Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, January 9th. Abraham had an extraordinary relationship with God. By studying his response to the Lord, believers in Jesus can learn how to have courage to move forward by faith.
Everything God calls us to do in our life, He calls us to move forward, never backwards. And that is always an act of faith on our part. And if you recall, the Bible says we're saved by faith, we walk by faith, we die by faith, we pray by faith, everything is the result of faith. And so, as you think about the life of faith and how God works in your life, I want us to look at the life of Abraham just in one chapter, this 12th chapter of Genesis. I want us to see four things primarily.
First one is this, and you'll be wise to jot this down. The call of faith oftentimes is a call to step out into the unknown, to go where we are unfamiliar to some area and some direction that is untried and that is unknown to us. Now let me say very quickly, the call of faith is oftentimes a call to step out to the unknown. Listen, unknown to me, yes.
Unknown to those about me, yes. Unknown to God, no. God has never asked you and me to step out in anything that is unknown to Him. So if you'll notice what God said to Abraham here, He says, I want you to go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land which I will show you. He didn't have any idea where he was going at first. And if you'll turn to Hebrews chapter 11, and the writer of Hebrews, speaking of this very incident, makes this extremely clear in this 11th chapter as he's talking about Abraham's call. He says in the 8th verse of the 11th chapter of Hebrews, he says, by faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was going.
Now let me ask you a question. Are you willing to follow the leadership of the Lord when you don't know where He's going to lead you? When God says, this is what I want you to do, this is the next step. Are you willing to do that without being able to reason it out?
Without being able to figure out how it's going to work out? You see, if I am following Christ, that is a walk of faith. And if I'm going to follow Him, I have to follow Him by faith.
And where that will lead you is in to and through situations and circumstances that oftentimes will be very difficult, ultimately absolutely fantastic through deep valleys, dark valleys, trials, tribulations, heartaches, all kinds of things, all kinds of circumstances. He doesn't say, just follow me and I'll just put you on a cloud and we'll just float you right on across this desert. No, He took him through it. And He took him in a way that he had to listen and follow Him. Second principle I want you to notice here, not only in the life of Abraham is this walk of faith a step into the unknown, but it is also a call to separation. Listen to what He said to him. The call of faith is a call to separation. Now listen, He says, Abraham, go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land which I will show you.
Now do you know what the biggest problem is? Listen, all of us have a comfort zone. Now nobody else's comfort zone is exactly like yours. All of us have a little comfort zone in which we feel very secure, we feel accepted, we feel loved, we feel like as long as we keep this all right, everything's fine.
Listen to me carefully. The comfort zone is where faith goes to sleep. Because you see, as long as you're in your comfort zone, you don't have to trust God.
We don't want to let go what feels good and secure to us. But the third principle I want you to notice here in the life of Abraham is this. And that is the call of God always includes the promise of blessing. The call of God always includes the promise of blessing. Now it won't be as clear and certainly not in the magnitude of this one, but listen. He says now, go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land which I will show you.
And He says, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make you a great nation. I will bless you, make your name great. You shall be a blessing. I shall bless those who bless you. And the one who curses you, I will curse. Divine protection. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Now that promise, of course, you and I are today being blessed by it. Because what happened? Abraham had Isaac, Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons. And the key son of all of those 12 was Judah, the lion of the tribe of Judah, from which in the lineage came the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior.
And there have been many times when I have felt God was challenging me. And you know what His promise was? Blood, sweat and tears, heartache, rejection. That's not very appealing. Right.
But you know what? Look beyond that. You see, our problem is that we're too short-sighted. But if I'm willing to look beyond the hurt, just beyond the hurt, brother, it gets absolutely fantastically wonderful. Abraham was wise enough not to look at the desert, but to look beyond what God said.
The fourth principle I want you to look at here, and I don't want you to miss this one because this is so very, very, very, very important. And that is, when you and I are talking to the Lord and listening to Him and searching to know His willing decisions in our life and so forth, whatever it might be, you can mark this one down. The call of faith will involve testing and trials. Now this is so clearly evident in the life of Abraham here. Suddenly there's a famine. God knew all about that famine. Listen, if God could take him out of the fertile lands of the Ur of the Chaldees and bring him to Haran and then around finally to Canaan, He can certainly feed him in a famine. But you see, it's natural for us when things really get hot around us and they get barren and things aren't working out for us to get our focus off of the Father, onto the famine, on our fears, and then we begin to make choices, not based on faith, but based on reasoning. So the reasonable thing to do was go down into Egypt because Egypt was a fertile area and surely they would have enough.
The Bible never says that God called Abraham to Egypt. That was a decision he made on his own because he took his eyes off the Father who had led him step by step, got him on the famine, then on his fears, which is on himself, and he got in trouble. Now here's what I want you to see. Any time, mark this one down, any time you take your eyes off the Father and you begin to focus on this trouble around you, whatever it is, it doesn't make any sense if it's in your home, your business, your finances, relationships, whatever it is, you get your eyes on that, then what happens is we become afraid it's not going to work out the way we want to so we begin to figure out how to do it. And instead of walking by faith, now we're walking by reason and by sight and by feeling. And here's what happens every time. We get in trouble.
Notice what happens. One sin leads to another. This act of unbelief led him to something else.
Now look at this. Verse 11. So it came about when he came near to Egypt that he said to Sarah his wife, see now, I know that you're a beautiful woman.
She was about 65 years of age. Verse 12. Came about that when the Egyptians see you that they will say this is his wife and they will kill me.
But they will let you live. Please say that you are my sister. Now she was his half-sister. So that it may go well with me because of you and that I may live on account of you. What happened? When you take your focus off the father and you put him on the famine and you become fearful, you begin to look out for you and oftentimes you will hurt the folks whom you love the most and who are the dearest to you. You don't mean to, but you do. And notice what this man did. He was willing for his wife to be taken by Pharaoh and made Pharaoh's wife to save his own skin. You say where in the world is his faith? Well, thank God Abraham failed every once in a while because we can say, boy, that's what happens to me. I get my focus off the father onto my famine and I begin to fear that I want to manipulate my circumstances. And every single time we get the focus off him on the famine and we begin to fear, we get ourselves in trouble. We hurt ourselves and we hurt others.
So what do you do? Listen, his first mistake was doubting God. You know what the second mistake always is?
An act of disobedience somewhere else. He asked her to lie and he himself lied. And so what happens? Verse 15, And Pharaoh's officials saw her, praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. They didn't ask him, they just took her. Therefore, here's what Pharaoh did, he treated Abraham well for her sake, gave him sheep, oxen, donkeys, male and female servants, and female donkeys and camels.
I mean, listen, this was a big deal swap. For his wife, he became a very, very wealthy man. But it was an act of disobedience. He took his focus off the father, got it on the famine, on his own fears, and the next thing he's doing, what's he doing? He's just stepping away from God all the time. And of course, by the grace of God, the Bible says that the Lord struck Pharaoh in his house with a great plague, with plagues, because of Sarah, Abraham's wife. So I believe that somehow, immediately, God's judgment came upon the household of Pharaoh to preserve and to protect the purity of Sarah. And so the Bible says that Pharaoh calls Abraham in and says, What is this you've done? And so having given him all of these things and all these treasures, Abraham leaves. Now, it looks like, look at this, it looks like that in his sinning against the father by his doubt, that God protected him and he came out real well smelling like a rose, gold, silver, camel, sheep, goats.
I mean, he walked out of there, a very, very, very wealthy man. Now, here is the hook every single time this is it. And I want you young folks to listen to me very carefully, as well as adults and everybody else, because it applies to all of us. Whenever I get my focus off the Father, and I get it on my famine and myself and my fears, and I begin to manipulate and I work out my circumstances, every single time I come at a loser. Because something happened here, I'm going to show you in a second, something happened here that looks like when you read it, you just sort of read right across that and it doesn't even faze you. But that little side trek down into Egypt, which was an act of doubt and disobedience to God, Abraham never got over it in all of his life.
Here's what happened. Look at this, verse 16. Therefore, Pharaoh treated Abraham well for her sake, and gave him sheep, oxen, donkeys, male, female servants and female donkeys and camels. Now, turn to the 16th chapter of Genesis.
And I want you to look at this very first verse. Now, Sarah, Abraham's wife, had borne him no children, and she had an Egyptian maid. Where do you think he got her?
Down in Egypt. An Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. So Sarah said to Abraham, Now behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
Please go into my maid, perhaps I shall obtain children through her. And Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah. Another mistake in his life. Because suddenly, there was dissension in that home. Dissension that never ceased.
She gave birth to a son by the name of Ishmael. That birth, and the generations that followed that, caused havoc in his family for centuries. This mistake was a mistake that Abraham never escaped from.
Not only did he not escape from it, but his family never escaped from it. Because as we look at the nations today, we have Israel over here and Arab nations of the world here. And as you look at that conflict today and look at the conflict that began back there, that's not to say that God loves anybody unless He loves anybody else. I'm not being critical of anybody.
The only thing I'm saying is, here's the principle. He should never have gone to Egypt. Because it was the beginning of turmoil in his home. And Hagar was despised by Sarah. And she became jealous and covetous of her. And not only that, the sons and all the things that took place as a result of that.
Here's what I want you to see. Our little detours down into Egypt may look very, very innocent when we take our focus off him, get him on our famine, get our needs met our way and our own time, and ignore the consequences. That little journey down into Egypt, he never got over.
You see, you and I were created to live for Christ and to obey Him and to follow Him. Now God made Abraham a great man. And all of us have been blessed because it was through Him the Messiah came. And now 2,000 years later after the Messiah, almost 3,500 years from the time He spoke to Abraham, all of us have been blessed.
But how often He failed. But it's interesting that the next thing we see in the next chapter, He's back, back to Bethel where He built an altar before to God. And if you'll notice in the fourth verse of the thirteenth chapter, He comes up out of Egypt, back up into the Canaan. And to verse four, to the place of the altar which He had made there formerly, and there Abraham called in the name of the Lord, and he must have repented before God and asked the Lord to forgive him for his failure to trust Him and to obey Him.
Let me ask you a question. What is it that God is challenging you to do that you're unwilling to do? What is it that you are telling Him, Lord, I just can't see my way clear and this is unknown and unfamiliar territory You're calling me into and I just can't do it. You're going to miss God's will. Is He saying that you separate yourself from that circumstance, that job, that relationship, this material thing, and you're saying but God and your security is wrapped up in something that it should not be? God is offering you a blessing if you will trust Him. And then I want to ask you another question.
Are you seated here today or maybe are you listening? And when I said detour to Egypt, something came to your mind just like that. Are you considering a little detour in your spiritual walk and your walk with Christ that you know that deep down in your heart is something you are doing rather than what God has called you to do? Have you taken your focus off of Him and set it on yourself and your famine and you want to get your needs met and you want to get them done now in your way? And instead of trusting Him, you're working out yourself in your way rather than trusting Him?
I want to say to you, my friend, you're headed for trouble. You don't have to. Just trust Him.
You don't have to figure it out. Just trust Him. Just do what He says do and give Him the privilege of demonstrating His awesome power to supply your need, whatever it might be.
And you know what will happen? God turns famines into fantastic testimonies of the grace of God, the power of God, the provision of God, the blessing of God. But you know what we do? We mess it all up by trying to work our way through those famines, some of which God sends into our life to test our faith, to give us the privilege of growing in our faith and giving us the privilege of demonstrating how great He is. The call of faith to step out where it appears to be unknown, to separate myself from my comfort zone, to the best blessings that God has to offer, to be tested, to be tried, yes, but in obedience we are able to enjoy the best that God has to offer. Thank you for listening to part two of The Call of Faith. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our online 24-7 station. And if you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
