in the book of Genesis this morning. This must be one of my favorite chapters, maybe in the Bible, but certainly in the book of Genesis. And I would just like to read a portion of it. It’s Genesis chapter 15. I’ll read the first six verses and then toward the end. It says, “After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I’m your shield. Your reward shall be very great.” And Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.” And Abram said, “Behold, you’ve given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir.” And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars if you’re able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. And then down to verse 17, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” So, let’s do some work in this passage this morning. This is This is holy ground, I think, to tread on because this is one of the most stunning appearances of God in I think in all of scripture. There are many times where God makes a special appearance to people in the book of Genesis, throughout scripture, and those times are what theologians call theophanies. The appearance or the manifestation of God to people. So, a theophany would be God appearing to Moses in the burning bush or God leading Remember he led the children of Israel in a pillar of cloud by day and and a pillar of fire by night. Or Jacob is is wrestling with a man and then afterwards he realizes that was God I was I was wrestling with and the theophanies in scripture are powerful. They’re often quite frightening. One we’re looking at this morning, this may be the eeriest or the spookiest of all of them. But as we open it up it discloses a stunning picture of exactly how the gospel works in our lives. So we’re This morning we’re going to think about three things. How God relates to time and then how God handles the promises that he makes to us and how we are meant to respond by faith. So first let’s let’s think a little bit about God and time. You know, in the last couple weeks we’ve seen Abraham and he’s been tested first by scarcity. Remember there was famine when he was in the promised land and he he took off for Egypt. He didn’t feel he had an off and didn’t do very well on that test. He nearly lost his wife. But then he was able to get back home. He renewed his worship of God and it made him radically generous. He could say to his nephew Lot, “Go ahead and take all the best land and I’ll take the other side and I’ll just trust God for my resources.” Then last week he wasn’t tested by scarcity. He was tested by success because Abraham went to war. He won a war and the spoils of war. All this great power, property, people were at his fingertips. But he refused to exploit the situation because he wanted everyone to know that if he was going to prosper it would be by God’s hand in his life, not just by taking advantage of the circumstances and and taking advantage of other people. So maybe we can relate to being tested by scarcity and tested by success at times, but I know all of us can surely relate to the test we see Abraham facing this morning and this is simply the test of time. You know, for people who are much smarter than us, who dabble in theoretical physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is like the holy grail of physics. And over a hundred years ago, Einstein devised a thought experiment that involves two twins, one staying on Earth and the other traveling into space at nearly the speed of light. And when they eventually reconnect and compare clocks, the traveling twin is years younger because less time passed for him. Space and time are linked in a way time becomes elastic. It stretches when it’s affected by motion and gravity. And since his theory was first proposed, Einstein’s theory has been well established, measured experimentally in a number of very convincing ways. But it makes our brains hurt to think about it because we don’t we can only think of time as constant and linear. It’s not elastic. It’s not something you can tamper with. But the Bible would say that our view of time is flawed. It’s seriously deficient. Our view doesn’t line up with reality. We just don’t get it because God’s eternal. That means time means relatively little to him. Now, we see that in the Bible in passages like Joshua chapter 10. God just decides to stop the sun at noon and delays it’s going down for a full day, throwing the world into this extended daylight saving time. He manipulates time like a child manipulates a little windup toy. And then you go into the Apostle Paul in 2 Peter or Peter in 2 Peter 3:8, he says, “With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.” A day is like a thousand years. I I feel that when I’m listening to something like a symphony performance, even 5 minutes is like a thousand years to me then. But how do we relate to a God like that? We’re We’re so linear. We’re so impatient. How do we relate to someone who says, “Oh, a thousand years are like a day to me.”? C.S. Lewis wrote, “I firmly believe that God’s life is non-temporal. Time is a defect of reality, since by its very nature any temporal being loses each moment of its life to get to the next. The moments run through us as if we were sieves. God forbid that we should think God to be like that. So, time runs through all of us like water through a sieve. We have to leave one moment behind to get to the next one. We get anxious just watching the uh the microwave countdown, you know, we’re eager to discard 1 minute, get on to the next. God has no such concern or limitation. So, we sympathize with someone like Abram, who keeps on having to sit around as years go by waiting for God to come through and fulfill all the promises that God had made to him. We read in Genesis 12:4, Abram was 75 years old when he first went into the promised land. In the chapter that immediately follows the one we’re looking at today, we find out that he was 86 by then. So, Abram, this octogenarian, he’s just watching the years of his life tick by with not much happening. We mentioned a couple weeks ago, there are only eight recorded conversations in scripture between Abram and God. So, likely there were very long stretches where Abram would have maybe cocked his ear to heaven to try to hear something and he just heard crickets. But he’s like Frodo. He’s carrying the the the the ring in the Lord of the Rings and he’s the the bearer of these weighty promises that God has made to him to bless him richly and to make him a blessing to all the other nations. And God had promised Abram to give give him a land and give him many descendants. But Abram just sits watching the best before date for him and his wife come and go. And that endless waiting takes an emotional toll on him. Meanwhile, God, who stands outside of time, he’s not perturbed by any of that at all. You know, if you think of your own life and times when maybe you’ve been very close to God and he has spoken to you and he’s encouraged you and he’s perhaps opened up a glimpse, he’s pulled back the curtain a little bit to show him some of the possibilities for your life, some of the things he wants to accomplish in his kingdom through you. And God does that. He draws us very close to him. He pulls back the curtain. He reveals something to us. We’re eager to get there, but we want to get there right away. We’re eager to change the world and change people’s lives and be a real New Testament type church with a vital ministry to our neighborhood and our city. You know, a church where the presence and the power of God just roars through us. And then years go by and we get discouraged. We settle for lives that end up not expecting very much from God. We start praying for smaller things that we feel are manageable for the king of the universe to handle. But to God, if he gave us a vision 25 years ago, well, to him it’s like he spoke it to us a half an hour ago. In God’s eyes, if we have the promise, we already have the reality. Time is irrelevant. God sees our past, our present, our future all at once. He’s not at all anxious about how our lives progress. We get intensely anxious. We want to get to the destination. God just says, “Just enjoy. Sit back. Enjoy the journey with me.” I heard a speaker once at a conference and he said that in his long years of relating to God, he had found that the more impatient I am, the more God slows things down. And the more patient I am, the more God speeds things up. That sounds frustrating. I mean, it doesn’t make like life easy, but it’s the way that we see God working with so many of the great heroes of faith in the Bible. We shouldn’t expect that he would work differently with us. Time and time is a very difficult test. Especially if we’re praying for a loved one to show some responsiveness to the gospel. If we’re waiting for a job to open up and there’s nothing on the horizon. If we’re waiting for a person to come along that we can get to know and and marry. If we’re longing to see more of God and be more fruitful in his kingdom, test of time is a heavy test. It was something that Abram, he just had to process that for many, many years. Beginning of chapter 15, we find Abram he’s sitting in his tent yet another evening of a of a fairly probably uneventful year or uneventful month and he’d been promised, Abram you’re going to have a huge life, an enormous life. You’re going to be internationally significant. But year after year after year of camping, that can get pretty old. But on that particular evening, God suddenly showed up in a vision saying, “Don’t be afraid, Abram. I’m your shield. I’m your very great reward.” Now, I’m sure Abram was shocked by that sudden theophany, that appearance of God. But he had the presence of mind to get right to the matter where it didn’t seem to him that God was his reward at all. The promised reward, the one that would seem to be withheld, was a baby, an heir, a descendant. Abram said right away, “Oh sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who’s going to inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus. You’ve given me no children. So, a servant in my household will be my heir.” You know, Proverbs 13:12 says that hope deferred makes the heart sick. But longing fulfilled is a tree of life. And Abram at that time was in a phase of his life where his heart was sick with longing. But without any apology at all for the delay, God simply reiterated his promise that Abram would be the father of many offspring saying, “Oh, this man, Eliezer, this manager of your household, he’s not going to be your heir. But a son coming from your own body will be your heir. Then he says, “Let’s Let’s go outside, Abram. I want to show you something.” So, Abram put on his bathrobe and his slippers, and he opened up the tent flap, and he walked outside. God said, “Look up at the heavens. Count the stars if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.” Yeah, I spent one of my summers in high school on a fence-building crew in the sun-baked southwestern corner of Saskatchewan, land of tumbleweeds and antelope and gophers and ticks and very few people. And at night, oftentimes a friend and I would would climb up on the trailer roof, and we’d just lie back and stare at the sky. There was zero light pollution to hinder the view, and just thousands and thousands and thousands of stars from horizon to horizon. Of course, no one’s foolish enough to try counting them. Abram looked at the sky, and God says, “So shall your offspring be.” As if to say to Abram, “Abram, do you think I’m going to fail you? Do you think that you should give up on me? It’s not just about you, Abram. It’s about the whole world. My promise is to bless the whole world through you. I haven’t been ignoring you all these years, but I’m doing much, much bigger things around you. I have affection for so many people, and I’m making a way to save them all.” You know, from our New Testament vantage point, we read something like Galatians 3:7, which tells talks about us, and it says, “All those who believe are children of Abraham.” And Romans 4:11 calls Abraham the father of all who believe. So, we understand that when Abram was looking up at the stars, he was looking up at you and me. Every point of light was like one of us, those who would who would come to faith in Christ, and Abraham would be the father of our faith. And today, there’s over a billion people on our planet who claim to worship God through his son, Jesus Christ, and that’s a lot of people. All descendants of Abraham spiritually. So, when we look up at the sky, we should see converts. You know, there’s converts from Kenya and Colombia and Afghanistan and Baffin Island and and New Guinea. That’s what the stars represent as God shows Abram that rightful night sky. Where the Lord came to Abram as it comes to us, we have to decide is God going to be trustworthy or untrustworthy? And when we’re looking down, we’re just staring at our problems, just looking at circumstances, fretting about timing, God just is always going to call us to look up and see him. See what See what he has for us. The next scene, God moved on. First of all, he reaffirmed the promise of descendants. Abram, look at the sky. It’s going to be like that, your descendants. And then he reaffirms the promise he made to Abram about the land. God said, “I am the Lord who brought you up out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.” But again, Abram’s an old man. He’s He’s not a landowner. He had no way of seeing how that could be possible. Every step step that Abram took in the promised land, it belonged to someone else. It’s like Abram joined a game of Monopoly 6 hours into the game, you know, and he couldn’t make a move without landing on someone’s Park Place or Boardwalk, and everyone else has hotels and and he doesn’t even own a parking spot. So, he said, “O sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” Here’s where things get really spooky because the night sky is growing darker. Lord said to Abram, “Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each 3 years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.” Now, Abram, he knew what was going on there because collecting these animals, that was in the culture of the ancient Near East. This was a way of signing a contract or ratifying a covenant. So, he dutifully brought these animals. It says he cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other. The birds, however, he didn’t cut in two. Then birds of prey would come down on the carcasses and Abram would have to get up and and shoo them away. But he created this bloody hallway, this passageway of death between the halves of the animals. This was a way of making a solemn agreement between two parties. You know, it was not a a world of written agreements where people would sign contracts. This was a very messy way of shaking hands. And we have a reference to this practice little later on in the Old Testament in Jeremiah 34 where God is chastising people who said they had made a a covenant that they would release their Hebrew slaves, but they didn’t fulfill it and they kept them instead. God says to them, “The men who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat them like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces.” Goes on, “The leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the court officials, the priests, the people of the land who walked between the pieces of the calf, I will hand over to their enemies who seek their lives. Their dead bodies will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.” Now, God who takes his promises very very seriously says that those covenant breakers would bring the covenant curse down on themselves. They They had walked between the animal pieces and breaking the covenant meant that they would now become like the carcass themselves. Birds of the air, beasts of the field would come and feed on them. So, it’d be like you going to the bank and you sit down with your bank manager to work out a mortgage and you agree to the terms and instead of signing a document he passes to you, you walk out into the parking lot and his assistant manager has slaughtered all of these animals and cut them in half and you and the bank manager look at one another and you walk between the pieces of the animals as a way of saying that if either of you violates those terms of that mortgage agreement, may you be made like those carcasses on either side of you and may birds come down to feed on you. If you did that, maybe you’d think twice about skipping a mortgage payment. Or before a wedding, instead of having a you know a marriage license up on a table for the groom and the bride to sign once they’ve made their promises to one another, well the bridesmaids and the groomsmen before the wedding, they’re busy doing the many messy work of slaughtering animals and cutting them up and putting them on one side or another for the couple to walk between and should either of them break their covenant vows, may they be the ones whose lives are taken, whose carcasses are strewn over our parking lot and then the crows and the magpies come down and feed on them. I think marriages might last longer if that was the case as well. But after Abram, he dutifully arranged these items for sealing an ancient covenant, then that eerie momentous evening continued. Says as the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, but it wasn’t a regular sleep. A thick and dreadful darkness came over him. It’s not just regular night time, it’s terrible. It’s frightening. Out of that darkness, Abram heard God’s voice confirm the land would surely belong to his descendants, but it would be centuries before that promise was fulfilled. Lord tells Abram about his own death, about the enslavement of his descendants for 400 years in Egypt before their eventual return to claim the promised land. Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own. They’ll be enslaved and mistreated 400 years, but I’ll punish the nation they serve as slaves and afterward they’ll come out with great possessions. You, however, Abram, you’re not going to last through that time. You’ll go to your fathers in peace. You’ll be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation, your descendants will come back here. What’s the reason? For the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. He’s giving Abram the reason for the long delay in his family receiving the land. It’s because the land’s current inhabitants, all the various people groups who inhabited Canaan, the promised land, represented by the Amorites, they’re not yet sufficiently wicked for God’s judgment to fall on them. I mean, divine judgment will come 400 years later in the form of conquest by Abram’s descendants, but that must wait until the people are sufficiently wicked to deserve that fate. And we see that when we go back to 2 Peter where it says, you know, about a thousand years being like a day to God, it’s a statement really of God’s mercy and his compassion and his forbearance toward the lost. Peter says, “Do not forget this one thing, dear friends. With the Lord, a day’s like a thousand years. Thousand years are like a day. The Lord’s not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness. He’s patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” So, by delaying his judgment against the Amorites, even if it meant the enslavement of Abram’s descendants for 400 years, the Lord’s expressing great forbearance that he has toward nations, wanting no one to perish, all to come to the place of repenting of their sins and drawing near to him. So, if we think God is slow in getting back to us and keeping his promises, we need to understand that God has a lot going on. And it’s not all about us. He’s making a multitude of saving connections all the time with people scattered all over the world. So, if we feel tested by time, we need to trust God that he’s still working everything out for good, not just for us, but for everyone. So, in that typical ancient covenant ceremony, a great king would make a covenant with a defeated enemy, a vassal, a servant. And if the king was particularly benevolent, if he was a good guy, he might accompany his vassal through that um that um corridor of carcasses. But more likely, he would exercise his superiority. He would stand on the sidelines. This was not a relationship of equals, and he would require the vassal to pass through the pieces alone. Surely, that’s what Abram was expecting what uh God wanted him to do when he laid out, cut up, and laid out those animals. But instead, look what happened. And this is utterly amazing. It says, “When the sun had set, and darkness had fallen, a smoking fire pot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.” It says, “On that day, the Lord made” literally, it says the Lord cut a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants, I’ll give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates, land of the Kenites and the Kenizzites and the Mennonites and the Hutterites and uh Girgashites and the Jebusites.” And that eerie smoking fire pot and that blazing torch represented the very presence of the Lord going between the carcasses alone. In doing that, God was essentially saying to Abram, “If I break my covenant with you, if I fail to keep my promises, may I be cut off. May I be destroyed. May my flesh lie upon the ground to feed the birds of the air and the and and the beasts of the field. May my power become powerless and my immortality become mortal, and may the impossible become possible, and may I, your God and creator, die. Now, Abram surely didn’t know what was going on, but we do because 2,000 years later, that thick darkness came over Jerusalem at noon, and and the very son of God was having his body ripped apart on the cross, and his power was becoming powerless, and his infinity was becoming finite, and his immortality was made mortal. The impossible was becoming impossible, and the son of God was dying. And as his friends, I’m sure were busy asking permission to take his body down from the cross, I’m sure the birds of the air were already feasting on the carcass of Jesus. Now, the curse for breaking the covenant, in Galatians chapter 3, Paul muses about Abraham and how Jesus became the curse for us, writing, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. He became a curse for us. He became He absorbed the covenant curse.” He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles, to all of us, through Christ Jesus. In other words, why did God go between the carcasses alone? Why didn’t he just make Abram do it? Why did he do it at all? Because he knew that Abram, nor any of us, could ever keep a covenant with him. He would have to keep it for both of us. I mean, how many times have we said to God, “Oh, I won’t do that again. I’m sorry. If you just get me out of this jam, I’ll never go back to it. I’ll serve you forever. Um I won’t be inconsistent.” And then a few days later, a few weeks later, we find ourselves going right back to it because we’re covenant breakers. No matter how sincere we are in our life with God, we still break covenant, and God’s completely holy. He’s incapable of breaking covenant with us, but he wants us to be with him forever, so he is willing to take on the curse of covenant breaking so that our sins can be forgiven, and we can have eternal life with him. How do we get that eternal life? The answer, it’s hidden in our passage, hidden in plain view. It’s a verse we skipped over. The answer lies in verse six. It’s sandwiched between God reiterating the promise to give Abraham descendants and to give him land. And verse six says, “Abraham believed the Lord and he credited to him as righteousness.” God’s saying the keeping of the covenant is not a cooperative effort between us and God or between Abraham and God. God walked between the carcasses alone and the only requirement of Abraham was to believe that God had taken care of everything to make good the promises he’d made. It doesn’t say that Abraham believed in God because any of us can have a passive, intellectual belief in God, you know, that he exists, that he created the universe. It says he believed God. And that indicates trust and dependence and an act of faith. That’s what God calls us to as well, not only to believe in God, but to believe God. We can believe in the Lord and still not believe the Lord. We may not believe that every word he’s spoken in the Bible is true and trustworthy or that every promise will surely come true. See, we can believe in God but not believe God. Time is relative. Surely our covenant-keeping God is going to accomplish all that he has purposed to do, including taking us to be with him forever. God does everything for our salvation. All we need to do is to believe him, to trust what he accomplished for us on the cross. And believing God, that doesn’t mean we can’t ever have any doubts. I mean, Abraham, he he wavered on occasion, like like when he almost lost his wife in the book of Genesis, but his faith was big enough to accommodate his doubts. Doubt’s kind of actually the the soil that our faith grows in. But we have to take our doubts to God and lean into him and ask him questions and then we have a new level of fellowship with God and understanding. It’s actually demonstrating great faith when we take our doubts to God and say God you you have to help me deal with this because I I I have questions. I have doubts. Soil of doubt is pretty essential for the growth of our faith. Faith is plenty big enough to accommodate sincere doubt. You always have freedom to wrestle with doubts. Wrestle all night if you have to. In our passage though, Abraham took his doubts to God. He questions God. He says, “How can this be?” He says, “I don’t have any kids, you know?” And he’s taking his doubts to God and that’s a very mature demonstration of faith. Faith that translates into righteousness. You and I may not feel very righteous. We not may not feel we’re in right standing with God, but God promises to take our faith and translate it into righteousness. Romans chapter 4 is a great chapter because Abraham’s faith is held up for us as the ultimate example of how a person comes to God. He’s not trying to work his way to get God to fulfill the promises, to come near to God. He simply believed and through that faith, God God looked at Abraham and saw a righteous man. This is counterintuitive to every other religion on earth. Every other religion involves and demands performance on the part of the worshiper, you know, if the deity is going to accept them and receive them. But Romans explains to us that to the man who does not work but trust God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. And Romans 4 closes with, “Yet he,” meaning Abraham, “he didn’t waver uh through unbelief regarding the promises of God.” Meaning that he certainly had doubts and questions. We read about that, but he took them to God. He didn’t just drift into unbelief. He didn’t waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but he was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. That’s why it was credited to him as righteousness. The words it was credited to him were written not for him alone, but also for us to whom God will credit righteousness, for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for for our sins, was raised to life for our justification. So, your your faith, however small your faith is, and however rattled by doubts you may feel, if it’s put in the right place, if it’s put on Jesus, then God sees you this morning as a righteous man or a righteous woman. What great hope that leaves us with. You know, Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, talks a lot about Abraham, talks a lot about Abraham’s faith. And in Hebrews chapter 6, our hope in Christ is described as an anchor for our soul. Tim Keller gives a bit of an illustration of what that means to him. He says that when his boys were young, he and his family would uh spend a week each summer with his wife’s family on the shores of Lake Erie. And he says uh his oldest son was a fisherman, and his his middle son, of course, wanted to fish, too. And Tim Keller says he would try to put it off as long as possible, but once a year they would convince him to rent a boat and take them out on the lake and fish. And he says it was a very frightening experience. He says, “Because you either had to fish just as the sun was coming up, which no one wants to do on vacation, seems awful to me, or as the sun was going down, and so that’s when I would do it. And what would happen is you’d get in the boat, it’d be a little motorboat, and you’d go out as far into Lake Erie as you possibly could. It’s kind of like a sea, Lake Erie, it’s one of the Great Lakes. You get out as far as you can possibly can, you can hardly see the land. And he says, “For a landlubber like me, that’s frightening. I would go out there, I’d look back, I’d say, ‘Well, I think that’s where we came from.’ You’d go out a couple miles and then of course you’d have to fish until it just started to get dark and then you had to run back in before it became totally dark or you’d be completely lost. You wouldn’t even know what country you were in. And he says, “And so I’d I’d go out there as far as we could. I would look and the thing that would frighten me is because of the currents and and the water would take us everywhere. And I was frightened that as we would fish, the currents would take me away from the land or away from the part of the land that I needed to get back to.” It was a pretty big lake. My only hope was the anchor. Because what’s the anchor do? The anchor doesn’t just hang in the water cuz the water’s moving around all the time. You have to get it beneath the water into the rocks which don’t move around. And if you get it down into the rocks, then the vicissitudes of the water don’t matter. Keller goes on, “Now the reason that the anchor is used in Hebrews as a thing that secures our souls is because well, what is the anchor of your soul? What is it that makes you feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve got real confidence to live life.’ If it’s your job, if it’s your looks, if it’s your talents, if it’s a friend, you know, you feel that’s the one thing that’s always going to be there. But no, no friend will always be there and no family will always be there and no talent will always be there and your looks certainly won’t always be there. Whatever it is that you put your anchor down into, if it’s circumstances, it’s just it’s like just dangling the anchor in the water. All that stuff is water. Everything but the promise of God is water. It’s ebbing, it’s flowing. If it looks like it’s flowing now, it’ll ebb later. That’s the way water is. You’ve got no hope unless you can put your anchor beneath the water into something that’s not water. If you anchor your life into your circumstances, you’re going to be thrashed all around. The only way you’ve got hope is if you anchor it into something that’s not a circumstance and something that doesn’t change, something that’s heavier than heaven and earth, something that will outlast heaven and earth. Not only will it outlast your friends and outlast your looks and your abilities and your jobs, it’ll even outlast the rocks at the bottom of Lake Erie. It’s the promise of God. So, Abram was able to get the anchor of his heart down that far into the rocks, so that even as he’s being severely tested by the passing of time, and it even gets worse as we go on in Genesis. And he wavers on occasion, but he takes his doubts and his wavering to God, still had his anchor in something very solid. God who’s never going to break covenant with us, and that’s the one we get to stand and worship that God together this morning. Let’s just take a few moments just to pray for a few of these things. And here’s some things you might want to use as hints of things you might want to pray about in the next couple moments. If you find that you’re waiting on God right now, you’re being tested by time, you you you feel that God has given you some promises, or you’re just you’re just long for something to happen in your life, and uh you can thank God that he is does see the end from the beginning of your life, and he’s not ignoring you. And then talk to God about any prayer requests that you’re longing to see fulfilled, and confess any doubts that you may be feeling. Just take your doubts to God, and then thank Jesus that he’s the anchor for your soul, and that you can sink deeply into him. Just take a few moments of personal prayer time, and then I’ll close us off.