Genesis 12:1-8

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.
 

          We all have a "Haran" in our lives.  A “Haran” might be a place where we feel comfortable or a daily routine that we follow, or a circle of people who we know and who know us. Our “Haran” is the place where we feel safe because we know the landscape. But what happens when our “safe space” is interrupted?  What do we do when we are required, for one reason or another, to do something that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable?
          Imagine receiving a phone call today with a simple instruction: "Pack your bags. Leave your house. Start driving. I’ll tell you where you’re going when you get there." Most of us would hang up. We want to know where we are going and why we are going there. It would be quite natural for us to ask a lot of questions before we would agree to do something like that.
          Today we look at a man who found himself in that exact situation.  One day God called to Abram and told him to pack his bags, leave his home, and start walking.  He didn’t tell him where he was going.  But he did give him a promise – his name would be great, his descendants would be many, and one day all nations on earth would be blessed through him.  All Abram had was a promise, but it was a promise given to him by God.
          Today we will see why we can all respond to the promises of God the way that Abram did. We can…
 

 “Rely on God’s Promises”
 
I.  Faith believes
II.  Faith acts
III.  Faith shares

 
          Abram had made a pretty comfortable life for himself in the land of Haran.  No doubt he intended to live out the rest of his life surrounded by his family and the creature comforts of his home and his possessions.  Everything changed quickly and drastically.  Moses wrote, “
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
          God had a plan for Abram.  He went on to tell him why he wanted him to leave Haran and journey to a new land.  He said, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”  Moses kept the narrative for this story pretty short. He wrote, “So Abram went.” His explanation as to why Abram did what he was told contains a key element to this story.  He wrote, “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.”
          Abram demonstrated the power of faith.  I think the narrative might have been a little different if this request had come from anyone else.  If you get a call from a friend who asks you to come help him, you likely will want to know what he needs you to help him with.  You are probably going to be willing to do it, but you want to know what it is first.  If that same request came from a stranger, there would no doubt be more questions before you would agree to help them.
          Abram’s call came from “the LORD.”  The faith that God had given him made it possible for him to respond without a detailed explanation.  The power of faith that God gives his people leads them to trust that he is doing what is best for them.  Abram acted so quickly because he knew that God would do what he had promised he would do.  Faith made the promise certain.  With that faith in God, Abram responded.
 

II. Faith acts

 
          In the Ancient Near East, your identity, safety, and economic survival were tied to your family and land. By leaving, Abram was effectively becoming a "nobody" in the eyes of the world to become "somebody" in the eyes of God. He understood this wasn’t just a brief business trip after which he would return home and resume his regular routine, but rather a permanent move.  We are told, “He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.”
          One thing prompted his actions, and that was faith.  Abram did what he was told because it was God who had told him to do it.  Others did similar things.  Noah spent 120 years building an ark on dry ground because God had promised that he would use that ark to save him and his family from a world-wide flood.  There had never been one before, but when God commanded Noah to build the ark, he did it.
          Our command from God puts our eternal well-being in the hands of a promise that many consider ridiculous.  First of all, it asks us to believe in an eternal life without any real proof that there is one, and then to believe that this life will be lived in one of two place, heaven or hell.  We are then asked to believe that we can live in heaven because a carpenter’s son died on cross.  We are currently in the season of Lent which tells this story of Jesus’ death and will be followed by the season of Easter that shows us his resurrection.  We are then asked to believe a promise that Jesus gives us, “Because I live, you also will live.” (Jn. 14:19)
          And we do believe it because the promise comes from Jesus.  The faith that God has given to us in his Son is a powerful factor in what we do in our lives.  It gives us a different perspective on life than those without faith in Jesus.  We live with a certainty while many live in doubt.  We live with hope when others feel only despair.  We put God first in our lives and ourselves second when others can’t see the wisdom in doing so.
          At an age when most people would be looking for stability, Abram took his wife and his nephew and everything they owned and set off on a journey…somewhere, the destination still unknown.  When they reached Shechem in Israel, God told them that this was the land where he was leading them.  Moses wrote,  “The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.”  They travelled on a bit further and there we are told that the 3 “called on the name of the Lord,” a Biblical phrase that meant they worshipped God.
 

III.  Faith shares

 
          Abram may have still had some questions about his new life in Canaan.  When you are asked to basically start your life over, there is a lot to think about.  But Abram could do that with the certainty of the promise that God had given him.  Somehow, some way his family would become a great nation and from that nation would come one through whom “All nations on earth [would] be blessed.”  He knew that God was talking about the Savior.
          The story of Abram is an interesting story.  The promise that his family would be a “great nation” prompted a name change from Abram, “exalted father” to Abraham, “father of many.”  As his family slowly began to grow from a son that many believed he and his wife were too old to have, God began to build that “great nation.”  A 400-year chapter of this story spent in Egypt saw the family of Abram grow to over 2,000,000 people.  After 1,500 more years and repeated promises of a Messiah, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, just as God had planned and promised.  Through that Messiah, a descendant of Abraham, people from “all nations” find salvation through faith by the grace of God.
          This is how God works to fulfill the promise to Abram that “all peoples on earth would be blessed” through him,  He uses the power of his grace to call people to faith in what cannot be proved and often seems unreasonable.  He asks us to step out of our personal “Harran,” the comfort of living by what we can see and prove and know for sure. and to trust his promises of things that we cannot prove or see, but can know for sure through the certainty of faith.
          That certainty, a precious gift from God, is what we share with our children and our friends, with our neighbors and others.  Our future life in heaven which carries us through difficult times in our lives and gives us hope is what we want others to know and share.  We work together as members of Emmanuel and our Wisconsin synod to keep expanding the family of Abraham, the believers gathered by God through the power of his Word.
     We have been called by God to follow him with the promise that he will lead us to our eternal home.  We believe because it is God who gives us that promise.  With the faith of Abram, let’s continue our journey, knowing that God will lead us home.  Amen.