Abraham: The Pilgrimage of Faith, Part 1

See, a lot of us are like this, okay God show me where you're taking me and then I'll let you know if I'm going. But Dr. Tony Evans says faith gives us the power to approach life the other way around.

He has a purpose that he wants you to fulfill, but he will not show you your destiny if he can't get you to leave the world. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas and president of The Urban Alternative. One of the toughest things to do in the Christian life is nothing, to wait patiently on God and trust him while we do. Today Dr. Evans says we can learn that skill by taking a look at the life of Abraham.

Let's join him as he begins. We've defined faith as acting like God is telling the truth, acting like it is so even when it's not so in order that it might be so simply because God said so. That you measure your faith by your feet, not by your feelings. We learned that Abel worshiped by faith, Enoch walked by faith, Noah worked by faith, and today we're going to talk about the leading candidate of faith in the Bible, and his name is Abraham. In Hebrews chapter 11, we read in verse 8, By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was going.

By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. We're going to learn three things about Abraham today and his walk of faith, that if you want to experience God at a whole new level by faith, it will involve a leaving, a living, and a looking. Let's start with the leaving, because verse 8 tells us, By faith, when he was called, he obeyed by going out to a place. Now this is described for us in Genesis chapter 12, chapter 13, when God told Abraham, I want you to leave your city, your community, your house, and even your people, and I want you to go to a place that I'm not going to tell you about yet.

Said he didn't know where he was going. All he knew is God told him to leave without knowing where God was taking him. Why is God telling him to leave, er, of the Chaldees? Why is God telling him to to move away from family and friends and things he grew up with? He's in a context of worldwide paganism. Joshua 24 2 says that he was raised in a family of idols, so they worship idols.

They worship false gods, so they had religion, but it wasn't the true God. God says, I have something for you to do. I've got a plan for you, Abraham, but in order for me to fill my plan, you've got to leave here. In other words—stay with me—if you want to see where I want you to go, I'm not going to show you where I'm taking you till you leave where you are. You cannot stay here and have me. You cannot stay around paganism and have me. You cannot stay around humanism and have me. So you've got to leave and you've got to trust me that I know where I'm taking you, even though I'm not telling you.

See, a lot of us are like this. Okay, God, show me where you're taking me, and then I'll let you know if I'm going. You say, well, what's that got to do with me? I don't live in Ur of the Chaldees. Ur of the Chaldees represents worldliness. Worldliness. That is, paganness. Attitudes and actions that leave God out.

God has saved us out of this world. The world is not, as we've said many times, a place. The world is a philosophy. It's like the world of finance, the world of fashion, the world of politics, the world of sports. While they involve places, they're really an orientation centered around a certain thing.

World of finance is about money. Well, worldliness is about the exclusion of God. The enemy wants you to exclude God, and God says, leave there.

That is, your life and my life cannot be defined by leaving God out or just putting Him in piecemeal when we like it as a spare tire, taking Him out the trunk when life goes flat, putting Him back when we can roll on by ourselves again. You will never know where God is taking you unless you leave where you are, the world. You will never find out. He will never show you.

What motivated Him to leave? God said, I have an inheritance for you. Says He left to get His inheritance. An inheritance is like a will. It's something bequeathed to you. Every head of a household ought to have a will. You have a will.

Let me tell you a secret. You're gonna die. If Jesus doesn't come, you're gonna die not having a will, not gonna keep you alive longer.

All right? So every head household should have a will, but an inheritance is something bequeathed to you. God says, I have a will for you. I have an inheritance for you. I have a plan for you.

Or as we said in our series, we have a destiny for you. God has something for every believer here. If you are a Christian, He has a purpose that He wants you to fulfill, but He will not show you your destiny if He can't get you to leave the world. As long as you're hanging on to the world, you're at enmity against God. God cannot communicate with you.

So you won't hear heaven talk. You won't get answered prayers. You won't get direction. You'll be aimless because your affections are not with Him.

They are elsewhere. You visit Him on occasion, but you live with affections and actions that leave Him out. In fact, one of the ways you know you're growing as a Christian is when your passion for the world is dying and your passion for Him is growing. If you're loving the world more than Him, that's because the world has your affections. It has your passions. It has grabbed you. So He says, you must leave this paganism that doesn't include me without me giving you all the details.

You're gonna have to walk by faith and believe I know where I'm taking you. The problem was, or is, that that's where He was born. That's where He grew up. That's where all His people are. That's where His businesses were. The Bible says He was a filthy rich guy. That's where all of His activities were. So it's hard to leave something you've grown up in. That forms your frame of thinking. But it says when He heard the voice of God, He obeyed and left because His inheritance was more important than His current location. So here's the decision we have to make.

That is, if you really want to experience God, is what God has for you more important than where you are. When I was a boy growing up in Baltimore, as a young kid, I spent hours playing marbles. Marbles was the thing. I spent hours playing marbles, and I got pretty good at marbles. You know, you put the marbles in the circle, and then you try to pop them out of the circle, and I got pretty good at it.

I could get a little further away and kind of get my aim down and get it down, get a little further away. At one time, I do remember, I was like six feet away from the circle, and I had that thing, and I got my marble online, and I put it down, it came up, and boom! I not only hit it, I cracked the marble in half. You couldn't say nothing to me, you know, because I'd gotten good at marbles. But then one day, a guy from the neighborhood brought over a football, and I got to introduce the football, because everybody here knows how passionate I am about football. I discovered football, and I started to fall in love with football.

I started to get passionate about football, and I noticed something. I noticed I was playing marbles less and playing football more. After a while, I wasn't playing marbles at all, because every day after school was football, on Saturday was football, it was football, football, football, football, football, because my love grew in a new direction, and I had to say goodbye to my old play thing. Unless you believe God's got a football, you'll keep playing marbles. Unless you believe that God has a destiny for you that is so spectacular, so powerful, so potent, so purposeful, you'll keep playing marbles. You'll be satisfied with that little circle you're in and think you're doing something because you say a prayer once a day, and you go to church once a week.

Abraham said, I don't know the details. I know you gave me this general outline, but you haven't given me any details, but even though I don't know where I'm going, I believe you know where you're taking me, so I'm gonna risk leaving the things I know best and love most. Here's the question. Do you love the world so much you're willing to lose your destiny? Because God knows where He wants to take you, but you must be willing to leave, say goodbye. Some of you are gonna battle because you're gonna have to say goodbye to that worldly relationship that's keeping you from your destiny.

You may have to say goodbye to that worldly scenario where the guys are going out after work, and they talk in smut, and yeah, you may not use all the words they use and make all the analogies they use, but you find yourself comfortable there, and you don't want to lose a friendship, and we're not talking about being antisocial. We are talking about saying that that does not fit where I'm trying to go, and so because that doesn't fit where I'm trying to go, and I want to get to where God's taking me, I'm willing to leave. It's gonna be hard to leave, but I'm willing to leave, because you can keep yourself from ever hearing the voice of God if you stay in the world, that system that leaves God out. So once we decide to leave, where do we go next?

Dr. Evans will have the answer when he comes back in a moment. Stay with us. Words cannot express my gratitude to God for His faithfulness. Who would have thought He would have taken this urban kid out of Baltimore, Maryland, given him the opportunities, allowing me to earn a doctorate degree, and to build a church ministry that would model what we've been doing nationally and internationally through this ministry, that He would build up and give us a staff who are committed to getting this truth out, reaching hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people with the truth of God in all manner of ways, and to impact individuals and families and churches and even communities with the worldview of the kingdom agenda, the visible manifestation of the comprehensive rule of God of every area of life, and I'm certainly grateful for all the friends He's given us to keep us being able to get God's truth into a needy world.

I praise God for 40 years of His favor on us. The Bible tells us without faith it's impossible to please God, but with faith there's no limit to what God can do through us. That's why Tony's just written a brand new book examining the powerful faith journeys of the men and women mentioned in Hebrews 11.

It's called Kingdom Heroes. These heroes were ordinary people who became some of the most familiar characters in the Bible simply by believing God and staking their lives on the fact that He was telling the truth. By studying their lives, we see what it looks like to walk in the assurance of God's love and can be inspired to embrace and demonstrate that same confidence in our lives. Faith didn't go out of style in the Old Testament.

It's still as powerful today as ever, and God still honors those who trust Him. We'd love for you to be one of the first to receive this new book from Dr. Evans, so if you contact us and make a contribution to the ministry right away, we'll send you as our thank-you gift Tony's book, Kingdom Heroes, also the companion Bible study, and all 13 messages from the two-volume audio series we've been hearing from today called Heroes of the Faith. Just visit us at TonyEvans.org to make your online donation and request.

But don't wait! This special faith package is only available for a limited time. Again, that's TonyEvans.org. Or call our resource center day or night at 1-800-800-3222, and let one of our team members help you.

That's 1-800-800-3222. Dr. Evans will be back with more of today's lesson right after this. How do you share the gospel with confidence? What's God's plan for our communities?

Why does the Old Testament matter to your faith today? Those are just a few of the questions you'll get answered when you enroll in the Tony Evans Training Center, an interactive online study experience with Dr. Tony Evans where you can grow in your knowledge of God's Word and learn to advance His kingdom agenda in your life. Visit TonyEvansTraining.org to get started today.

That's TonyEvansTraining.org. Hebrews 13, 13 says you must go outside of the camp where Jesus is. Jesus died outside of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was where Judaism was. He went outside the camp and died. It says you can't stay in just a religious environment and not be willing to be identified with Jesus Christ and bear His reproach and expect to hear from God. You have to go outside the camp.

That is, you can't be just part of the system. So the first thing you need to know is that your life of faith will require a leaving of worldliness, desires and actions that are in conflict with God. Secondly, your life of faith from the superstar of faith will involve a living—a leaving and then a living. Notice this, verse 9. By faith he lived—see that? By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise.

Wow. He left and then he lived. Now watch this.

It says he lived in the land of promise as a foreigner and an alien. Wait a minute now. Wait a minute.

Watch this now. He left. He left Earl of the Chaldees paganism. He is now in the land God is promising him. Okay?

God promised him a land, but in the land that he's now in and living in, he's living as an alien and a foreigner in the middle of a promise. Some of us are in God's waiting room, and there's probably no greater discipline in the Christian life, no harder discipline, than waiting. God, how long is this gonna take? When you gonna come through for me? How come I take two steps forward, three steps back? How come every time I look like you're getting ready to do something, you flip on me and the thing doesn't work out?

Anybody know what I'm talking about? I remember one time I was on a plane coming into a city. Pilate said, ladies and gentlemen, there's bad weather around the city, and so we're going to have to enter a holding pattern. Now I have plans because I had to speak somewhere, I had to meet some people, I had my plans. Finally they said, we've gotten permission to land. I take a deep breath. The plane touches down. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to report that the plane sitting at our gate, that has been delayed because of the weather being able to take off, so we got to sit here on the tarmac. I finally look like I got a breakthrough.

Finally look like this thing is gonna come together. I'm finally sitting on the ground and stuck. For an hour and a half on a plane on the tarmac, I'm in the vicinity, but I don't have a promise.

It says he lived in a tent as a foreigner in the land of promise. So watch this. You might be thinking that your destiny is a long way off when you actually might be in the middle of it, and it just not be made manifest yet. So I know what you want to know. You want to know when is this thing gonna land, and God answer my prayer, deliver me whatever it is that he has destined for me.

When is it gonna happen? I'm tired of waiting. Okay, here it is. God is always doing two things at one time related to your life and mine.

Here are the two things. He's preparing the promise for you, and he's preparing you for the promise. Whatever your inheritance is, whatever your destiny is in time, is being made ready, but he's also got to get you ready, so that when the promise and the plan and the destiny is realized, you don't mess it up, because you weren't ready. Watch this. God could have the promise waiting for you to show up, but if you're still like Lot's wife looking over your shoulder, if you still haven't left, then he doesn't hook it up. So on my side and your side, we could be delaying the promise while waiting for the promise, and that's exactly what happened with Abraham.

Watch this. Abraham is 75 years old. His breakthrough doesn't come for 25 years. It's gonna take him 25 years for God to break this thing through.

That's when Isaac appears. It took him 25 years between when he told him I'm gonna do something and when he did it. Why did it take 25 years? It took 25 years because Abraham wasn't ready yet.

Abraham was lying, cheating, had an affair with his handmaiden, had a baby out of wedlock. Abraham needed some development, and God was not about to give him a miracle without a development. He was not about to give him his destiny until he came to his senses, grew in his faith, but that's good news and hope for you and me, because that means when we have not learned to live by faith, God will hang out till we get the message, and he'll keep us hanging out, circling the airfield in the neighborhood of the promise until he's ready to land us because we've grown. So one of your major reasons to want to leave Aaron the Cow, these the world, and want to live in God's presence and move quickly in obedience is so you can get what he has as soon as he can give it, because you're ready for it. God, why is that such a big deal? Because God doesn't want to give you a destiny that will cause you to forget Him. See, that's the problem with everybody running around here looking for a blessing. God, if you if you do it for me this time, if you get me out of this this time, if you help me this time, I'll serve you for the rest of my life.

Come on, tell the truth. You promised him. He got you out. He delivered you. He met the need.

You were good for two weeks. After that, you went back to your whole life, because God knows you're not fully committed yet. So He did not let him own the promise.

He just let him be in the vicinity of it. Dr. Evans will be back to illustrate that idea with a story from his own life, so stay with us. First though, today's lesson is part of Tony's current series called Heroes of the Faith. Don't forget, for a limited time, we're offering the full-length version of all 13 lessons in this two volume series on CD and digital download, along with Tony's brand-new book and Bible study guide, Kingdom Heroes. Their yours is our way of saying thank you for your contribution to this ministry. Just visit tonyevans.org to get the details, and while you're there, be sure to sign up for Tony's free weekly email devotional. That's tonyevans.org. Or you can call our resource center at 1-800-800- 3222, and let one of our friendly team members assist with your request. Again, that's 1-800-800-3222. Following God's direction may take us into unfamiliar territory, but on Monday, Dr. Evans talks about keeping something familiar in sight, no matter how much the scenery around us may change.

Right now, he's back with a final story for today. When I go to a hotel, I live out of my bag. I don't take stuff up and put it in the hotel drawers and organize stuff and take out my kit and put my toothpaste all lined up there and all that. I don't do all that. I open up the suitcase, get what I need, that's it. And the reason I do that is because that ain't home.

I don't live there. I'm passing through. So I don't get too comfortable, because I know I'm not staying. God says, if I'm going to take you to your inheritance, I've got to develop you for your inheritance, and when I develop you for your inheritance, keep your shoes on light, because I'm gonna send you through some stuff. I'm gonna take you through some things. There gonna be some mountains, there gonna be some valleys, but they're all designed to develop you. I got my piece out here I'm gonna take care of. I just got to get you right. Some of us are working on 50 years of things that should have been solved in three years, but we didn't pitch that tent and built us up a house that we ain't gonna move out of, and so God does not have flexibility with our lives, and so He can't grow us like He wants to grow us, because we're not available for Him to do His thing. But it says, by faith Abraham was willing to live as an alien, to live as a foreigner, not become too attached, looking for God to change his scenario. The alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by The Urban Alternative, celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.