Have you made some kind of goals or resolutions for 2024? If you have, think about this question: Are there any of your goals or resolutions that you have abandoned? It’s hard to make changes, isn’t it? I mentioned some of the challenges we face with change in my previous message. With this one, I am going to approach the issue of change from a different direction. After all, goals and resolutions are changes that we want to make, and we still find them very challenging. We might recognize that we are in a rut, and we want to get out of it, but for some reason, in spite of our best efforts, we can’t. So intentional change is hard.
Another kind of change is the type that is forced on us. We all have some lived experience with that kind of change as we went through the Covid-19 pandemic. On the one hand, forced change is easier because we have no choice. We simply have to make the changes that are required of us. On the other hand, what can be tricky about forced change is that it has an impact on our interior world, so we need to be aware of what is going on inside of us and taking proper care of our emotional and spiritual well-being. I don’t know how you navigated the pandemic, but I thought that I was thriving, and I told myself that for two years. It wasn’t until last year, more than two years into the pandemic, that I realized that I wasn’t doing very well at all. There was an impact on me due to the forced change of the pandemic and, for the first two years, I was so busy adapting that I did not even realize what was going on inside of me until later on.
Today, however, we are going to focus on a third type of change. In some respects, this is the hardest kind of change to make and in other respects, it is the easiest kind of change to make. This is not a forced change, so our will gets to play a role. But it is not a change of our choosing. The type of change we are going to focus on today is a change that God calls us to make, and then we have to decide if we are going to make that change or not. So what do we do when this kind of a change comes upon us? To help us answer that question, we are going to reflect on the life of someone in the Bible to whom this happened. Our main focus will be on Genesis 12:1-9 so if you have a Bible or a Bible app with you, I invite you to turn there now.
God’s Call to Abraham
There we meet a man named Abram, whom God later renamed Abraham, which is how I will refer to him in this message. Abraham was born in the city of Ur in what is present-day Iraq. Back then Ur was the largest city in the region. Though it is now 240 kilometers from the coast due to the receding of the Persian Gulf, in Abraham’s time, Ur was a port city and large center of commerce. The city of Ur was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the Babylonian moon-god, so Abraham came from a pagan background. When Abraham was seventy years old, his father, Terah, moved the family from Ur northward to Harran, which is in the southern part of present-day Turkey. Harran and Ur were like sister cities and Harran was also dedicated to the Babylonian moon-god.
Abraham lived at Harran for fifteen years and during that time, his father Terah died. Then Abraham had an encounter with God which changed everything for him and for the world. Turning to our passage, we read, The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. (Genesis 12:1) Now, the fact that God would call someone living in a pagan context to do something special for him is incredible, but what makes this even more incredible is that this is not the first time that this had happened. In Acts chapter 7, Stephen tells us, “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Harran. ‘Leave your country and your people,’ God said, ‘and go to the land I will show you.’ (Acts 7:2-3) So it was God that prompted Abraham to move from Ur to Harran 15 years earlier. Now, Go was calling Abraham to move again, and this time the call came with a blessing:
“I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)
That moment contained within it the potential to change the history of the world forever, and within that moment a whole bunch of factors were in play. One of those factors was Abraham, who had a choice to make. Would he uproot himself and his family and leave his familiar surroundings and culture to move far, far away to a strange land filled with strange people who followed customs and traditions that were foreign to him? Or would he say to God, “Thanks for thinking of me in this way but I am going to pass on that one.” Can you imagine the insane amount of courage God must have had to call Abraham and then give him the choice of how to respond with God’s plan for saving the world hanging in the balance? It’s nuts when you think about it. From our perspective, when we look back, it looks like everything was preordained, but in that moment, it wasn’t. Abraham could have said “no” and God knew it.
And there was nothing in Abraham’s past that we know of to suggest that God was making a rock-solid choice when he picked Abraham for this special mission. And Abraham’s future choices revealed some character issues that suggest he was not the best choice. He put his wife at risk of moral compromise when he lied to save his own skin by telling Pharoah that Sarah was his sister. When it seemed as though God was not going to keep his promise to give Abraham a family, he agreed to Sarah’s suggestion and took matters into his own hands by conceiving a child with Sarah’s servant, Hagar.
And yet God chose this unlikely person to do an incredible thing for him and gave him the choice of whether to do it or not.
Abraham’s Perspective
But now let’s look at that moment from Abraham’s perspective. Because the other big factor in that moment is God, and why should Abraham heed what this God was saying to him? We don’t know what Abraham knew about God prior to this. And the move that God was calling to make now was like moving from Langley to Brandon, Manitoba. And God does not tell Abraham why he is asking him to do this. I am sure that there were lots of questions running through Abraham’s mind after God spoke to him.
But whatever Abraham knew about God, it was no reflection of who God really is. And it is the same with us. What other people may know about us is no reflection of who we really are, and what we may know about ourselves is not really an accurate picture of who we really are. God is the only One who knows our true selves. We are flawed and fragmented beings. So there is Abraham, who doesn’t really know God and doesn’t really know himself, with a big decision to make: how is he going to respond to God’s call?
And while, on the one hand, being a broken being with only a partial perception of God, can cause a decision like this to be difficult, on the other hand, it doesn’t. Because God isn’t broken and his perception is perfect. Unlike Abraham, there is nothing to suggest that God’s character is flawed. The beauty of creation and the complexity of the various systems and creatures it contains suggest that a great and wonderful being designed it all.
The corruption introduced into creation by human disobedience threatened to undermine and destroy all that God had done, but God did not abandon his creation. Love compelled him to promise a Messiah who would come and undo all that evil had done. It was through this Messiah, who would be a descendant of Abraham, that all peoples on earth would be blessed. Through Messiah Jesus, broken and flawed people just like Abraham and just like us would be brought back into God’s family to have an intimate relationship of love, life and wholeness with the God who created, redeemed and restored all things. In the person of Jesus, it was God himself who would pay for all the times we broke our promises to him, all the times we turned our backs on him, all the times we hurt ourselves and others through what we said, thought and did.
And the call to life with God comes with the promise of blessings, the blessing of the forgiveness of all our sins, the blessing of unconditional love that satisfies and heals our thirsty and broken soul, and the blessing of a life that is far beyond anything that we could ever ask or imagine because it is life with God. And with God, we become part of something that is far beyond ourselves. We become part of a community of people that spans the globe and the realm of heaven backwards and forwards through time into eternity. This is a community that is centered not on itself, but on Jesus, and his mission of finding and saving all that is lost.
And one day, all the hidden things of God will be revealed in all their glory. For Jesus will return to this world in a visible way to banish all evil, defeat death once and for all, heal and restore all creation, and raise us from our graves to become fully alive body and soul, and we will live with him and with each other in the new heaven and earth forever.
The decisions God sets before us become quite easy when you consider what an incredible God we have.
All of Us are Little Abraham’s
So what does this mean for us? As we go about living our lives in this world, all of us are like little Abrahams who will encounter moments with the potential to change the history of heaven and earth forever. It could be a decision to go on a date with a certain someone, or which school we will attend, or moving across the country for a job opportunity, or when will I retire, and where will I live when I do? All these decision points have the potentiality to change our lives, the lives of people around us, and the lives of people who are not yet even born, forever. God must be crazily courageous to let us flawed and broken human beings make decisions like these, but he does.
And in those moments, we will still be the flawed and broken human beings we have always been, and we will not have all the information in our hands, and we won’t have a full picture of who God is or what he is doing. We may not even have a clear sense of what it is that God is calling us to do. And yet we will have to make a choice. Actually, there are two choices that we have to make. There is the choice that is before us. And there is the choice of who we are going to trust as we make that choice: ourselves, or God. And the second choice is more important that the first. Romans 8:28 says, And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28) That means that as you live your life trusting in God, you can make the wrong choice, and he can still make it turn out for good. In the same way, without God, you can make a right choice and it will end up being nothing but ashes in the end.
We have an incredible God who chooses unlikely people to do incredible things for him. But there really is no risk in choosing to follow God because he is the one who makes all things work out for good in the end.
The God Who Restores the Broken
Paul Hauser grew up in a Christian home as the son of a Lutheran pastor. He got into acting and moved to Los Angeles in his early twenties. It was there that he met Amy shortly before the pandemic began. They started hanging out during the pandemic and within a short time, they were married and expecting their first child. As sometimes happens in families, a conflict arose between Amy and Paul’s family. Rather than try and work things out, Paul abandoned Amy when she was two months pregnant. He still supported her financially, but other than that, he ghosted her. He had concluded that the marriage was a mistake and started divorce proceedings. Paul didn’t attend the birth of his son and he only visited him one weekend in the first six months of his life. The divorce was finalized. But Amy still had hope and she kept telling herself, “God’s not done yet.”
Paul began having thoughts of suicide when he was drunk or high and he realized that he needed to get sober. He got into a program and has been sober since October 2021. With sobriety, Paul began realizing what he was doing to Amy and his son. He started hanging out again with Amy and their son at the start of the New Year. In April, they decided to get remarried, which they did on May 14, 2022. They got pregnant that summer and their second son was born on April 1, 2023. They named him Jonah because that’s a man in the Bible who tried to run away from God. In their “I am Second” video series, Amy says, “We want Jonah’s life to tell the story that no matter how far you run, no matter how hard you run, God’s still coming after you, coming in to restore the things that were broken.”
Paul says, “Back when I was at odds with Amy and I was mistreating her by way of neglect, I couldn’t fully surrender to God because I hadn’t done that before. … To fully surrender to God would have been to drop everything and not listen to anything but the voice of truth and that’s hard to do.”
Surrender to God
Surrender to God. That is hard to do. But let us have courage, dear friends, to do exactly that, and let us remember that we have a gracious and loving God who only wants what is best for us and for the world and he is waiting to welcome us with open arms.
So here we are in this moment, and God is calling you, with all the potential of eternity hanging in the balance, and as God calls you, he also promises you blessings. What are you going to do? My prayer is that you will answer his call and follow him. For he tells us in Proverbs 3:5-6,
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
That’s the call, and here is the promise:
and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6). Amen.
Farewell to Shadowlands 