Having Faith

 

Text: Genesis 15:1-6

Focus: Faith

Function: Helping people to trust in God

15:¹After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” ²But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” ⁴But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” ⁵He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” ⁶And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

I titled this sermon, “Having faith.” I don’t want to make any promises here about how complete the lesson will be. Walking by faith in what God has done for us is a lifelong vocation, it is something that we grow into as we learn to trust God in the midst of circumstances, whether good or bad.

So, I can’t sum up for you, in one short lesson just exactly what it means for us to have faith in God. But, we are going to look a little bit at the life of Abraham and see what it meant for him to have faith in God.

The significant verse from the passage is is verse 6: “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

In the book of Romans, brother Paul does a good job of explaining how we are justified by faith over justification by the deeds or works of the law.

He explains that Abraham was considered a righteous person because He trusted in God.

He trusted in God and God’s judgment. He trusted in God and relied on God’s word to him.

Now Abraham was unique compared to us. He had visions and God spoke to him from time to time. That is not a general occurrence for us.

Abraham lived up North in what was then a land called Ur of the Chaldeas. It was modern day Iraq. And the people who lived in that land believed that God, the creator of the world, would judge evil and they lived their lives in respect to the fact that they have to answer to God.

While living up North, God spoke to him and told him to take his family and move to the land of Canaan where God was eventually going to give the land to Abraham’s descendants.

Abraham believed God and left the security of his home and the people he trusted to be righteous and just and always treat the stranger with kindness and respect to go to a foreign land where he had no idea whether or not people feared God.

More than that. It was a great risk. There were no nations at the time. The Political structure was city states that were made up primarily of one family line. The whole system was Patriarchal and tribal based on family lineage. When Abraham left home, he became a foreigner in a strange land and therefore he did not have the civil protections accorded to him if he stayed in Iraq. Although he owned slaves, he didn’t have the civil protections accorded tribal members and he could have been enslaved himself.

But Abraham heard the voice of God call him to trust him and lead him safely into this new land that his family would eventually inherit.

And that leads us to the point in time of our text today. He is in the new land and God appears to him again and tells him that this is his land and that his descendants will be more numerous than can be counted.

He questions how that can happen since he has no natural children, only enslaved people that he owns.

And God promises him to have these descendants and the text says that since he believed God without evidence, no child yet, God called him a righteous person.

Righteous is a legal term in this place and it means that he is a justified person. God will save him in the end because he is a good and decent person.

Both the Old and the New Testaments make it clear that the righteous person does just acts. When Jesus said, I was naked and you clothed Me, hungry and you fed Me, sick and in prison and you visited Me when you did these things to the least of these.

Jesus makes it clear that only the just person, the person who does the just and right thing, the loving thing, is a believer.

Abraham trusted God to keep him safe in a land where the fear of God was waning.

We see that demonstrated in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It was another time that God spoke to Abraham. This time, the text says the the Lord, in human form, (probably pre-incarnate Jesus) and two angels visited Abraham. They changed his name from Abram to Abraham, and told him and Sarah that they will be parents at this time next year.

And then they told Abraham that the two angels were going on ahead to Sodom and Gomorrah to destroy them for their wickedness.

You know the story, they tried to rape the angels, the angels struck the men with blindness, they led Abraham’s nephew Lot out of the town and destroyed the city.

Abraham was a righteous man. It means that he was also just.

He trained Lot.

Lot survived the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah simply by welcoming the stranger at the gates. He welcomed the foreigner and God saved his life. His welcoming of the strangers was his proof of his faith. He trusted God still and knew that it was the right thing to do to take care of strangers and aliens in your land.

Although the concept of the fear of God and God’s ultimate judgment was lost on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s righteousness spilled over to his nephew who demonstrated his faith by his works and took the angels in.

He believed God and did the right thing.

Abraham believes God and does the right thing.

It takes faith and trust, in God, at times, to do the right thing.

At times, the right thing is a sacrifice.

The right thing to do at times is to forgive an enemy even though we have no recourse for revenge. We trust God for our vengeance. And we ask God to be merciful to us, so we know that God’s vengeance will be merciful toward others.

I mentioned my own struggle with racism. God says, forgive our enemies and love them. Love covers a multitude of sins.

I am learning the process to forgive. When I was 13, on was a warm summer night we convinced our parents to let us walk home the 1.2 miles from church to our house. We bordered on a rougher neighborhood in the journey.

During the trip, a gang of young black men began to harass us. We tried to lose them in the alleyways, but they caught up with us in the median of a boulevard and beat us up pretty good. I got a broken rib and severely blackened eyes.

Racism is an ugly thing and I have experienced the worst of it in my own life’s experiences. But I look back at that moment and see the torment in the eyes of my own attackers. They were young and angry, looking for payback for the years of oppression that they had experienced. Even then, God told me, and taught me to forgive and love my enemies. It set me free from the bondage of that pain.

Abraham walked by faith, and it wasn’t easy for him. Sometimes he made terrible mistakes, but he kept coming back to God and God kept forgiving him because, I believe, he wanted to do the right thing in his heart.