ear Friends,

Good morning! Yesterday we dealt, very briefly, with Abraham’s calling, and we noted that he took a shot at obeying. Abraham is an ordinary man, called to an extraordinary life. God has a great purpose for him, but to fulfill it, Abraham will have to change a great deal. And change is something we do with great difficulty. "We can re-invent our appearance, as Americans know all too well; but real change of our moral and relational center is a long, slow, tough process, and that change is what the story of Abraham shows us."

Abraham is called by God, given a great promise by God, and the circumstances of his life are totally changed by God, and all that happens very rapidly. He meets the living God and leaves his place in the world. He starts living in new circumstances, doing what he thinks is his best for God. He is very much like most of us believers, however, and cannot really start fulfilling God’s promise for him until deeper change occurs.

You remember that God’s first objective in His plan of salvation was to establish His people in the land from which God would spread out His salvation. So He sends Abraham into Israel, the land of Canaan, and Abraham builds an altar there. That’s a promising beginning. Now worship of God is beginning in the land God will use to establish the community of faith. And then Abraham falls into sin. The problem with us living sacrifices is that we tend to crawl off the altar. Watch:

10Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. 11As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. 12When the Egyptians see you, they will say, `This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you." 14When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. 15And when Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels. 17But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife Sarai. 18So Pharaoh summoned Abram. "What have you done to me?" he said. "Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? 19Why did you say, `She is my sister,' so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!" 20Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.13 1So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went with him. 2Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.

Abraham, after his calling, falls again into sin. In fact, he is in a lot of sin.

1. His first act of disobedience to God is to leave the land. God does not send him to Egypt. The famine tests Abraham and he fails the test. He had generous flocks and was in no danger of dying, but to preserve his wealth he left the land to which God had brought him, the place in which God desired to make Abraham fruitful and to create for Himself a sacred community. Abraham did not value the land. He thought of himself as still just sojourning, and he skedaddled when hardship came.
   
2. He still was bringing along Lot, part of his family, in spite of God’s instruction to leave his kin and come out of the life he had been living.
   
3. He was endangering the one person God told him to stay beside and to protect, his wife Sarah, by seeming to make her available to Pharaoh.
   
4. He was lying to his hosts in order to protect himself. It was a part truth that Sarah was his sister – she was actually his half sister. That is exactly the kind of lie called and pious people tell, the kind you can sort of justify. But he was using language to mislead others about the truth for his own convenience.

Our boy is not doing too well. He is rightly rebuked by Pharaoh and heaved out of the country. Notice that a called man, a man who is in relationship with the living God, is rightly rebuked by a man of the world on a matter of simple truth and justice. It happens.

In spite of all this, God has promised to make of Abraham the father of the a great nation out from which will spread His blessing to all peoples. And the promise was not conditional. God had just promised. So now, instead of reacting the way He had when viewing Noah's generation, God patiently remains with Abraham and brings him back and reestablishes him in the land. He does not quit on Abraham, but disciplines him gently until Abraham actually changes to become His instrument.

This is a story filled with the Gospel of God, isn't it? Watching Abraham go through all this, makes me think of the great scene in True Grit where John Wayne watches the young cowgirl take on some huge problem with great recklessness. He leans forward in his saddle and drawls, “She reminds me of me.”

Have a great day, called ones. Our God will never let us go.

Love,

Jeff