Abraham is our ‘faith father’ when it comes to the journey of faith. This morning, we looked at how he models faith for us and shows us how to be those who are “willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God’s action for them” (Rom 4:12, The Message)

We are first introduced to Abraham (then called ‘Abram’, ‘exalted father’) in Genesis 11 and in Genesis 12:1-5 we hear God’s call to him and his response to that in setting out from Harran on a journey which would occupy him for the next one hundred years! He set out on a journey of faith, not really knowing what to expect, not really knowing where he was going, simply knowing that God was speaking to him and believing that that was enough. Hebrews 11:8 says ‘By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going’. We don’t always have all the answers as we set out to walk by faith, but the key question is not whether we can understand what God is saying to us but whether we will obey. Understanding often comes later on in the process: what precedes it is obedience.

Abram’s initial response to God in setting out on this journey of faith is the beginning of his adventures. Our initial response to God in setting out on the journey of the faith is also the beginning of our salvation adventures. The journey starts when we realise we cannot save ourselves and have to receive God’s gift of righteousness by faith (see Romans 1-3). That has to be a personal response to God and will always seem risky! But just as we start the journey by faith, so we must continue by faith: ‘we live by faith, not by sight.’ (2 Cor 5:7) Paul had strong words for the Galatian church which started off well enough by faith but then believed they had to continue by works! (Gal 3:3) Abraham journeyed to many different places throughout his life, and at each place, he received further revelation from God and that deepened his relationship with God. Time and time again in the story we read how that happens and Abram responds in worship and with sacrifices. Wherever he went, it seems he ‘built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the Lord.’ (Gen 12:8)

Abraham shows us how to start our journey of faith: by hearing God, obeying God, embracing what God says and does for us, no matter what it may look like to the natural eye.

He shows us how to continue to walk in faith, having that deepening relationship with God and continuing to respond to each revelation God gives him with worship and sacrifice and obedience – even when what God is saying doesn’t seem to make sense, as will happen many times over this hundred year journey!

And he shows us how to end the journey, still looking ahead to all that God has for him, eyes on the eternal city built by God (Hebrews 11:9-16):

“Oh, the glorious day when we arrive
And Heaven’s gates are opened wide
All our fear and pain will fade away
When we see You
Face to face,
Our Great and Awesome King .
You will reign in brilliant light
Forever glorified
In Your city
And we, Your daughters and Your sons ,
Will see the kingdom come
In Your city.” (‘In Your City’, Phil Wickham)
‘In Your City’, Phil Wickham

The Christian life is a journey that starts by faith and continues by faith. That may seem obvious, but it is surprising how often we begin well and then fail to continue in the same vein, perhaps thinking of faith more as a propellant than an ongoing fuel.

In the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14-30), the Master commends the two servants who use their treasures boldly and resourcefully, but the third “who prudently wrapped up his money and buried it typifies the Christian who deposits his faith in a hermetic container and seals the lid shut. He limps through life on his grade school catechism and resolutely refuses the challenge of growth and spiritual maturity. He wants to take no risks. But precisely because of this, he loses the gift entrusted to him.” (Brennan Manning, ‘A Glimpse of Jesus: Stranger to Self-Hatred)

When we hear God’s voice calling to us, we have a choice. We can follow the direction of that voice (which may well mean leaving all that seems familiar and secure and safe) or we can stay where we are, refusing to move in this new direction (because of fear or because we prefer the old life to that which is on offer.) Quite often, we don’t think of the crossroads in those terms. We view procrastination as a ‘waiting period’ and I’m certainly not saying that we don’t have to ponder and reflect, especially life-changing decisions. But quite often ‘endless delay creates more problems than it solves’ and ‘we postpone a decision (which is a decision itself), hoping that the Storyteller will grow weary of waiting and that the imperious inner voice will get laryngitis.’ (ibid.)

If we are to continue to grow in faith, we need to be aware that we have to not only hear God’s voice but heed it. James has been blunt about this: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22) and “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” (James 4:17) Procrastination is very different to listening and hearing God. Procrastination is really putting off the thing you know you ought to do because, deep-down, you don’t want to. There may be good reasons why you don’t want to, but no reason is good enough to say ‘no’ to God!

“Procrastination means that we stop growing for an undetermined length of time; we get stuck. And with the paralysis of analysis, the human spirit begins to shrivel. The conscious awareness of our resistance to grace and the refusal to become who we really are brings a sense of oppression.” (ibid.) We can fight God all we like, but we are the losers if we win that battle…

If you are in that place of indecision and procrastination, fearful to take that new step of faith, wary of what God is saying to you, it is easy to listen to voices that urge caution and hold back. “Only Jesus Christ delivers us from indecision,” says Brennan Manning, and I would agree with that. The inner voice of the Spirit, prompting us to leave our comfort zones and continue to walk by faith, stirs us and moves us forward. The alternative is to live fragmented lives, lacking in harmony, and to miss out on a new adventure in God. The world has a proverb: ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ I think the Master approves of that one!

The tension inherent between the doctrine of man’s free will and God’s sovereignty often puzzles people and can’t be fully explained. Both sides of this coin are needed; one verse which perhaps captures both sides is in Philippians, where Paul says “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose.” (Philippians 2:12-13) We have to ‘work out our salvation’ (not in the intellectual sense of trying to fathom it, but in the sense ‘to do that from which something results: to bring about, result in’, living out our salvation as testimony to what God is doing), but God is also the One who works in us to bring about His purposes.

It’s easy for us to run to extremes with every doctrine: either sitting back in passivity, waiting for God to work, or frantically manipulating circumstances and people to fit in with our view of what God wants to do. Neither extreme is to be commended!

I recently had to contemplate major changes in my life and desperately wanted to know God’s will for my future. Ideally, I wanted a very Biblical experience: a burning bush, a blinding Damascene light, a pillar of cloud or fire, that kind of thing. Whilst part of the desire for such a visible or audible manifestation of God was because I wanted to be sure I took the right path and didn’t make a mistake, there was also the sense that such visions make life easier (so I thought) when it comes to times of trial or doubt.

You could say that God spoke very decisively indeed to me, but it certainly didn’t take the form I had prayed for! Instead, this quotation in a book I was reading (which prompted me to read the whole book from which the quotation came!) pierced through the mixed motivation of my heart and showed me that in most major crossroads of life, there is a partnership between us and God:

“There are those who, by virtue of their own passivity, dependency, fear and laziness, seek to be shown every inch of the way and then have it demonstrated to them that each step will be safe and worth their while. This cannot be done. For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action. While the words of the prophet and the assistance of grace are available, the journey must still be travelled alone… No words can be said, no teaching can be taught, that will relieve spiritual travellers of picking their own way, working out with effort and anxiety their own paths, through the unique circumstances of their own lives, towards the identification of their individual selves with God.”(Scott Peck, ‘The Road Less Traveled’)

This quotation pierced the outer veneer of spirituality I was adopting (surely there’s nothing wrong with wanting a Biblical experience of God?!) to reveal the true motives of my heart: the sense in which I felt that I needed ‘proof’ of God’s will, that I preferred safety to risk, that a cast-iron vision of God removed any need for faith and that it was a much ‘safer bet’ than stepping out in a new direction with no guarantee of ‘success’ along the way. I also found it highly ironic, because one of the things that frustrates me immensely as a teacher is a pupil who wishes to be spoon-fed the answers all the time rather than finding the exhilaration of discovery for himself, yet here I was actually wishing God would spoon-feed me the next steps of my journey with Him or speak to me in red text (Garry’s Bible has the words of Jesus in red, which makes it so much easier to distinguish God’s voice from all the other voices we hear!)

To grow spiritually really does require courage and initiative and independence of thought and action. The journey of faith is not for the faint-hearted. But as we seek to ‘work out’ our salvation – often, indeed, with fear and trembling, with effort and anxiety – we can be encouraged by the fact that we never walk alone.

“Standing on this mountaintop
Looking just how far we’ve come
Knowing that for every step
You were with us.

Scars and struggles on the way
But with joy our hearts can say
Yes, our hearts can say:
Never once did we ever walk alone
Never once did You leave us on our own
You are faithful, God, You are faithful.” (‘Never Once’, Matt Redman)
‘Never Once’, Matt Redman

At last night’s service, we also took time to remember those affected by the M62 crash on Friday. A group of women from local villages South Elmsall, South Kirkby and Upton were involved in an accident on the motorway on the way to a hen party on Friday night. One of these (Bethany Jones) was killed and a number were badly injured, including the bride-to-be.

As several of our members live in that locality, we joined with the dozens of people who gathered in the centre of South Elmsall to remember Miss Jones and all those who were injured and lit a candle as we prayed for God to work in this desperately sad situation:

We pray God’s comfort, strength and healing on all involved in this accident and were pleased to support the fund-raising for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance which provides a life saving rapid response emergency service to 5 million people across Yorkshire and which were involved in helping those involved in this accident.

Children’s songs are a regular feature of Sunday evening services at our church. Apart from the fact that they usually communicate great truths in a very simple form, they are a way for children to ‘let off steam’ and help them to feel part of our services.

Last night we sang a couple of golden oldies: ‘This Little Light of Mine’ and ‘The Love of Jesus’. And this little girl had great fun joining in with the actions:

‘It’s so high, you can’t get over it!’

‘So wide, you can’t round it!’

Her enthusiasm was infectious and made me ponder again what Jesus said about the greatest in the kingdom of heaven:

‘At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’ (Matt 18:1-5)

For me, what a little child teaches is how to express emotion with no inhibitions, how to receive each day as a gift, how to immerse oneself in the now with no thought for the past or the future, how to receive with gratitude and how to embrace life with fervour and passion.

Stephen spoke from Matthew 6:19-21 last night, looking at ‘God stuff’ and ‘ordinary stuff’ and how our preoccupation with the latter often crowds out room for the former.

Gillette (famous for making razors) used to run an advertising campaign with the slogan ‘the best a man can get‘:

The razor for women (temptingly named Venus) was said to:

The fact remains that if we want God’s best for our lives, we have to heed Jesus’s warnings about the dangers of worry and becoming too attached to material possessions. We can easily become more attached to the ‘stuff’ of this world than to God. Possessions take over our lives and our thinking and we become anxious lest we lose them. If the material increases significantly, there is limited space for the things of God. Jesus calls us to value spiritual stuff more than material stuff We cannot serve both God and money (Matt 6:24) but need to bring all our worries to God. Worry takes over what should be God-space (see Matt 6:25-26) and the antidote to worry is given in Matt 6:33-34 where we are told ‘seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well’.

God is the best we can ever have. We have a ‘God-shaped hole’ within us that cannot be filled by material possessions and we need to understand that what we own does not define who we are as people. The definition of our lives needs to come from God, who is generous and gives freely to all. The ‘stuff’ He gives us should be more than simply a blessing to us; it should become the means by which we can bless others. Where are our treasures? What are our treasures? Are we worrying about material stuff or is it in God’s hands?

This week’s ‘Doctor Who’ episode was entitled ‘Journey to the centre of the Tardis’. The Tardis, Dr Who’s time machine, is deceptively large. It looks like a police telephone box from the outside, but inside is ‘infinite.’ In the same way, God is so much bigger than anything we can imagine and He does not want to be restricted to some tiny corner of our lives, squeezed out by material things which are only of limited, temporary value and by anxieties and worries which again are time-restricted. He is the infinite One who wants to be the centre of our lives. When we love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, we find the God-space in our lives growing and can use any material blessings He gives us to bless others and to live in freedom from the love of money. God Himself is revealed in us and we experience the best any person can get!