June 8, 2008 Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Series: Standing on God’s Promises
Sermon Title: “Blessed to be a Blessing”
Text: Genesis 12:1-9
Dr.
Delivered on June 8, 2008
“The Lord said
to Abram: ‘I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your
name great, so that you will be a blessing.’” Genesis 12:2
Blessed to Be a Blessing
I hope you had a good week last week. I did. Donna and I celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary, I lost five pounds on my new diet, and I went to my orthopedic doctor and found out my painful right knee isn’t a joint problem requiring more surgery, but simply a tendon problem requiring rest. I thought my week was going to be even better than that on Thursday. That’s the day I discovered I’d won 10 million dollars.
Who wouldn’t be thrilled to win that kind of money? But there it was, right there in my mail that day. A large envelope marked, “PRIORITY MAIL - Open Immediately!” The letter inside read:
Dear Mr. JACKSON (all caps), “Our records indicate that you are scheduled to win our $10,000,000.00 Super Prize in just a few short weeks.” The letter went on to say, “You are the ONLY ONE who can win this $10,000,000.00 with this SuperPrize Number” – then it listed a fifteen digit number.
Promises, Promises! Life is full of promises, isn’t it? Promises are an important part of everyone’s life. We can’t live in human society without receiving and giving promises. The fancy religious word for a promise, of course, is covenant, a word that appears some 270 times in the Bible. But covenants aren’t just things from back in the Bible days. Some of us live in neighborhoods with covenants. Many of you signed a membership covenant when you joined this church. And many of us are married, which is also a covenant.
But even though promises are everywhere, how many of them can we trust to come true? Whose promises can we depend on? Looking at the mailing I got it’s easy to understand how people can be fooled by such things. The mailing looked very official. I can see how people would be duped. In fact, I had an aunt who sent thousands of dollars to bogus companies that called her promising vacations, automobiles, houses, and incredible returns on her “investment.” Some even sent her a few hundred dollars back knowing if they did she’d send even more.
Like I mentioned
earlier, marriage is officially a “covenant,” but even there some folks have
trouble trusting such a promise to be true. For instance I read about a couple
in
Promises are intrinsic to our lives and today but they’ve lost some of their meaning because so many of us have been burned. Who can you trust to keep their promises? That’s why we’re in a series talking about promises that always come true in our series called, “Standing on God’s Promises.” You see, a promise is only as good as the character of the person making the promise and their ability to make what they promise happen. So what we’re doing is working our way through the book of Genesis looking at just a few of the nearly 9000 promises God made in the Bible. Last week we looked at God’s promise to Noah, the promise that he, and we, has a friend in God. Remember?
Today's reading from Genesis records a promise that may be even more unbelievable than the “Urgent Mail” I received last week about the 10 million dollars. Abraham and his wife are sitting in their tent minding their own business one day when God suddenly speaks to Abraham. It’s startling actually. We’re briefly introduced to Abraham at the end of chapter 11 where we are given just the barest sketch of his family situation. Then in the first verse of chapter 12 God clears his throat and begins speaking to Abraham. He calls Abraham to leave everything dear to him; his country his relatives, and his ‘father’s house’ which means the wealth of his family to go “to the land I will show you.” Then God makes this promise to Abraham:
2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:1-3).
Abraham immediately strikes out and obediently traverses the entire land inhabited by the Canaanites (vv. 4-5), and then God reaffirms his promise: “to your offspring I will give this land” (vv. 6-7), whereupon Abraham “built an altar there to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord” (vv. 8-9). The rest of the narrative about Abraham, in fact the rest of the entire Bible is about the unfolding of this promise.
In fact, this amazing – oh, let’s face it – this impossible promise sits at the very heart of the Christian faith. That which is dead and empty, that which is barren and without hope; shall be filled and blessed; and through the blessing God will bring through Abraham’s line others will be blessed. This promise also lies at the heart of Judaism and of Islam. All three of these great monotheistic religions refer to Abraham as “Father Abraham” and claim him and these promises made to him at the core of their beliefs.
And so this morning I want us to look at what these promises teach us about ourselves, and when I say “ourselves” I mean us individually and I mean us as the church, the body of Christ. Noah’s story taught us that “we’ve got a friend” in God; a friend that will never forsake us or leave us, despite our unfaithfulness to him. The story of God’s promise to Abraham teaches that we are “Blessed to be a Blessing.” Let’s see how.
We Are HEIRS
First of all we are blessed to be a blessing because we are HEIRS to God’s glorious inheritance. The first part of God’s promise to Abraham says, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great” (v. 2).
For many of us summer
the time when we brave the heat and gather with our extended family for big
family reunions. Family reunions are a time of eating good food, swapping recipes,
remembering family members who have died, and meeting family you didn’t even
know you had. Some families even make up a special T-shirt for the occasion
with the name of the family and the date emblazoned on them. I’d imagine most
of us have been to a family reunion. Some of you may even have one coming up. I
know the Sloyers have a big family reunion coming up soon. And my
I guess most of us think of an inheritance this way – who wouldn’t want to have a rich uncle named Bill Gates or Ted Turner. But the Bible teaches that we are in the family line of Adam, and Noah, and Abraham, and right on down to today, and because you and I are we are heirs to a blessing that money can’t buy. I’ll be honest with you, should the “Prize Patrol” ever come to my door bringing the $10 million I talked about a moment ago, I would certainly invite them in to talk it over. But if during the conversation they said I had to trade the promises of God for their $10 million I would send them packing in a heartbeat. Why? Because $10 million dollars does not have the ability to say, “I give them eternal life and they shall never perish!”
And the inheritance we share as heirs of God is not limited to eternal life when we pass from this world. The inheritance we are blessed with is about the peace that passes all understanding. It’s the blessing of getting out of the rat race because like they say, even if you win it, you’re still a rat. It’s the blessing of seeing things as they really are, the way God does, and not through the lens of this world.
I know I talk a lot about movies in my sermons, and I really don’t spend all my time watching them, but there was a movie a few years ago – actually a fairly inappropriate movie in many ways, but it had a good sort of moral. It was about a guy who was obsessed with being hip and with external beauty who suddenly was hypnotized and began to see the inner beauty in the people around him. People – men and women – who would be considered “ugly” by normal standards suddenly became attractive to him because, like God looking upon scrawny David, “looked on his heart.” That’s another part of the inheritance we have as God’s children.
I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t trade that for $100 million. The first thing to learn from Abraham’s story is we are heirs – we are blessed beyond belief.
We are the
HOPE of the world
But the blessing isn’t just for us. The second part of God’s promise to Abraham teaches that we are the HOPE of the world. We are blessed to be a blessing. After God says to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great” he goes on to say, “you will be a blessing….and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:2-3).
Of course God’s promise here to Abraham was that one of his heirs would eventually be Jesus, the Messiah, and through him, all the families of the earth would be blessed. Like we just said, Abraham's blessings have become our blessings, but just as God told Abraham, in and through us all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
I have a confession to make – last year during the terrible drought we had I would sometimes go out late at night to water a few bushes we put in last year. They were new plants and really needed the water! As the summer wore on I began to notice something unusual. These bushes I was watering are on a slight hill along the side of our yard and have ivy bordering them. What I began to notice was that not only were my new bushes surviving, but the first few feet of ivy below them were a brilliant, healthy green color as opposed to the yellowish-brown ivy at the bottom of the hill. You see, the ivy was benefiting from the blessing of water that the new bushes were getting. Blessings were literally spilling over onto them.
That blessing was, of course unintentional and caused by me, not by the true recipient of the blessing, our new bushes. But the principal remains. You and I are not the true source of the blessing to the world – God is, in Christ and through His Spirit. I don’t want to stretch my metaphor, but we’re like the hose that carries the blessing and the blessing itself is the life-giving water.
That’s how this whole faith thing works – and that’s why as a church and as individual Christians we must get it through our heads it’s not about us. The church doesn’t exist for itself – the church exists for others, to turn the blessings we’ve received into blessings for others.
It was Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels who coined the phrase, “The local church is the hope of the world.” By that he didn’t mean we’re something special or that we are the Savior of the world. What he meant by that is that we are the conduit through which God’s work can be carried out. We are the messengers – bearers of “good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people.” This, by itself, defines who we are and what we are to be about. We are to “go and make disciples of all nations.” Which leads to the final defining characteristic of God’s promise and that is what makes Abraham, and you and I so special in God’s scheme.
We HOLD the
key in our Hand
And that is that Abraham, and you and I HOLD the key in our hand of whether or not we will get to participate in God’s marvelous plan. It’s right there in the first verse where God said to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred, and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” And then in verse 4 it says, “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” The key to whether or not we get to enjoy being part of the plan is whether or not we obediently go as commanded by God.
Some commentators I read on this passage argue that God’s covenant with Abraham was conditional – that he had to go in order for the covenant to work. They make it into some kind of “tit-for-tat” contract instead of a unilateral promise on God’s part, which it was.
But I don’t think so. Read the passage again. It never says, “If you go then I’ll to these things for you…” God never says, “Promise me you’ll only worship me Abraham, and I’ll bless you.” God simply says, “Go” and then follows this commandment up with four “I will’s”
When God speaks, the deed is accomplished in fact – even though the deed itself may not have been realized at the time. Understanding this is critical to your faith. When God says it, it’s as good as done. When God says, “Let there be light,” there is light. When God says Abraham is the ancestor of a “multitude of nations,” the nations are born in fact even though they will be delivered in time.
The crux of what I want us to take away from Abraham’s story is that the promises of God are the deeds of God – they are a done deal. Abraham will have a child. That child will have a child and so on, until Jesus himself is born. When God made the promise, it was, as the French say, a “fait accompli.”
The remainder of Abraham's story in Genesis is a wonderful account of how God’s promise is sure, but Abraham's faith all too human. Abraham and Sarah falter at several points in their story. They doubt God, they take matters into their own hands with Hagar and Ishmael, they laugh when God promises a child, but finally, the promise is secured and Abraham worships the One who can make and keep seemingly impossible promises.
What that means for us then is that faith is believing in God's ability to keep the promises he’s made. And our faith will be tested practically every day we walk on this earth by the situations we encounter in our life. And there are times when God will call us to “step out” – to “Go” – to walk away from our comfort zone – possibly to give up possessions that have come to possess us – and to walk towards the far better things God has for us that fit into his plan and purpose for us in the world.
Perhaps some of you find yourselves in that position today. You sense God calling to you, “Go” and you are weighing things in your heart and mind. Listen, whether or not you go will NOT stop God’s plans from coming to pass. All your saying “No” to God means is that you may miss the joy and adventure and the thrill of knowing you are right in the center of God’s will doing what He would have you do.
What about you? Do you understand that you are an heir to God’s promises? Are you being a blessing to others by pouring out God’s blessings that you have received to others? And finally, do you realize you hold the key to all this in your trembling hand? Will you go? Will you trust him? Do you believe in God’s promises? I pray you do. Amen.