|
[back]
Costly Sacrifices and Incredible Rewards of Faith
Dear Friends,
When the Lord told Abraham to leave Ur, his native land, and to leave his natural family, the father of faith was being commanded to do something unnatural and challengingly different from what even a godly man would expect. Even before the Moral Law was expressed in the form of the Ten Commandments, that Law was written by God in the conscience of those who followed Him. Yet here Abraham was being told by God to do something that would surely disappoint if not dishonor his father and mother, contrary to what would later be expressed through Moses in the Fifth Commandment. Such testing of the father of faith would grow yet more painfully and perplexingly severe, as he would be told as an old man to wait for God to give him a son through his aged and barren wife, Sarah, and still later, he was told by God to kill that son as a sacrificial offering. The compensation for all of this costly testing the Lord stated in terms of where God would lead Abraham and what He would make of the obedient patriarch. The Lord told Abraham that He would lead him, to the land which I will show you, and that He would make of him a great name, a great nation, and a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1-3).
We rightly marvel at the man who would leave so much natural and familiar blessing for the intriguing but admittedly sketchy promises of the Lord. We may learn many valuable lessons about our own walk of faith as we study the budding, blossoming, and finally fruitful faith of this great patriarch. Yet even greater importance is what we should see and understand about Abraham’s God in how He led His beloved servant. For example, the Lord always is keenly aware of the manifold costs He asks of His servants when He calls them to walk by faith in Him. This divine awareness is seen in the way God specifies all that Abraham would be obliged to leave in his pilgrimage of faith. Abraham was called to go out from his native country, and from his natural relatives, and from his father’s house. Our God always knows with loving apprehension how costly is the way He calls us to undertake.
In addition to our Lord’s sympathetic understanding of the deaths we must die if we are to enter His kingdom, we perceive how He offers nothing less or other than Himself as the supreme compensation for our bearing the costs of obedience to His calling. This fact is evident in how the Lord states the Promised Land to Abraham. God does not elaborate a description of the marvels of that land. In fact, the Lord says nothing at all about the land, whether good or bad. The land is not held out to Abraham as an ultimate reward of which God is but the instrumental Giver. Instead, Abraham is told to go to the land that the Lord would show him. This way of stating the matter makes the land something of almost indifferent significance, while it makes everything of the One giving it. Our God always gives us only those things that will not distract us from Him but rather will prompt us to greater devotion to Him.
Finally, God promises not only Himself as Abraham’s reward, but also such great, precious, and numerous blessings that the patriarch could never contain them all in himself and during his life in this world. The old man would attain a great name; the old man who was childless and stripped by God of his country and of his father’s household would become the one in whom all the families of the earth would be blessed.
Those who venture their all upon their trust in and obedience to the God of Abraham die natural deaths, but those deaths make way for the abounding and glorious resurrections that only the God of grace and glory can give. Our God does not ever give us less than we expect and can enjoy; He gives us an exceeding abundance of all that is beyond what we could ask or think. Abraham had his doubts and hesitations and false steps during his pilgrimage of faith, but he never did have or does now have or ever will have regrets that he heard and heeded the voice of the living God. Neither will we ever have cause to regret our faith in and obedient following of the God who has loved us and redeemed us at infinite cost to Himself. For all of our temporal and earthly losses, He gives us precious and abundant blessings here (Mt. 6:33), and inconceivably glorious eternal blessings hereafter. We can, like Abraham, rightly and gratefully reckon that all of our losses in Christ and for Christ’s sake will be ultimately turned into glorious and eternal gain.
Faithfully yours,
William Harrell
[back]
|
Sunday
Morning Worship 10:30 AM
Evening Worship
6:30 PM
Wednesday
Christian Education
7:00 PM
Saturday
Congregational Prayer Meeting
7:00 PM |
