It takes a big shift. It’s a bit like, you know, you’ve been in a movie theater and you’ve been captivated for a couple hours by some sci-fi fantasy like Lord of the Rings or the Matrix or everything everywhere all at once and you’ve been wrapped up in the story. You walk out of the dark theater and right away you just notice the popcorn on the floor and you forget where you parked your car exactly and everything just dissolves back into reality. It’s like that because the first 11 chapters of our Bibles cosmic in scope. They’re extremely fast-paced, huge amounts of time compressed into a few short words. Beginning with chapter 12, things slow down to a much more leisurely, even mundane pace. First 11 chapters contain this cast of intergalactic characters. We have God, the Almighty, the one and only, the creator. And uh beneath God, he’s created these sons of God, these other heavenly beings who do his bidding and carry out his will. And some of those beings break bad. And we find a serpent in the garden who successfully tempts mankind to tumble into a cauldron of sin. That’s quickly followed by centuries, many centuries go by. Very quickly, unhealthy human development. uh it creates a world of unending violence and a circuit breaker is instituted by God in the form of a of a cosmic of a great flood. The judgment of a great flood. Not long afterward, humanity begins to rebuild again, but again in a direction that contravenes God’s will for them to multiply and fill the earth. So God forces another reboot leading to diversity of languages and fostering the formation of people groups and different cultures, appearances and religious practices. And after all that cosmic drama at the beginning of Genesis, remaining 39 chapters cover only four generations of a single family. Over the next few months, we’ll pull out various episodes from the lives of those individuals. They’re the foundational family of faith. Their faith really is our faith. Their journey is our journey. Their struggles we can relate to because they’re our struggles and their future is our future. So we begin this morning with figure who gets a lot of attention in scripture. Abraham. We’re going to notice three things in this brief passage we’re looking at this morning. It’s his initial contact with God. We look at the initial call on his life, which is essentially his conversion out of paganism into knowing the true God. And then we look at the second call on his life which was essentially his call to mission to do what God wanted him to do. And finally we look at the intent or the focus of his mission. It’s to be a blessing to all the people on the earth. None of us are Abraham but the trajectory of our lives really with God follows that same pattern. First there’s a conversion to faith. Then [clears throat] God gives us a sense of mission and what he wants us to do. And then that mission involves being a blessing to other people. How can I not just serve myself but serve other people as well? So let’s look at Abraham this morning. See how his spiritual life mirrors our own. Really, it’s impossible to overstate the significance of Abraham because most of the people in our world, the majority of people in our world claim him as a key figure in their religious and cultural heritage. Whether Jewish people, Muslim people, Christian people, majority of people on our planet, they all look back to Abraham in some way. Every church or mosque or synagogue you drive by has something to say about him. And we really can’t understand world civilization without knowing his story. Also, by chapter 12 in our Bibles, just a side note, we’re moving in what we into what we would call known history. Because prior to chapter 12, the dates and the years are uncertain because we have no other supporting historical material to base them on. With Abraham, we’re moving into the realm of known history. We’re able to confirm dates and events from supporting evidence of other cultures that existed at the time. We use archaeological data and we look at the kings and the places listed in the stories of Abraham’s life and dating becomes quite reliable. So, we can determine that the events of chapter 12 we’re looking at this morning, they occurred between 2100 and 1875 BC, roughly 4,000 years ago. Which means that Abraham stood the same distance from Christ as you and I stand today. He stood 2000 BC. We stand 200 AD. Same distance from Christ. Here’s the first thing we learn about Abraham or Abram. He’s he’s listed in our Bible is Abram. Abram his given name means father. Abraham the name God gives him is father of many. Abraham is daddy or Abram is daddy. Abraham is like big daddy. And we’ll see though how those names carry significance as we go along. We’re first introduced to Abram the end of uh chapter 11 talks about his dad. This is the account of Tara. Tara became the father of Abram, Nahor and Heron. So Aram’s family, Abram’s family lived in the city of Er, which would be in modern-day Iraq, 300 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, not far from the plains of Shinar, where they had tried to build the tower of Babel. City of It’s an interesting in that it was extensively excavated in the 1920s by a British archaeologist named Leonard Woolly. And it wasn’t a primitive ancient village. It was a sprawling metropolis, had a library, had a university. The discoveries at were so impressive they attracted visitors from all over the world including one young writer named Agatha Christie. She ended up marrying Woolly’s assistant and she said her first novel murder in Mesopotamia in an excavation in Iraq. So that great find at that structure that dominated the whole region, a massive three-staged ziggurat. We talked about those last week similar to the one they were likely building at Babel. And each of those three stages was distinctively colored. And the top level housed a silver shrine dedicated to Nana, the moon god. And here the plot thickens because we learn that Abram was brought up in a culture and in a family of idol worshippers. We don’t know what happened to all the people groups that were dispersed at the Tower of Babel. But we get the sense that like many people in our world today, they were sort of making it up as they went along. Our creator God had not revealed himself to all of them. They were clutching at things that God had made. In the case of it was that big white globe that hangs in the sky at night. That was as good a focus of worship as anything they had. And humanity, it tends to spiral far from God. When the knowledge of the true gods not being passed on in the city of any true religion that followed the true creator worship that had begun in the garden of Eden, it seemed like it had just ground to a halt. I don’t know if there was any real understanding of God on the face of the earth. Many years after Genesis in Joshua chapter 24:3, Joshua said to the people, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says long before your forefathers, including Terara, long ago, your forefathers, including Tara, the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the river and worshiped other gods.” Abram‘s father was an idoltor. He was also a polygamist. He had more than one wife. And we soon learn that Abram married his halfsister Sarai. And that was a marriage relationship of a kind that that the Lord would later prohibit when he gave the law to his people through Moses. But in Abram’s day in the pagan city of it was nothing that would bother anyone. And the other thing we learn at the end of chapter 11 fact that will have great significance as the story of Abraham goes on is that Sarai was barren. Her and Abram had no children. So altogether Abram seemed a pretty unlikely choice for God to do anything wish with. He worshiped the wrong gods. He had the wrong kind of marriage. He had no offspring to propagate any kind of new line of spiritual descendants. But then came the call out of the darkness of Abram heard this strange unexpected voice. We read that in the New Testament in Acts 7:2. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia before he lived in Heron. Leave your country and your people. God said, “Go to the land I will show you.” That was essentially the call of conversion for Abram. It disrupted the life of an idoltor. Of course, Abram had no real knowledge of who this God was who spoke to him. He didn’t have any Bible stories to read. Uh uh but like all of us, God God made himself real to this idoltor. And God has to do that for all of us. The first first part of any of our spiritual journey, God has to shake us free of our spiritual deadness. Maybe wrench us free from a false religion such as with Abram. God God suddenly to Abram was no longer some distant moon or philosophy. He was up close. He was personal. That happens to us when God makes himself real. We have to be awakened, convicted, humbled, and unless that call of conversion comes to us from God, we’re going to be little idolattors all of our lives. We’ll scratch away at small things to try to provide some ultimate meaning to our lives. Even if we grow up in a great Christian environment, our parents are solid. They take us to a solid Christian church, God still has to appear to us and make himself real to us if we’re going to begin following him. can happen in stages, can happen in a flash, it can build slowly and then suddenly culminate or or it can come like a stroke of lightning. But as Romans 8:30 declares, “And those whom he predestined, he also called and those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified.” There’s a lot of theology packed into that verse. But notice there can’t be any justification, any being made right with God unless we first hear the call. A woman named Jackie Pullinger, she was born just outside of London 1944. Like nearly everyone else in England at the time, she was raised in the cultural religious world of the Church of England. And she felt a few spiritual tugs on her heart as she was growing up. as a young child, a a very proper Victorian-looking missionary lady came and spoke to her Sunday school class and asked the children if any of them wanted to go out on the mission field and and she thought, “Well, maybe God wants me on the mission field.” And at boarding school, when all of her class of girls was being dutifully confirmed uh into the Church of England, she remembers being actually quite serious about it, unlike the other girls, and feeling that she was one of the few who really believed in God, and it was quite a joyous occasion for her. So she began writing missionary agencies as a young girl saying she was thinking of becoming a missionary but of course they weren’t interested in that. They just put her on a mailing list. She became an accomplished musician playing piano and obo. She says that when she was in university she would pass the notice board that talked about the Christian group on campus. And uh she would have a little twinge in her heart then. She would look at those Christians sitting over in a huddle in the cafeteria uh looking very unattractive. [clears throat] She describes them as as being wet and pimply and feeble. And uh to her dismay, most of them were organists. And they they would ask her questions like, “Oh, are you saved?” or “Have you been washed in the blood?” And she had no idea what they were talking about. In time though, she had a couple of friends who invited her to a Bible study. And they seemed like normal people to her. The first ones uh she had met, she said, whoever talked to her about Jesus that didn’t make her toes curl. And she was very upset to hear talk about heaven and hell because those are concepts that she had thrown away years earlier. Even more disturbing for her was to hear that no one could get to God except through Jesus Christ. And in her social circles, being narrow like that was the worst of all sins. So she felt very constrained at that time to either accept what Jesus had said about himself or forget about the Christian faith altogether. It was a moment of decision for her. Reluctantly, she told Jesus that she would believe what he had said. And though she didn’t like it very much, she was converted. Jackie writes, “My life became fuller than I had believed possible. I hadn’t entered a narrow life at all. Now for Abram, when he first met God in his hometown of he’d been told to leave his country, leave his people, go to the land God would show him. Movement was expected, but it took him a while to get there. He might have spoken to his dad about this visitation from God. And the end of chapter 11, we read that Tara, his dad, gathered the family and set out for the long journey to Canaan, not taking a direct route through the harsh desert, but following what’s known as the fertile crescent. And they ended up not in Canaan, but in Haron in modern-day Turkey, another center as it has of moon worship. And Abram’s dad decided that Haron would be a good place to settle down, which they eventually did. And Terara died there. Now, I don’t think I don’t think that Abram’s relatives ever left their moon worship behind because later in Genesis, Abram’s grandson Jacob would head back to that territory of his relatives in Haron to find a wife. And at that time, his uncle Laban and the family, they were still worshiping various household gods. But as we move into the first three verses of Genesis 12, we see the call now to mission that God gave Abram. A call. This is a call that forever changed our world. In God had made himself real to Abram. It was essentially his conversion. But Abram also received a call to mission. What God wanted him to do with his life. And these three opening verses of Genesis 12, they carry the weight of the world on them. The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people, your father’s household. Go to the land I’ll show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great. You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. Whoever curses you, I’ll curse. And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Really interesting contrast in this call to Abram and what the people at Babel were trying to do. If you remember last week, they were intent on making a name for themselves, but God told Abram, “I will make your name great.” They said, “Well, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower, and we’ll stay together.” And God told Abram, “Go from the country to the land I’ll show you.” As they prepared to build the tower, they were concerned that they not be scattered over the face of the earth. But the mission God gave Abram was one that would be a blessing to all people scattered all over the earth. There’s something we learn here, I think, about God’s call to mission in our lives. And I’m not meaning that God wants all of us to be missionaries, although maybe that’s where God’s pointing some of us. It simply means that when we’re converted to Christ, God has work for us to do on behalf of his kingdom. What that work looks like, we might not be able to plan or predict, but it involves kind of putting our hand in God’s hand and having him lead us into the life ministry he wants us to. Abram had no idea where he would end up. He was just told, “Leave your country. Leave your people. I’ll show you. I’ll work it out for you. Pack your bags. Start moving.” And the idea of this, this is nerve-wracking for us. You know, as Pastor Tim Keller notes, God doesn’t give any longitude or latitude. And people were saying to Tim Keller all the time, “I’m interested in being a Christian, but will I have to break up with my boyfriend or my girlfriend? Will I still be able to live this material lifestyle that I’m living? Um, will I have to stop this? Will I have to start doing this?” And Tim Keller says, “You know what? When I was a younger minister, which was a long time ago, I made the mistake of trying to answer those questions. I used to say, “Well, yeah, Christians can do this, and they and they shouldn’t do this, and they can’t do this, can’t do that.” He says, “I began to realize how deadly wrong I was.” Because when you say, “I’ll get out, God, if you show me where you’re taking me. If you’ll show me exactly what you want me to do and exactly what you’re going to have me go,” you’re not answering the call. You’re staying in control of your life. You’re not giving up your valition. You’re not giving up your will. You’re not surrendering your will. You’re staying in the driver’s seat. You’re [snorts] saying, “God, I’ll be happy to go if I know where I’m going and if it makes sense to me.” But God actually says to Abram, “Get out.” And Abram says, “Where?” And God says, “I’ll show you later. Just go.” And later he says, God says, “I’ll give you a son.” And Abram says, “Well, how are you going to do that?” And God says, “I’ll show it to you later. Just just trust me.” And uh and finally God says, “Go to the top of the mountain.” and sacrifice your son to me.” And Abram says, “Why?” And God says, “I’ll show you later.” You know, just just climb. And that’s what that’s what Christianity is really meant to be all about. We can’t ever answer God’s call in our lives if we always want to see the end from the beginning. Now, I’m I’m no Abraham. mama claiming anything here, but many years ago, Charlene and I were sitting in church one Sunday and we felt this little twinge and we were quite newly married and and uh I sensed that maybe God was calling us to leave our jobs. I was working a bank, she was teaching school and uh maybe we’d go to a seminary and get some formal Bible training. And now Charlene’s going to tell the story a little bit differently. For me, it was kind of exciting. ing for her was kind of dreadful, but uh uh we wouldn’t have never said that God was thundering, you know, in our in our minds or in our hearts during that Sunday service, anything like that. But there was some gentle intuition that we believe was from the Holy Spirit. And we we ended up our we shut down our careers. We headed down to Dallas Seminary. It was a 4-year program. We had enough money saved to see us through about the first year and a half. Had our first baby show up couple months before we left. And and I will never say that things were easy or effortless cuz they weren’t. But looking back, it was very right to follow that little twinge that God gave us. It opened up decades of doing what we feel God called us to do. I think one regret many of us might feel if we’re coming to the end of our lives, I wish I’d risked more for Jesus. You know, I wish I’d put myself out there a bit. I wish I’d uh I wish I’d answered some of those twinges or intuitions he gave me. Because if we’re moving in God’s call and we’re putting our hand in his, it’s really not that much of a risk at all. We we can go wrong, but we won’t go too wrong for too long if our hand is in God’s. You know, as a new Christian, her early 20s, Jackie Pollinger, she had a career in England teaching music, but [clears throat] that missionary idea that had been latent in her life, even before she was converted, it just wouldn’t go away. She wrote to a number of missionary organizations. None of them said, “We don’t have any any use for musicians.” And others told her that they wouldn’t even consider taking her on as a missionary until she reached age 25. And she said, “But I think Jesus might come back before I’m 25.” She said, “Couldn’t I go sooner?” Well, no one was willing to accept her. And about that time, she had a strange dream. And she was looking at a country on a map in her dream. And the country was Hong Kong. And she actually wrote to the Hong Kong government, which was under British territory, British protection. Again, they told her they had no place for her. About that time, she was invited to a Christian meeting. And when she arrived, someone took her aside and told her confidentially, “Well, don’t be surprised if something odd happens here.” And nervously, she kind of sat by the door because apparently they were going to use some spiritual gifts at their meeting. And she wanted to be in a good position to run away if she had to. And she wasn’t sure what to expect. Meeting was orderly, it was calm, just normal prayers and songs. One or two people were present. They spoke in a strange language that no one understood and others explained what they meant. But there was no booming voice talking to her. And then it came. Someone was speaking very quietly and she was completely sure in her heart that this was the word of the Holy Spirit for her. Go trust me. I will lead you. I’ll instruct you and teach you in the way you shall go. I will guide you with my eye. There it was. She says, uh, what God had been saying all along was now underlined. I was sure that God had my life in hand and that he was going to lead me somewhere. Well, she didn’t know what to do. Over the Easter holidays, she went to a parish. There was a vicor there there named Richard Thompson, and he had known her for some time, and she felt really uh that he might be able to give her counsel. She told him that God and her had reached a stalemate. God had clearly told her to go, but God wouldn’t tell her where. So, how can I go? She asked. Vicer’s reply was extraordinary. He said, ‘Well, if God is telling you to go, you you’d better go.’ Well, how can I? All my applications have been rejected. Well, if you tried all the conventional ways and missionary societies and God is still telling you to go, you’d better get on the move. If you had a job and a ticket and accommodation and a sick fund and a pension, you wouldn’t need to trust him. Anyone can go that way, whether they’re Christians or not. If I were you, I’d go out and buy a ticket for a boat going on the longest journey you can find and pray to know where to get off. He says, “You can’t lose yourself if you put yourself completely in God’s hands. You know, if he doesn’t want you to get on the ship, he’s perfectly capable of stopping you. Maybe the ship will go anywhere in the world. Maybe you’ll go all the way around the world just to talk to one sailor about Christ. Maybe you’ll go as far as Singapore to play the piano for a week of youth meetings and then you’ll come back. Those words rang true to her heart and she felt she couldn’t lose on this adventure. So Jackie Pollinger counted up her money. She found the cheapest ship, the longest route passing through as many countries on the way. Went from France to Japan. She bought a ticket. She was all set. Her parents and her friends were very skeptical. Her father asked her, “Well, what right do you have to go give your religion to people in other countries when they have perfectly good religions of their own?” The missionary society said that was very irresponsible advice for the vicer to give to a young girl. And she thought, “Well, that’s probably right, except it was the Holy Spirit that was speaking it. How would you feel if some preacher gave your young daughter early 20s that advice?” However, her mom’s frantically chewing stomach pills on the way to drop her off at the harbor. She arrived at the boat. She got on. Eventually, she arrived at the port of Hong Kong. She tried to get off the boat and the immigration officer asked her where she would live and she told him, “Well, I don’t have anywhere to live.” He asked her where her friends were and she said, “I don’t have any friends here.” He asked her where she worked. She said, “Well, I don’t have a job.” He asked her where her mom was. She said, “Well, she’s back in England.” He asked her where her return ticket was. She said, “Oh, I don’t have one.” Asked her, “Well, how much money do you have?” She said, “I have a hundred Hong Kong dollars.” He told her, “Well, that’s not going to be enough for 3 days in Hong Kong.” So, he told her that um she wouldn’t have permission to leave the ship. She was afraid she’d come all this way to Asia simply to be repatriated back to England. Suddenly, she remembered that her mom had a godson in Hong Kong who worked as a policeman. She says, “Well, I do know someone here. He’s he’s a he’s a policeman.” And policemen are very respected. That changed everything. They thrust her passport at her. They muttered angrily that she could get off the boat as long as she looked for work immediately and her adventure continued. So, you’ve seen how God first called Abram out of paganism to a relationship with the living God. Then he gave Abram a mission to fulfill. And if you look closely at the mission, promises three things to Abram. Leave your country, your people, your father’s household. Go to the land I’ll show you. I’ll make you into a great nation. I’ll bless you. I’ll make your name great. You’ll be a blessing. I’ll bless those who bless you. Whoever curses you, I’ll curse. And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Three aspects of that uh promise, land, seed, and blessing. The land God was giving him was a land God would lead him to as uh the land that was reserved for God’s people, Israel. The seed or the descendants promised that God would make Abram into a great nation. He would have many descendants. And neither of those first two promises showed much promise to Abram in the next number of years. You know, even when he when Abram died, he the only piece of property that he owned on that land that God led him to was a grave to bury his wife in. It would take and it would take them forever to have their first child. They were stretched beyond hope to trust in God that somehow it would happen. But when the Lord told Abram that all peoples on earth be blessed through him, that’s the promise that resonates in our hearts this morning. Because it was through Abram’s line that Jesus would come 2,000 years later. The great promise underneath all those promises God gave to him was the promise of Genesis 3 where God said the seed of woman will come and he will one day crush the serpent’s head. Work of the serpent would be undone. serpent had engineered things so that a holy God could only judge sinful people. And the serpent crawled away in the dust with a smile on its face. But what if God’s own son would leave heaven and go to the place he was to go to, a strange place with a people and a culture very different than heaven, a vile place, a sorted place where the son of God would live a a sinless life and would die a sacrificial death so that all people on earth could be blessed through him. That great promise of Jesus underlay all the promises that God instructed to Abram. Abram all peoples on earth be blessed through you because through you Jesus will come with the power to save and to redeem and to justify all those who call on his name for salvation. So armed with that promise of God to be a blessing, we read in verses 4-9 of chapter 12 that Abram was obedient to go to the land God showed him. And he began going through the land and he went through the land. He began putting up altars, places of worship. His life was a life of faith, not of sight. Those altars of worship could be places he could return to when things got tough. And things did get tough for Abram. and he did return to those altars from time to time. His life was a life of faith, not sight. Romans 4:3 says that Abram believed God, it was credited to him as righteousness. You know, faith is the only currency God accepts. If we’re to be converted and sent out on mission, if we think that our service or our mission for God is what makes us worthy to be accepted by him, we have it all backwards. We don’t understand the gospel. We don’t understand the life of Abraham. We might as well be back in worshiping the moon and trying to please the moon god. Abraham gives us our template for faith for trusting God and his promises completely messing up and Abraham will at times but rising forward to stumble forward again. Being converted knowing that God is sending us on mission to be a blessing to others. Is there really anything better than that? You know, when Jackie Pollinger got off the ship in Hong Kong, within a a few days, she’d made contact with a Christian lady, and she found herself in the infamous walled city of Cowoon. It had once been an old fort on the Hong Kong Peninsula. It had morphed into a nearly autonomous region. It’d been vacated by the Chinese, surrounded by British territories. The police rarely went into the oldwalled city. It was filled with squatters who had escaped uh communist China. It was filled with prostitutes and drug addicts and triad gangs and many, many unlicensed dentists and rats and spiders. It was desperately poor to get in. Very difficult. You almost needed a guide. That’s Jackie Pollinger in the walled city. The roof, the buildings were so congested. It was only really on the same footprint of our church and our parking lot. a little bit bigger than that, about 6 acres. So congested the roofs nearly touched. Could be a bright sunny day outside. At street level, it would be dark. Uh into that area were crowded maybe 35,000 people. Could have been 60,000 people because there was no census. There were two toilets, one for men, one for women, service that population. So refues flowed down the the al the pathways between buildings or would be tossed down from the windows above. Now, Jackie Pollinger, she had a good career as a as a music teacher and she was offered this job at an elite school on the island of Hong Kong [clears throat] uh teaching uh young girls. And but she found that whenever she walked into that walled city, she would be so happy. And if you read Jackie Pollinger’s book entitled Chasing the Dragon, and I’d recommend it, you’ll find story after story of prostitutes and drug addicts and gang members coming to faith in Christ, beginning new lives. Just uh the intervention process they had for she had for heroin addicts, people who wanted to finally kick heroin. They would be put in a room for 10 days and all these recovered addicts would be in the room praying with them and praying for them and teaching them how to pray. tremendously successful. After her first decade in the Wall City, she started a charity called St. Stevens Society, provided rehab homes for recovering dug addicts and and prostitutes and gang members. She eventually married a recovered addict. Uh he passed away about seven years later from cancer, but he had become part of her ministry as well. And you know, her work has continued over all these years. She’s in her 80s now. She’s still, if you look at the St. Steven’s website still shows her going strong in the ministry that she began in 1966. And in the forward to a revised copy of her Chasing the Dragon book, she writes, “You know, Chasing the Dragon backfired on me. I’d written it in the hope of recording history, inspiring hope. Having disposed of one decade I’d hoped to get on with more life. Instead, she says, “I Christians kept inviting me to retell tell and retell my story again and again.” But she said, “What I had meant was that you, the reader, might see that the same God could impart his heart, his power in your city, and you could write your own books.” She says, “The first edition covered about 10 in the blocks will probably be unnamed. We don’t care to extend our work, but to extend his kingdom.” And she says, ‘There are many more adventures to be had, many more battles to be be fought. It’d be such fun to be part of them rather than just read of them. So go write your own book, she says. Go. And I think we should pray there. Some things that we might want to pray about. Yeah, I can’t even read that now. Thank God for the time that he made himself real to you and drew you to himself. and pray that as you sense God calling you deeper into ministry and mission, you’ll answer that call by faith, no matter how unclear the next step might be. And pray for God to show you how you can be a blessing to people around the world or people even in your neighborhood this week. This is just your moment with God, your time of prayer. So take a few moments and then I’m going to lead us in pastoral prayer after that. >> [snorts]