face obstacles.

We face obstacles of other people, and we face obstacles of ourselves, our very own sins and idols that we won't be able or seem to be able to let go of, and yet we labor on.

And so we have these markers when we look back.

We dug a well that was a good thing, and yet there was this contention with it, and we dug a well that was another good thing.

It was this attempt at a good thing, and yet there was there was this quarreling that came with it, even in our own hearts.

And yet Isaac keeps moving forward.

This is a picture of just the perseverance of the Christian life, where you have the promise.

You have the promise, but it's not fulfilled yet.

And so you labor on, guided by the promise.

Hebrews 11, verse 39 through 40, speaking of Isaac here, says of Isaac and Abraham and Jacob, it says, and all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised.

Hebrews 11:39–40

Isaac didn't ever inherit the land.

Since God had provided something better for us, that's talking about us, those who live after Christ, that apart from us they should not be made perfect, that their laboring towards this promise is meant to be an encouragement for us who have the benefit of Christ, who look back and see that their labor was fulfilled in the coming of Christ.

And what does Christ do?

He enters into a land, a wilderness full of people that are hostile towards him.

And he moves through that hostility, doing nothing but good things, just digging new wells, you know, so to speak, healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, preaching encouragement to the poor.

And as he moves in that way, he is holding and demonstrating the promise of the kingdom.

And what is he met with?

A constant quarreling.

A quarreling that it becomes so extreme it amounts to his own death.

But what does he do when he dies?

He holds the promise.

And what was that promise for?

It wasn't just for the promised land, it was for us.

For us to be brought in, even in amid amidst all of our mixture, he is able to accomplish our righteousness for us.

He holds it perfectly, perfectly holds the promise on our behalf.

And because of that, the promise is fulfilled.

So what is our promise?

What is our promise?

That any of us who come to Christ will be saved, that he has accomplished the promised land for us, that our righteousness is stored, incorruptible in heaven.

And so how do we live?

We live like Jacob in the midst of his blessing.

We move out into the promised land.

We seek to bring righteousness of wells where there are dry and barren lands.

And we expect that there will be quarreling that we meet, but it doesn't stop us.

Instead, we persevere, not looking to our own righteousness.

We don't persevere because we trust in our own righteousness.

We persevere because we trust in the righteousness of Christ.

See how incredible this is?

Okay.

We live as Isaac when you're Isaac.

That means we learn to rest as we are in the grace of God.

And in resting as we are in the grace of God, we persevere towards the true righteousness that He has promised us.

All right.

Are there any questions today, Tim?

In what ways can we practically live in bold faith when we do not have the specific promises that God gave to Abraham and his descendants?

Oh, but we do.

Those promises are ours.

Consider the promise of the covenant.

It is for you and your offspring.

That's still true.

That's still true.

That we have this promise of giving to our offspring, this hope of the covenant.

Here, this is yours to take up.

It is given to you.

Take up the hope of the covenant.

Now, I understand the question isn't exactly that.

The question is, yeah, but when the promise is just stay in the land, that's a lot easier when I'm trying to decide, like, yeah, but what job should I take next?

Or how should I respond to this email?

Or is it reasonable to cut this person out of my life?

Is that setting a boundary that protects my family?

Or should I continue suffering in this relationship as a demonstration of Christ's love towards them?

That's questions more like that, right?

The questions that they're that you're getting at.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is why the Christian life requires us to be people that live with this is gonna sound like such a cop-out answer.

I can feel it.

I hope it doesn't.

That live with incredible wisdom.

Now, why does it require such wisdom to live?

Here's what the opposite of wisdom could be.

It could be, oh, I've got it.

Here's you know what the opposite oh man.

You know what the opposite of wisdom is in our culture?

Data.

Data is the opposite of wisdom in our culture.

Because you know what we mean when we say data?

Something is so self-evident that I don't have to actually make a decision about it.

Do you see what I mean?

And so what we're doing is we're distancing ourselves from the uh uh the moral responsibility that we have for the decisions that we make.

I'm not saying we ought to make uninformed decisions.

What I'm saying is there's no such thing as a decision that we're not responsible for.

Data does not speak for itself, it is interpreted, and then we speak on its behalf, and then we're morally accountable for that.

And what we would like the Christian life to be is that the law of God would be a list of data that spoke for itself, and then we would know precisely what to do in any given circumstance.

Instead, we're given dilemmas like this: hostile nation, waterless country.

The promise is to stay in the land.

What do I I've got I've got all these sheep to take care of.

They seem like they're part of the promise.

So so what do I what do I do now?

I guess I'll start digging wells.

Is this even working?

Digging these wells?

Every well I dig, it just creates mer more turmoil and more difficulty.

But it seems like the best thing I can do in this situation is to try and dig another well.

I finally dug one well and it seemed to kind of work.

Okay, I'll settle here for a while.

What I want us to see is that it wasn't different for them.

They held the same promise, they faced the same dilemmas.

And what we need is not to be able to write the perfect pros and cons list that makes the decision for us, but instead by coming to Christ, by Isaac going to Christ as Isaac, by you going to Christ as you, then you can trust Him to transform your heart so that you are able to live in the world with wisdom and perseverance in a way that aims towards Him.

And the things that you get wrong, you may not actually be as wrong as you think.

God might use those.

But we're called to live with a demeanor that trusts Him, shaped by faith.

Does that help?

Okay.

Part of the ways that we form our hearts, this is a segue.

Part of the ways that, welcome to the segue.

You shouldn't have to say it if it is.

Well, one of the ways that we form our hearts is, man, come to church.

Hear his word, talk about it.

Have your hearts formed by this.

And come and participate in communion with us.

Remember, remember and proclaim the gospel of God as the most central fact of your life, that Jesus died for your sins, which means you're a sinner, and that his death accomplished your righteousness for you on the cross, that you can hold it by faith, and that a life arced towards him will not be foolish, will not be wasted, but it will be meaningful, even if you can't exactly articulate it right now.

You hold it by faith here.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, said, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time of communion.

Lord, that in it our hearts would be formed to be the type of people who are wise like you, made wise by your gospel, to live in this challenging state that we are in, which is one where we have the promise just like Isaac, and yet there's this mixture in ourselves.

Lord, let us repent as we come, that you would purify us by your grace, so that that purity wouldn't be puffed up into pride, but it would maintain its humility before you as the one who gives us even our own righteousness.

Lord, we praise you for your gospel.

Let us be a people who are shaped by it to live wisely in the world.

Let us become wells, Lord, for that.

We we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.