Good morning. How are you all doing today?
Great. How are you?
I'm doing great. Thank you so much.
If you are joining us here in our sanctuary for the very first time,
we want to say welcome to all of you.
If you're watching online for the first time, we want to say welcome to you as well.
We're so glad you're here to worship with us here at Hosanna.
I am Pastor Nathan, and today we're going to be looking at Abraham's first stumble,
his first fall.
Last week we looked at faith and obedience, the faith of Abraham,
and how wonderful it is as an example to us to walk, to live a life of faith.
Then right after that story, we get kind of a negative story about Abraham
doing the opposite of that.
It's just such a very real, relatable story because all of us that are believers,
we've put our faith in Jesus Christ, we want to please God.
We intend to honor God with our decisions and our lives,
and yet, as Paul said, our sin nature still resides with us.
So we still find ourselves stumbling at times.
It's good to know that one of the largest giants of faith, Abraham, also stumbled.
So that means we're all in good company.
We're going to be looking at this testing that comes upon his life right after his great triumph.
Through the first part of what we have about Abraham in chapter 12,
is we see that he made this wonderful faith response to God's call.
As God spoke to him there in Ur of Mesopotamia, God spoke to him,
called him to leave everything, and Abraham believed God.
He believed him. He said, God, you're real, right?
There was this response to God, and so he ended up leaving his city with his family.
They traveled from Ur up to Haran.
Then we read about how that was a little bit of a delay in what God was calling him to do.
So he was there until his father died, and then he continued to travel in pursuit of the,
quote, land that I will show you that God said.
Because Abraham didn't know where he was going.
He was just fully trusting God, wandering and walking where God would lead him.
When he finally got to Canaan, it was there that God appeared to him
and told him that I'm going to give all of this land to your offspring.
So he toured the promised land.
He traveled from the northern part of it all the way through the southern part of it,
and everywhere he went he was building altars and praising God
and worshiping the one true God right in the midst of a pagan culture
where the Canaanites were there worshiping their false gods
with their false oracles and things of that.
But Abraham didn't care.
He said, God said this is going to my descendants.
It's as good as mine.
I'm going to live my life on those promises because they are as true now
as they will be in the future.
But even though it was his, even though God had promised it to his offspring,
Abraham wasn't allowed to physically take possession of the land himself.
But instead, according to Hebrews 11, he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise,
living in tents.
But still, whether he was in tents or not, he knew based upon God's promise
that the land was his.
The land was for his descendants and his family, and God would honor his promise.
Such an amazing story of walking in faith.
Such an amazing story of trusting in God simply because he's God.
Just believing that you are God Almighty, therefore whatever you tell me to do
is true, is right, and I'm going to do it.
And that's the example we have of him.
As a believer in every generation, times of great faith victory are often followed
by times of testing, times where our faith is challenged,
our obedience is challenged.
And today I want to look at the question, why does God allow that to happen in our lives?
Why does God allow the trials to come?
What does it teach us?
That's what we're going to be looking at this morning, but first we're going to spend time
praising God, celebrating him for who he is, what he's done.
He is worthy, he is almighty, he is majestic, he is wonderful.
And we just want to tell him that this morning, amen?
Let's pray.
Father, we love you so much.
Lord, we know that you work in our lives really despite us, God.
Despite the fact that we still have sinned natures with us, despite the fact that,
Lord, often we're faithless when we should be faithful, and yet, God,
you still move through us, you still work through us.
God, it is a mystery to us in our human understanding why you love us,
why you continue to love us when we stumble and mess up, Lord.
But God, you don't ask us to understand it, you just ask us to receive it,
and God, we receive it.
We're so grateful to you.
Lord, today I pray that you would speak to us, Lord, and encourage us
through the story of Abram, God.
Lord, it is such an encouragement that in your word, you don't paint the heroes
of faith only as perfect heroes without ever fault, but Lord,
you give us very clear pictures of both their successes and their failures.
And Lord, that is an encouragement to us because, God, you don't wait for us
to be perfect people to move in our life, God.
You simply say, come to me as you are, trust in me, and then I will begin
that work of changing you into the person I want you to be.
And God, you do that through trials.
You do that through circumstances that you allow in our life that we would learn
who you are, learn to grow in our faith the ways that we need to grow, God,
so that you would then be able to use us in all the ways you plan to use us, Lord.
We thank you, God, and we just want to praise your name this morning.
Lord, we love you so much.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
All right, we are in Genesis chapter 12.
We're looking at verses 10 through 20 today, and as I said in the intro,
you know, faith is something that is key to our relationship with God.
Our whole salvation is dependent on the fact that we believe that God is real.
We believe in what God did.
And then as James says, if you have real faith, your actions will change,
and your actions or your works will be an evidence and a demonstration of your faith.
However, James does talk about faith being tested,
and we're going to see that today in Abram's life in Genesis.
Now, everybody's faith will be tested at one point or another,
maybe not as dramatically as someone else, but it will be tested.
And James said this in James chapter 1, verses 2 through 4.
He said, consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters,
whenever you experience various trials.
Now, that word whenever doesn't mean maybe it won't happen.
It means it's going to happen, so when it does, he says, count it all joy,
because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
And let endurance have its full effect so that you may be mature and complete,
lacking nothing.
Well, here in Genesis chapter 12, verses 10 through 20,
we're going to see Abram facing a great trial.
You know, having traveled all the way from his homeland in Ur up to Horan,
spending time there and then traveling down into Canaan,
we saw a radical demonstration of faith,
a really amazing example of just walking in faith, right?
Abram went to a place that God said, I'll tell you when you get there.
And it doesn't even record for us that God said, go north first.
He just said, go.
And so they went.
And the entire thing was a step-by-step process of faith,
of Abram just going, God's going to tell us, so we'll go that way.
I think God wants us to go there.
And then it happened just as he said.
When they got to the promised land, God told them,
this is the land that I'm giving your descendants.
And so Abram had followed a God that he had only heard at that point up to Canaan.
And then when he got to Canaan, he told us that the Lord appeared to him.
So he got to see a physical representation of the Lord.
And so after God spoke to him in Ur, appeared to him in Canaan,
made the promises, Abram did this whole tour of the entire promised land.
And everywhere he went, he built altars and worshiped and proclaimed the name of God.
A beautiful story.
We're like, whoa, exciting, heroic.
But as James alluded to, a trial came.
A trial came upon his life.
And because we will experience them, this is a lesson for us.
It was a trial that God allowed, whether Abram knew it or not at the time.
I don't believe he really recognized this as a trial from God.
And so anyways, when we look at this story, we go, okay, Abram,
certainly this great man of faith, this hero of faith,
will just soar victoriously through this trial, right?
Because that's what happens, right?
All the heroes of the Bible never make a mistake.
And so we pick it up here in verse 10 of Genesis 12.
There was a famine in the land.
So Abram went down to Egypt to stay there for a while because the famine in the land was severe.
So the opening to Abram's trial here, his first big trial,
comes through something that just happens in the normal course of life, right?
We call that life happens.
Has life ever happened to any of you in this room?
Yeah.
We refer to all kinds of things as life happening.
There just seem to be natural occurrences, natural things that take place in our world,
things we might not necessarily consider spiritual things.
You get a flat in the tire. You get laid off from work.
A famine is in the land, right?
These are just natural things that happen.
And famines were a fairly common occurrence.
They were something that would happen in the world at that time.
And famines even happen today.
But even though it was a natural thing,
it was something that God was going to use to refine his servant.
And that's what God does in our lives today.
The things that we might say, oh, that's just life happening, God knows.
God is allowing it, and there's a purpose for it.
And so as we face things that happen in our life,
we always have to be people in a process of saying,
okay, God, what are you teaching me through this?
God, why is this happening?
And not just why is this happening, but like, God,
what is the point here that you want me to learn?
What is it you want me to learn about you?
What is it you want me to learn about faith through this situation?
So it tells us here that as this famine took place,
Abram went down to Egypt to stay there for a while.
So he wasn't abandoning the promised land.
He wasn't moving to Egypt permanently.
He was just moving out for a time while this famine was there.
I don't believe he was abandoning the promised land at all
because if he was going to abandon the promised land and go,
God, I'm out, I think he just would have gone back to Haran or back to Ur
because that's where his entire life was prior to following God.
However, he goes down to Egypt because that was simply the normal thing to do.
In this time, people that lived in the land of Canaan,
what we would call Israel today, and especially those in the southern part of Israel
in the Negev Desert, when a famine would take place there,
the place everybody went was down to Egypt. Why?
Because the Nile was very fertile.
There was never a famine there. There was always food.
And so anytime there was a famine in the land of Canaan,
people would go down to the Nile.
And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because it was the natural thing to do.
A natural occurrence had taken place,
and the famine's response was the natural response.
It was what everybody else did.
So he goes down to Egypt, doing the thing that everybody normally did,
and this is where his trouble begins.
You see, the famine naturally created a fear of starvation.
That's what famines do.
They didn't have the local grocery store to go down to,
but if they did have a grocery store,
the local toilet paper would be sold out.
It was a bad situation.
So this fear, what am I going to do with my family?
How are we going to eat? There was all this stuff.
We know that when he left Haran,
it said they had acquired a lot of people in Haran,
meaning a lot of people that were a part of their family, if you will,
servants, workers, that kind of thing.
And so there was a lot of people for Abram to be worried about,
and naturally he would be worried.
But then also very naturally he reacted to his fear
the way everybody else did.
The point of that is he reacted to his fear
without any inquiry to God as to what to do.
We don't have any record here that he said,
God, you called me out of Ur.
You took us up to Haran.
You brought us down into the promised land.
I've walked this whole land and praised you
because in the midst of all this pagan Canaanite worship,
Lord, you've been with me. I trust you.
There's a famine. God, a famine is nothing to you.
What do you want me to do?
That's not what we read.
What we read is through this faith walk.
He's like, praise God, praise God.
And then a famine's in the land,
and what he does first is what everybody else does.
He responds to it naturally, not spiritually,
and this is where his troubles are going to crop up here.
I'm not saying that Abram was in sin
by going down to Egypt, right?
There's no reason to look here that he was, you know,
denying God and walking away from God,
but what he was doing is turning to his own understanding.
He was turning to the natural understanding
of what everybody else did,
and in that picture, instead of denying God,
he wasn't doing that. He just simply forgot about God.
And don't we do that?
Trial's hit, trouble's hit, right?
We may be the most spiritual people.
We're going to church, we're reading,
we're praying all the time, and then a trial comes,
and we forget about our awesome God,
and the first thing we do is start appealing
to our own experience, appealing to our own knowledge.
We automatically go to the I will figure it out mode,
and we forget about God.
Now, there's nothing wrong with appealing to our knowledge
and our experience, right?
He's given us those things, and he gave us a brain to use
to figure out problems, but he wants us to turn to him first.
You see, my background is I was an IT guy.
I used to fix computers and build computer networks
and all that, and when God led me to serve here at Hosanna,
one of the things that I was responsible for
was all the technology.
You know, if it used power, if it had an on-off button,
I was responsible for taking care of it and fixing it,
and I was just blessed.
That was my background.
I got to use it to serve God's church,
and so one day, Pastor Gary, our founder, called me,
and he said, hey, my laptop's broken.
I need you to come take a look at it,
and so I fixed laptops hundreds of times.
So I go to his house, and I figure out what the problem is.
I'm like, yep, that's the problem.
I identified it. I know how to fix that.
I start going through all the steps to fix the problem,
but it's not working, and I'm getting frustrated.
I'm like, I know how to do this, right?
Why isn't it working?
Pastor Gary walks up, and he goes, what's wrong?
I'm like, it's not working,
but I know what I'm doing here,
and he goes, did you pray yet?
And I'm like, Pastor Gary, you know,
I know how to do computers.
I don't need to talk to God about it, right?
This is what's going through my head.
Meanwhile, I'm going, oh, wow, yeah,
my boss just told me to do the spiritual thing.
I work at the church. Why didn't I think about that?
And he goes, yeah, did you pray yet?
And I was like, okay.
So I laid my hand on the laptop, and I said,
God, you know what's wrong.
I think I know what's wrong, but the fix isn't working.
Can you please fix this laptop?
Amen.
The very next thing I do, it starts working.
And I'm like, and Pastor Gary just smiles.
He goes, hmm, and walks off.
I was like, okay, I got the lesson.
I learned.
It's not about our knowledge and experience.
That is a tool God gives us.
It's about building the habit of going to Him first.
Saying, here's a challenge.
God, let me go to you first.
Here's a thing that I am absolutely confident
I know how to fix it, but God, let me go to you first.
You see, this is what Abram didn't do here.
And so instead of, you know, going to God first,
he did what a lot of us do.
We start to make plans, we start to figure it out.
And then we go, oh, oh yeah, God, bless my plans.
Well, this is what goes on as we see here, verse 11.
When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai,
look, I know what a beautiful woman you are.
When the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife.
They will kill me, but let you live.
Please say you're my sister, so it will go well for me
because of you, and my life will be spared on your account.
So the problem, the trial, the test here that Abram is walking into
didn't come necessarily from the famine.
The famine was the natural thing God used to push Abram into Egypt.
The problem came from the fact that Abram's wife was of legendary beauty.
She was beautiful.
She was just a knockout, right?
Now, before you cancel me, I'm not saying it's her fault for being beautiful,
and that's what caused the problem, ladies, okay?
So don't go there with that.
It's just the reality that she was a very, very beautiful woman,
and he was worried.
He was worried that someone was going to try and come take her
because that would happen.
People would go kill the husband, steal the wife.
And so he's worried about this.
And it wasn't just him with husband glasses thinking, my wife's so beautiful.
No, the Egyptians thought so, too.
In verse 14, we're going to see that even the Egyptians were like,
wow, she is beautiful.
So the worry about what would happen as they crossed from Sinai into Egypt,
it was something playing vividly in his mind.
Obviously, he had contemplated ideas and come to the conclusion
that they're going to murder me.
And there's a lot of other possibilities, too,
because we're going to see in the rest of Abram's story,
and this was something that then came to be a part of Jewish culture,
that hospitality was very important.
People came to your tent.
You would bring them in. You would make them some food.
You would be very hospitable.
And so I imagine that going through Abram's mind is,
what if they're not as hospitable as we are?
It's speculative, but it's possible.
What if they do to me what so many other cultures do, right?
Just kill me and take my wife?
And he's like, man, my wife's hot.
Of course they're going to kill me and take her.
So, wife, I want you to tell them you're my sister.
Now, this was a well-known custom at the time,
not the telling you're my sister thing, but the reason behind this.
It was a well-known custom at the time called fratriarchy.
Fratriarchy was simply this.
In that culture, the women didn't have the rights that men had.
There wasn't any equality there, right?
Very different than our culture today.
The fathers basically had full authority over his kids,
and the daughters especially.
He was the one that dictated everything they did, where they can go,
and who they married.
It was a very arranged marriage-focused culture.
And so, as a young woman would grow up,
and it would come time for her to get married,
the father would evaluate what was going to be best for the family,
what union would be best for the family,
and then he would arrange the marriage, negotiate for that,
and then she would be married off.
Well, the custom of fratriarchy said when there was no father,
the eldest brother would be the one who assumed legal guardianship over his sister,
especially regarding arranging and negotiating a marriage on her behalf.
And so, even though it doesn't say it here,
I believe it's very likely that Abram's thinking was,
look, if you tell people you're my sister,
anybody that wants to negotiate with me to marry you,
because if they knew I was your husband, they'd just kill me,
but if they knew you don't have a husband,
they would negotiate with me, your brother, for that marriage arrangement.
And hopefully, maybe that would give us time to escape.
Hey, she's beautiful, I want to marry her.
Cool, come back next week, we'll negotiate.
Pew, and they're out of Egypt.
Don't know if that's exactly what happened, but I think it's very likely.
And so, in Abram's mind, what he was doing was protecting God's plan.
You see, this deceptive ploy, this wasn't new to Abraham.
This wasn't a snap decision he made on the way to Egypt, right?
It wasn't like, do-do-do, my wife's beautiful, I've got to figure something out.
It was something that he had premeditated, because in Genesis chapter 20, verse 13,
when Abram engages in this exact same deception with King Abimelech,
and Abimelech comes back to him and says, look, God is judging us,
why did you lie to us and tell us it was your sister?
Abram says, when God had me wander from my father's house, that was when he left Haran.
I said to her, show your loyalty to me wherever we go and say about me he's my brother.
So this plan to kind of lie, and I'll show you why he maybe thought it was a kind of lie,
was hatched when they left Haran, before he got to the promised land,
before he got there and God appeared to him and everything.
He already had this, I'm going to do this just in case.
Now, the decision to deceive was premeditated.
It wasn't a rash, quick decision in the moment on the way to Egypt.
Now, there may be some cultural nuances to this that I'm aware of.
I looked and I couldn't find anything.
But what Abram says to Abimelech certainly sounds to me like, if you love me, you will do this.
He says, show your loyalty to me wherever we go and say you're my sister.
Now, again, I love how the Bible highlights the rough parts of God's people.
I think this is very clear manipulation on Abram's part, trying to manipulate his wife.
Show me your loyalty, okay, by saying this.
And of course, in those times, because the husbands had ultimate authority over their wives,
it was like, okay, I'm going to do it.
Now, I'm not saying that she was necessarily afraid and all that stuff,
but this is a clear manipulation on Abram's part.
And then on top of that, we see his reasoning for telling her to do this was very self-centered.
He said in Genesis, tell him you're my sister so that it will go well for me
and that my life will be spared on your account.
What about her life?
Somebody steals her away, you know, lie to me so that you don't get taken.
He doesn't even say that.
Lie so that it goes well for me, so that my life is spared.
And I believe to Abram, he was like, this is a fantastic idea.
How wise am I?
Probably patting himself on the back, you know.
I mean, there's a real possibility that he's going, look, I came up with this lie
because God told me that it's through me, my offspring, my descendants
are going to bring blessing to the whole world and, you know, my wife's barren.
And if he was going, well, you know, okay, God's going to do a thing,
well, I'm protecting God's plan by making sure that people don't steal her.
I'm making sure that God's plan follows through.
And then on top of that, it's very likely that Abram was going,
well, it's not a total lie, right?
It's a partial truth or partial lie, depending on your point of view,
because Sarai was indeed his half-sister.
We read that back earlier in the chapter.
Now, something that was very culturally acceptable at the time
is that families could co-mingle that way closer together.
Today, we say don't do that for, you know, certain generations and families.
We stay away from that because of, you know, genetic malformation and stuff,
but early in the culture, this was okay.
And so it's his half-sister that he married.
So I believe in his mind, he's like, I'm not really telling a lie.
I mean, she kind of technically is my sister.
And, you know, I'm helping God in this, right?
So it's okay for me to do this.
Has any of you ever experienced that type of rationalization in your mind?
It's not really what God said not to do, kind of, sort of.
You know, and there's some people that espouse in certain situations
where it's like it's okay to not tell the whole truth, you know, in things.
And, you know, and there's nuances to that.
But for me, I just kind of like, look, just tell the truth,
the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and let God sort it out.
That's how I try and live my life, right?
And so even though he might have been right on a technicality,
the fact that he knew that the intention behind this was deception
tells us that it was wrong.
There was nothing right about what Abram was doing here.
Even though he was aware of his intentional deception,
and even though Abram said, look, I know this technically isn't true,
I'm not doing anything wrong, right?
And that's exactly what we do in this type of situation,
these types of situations where we think these things.
Well, well, we try and rationalize a way to do the thing that we clearly know
in our heart is not right, but we think we find loopholes.
Now, regardless of where you stand on that,
what we do know is that this natural response of Abram,
which I think is a very cunning snake oil salesman type of behavior,
wasn't an act of faith.
That's the issue.
It wasn't an act of faith.
It was as if Abram, who had been spoken verbally to by God,
who saw God visibly, the God who had made all these promises,
the God who had led him all the way to Canaan,
promises to his descendants, all these wonderful things that Almighty God
had already done in his life, it was as if in that moment,
God didn't exist.
It was as if in that moment where he could have been like, you know,
I had this plan to lie, but let's not do that.
Let's just trust the Lord.
It's as if in this moment where instead of going to God and going,
God, I have this issue, my wife's beautiful,
and I'm afraid they're going to take her, what do you want me to do?
He forgets all of that and just comes up with his own natural planning
and goes forward with his lie.
It's as if God didn't exist to him in that moment.
And when we find ourselves in those types of situations
and we do this kind of half-lie thing, well, we're in the same place as Abram
because right here, God was not directing Abram.
Abram was directing Abram.
And when we're trying to find loopholes in God's Word to get what we want
or to get out of certain situations, who's in the driver's seat?
It's us.
We're figuring out things based upon our own limited understanding,
our own limited knowledge, and we think that, well, we got this.
Our plans are going to be great.
God, it's okay. I can handle it.
So we see this great man stumbling here,
but in his own eyes possibly thinking he's doing a perfectly okay thing.
And then verse 14, we see this story continue.
When Abram entered into Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.
Pharaoh's officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh,
so the woman was taken to the Pharaoh's household.
He treated Abram well because of her, and Abram acquired flocks and herds,
male and female donkeys, male and female slaves, and camels.
So the average Egyptian likely would have come to him
and tried to negotiate for her hand in marriage, right?
That was how things were done in that culture.
And so Abram was kind of like ready for that.
He was thought about that.
He goes, look, I'm going to do this thing.
You lie. They're going to think I'm your brother,
and we'll negotiate and we'll be fine.
But what it doesn't appear that he thought about was Pharaoh.
Maybe he thought there was no way Pharaoh would get involved.
I don't know. It doesn't say here.
But he obviously didn't account for Pharaoh because Pharaoh is not going to negotiate.
Pharaoh is the ruler of the land.
He's the king of the land.
He's not going to come and say, hey, can we barter with this?
How absurd.
Pharaoh is the most powerful ruler in that land.
Of course he's going to take what he wants.
And he took Abram's wife.
Now it appears that Abram hadn't considered that.
And so what happens here is now they're in Egypt.
The thing that Abram was afraid of happened, or at least part of it happened.
They were wowed by her beauty.
But then without any negotiation, she simply was taken into Pharaoh's household.
So I can imagine Abraham thinking in this moment, how awesome is that?
He came up with this wonderful plan.
This half-truth, half-lie.
And it didn't work.
It didn't work on this man, Pharaoh.
Now we're typically aware of the fact that, like we see stories throughout the Bible
when people do the wrong thing, consequences come after that that are kind of negative consequences, right?
What happens to Abram here?
He becomes extremely rich.
Look at that.
He got all this wealth.
His wife is gone.
As a man, he's probably struggling with the, did she kiss him?
Is she in his arms?
Guys struggle with that type of thing.
What's going on over there?
Is he forcing himself?
And just freaking out about that.
And then Pharaoh's like, oh, here, bro, here's all this wealth.
Well, Abram, you wanted things to go well with you.
How's it working out?
How do we know this is wealth, right?
It tells us there that he got male and female donkeys, right?
That detail, obviously you go, oh, well, so he could breed them, right?
That's true, but one of the reasons female donkeys were a sign of wealth is because
female donkeys were easier to control.
They were more dependable for riding.
And so they were considered a very, very valuable mode of transportation to have.
If you had female donkeys, it was like you had the Lambo and the Ferrari and the Bentley, right?
That's kind of the idea of having female donkeys.
And he had a bunch.
Then it says that he was given camels, plural.
And you go, what's the big deal about that?
Well, it's understood at the time that this was happening, that we understand this happening,
camels had been recently introduced as a domesticated animal in the cultures in the local area.
And what that means is that camels were rare.
That you didn't have camel in every corner, right?
They were rare, and at this time they were mostly a prestige symbol for the wealthy, right?
It was like having that $30,000 handbag, right?
It does the same thing as the $10 bag from Target, but it has a certain brand on it,
and so therefore it's a symbol of wealth.
And he didn't just have one camel, he had camels, plural.
Now, this meant that he was wealthy, incredibly wealthy.
So, faithless, deceitful Abram, lavished in luxurious things
while his beloved anxiously spent days in Pharaoh's harem.
Is anybody else reading this story so far and going, I don't quite understand?
He did the bad thing, and he got blessed.
He did something that looks like a faithless act, yet it seems that God is blessing him in it.
We have to understand, and this theme has been coming up all the way through Genesis,
that our relationship with God is not transactional.
I've said this before.
Our relationship with God isn't a, hey, if you do a good thing today, I'll do a good thing for you.
You did a bad thing today, I'm going to do a bad thing to you.
That's not how our relationship with God works.
What we've seen over and over is that God saves people because they have faith in him,
not because of what they did or didn't do, they have faith.
And then when they do obedient things, we understand that those are a result of the faith.
Those aren't the things that earn the faith.
I think one of the most important things to understand in this world in our relationship with God is God loves you.
God saved you because you believe in him.
You believe that he is real.
You believe that he is God.
You believe that what he says is true because he said it.
And when he said, I came and died for your sins, it's absolutely true.
I count on that, and God says, great, through that faith, you're my child.
And so we enter into our salvation relationship with God this way.
And then for some reason we turn into this, well, God's happy with me today because I did good.
He's not happy with me today because I did bad.
And I think a lot of the reality here is what we're going to see in this story is there is us doing good and bad
and obedience to God and how God responds to us and the discipline that we do get
and what God is going to do blessing us or not blessing us because he's so chosen and has a plan on our lives.
And to learn that these things aren't always connected.
That we could do something bad and God could still bless us.
And we're going to see this in Abram's life.
That God blessing him with all this wealth here was a part of the plan he had for Abram's life all the way through to the end.
That this wealth set him up to do so many things as a part of following God's plan to have his line ultimately end up in the Messiah.
But God blessing him doesn't then say, oh, his lie wasn't that bad.
You guys understand?
And so we can't get caught up in going, oh, I did something I know is bad, but you know what?
My day went really well.
Maybe it's okay to do that thing.
Don't get caught up in that.
But here we see that Abram is blessed.
And there was nothing he could do about the situation anyways, right?
The one of, if not the most powerful ruler on earth had his sister.
Now Abram could probably die in a ridiculous rescue attempt, right?
Going against Pharaoh and all his people.
And some might go, oh, how romantic, right?
He could do that.
Maybe Abram could rationalize, well, she was barren.
And so maybe God's given me all this so I could go and maybe my next wife will be the one that my descendants will come through.
But we can't forget through all of this and all the speculation that Abram was now God's child.
Abram was a believer.
God was his father.
And so what we're going to see here is the way a father responds when their kids get themselves into bad situations.
Parents today, when your kids get themselves into a bad situation, do you look at them and you say, I don't know you, you're disowned, you're no longer part of my family.
No, what you do is you step in.
And sometimes you step in and you have to rescue them from their own decisions and then discipline comes after.
And this is what we're going to see God do right here, verse 17.
But the Lord struck Pharaoh and his household with severe plagues because of Abram's wife, Sarai.
So that word Lord there, that's that covenant name Yahweh.
That's the name that God uses of himself when he wants us to focus on the fact that he's personally involved in our lives, personally connected to us.
And so it's Yahweh, the personal intimate God of Abram who made promises to him simply because Abraham believed in him.
I have faith in you.
God said, cool, you believe me, you're my kid.
I'm going to do these things in your life.
We see that God now stepping in to help, to course correct.
Or really to keep Abram from permanently messing up his own life.
You see, if Abram did leave, that wasn't what God planned for his life.
If Abram didn't learn the lesson that half lies are still lies, it would be very difficult for the rest of his life walking with God.
It would be incredibly difficult for Sarai whom God loved as well.
You see, God had to step in here because God wasn't about to let Abram mess up or interfere with his promises.
When God chooses to promise something to someone, he's going to follow through.
Even if you're a knucklehead and you keep messing up along the way, if God has promised you something, he's going to fulfill his promise.
We could bank on that.
This is what it says in 2 Timothy 2.13.
If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.
Don't you love that verse?
If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.
If God makes you a promise, can you mess up that promise and cause God to go, oh well, never mind, I'm not going to do it?
No.
So when you read through the Scriptures and you see all these promises God makes to his children,
I will never leave you, never forsake you, that I will not put you in something that is more than you could bear,
but I will always provide the way of escape.
All of it.
We tend to get into this transactional thinking, right?
Oh man, I messed up. Am I still saved?
I didn't do the right thing. Am I still saved?
Does God still love me? Is he still going to bless me?
And we have to get out of that type of thinking.
When it says here that he struck Pharaoh's household with severe plagues,
it's some type of skin disease, boils, leprosy, something where it was just very gross and uncomfortable.
And God is striking Pharaoh here because he's not about to renege on his blessings to Abram.
It's like he said to Abram, look, I said I will bless you, I'm going to bless you.
So many times in my own life where I'm in the mire of my own faithlessness,
where I've let God down, I did the thing I didn't want to do, I said the thing I didn't want to say,
I treated someone the way I know I shouldn't treat them, and I'm like, oh, I'm such a horrible person,
and you know, it's just terrible.
Then God still blesses me in those moments?
I don't know about you, but when God blesses me in moments of my faithlessness, I want to cry out, why?
Why would you do that? Why would you still bless me?
And his answer is the same every single time.
He says, you're my kid. I love you. I promised to bless you.
Discipline will come, yeah, okay? But don't connect your disobedience to my promises.
I made a promise I'm going to fulfill my promises in your life.
And we come to the idea of like, but I don't deserve it, Lord.
I don't deserve your blessing. I'm a sinner. Look what I've done.
And he went, yeah? I didn't die on the cross for you because you deserved it.
I didn't make promises to you because you deserve it.
I did those things because I love you.
You're my creation, and I care about you so much.
I died for you because you couldn't save yourself no matter what.
And the more we get that into our head and our heart,
I think it radically changes our relationship with God.
It is so humbling to be in a place where you realize I was so faithless right now
and God is still being faithful to you.
And to receive that, so humbling.
But it keeps us in a place where we understand who God is and who we are.
And when God's made those promises, we get saved, we put our faith in Him.
It's like, okay, in that moment you didn't do anything.
There was no action, no work you did. You simply put faith in me and I saved you.
Everything from that point forward here on earth is simply a working out of that reality.
God says, through the blood of Christ, I see you spotless and blameless.
And we're like, you see everything, God, really?
He's like, no, through the blood of Christ. You trust me? I see you as spotless.
So the rest of your life is going to be working out your life as you conform to my image
and to become that person that I see you are.
And then, yes, one day we're going to leave this earth, have new glorified bodies
without sin at all, and we're going to be in paradise, heaven with God forever.
But here and now we're working that out. You will stumble, you will fall, God says,
but I will never cast you out.
Why won't you cast me out, Lord?
Because he loves you.
Because when you put your faith in him, you trust in him, God knows that.
You believe in me, he says. You trust me in your heart.
I believe that when our spirit is made alive and we have that sinful nature
and that born-again spirit living at the same time,
God knows that our born-again spirit has the full intention to honor God and to glorify him.
That's what our spirit wants to do.
But from time to time, we yield to the flesh.
That was the same thing Paul dealt with in Romans.
Paul the apostle struggled with sin.
Now, God looks at us in that time and he says, look, I get it.
That sin nature, when that sin nature that still resides in you,
post-salvation rises up and you'll yield to its influence,
that doesn't change the fact that I love you.
And because you trust in me, you've put your faith in me, I saved you.
It is finished, I said on the cross.
Now let's get up and keep walking.
But I stumbled, I died for that, let's keep going.
And through the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, he works and works and works in us
that we become stronger and more mature and we become,
just we grow in our faith to where we start choosing the obedience more than we choose the sin.
Back to Abraham's story.
Verse 18.
So Pharaoh sent for Abraham and said, what have you done to me?
Why didn't you tell me she was your wife?
Why did you say she's my sister so that I took her as my wife?
Now, here is your wife, take her and go.
Now there's some speculation here, but there was something that caused Pharaoh
and the people in Pharaoh's household to get the story out of Sarai
and caused them to send for Abraham.
Something happened there.
Speculatively, this is what I think may have happened,
that as Pharaoh and his whole household was touched with this plague, Sarai was not.
And somebody went, hmm, Sarai, what's up?
And Sarai might have went like, well, let me tell you what happened.
And then Pharaoh was like, what?
Go get Abraham.
Speculative, I know, but possible.
So they send for Abraham and then Pharaoh just kind of rebukes him.
You know, here's where we are in this story.
Because of Abraham, because of his half-lie, Pharaoh, who is not a child of God,
who doesn't know the Lord, who's a pagan idolater, is now able to stand
in the moral high ground before the believer
and accuse Abraham the believer of the one doing wrong.
It's Abraham here that appears to be the sinner
and Pharaoh who appears to be the innocent saint,
at least in the eyes of the culture.
When we choose to do the things without God's input according to our natural way,
when we choose to try and find the loopholes so that we can get what we want,
we blow our witness.
God has called us not just to be His children, but He wants to shine through us.
He wants people to see Him through our lives,
and when we're doing things that we shouldn't be doing and twisting things,
people aren't going to see Christ in us.
Before I was a Christian in high school,
the number one reason I wasn't a Christian was Christians.
Because we'd be at a party somewhere doing all manner of drugs and alcohol,
and that person's trying to tell me about Jesus, and I'm like,
bro, you're doing the same thing I'm doing right now.
Why would I want with you what you got?
I still get to live my life this way.
So yeah, go ahead and be a Christian, that's fine.
But don't tell me you're any different from me.
But when I met Christians who were truly different,
not without sin, but really cared about standing for righteousness,
really attempted to say no to sin and stuff, that caught my attention.
Of course, the thought in that moment was, oh, you think you're better than me?
And somewhere along the line, someone told me one day,
no, I don't think I'm better than you.
I just have the ability to say no to those things because I know they're bad.
And that just didn't make sense to me, but I started thinking about it.
When you're the person that is saying, God, I'm going to live for you,
not because I'm trying to earn salvation,
I just want to live in a way that glorifies your name,
so help me through the Holy Spirit.
When you find yourself in that position and you face situations,
and life happens, and you go, well, I could do this, or I could do this,
and you say, wait, hold up, before I even make any decision,
let me go get God's counsel.
Lord, what do you want me to do in this situation?
How do you want me to respond?
We get in the Word, we get counsel from others because the Bible tells us to do that.
And then we go, okay, now based on God's input, I'm going to make this decision.
Your witness is going to be powerful, really powerful.
People are going to see you have something they don't have,
following someone they're not following,
and somehow getting answers that they can't get.
And that's when people start to go, what's up with this Christian thing?
Tell me more about that.
But that wasn't the case in Abram's life here.
Pharaoh stood in the place of the victor, if you will.
Now again, Pharaoh was still wrong.
He shouldn't have taken another man's sister.
But in that culture, it was a completely normal thing.
However, it was still wrong.
But Pharaoh says, look, here you go, take your wife, get out of here.
And so Abram is kicked out of Egypt.
We have no record of Abraham even saying a word to Pharaoh.
I mean, Pharaoh's rebuking him, reproaching him.
How dare you do this?
Abraham didn't say a word.
What could he say, right?
Pharaoh's like, dude, why'd you lie to me?
Look at my whole household, our flesh is falling off our skins.
We've got these boils.
What did you do?
Why did you do this?
And Abram's like, what do you say?
What do you say?
So we have record of him saying nothing because he had culpability.
And the way this story ends is instead of Abram going into Egypt
and Egypt having the opportunity to hear him proclaim the name of the Lord
and to watch him build altars and worship the one true and only God,
instead of that what we see is he let his selfish self-preservation lead him
into doing what he thought was right based on his own understanding,
and we see that nobody there heard the proclamation of the name of the Lord.
No altars were built in Egypt.
And so Abram's lack of trust in God in relying on his own deceptive prowess
instead of God's promises,
we see this great man of faith reduced into this tiny schemer.
And it's a sad picture, but it is a true picture.
And it is a true picture recorded here so that we get the lesson from this
that God was trying to get into Abram's life.
Now before we get to that I want to ask the question,
why did Pharaoh kick him out instead of punishing him?
By all rights, Pharaoh had the right to do whatever he want with him, right?
Throw him into the dungeon, kill him.
But he says, get out of here.
It doesn't tell us why.
It doesn't tell us whether they were still suffering from the skin condition or not.
But what I believe is that Pharaoh never again wanted to be on the receiving end
of the power behind Abram.
That there was power behind Abram.
Now the sad part of this is that the witness of that power was one of just great fury.
And it's going to strike you with boils and all this stuff.
And I believe Pharaoh's like, I don't care to know what it is.
I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Get out of my country.
And then later on in Abram's life we're going to see that those riches that he gained,
they weren't the blessing that you would think they would be.
They caused all kinds of trouble.
But this brings us to the end of chapter 12.
And we don't see any like, oh, and they lived happily ever after on this, right?
It's just a record.
A bad record.
A kind of negative record of what took place there.
Now having combed through this failure on Abram's part,
we have to still all agree that Abram is a great man of faith.
Why?
Well, if you continue reading all the way through chapter 22 of Genesis,
you will see that very clearly.
And then if you go into Hebrews 11, what we have recorded in Hebrews 11 is his faith,
not his errors.
That means when you're God's child, God's not keeping a record of the wrongs.
They have all been paid for by the blood of Christ.
What he sees is the good.
He sees you spotless and blameless.
But why did God allow this trial in his life?
Was it so that he could, you know, snicker evilly as Abram's sinful character shined through?
I knew it.
You're a bad person, Abram.
No, it was because he wanted to teach Abram something.
That's why God allows trials, to teach us something.
James touched on it.
Count it all joy. Why?
Because through the trial you're going to learn patience,
and you're going to build endurance, and you're going to build character.
And God wants to build all of this because there's something that he has in store for you past that
that you don't have the character for yet, that you don't have the endurance for yet.
And so he'll let you go through a trial so that you could learn.
And often we learn the hard way.
And so these things happen.
And in the situation we're like, oh, dang it, I did not do the right thing.
I didn't depend on God.
And so God might allow it again.
And we're going to see it again in Abram's life when he gets before Abimelech.
And then the hope in our life is that we do the right thing this time.
Because God wants to teach us and grow us and mature us so that he could get us to where he's taking us to.
But one of the big lessons here in Abram's life is that he stumbled because when the time of testing came,
he forgot about God and relied on his own understanding.
When the time of testing came, he leaned on his own methods.
It wasn't that he stopped believing in God.
It's just that he forgot about him in the moment.
In that moment, there wasn't a God.
He forgot how great he was.
He'd forgot about the promises.
He'd forgotten of everything God had done in his life so far and leaned on himself.
And when he did so, everything fell apart.
God allowed it because he had greater things in store for Abram's life.
But Abram had to learn that decisions made out of fear,
decisions made without God's counsel, will often end up misrepresenting God and leading to more trouble.
The lesson for us today, right?
Those of us who have put our faith in Jesus Christ, who trust in him.
The ones who say, God, I believe in you.
You are God, and so all of my life is yours.
One, expect trials.
One of the worst things you could tell somebody is,
you need to come to Jesus Christ because if you do, everything will be better.
How many of you know that's not true?
Right?
I tell people when I lead them to the Lord and have the opportunity to pray with them,
I say, look, now everything is going to be worse than it's ever been for a little while
because the devil's mad.
And you're a brand new spiritual baby and he's going to do everything he can to take you out.
And that's why we say, hey, if you've given your life to the Lord today,
get our new believers packed because start worshiping, start praying, start studying
because you're going to need that.
Getting saved doesn't mean your problems go away.
It just means that when you leave this earth, you're going to heaven.
But it also means a God who loves you is walking with you every step of the rest of your life.
Trials have to be accepted.
Jesus experienced trials in Hebrews 2, 10.
It says, for in bringing many sons and daughters to glory,
it was entirely appropriate that God, for whom and through whom all things exist,
should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.
You see, Christ is the one through whom the whole world was blessed,
the promise given to Abram.
We see here in Abram's story this great man of faith.
He stumbles.
And we can't forget, he's just a man.
He's a human being used by God to bring God's promises to fruition,
to bring blessing and salvation to everyone on the world.
Now, that doesn't justify his disobedience, but he's not Jesus.
He was simply a part of the line that brought Jesus.
Abram's ultimate offspring, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, he did it all perfect.
You read through the Gospels, he didn't stumble when the trials came.
His faith never wavered.
He didn't even look to his own methods, his own experience, his own knowledge.
Instead, he relied on his Father in heaven for everything.
Now, where Abram was a great man of faith, Jesus was a perfect man of faith.
Where Abram left his home in Ur to go to an unknown land in obedience to God's call, awesome.
Jesus Christ, the second part of the Trinity, God the Son,
left heaven in obedience to the Father's call.
Abram is known as both a man of great faith and great failure.
Jesus is known as the only one who has ever led a perfect life,
without fault, without failure, without sin.
And for those who have experienced the regenerating power of Jesus Christ,
the Bible says that we are in Christ, right?
We are in Christ, we are hidden in Christ.
And because we are in Christ, who is the perfect man of faith,
one, we're saved, two, we're empowered to live that life of faith now.
That when we're in Christ, it's like, okay Christ, tell me what to do.
And he'll do it. He's already given much of it to us in his word.
It's that one that Abram's faith pointed to, the one who all the promises point to,
the one who filled all the promises, he's the one that enables us to live by faith.
And so when the trials come, because they will, don't forget about God.
Don't do the natural thing first.
Don't do the thing that everybody else is doing first.
That natural thing might be the thing you're supposed to do,
but build the habit of saying, trial, God I need to come to you first.
God, you've done all these things in my life, I believe your word,
what do you want me to do in this situation?
How do you want me to respond in this situation?
Sometimes God will say, don't do the thing that you think you should do, right?
Isn't that what he did in Israel's life?
Israel gets into the promised land, we're going to conquer,
swords and shields and battle, and he goes, yeah, okay,
so the first town you come to, walk around it.
What?
You said conquest of Canaan, not square dance of Canaan.
Walk around it.
Okay.
Walk, walk, walk, walk.
Seventh day, walk seven times.
Blow the trumpets.
All right.
Boom, the walls fall down.
Oh, we thought, okay, God your ways are higher than our ways.
And so when we trust God, when we turn to him,
instead of turning to our own knowledge first,
our own experience first, our own methods first,
but we go to him and we pray and we say, give me wisdom, give me knowledge,
show me your way to handle this situation, this trial,
he will, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in you, sustain your faith,
help you to do the godly thing and to say no to the fleshly sinful thing.
And sometimes you're doing exactly the right thing according to your natural methods
and it's still not working.
Why?
Because God is saying, have you prayed yet?
Have you talked to me yet?
Trust me, come to me with everything.
That's what I'm training you to do.
That's what I'm allowing these trials for so that you learn that lesson.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you.
We love you, God.
Yet, Lord, we know we need to love you more.
God, it's your perfect love that casts out all fear.
And so, Lord, when trials come into our lives and we may find ourselves fearful,
when life happens and we see the natural things happening, God,
Lord, fear is a natural part of that, Lord.
We're scared.
What's going to happen?
But, Lord, help us not to forget who our Father in heaven is.
Help us to not forget who our faith and our trust is in.
Help us not to forget that you came to this earth, God,
and you clothed yourself with frail humanity and you lived a life for many reasons,
but one of them is so that we could learn from you how to deal with situations and circumstances.
Lord, the Bible is very clear.
We know we're going to stumble, but that doesn't mean we should.
That doesn't mean we should seek it out.
Lord, we want to honor you in every decision of our life.
And, God, I know that you have plans for us as your children, Lord.
You know the future of each and every single one of our lives.
How are you going to use us to further your kingdom?
And for some of us, it's going to be, we don't know, Lord,
but you know if we're not the people today, we need to be for that blessing
you're going to bring into our life, that task you're going to put before us.
And so, Lord, we do welcome the trials.
Lord, help us to not be people who get so caught up in connecting
whether we did good or bad to those things, Lord,
but to understand doing good or bad and how you discipline us
is not necessarily connected to you blessing and allowing things to happen in our life.
And so, again, God, help us through your Holy Spirit to have more faith.
Help us through your Holy Spirit to be more faithful.
But, God, help us to never forget that when we are faithless,
you are still faithful, for you cannot deny yourself.
We love you, Lord. We need you, Lord. Use us, Lord.
It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Well, God bless you guys. Let's worship.