God Is Able To Raise People Even From The Dead

If I had to guess at what percentage of us are familiar with this passage or this story of Abraham offering up Isaac, I would bet that at least half of us, if not more, know the story. We've read about it, probably not in children's Bibles. They don't tend to put this story in children's Bibles because it's not the sort of thing you'd want to read to kids, I suppose. Though it is something that would be helpful for kids to understand. But we've heard this story. And we understand the basic flow of things. But what I want to do is first start out by recounting that flow, that progression of things. How did we get to this point? Because in Hebrews, what we have is a very short summary of a very long process, as it's recounted in Genesis. And so I want to lay out for you Abraham and Sarah, his wife's life, how they got to this point. How did Abraham come to a place?

where God told him to take his son and offer him up to kill him. So Abraham was a man back in the early, early days who existed before there was a people of God. There was God, but he did not have a nation or a group of people that were his. And so Abraham was not a Christian, if you will. There was no such thing. He wasn't even a Jew. There was no Israel. was a Chaldean. You might think, well, what's a Chaldean? And I'd say, well, just think of it saying, you know, well, he was a foreigner. He was just from another land, from a place. And God chose him out of that land, he and his wife and his family. And he said to him, come out of that land to a place that I'm going to show you, and it'll be a blessing to you.

There wasn't much to the promise. Abraham had a comfortable life, a wealthy life, and God comes to him in a vision and says, I want you to leave everything you know, everything that's familiar to you, and I want you to come on out. And I'm not telling you where you're going to go. I'm not telling you how long it's going to take there. I'm not even telling you specifically what it will be like when you get there. Come on, let's go. Now, I want you to think for a minute. If someone came to you with those terms, very vague, very unclear, would you get up and go? I think most of us would say, no, a little more information, please. You want me to move my whole family and just become sojourners. You want me to pack it all up and just live in tents. I'd like a little more information, please. But there's no more information given to Abraham. He gets up with his family, with Sarah, and they go. Now, one of the things that was true of Abraham and Sarah was they didn't have any children. Sarah was barren. They were unable to have children. They'd been married many years. They were well beyond the

normal time frame of bearing children. And then God says to him that he's going to give Abraham a son. So again, if you were in Abraham or Sarah's shoes and God came to you at, let's say, 90 years old and said, I'm going to give you a son, would you be inclined to believe that? Well, if you were to say no, I wouldn't be inclined to believe that. I'd say, well, then you'd be on the same path as Abraham and Sarah. Because both of them chuckled and laughed and thought, That doesn't work. We're past that season of life. We don't have kids. And yet God promises them a son. I want you to think for a minute. If you know this story, why did God promise them a son? There are other places in scripture where barrenness is apparent. You have barrenness with Hannah. You have barrenness with Rachel. And every time these women come, they ask God to give them a child.

Why do they want a child? There's always some other reason that they want a child. What are Hannah's terms when she says, if you'll give me a baby, I'll what? She says, I'll give that child back to you. I'll dedicate him to the Lord. And that child, once he was weaned, Samuel was taken to the temple and was left with Eli to become a priest. And so while she wanted a child, and every woman can understand that desire, While she wanted a child and the Lord hadn't seen fit to give her one, she understood that when the Lord gave her a child, it wasn't just for her to keep and have for herself. It was for the Lord's purpose. The same was true with Rachel. Jacob had been tricked into marrying Rachel's older sister, Leah. Then he married Rachel. And there became this nasty fight between Leah and Rachel. Leah being the ugly one, the unloved one.

but the fruitful one. Rachel being the one that Jacob actually loved, but with no child. And so these two women, these two sisters, were not fond of each other. And Rachel wants a child. Now, why does God give her a child? Well, it's to cover her nakedness. It's to redeem her. It's ultimately because the promised one, Jesus Christ, was going to come through her line, but it was to cover over her shame. It wasn't just so she could have a baby. God had a purpose in giving her a baby. And I want you to see it. The same is true of Abraham and Sarah. They're well beyond the time of life where it's normal to have kids. And God comes to them and says, I'm going to give you a child. And we have to ask, why was God inclined to give them a child at this late date in their life? Was it simply that they desired a child for themselves? And my conviction is that that's not why God gave them a child, though I believe it was true that they wanted a child. This is not why God gave them a child in this old age.

He gave them a child for the same types of reasons that he gave Hannah a child and he gave Rachel a child, which was that he had a purpose and he had an intention in giving them a child. So what was the purpose and the intention in giving Abraham a child? Well, he had told him, I'm going to multiply you and I'm going to turn you into a great nation. Well, that's very hard to do with no descendants. And so God's purpose in giving Abraham a child was to fulfill that promise. In Isaac, your descendants shall be called, is what our text says. There's this promise that Abraham wants to see fulfilled, and so he wants a child. Because he sees a child as being integral to having that promise fulfilled. Now, what did Abraham do after God said, we're going to give you a child? Well, he and Sarah said, well, how are we going to have a child? We're old. So Sarah decided and convinced Abraham that what he ought to do was take her maid, Hagar,

marry her and have a child with her. And then that would be a child. So you think for a minute about how gnarly that is. You have a married couple. They can't have kids, but they want to see the promise of God fulfilled. And so her response is to say, I want you to marry my maidservant and have a child with her. And that he will be the heir. He'll be the one. Well, if you know the story, you know that's exactly what happens. Abraham marries Hagar. Abraham has a child, Ishmael, with Hagar, the woman. And it goes from being a bad situation to a worse situation. They go from being childless to being Hagar mocking her master, Sarah, because she's able to have a child and Sarah's not. And so you can imagine that Sarah and Abraham are having a rough go of it, trying to see what God's purpose is in this and how it's all going to work out. But the Lord comes back to them and says, a year from now, you're going to have a son. And they laugh and they say, no, we don't think so.

And yet, a year from then, they have a son. They have Isaac. So now Abraham finds himself in a difficult position. Sarah and Hagar, you can understand the tension between these two women. Same sort of tension that would have existed between Rachel and Leah. Same sort of tension that exists nowadays in blended families. There's just an attendant difficulty when you have... One father and two mothers. How are those women supposed to relate? How are their children supposed to relate? It just creates a lot of conflict and tension. Well, that's what they're dealing with here. And there's Abraham. They're both his children. And what's he supposed to do? Well, what ends up happening is Sarah says, I want you to kick her and her son out. Get rid of them. And Abraham goes, that's not what I want to do. That wouldn't be right. That doesn't seem good to me. He's my son.

But the Lord comes to Abraham and says, listen to your wife and do what she says. So he sends Ishmael and Hagar on their way. And Ishmael does become, in one sense, a fulfillment of the promise. God does grow him into a nation, a group of people. But Abraham's son Isaac is the one that's supposed to be the fulfillment of this promise. So Isaac is born. Hagar and Ishmael are sent away. Isaac grows up. And then in Genesis 22, verses 1 and 2, it says, And now it came about after these things that God tested Abraham. And he said to him, Abraham. And he said, Here I am. He said, Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

Now, life hasn't been easier or pleasant for Abraham and Sarah up to this point as we would measure it. They had a comfortable life in Haran, and they got called away from it, and they went. They had a promise to have a child, but they didn't have one, and in the process, Hagar and Ishmael happened, and then Abraham lost his son Ishmael. They're still wandering around in the wilderness, and now Abraham's supposed to take his only son, Isaac, and he's supposed to kill him. Now, for my part, this is one of the most difficult stories in all of Scripture for me to wrap my brain around. And I don't say that to you to commend that sort of thought to you, but only to say, this seems monstrous to us. It ought to seem monstrous to us as a parent that God would ever come and say to anyone, your son has to die. Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and kill him.

God names every detail of the situation, even and especially Abraham's love for his son. And he says, you have to offer him up as a sacrifice. And I want you to think for a minute. Is there any way, any way in your mind that you could see your way to even entertaining doing what God said, let alone actually doing it? To our minds, it just seems impossible. How in the world could you do such a thing? Now, I want to warn you. I want to take it aside for a second and say, you face that kind of visceral response to things that God does in your life pretty regularly. And I want to caution you against giving in to that visceral response where you just say, well, I'm not going to do that. You ever have that raised up in your heart? Something goes on and you just dig, I mean, like that. You dig in your heels and you go, that's not what's going to happen.

I want to warn you about that because you ought to ask before you decide what you're going to do, where did that requirement come from? If it came from God, you would not be doing well to say, I'm not going to do that. And so we have to be very careful not to give into our initial reaction, this visceral response that says, I won't do things that don't make sense to me right away. Why? Because in that decision, we're deciding I will not live by faith or I will live by faith defined on my terms, not on God's terms. And what does our passage here as well as in Genesis tell us about Abraham? Well, what it tells us is that this is a test. It's a test for him. So what's being tested in Abraham? Is it not his faith? Now, which one of us wants our faith tested? We don't. We want faith, but we don't want it tested. And I'd say, I understand, but if I handed you a piece of gold, what's the first thing you would do with it? You'd go get it tested to see if it's real or not.

It's the first thing you would do. Because if it wasn't real, it would be worthless. But if it was real, it would be incredibly valuable. And so the test is the first thing you would do. And so while we might not like the idea of faith being tested by God, we can't escape it. In our lives, our faith will be tested. This is what's going on with Abraham. His faith is being tested. Who do you love? Who do you trust? What will you do? That's the test. So what does Abraham do? Well, it says that he saddled his donkey the next morning and took his son and went. And I wonder if he told his wife. There's no account of whether he told Sarah or not, and I don't know for certain whether he did, but I could imagine being a husband not telling your wife what you were doing with this sort of test. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

But it would be a miserable thing to even have presented to you and a far more difficult thing to actually do. Nevertheless, in the morning he saddled his donkey and away he went. I want to ask you a question. I told you Abraham the very next morning got up and he left. And we have every reason to believe in this account that Abraham was going to kill his son. I want to ask you, what would have happened if Abraham had not killed his son and had said, no, I'm not going to do this? Well, one thing that would be true is his son would live, right? You might say, well, God would just kill his son and take him away, and maybe, perhaps, but God never said that's what he would do. He didn't say, either you kill your son or I will. He said, take your son and go to this land and I'll show you where to sacrifice him. And I think it stands to reason that his son would have lived a long life. Sarah wouldn't have been upset. Both of these, to our minds, would have been good things.

The mother wouldn't have lost her son because the son would have continued to live. That's a good thing, right? Would there be any negative consequence of Abraham not doing this? It's kind of a hard question. It's especially hard if we only think of it in terms of his son and him having a son for his own pleasure. There is no benefit to his son dying. But you remember earlier I said that whenever God gives a child, he gives them with a purpose. So what was the purpose of Isaac? Why did God give Isaac to Abraham later in life? It's because he had made a promise to Abraham and said, I'm going to bless you. I'm going to multiply you. And in you, all the nations of the world will be blessed. And that is what Abraham wanted. Now, that part I just told you about the nations being blessed and and his son becoming a great nation. God did say that, but it's worth noting, it's very important to note that God didn't tell Abraham that until after he had taken Isaac to the mountain. What he had said before that we have recorded in scripture is in Genesis chapter 12, it says God tested Abraham and he said, where are you? Abraham said, here I am. And he says, take your son, your only son, Isaac, go to the land of Moriah and offer him up. Previous to that, when he came out of Haran, he said,

Come out and I'll show you a land. I'll make you a great nation. All of the details of how Isaac fit into that plan were given to Abraham after the offering, after the test. And isn't that the normal way in our lives that after we have a test, we find the reward or the blessing of passing the test, but not before. So Abraham takes his son because he wants to see the promise fulfilled. And that's something that we have to get very clear into our minds, that what he wanted is what we ought to want. He lived by faith because he wanted what God had said was going to be. He wanted it to come to pass. Now, to our minds, we'd say, if Isaac dies, the promise is gone. It would be better for me to keep my son alive so that the promise has a chance of being fulfilled. But that's not how Abraham reasoned.

In our text in verse 19, it says that he, speaking of Abraham, considered that God was able to raise people even from the dead. Now, isn't that an interesting piece of logic and reasoning? He was faced with an unimaginable difficulty. And the way he saw fit, saw, you know, reasoned his way through it was that God's commitment to fulfilling his word is such that if he tells me to kill this child, he will raise him from the dead so that his promise can be fulfilled. That's the way he thinks about it. Now that is not natural to any of us because that is faith. And because of this thing that Abraham does, Abraham is called the father of faith. He's the one that we're supposed to look up to.

He's the one we're supposed to emulate. He's the one we're supposed to be like. Jesus, when he's talking to the Pharisees in John chapter 8, he says this, if you are Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham. Because they said, we have Abraham as our father. And he says, well, if that's the case, then you need to be like Abraham. You need to do the things Abraham did. And what we're studying this morning is sort of the apex of what Abraham did. This act is what got him the title the father of the faith. This act is what was credited to him as righteousness. This is his faith. And so there's a tension that arises that you and I have to live in, and it's that faith does not always make sense to you. And if you value reason, logic, safety, comfortability, your own desires above what God has said, don't call it faith.

Because it's not. So often when we think about how to live our lives and what decisions we ought to make, we start thinking, we try to reverse engineer things. We start looking at the consequences and we go, in our minds it happens this fast, we go, if I do this, if I say that, whatever the circumstance is, if I do that, this will be the result. I don't want that result, so I will not do this thing. Everything revolves around what the outcome will be. And that's not how faith reasons. That's not how Christians ought to think. Christians ought to think, what has God said first? And you might say, but he says some things that are very difficult. Now granted, this is a difficult thing that has been said. But as Christians, we must start with what God has said. And you say, well, that's not popular. And I say, that's not where we start. Where we must start in living a life of faith is by saying first, what has God said?

what has he done? And we'll work out, we have to trust God with the conclusions, with the outcomes, with the details, and the path to get there. But we start with what God has said. What did he say to do? If Abraham had reasoned with this command from God the way we reason, the promise would have been nullified. Is anyone uncomfortable with me saying that the promise God made, the Abrahamic covenant, would have been nullified if he didn't do this? Does that make anyone uncomfortable? It shouldn't. It shouldn't. When I say that, I'm not saying God is incapable of doing something else. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, if you believe, oh no, it's all going to fall apart if Abraham does this, is that you think that what God says doesn't matter. That he's only in charge of the outcome and not the means, the process of getting there.

Well, he could have called back Ishmael. They could have had another son. There's all these other ways it could. God could still accomplish it. So that means we don't have to kill our son right now. And I say no. And the reason I say no is because God told him, he's the one that all your descendants are going to be named after, and he's the one that has to be sacrificed. Is it possible that God could do something else? Sure. He's created this whole world and everything in it in a couple of days. He's quite capable of it. That's not the question at hand. The question at hand is, what did he say to do? And what he said to Abraham was, take your son, this son, the one I promised you, the one I told you would be a blessing to all the nations, take that son and offer him up. That was the test. And instead of reasoning and arguing and...

all of this command away, Abraham rather said, God has said he's going to bless this child. And if that's the case, he can raise him from the dead. I'm going to do what he said. Abraham understood that his son wasn't the fulfillment of the promise, but the means to the fulfillment of the promise. And so this is what faith is, and this is how faith behaves. If you think that your life's always going to make sense and that everything you say and everything you do is never going to be come across as strange to an unbelieving world, you're wrong. And you don't know what faith is then. Because faith will come across as foolishness, insanity, stupidity, the height of it to the faithless people. So when we say that we're going to live by faith in our lives, we need to live by faith. As Christians, we're going to do these things. I want you to see that a couple of things. One, God tests your faith. And we have all kinds of cliches of getting around the test. Have you guys heard the saying, when God closes a door, he opens a window? You've not heard that? It's calm. People say these things. Right, yeah, yeah. What did you say, Michael? He won't give you more than you can handle. What's the rest of it, though? He promises not to give you more than you can bear, except that with the trial, along with it, will come a way of escape, right?

And with regard to what you said, we need to recognize that Paul in Corinthians says that he despaired even of life, that the burdens and the responsibilities of life were such that he despaired even of living. It was so hard and unbearable. And so we have a lot of cliche ways of taking this faith that we see in Abraham and bringing it down to where it makes sense to us. Oh, well, my faith will never be tested in such a way that I won't like the outcome or agree with the outcome or see how it makes sense. None of that. My faith will never be tested in such a way that the door will close to the furnace or the lion's den and there you'll be inside of it. God wouldn't do that. He would make some normal, natural way, some way that makes sense to unbelievers that everything's going to be fine. And I say, no, that's not the case. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were put into the furnace,

The fact that they went into there and they said, even if our God doesn't deliver us, we're not going to bow down and serve you. That was their faith. They went into that furnace. And what did they see in the furnace? Three men went in. What does scripture tell us about how many were seen in there? Four. That's right. That's faith. The men who were stoking the fire were dying because of how hot the fire was. And those three men walked in and walked out. You might think, well, that's so miraculous and this is so extraordinary, these sorts of things, that I've never had anything that extraordinary happen in my life. And I say, okay, has your faith ever been tested, though? Have you ever had a decision and immediately you're going, I don't want that, I don't want that, anything but that, no, not that thing. But in your mind, you knew that was the thing you really needed to look at and consider, that if you didn't look at and consider that option, you knew you weren't dealing with the situation. That's a test of faith. And so I don't want you thinking your faith will...

be tested in such steep, significant terms as Abraham's. Perhaps, but more likely, your faith is going to be tested in small things. Because he who's found faithful in small things will be entrusted with big things, right? So you ought to look in your life for where your faith is being tested in small things. And you should see, what do I do? Do I live by faith here? What sorts of things do you need to have faith about in your life? Well, we could go on and list A ton of them. Because the answer really is everything. But I want to mention just a few. One is your future. You guys know what a hoarder is? I think Christians think of faith as being hoarders. That they just get to collect. Living by faith means you just collect all of the things that you want and you just get to keep them forever. You just collect and collect and collect all these good things and they never go away and they never leave and nothing ever happens to them.

But Jesus tells us not to store our treasure up here on earth where moth and rust can destroy and thieves break in and steal. And what he's telling us is that our futures and the things that we work hard for and the things that we accumulate, they can be gone. I had a friend who learned this lesson a very hard way. His house burned down. It was years and years, I don't know, decades ago. He and his wife had worked hard and they had stability and they had... collected all of this stuff by being faithful and working hard. And then their house burned down. And it burned down in such a way that all their stuff was destroyed. All of it. They weren't hurt. They weren't home. But all of their stuff was destroyed. And what did he say? That's what we needed. We loved that stuff. And it was good for us to have the Lord take it away.

And so I don't want you to think of your future as though it's all going to make sense and you're going to just collect all of these good things and they're all just going to exist in your life in perpetuity. You're just going to have them until you die. That's not the case. Abraham was called to leave all of that, to pack up on donkeys and camels and go live in tents. And so you have to live by faith with regard to your future. And what that means is if you always reason in your mind, if I do this thing by faith now, it's going to ruin my future.

then you're not living by faith. That's not faith to say, I have a future that I'm going to have. And if I do this thing right now that I think I should do, but will compromise my future, therefore I'm not going to do it. I want you to know that's not you living by faith. You have to live by faith today. And you have to trust God with tomorrow. J.C. Ryle once said, he was an old pastor, said that today belongs to the Lord, but tomorrow belongs to the devil. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll be faithful tomorrow. I'll trust God tomorrow. But you know what? Tomorrow never comes. There will always be tomorrow. Until there's not a tomorrow and it's too late. Because you were going to do it tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow until you die. And what you've accumulated for yourself is a lifetime of todays where you weren't faithful. And so today belongs to the Lord.

Tomorrow belongs to the devil. You be faithful today and you trust God with tomorrow. If you think, well, if I do this, it's going to ruin my whole future. It's going to ruin my whole life. I say, do you not think that Abraham had that thought? Do you think that he is so pure and so righteous and so holy and so all of the rest that he wouldn't have that thought? I can tell you he had those kinds of thoughts. Do you know what he did right before he was told to offer up Isaac? They were traveling through I believe the Philistines. Maybe it was Egypt. I'm not sure. He did it twice. They're traveling through and he's got his wife with him. And what do we know about Sarah from scripture? Well, we know she was beautiful. And what Abraham was afraid of was that if he went through and said, she's my wife, they would kill him to take his wife. That's what he was afraid of. And so what did he do? Not once, but twice. He told his wife, tell them you're my sister and not my wife. Why?

Because if you're my sister, they can have you. And you understand what I mean by have you. One of them almost married her. But he won't be killed. So I don't want you thinking of faith as being something that's not difficult, something you don't falter with. Abraham was afraid about his life. He was afraid about his future. And twice he put his wife up to lying and saying that she was his sister. Worried about his future. One of the king, I believe it was Abimelech, came to him, found out that Abraham and Sarah were married. And he says, what is this thing that you've done? You were trying to bring curses upon my land and upon me because you didn't tell me what I was doing. You were going to let me marry your wife. And that would have been the worst thing in the world for my nation and for my land because that would be a great sin. And what did Abimelech do? You go with your wife and here's a blessing.

Abraham was afraid he was going to be killed, and Abimelech sends him away with wealth as a blessing. Now, we go, oh, well, wow, that's amazing. Look at that story. And I say, yeah, Abraham didn't see that. Just couldn't see it. And yet that was God's way. And so I believe that Abraham learned from that by the time he was offering up Isaac to say, well, if God could take me lying about who my wife was and turn it into a blessing and wealth, I have it in my mind that God could raise my son from the dead. And give him back to me so that his word would be accomplished. So you be faithful with today. And you trust God for tomorrow. That applies to your life station. Whether you're single, whether you're married, whether you're young, whether you're old, whether you have kids, whether you have no kids, whether you have sick kids, whether you have grown kids and grandkids. You ask the Lord, what do you require of me today? And you do it. Same is true of your career. Our church has been described as a young church. And that's true.

It's young, it's only 10 years old. And if I had to guess at the median age in our church, I bet it's not over 30. If we took the kids out, it might get up to 35. We're young. I'm young, I'm 37. I get told by guys just a little older than me that I'm young. So we're a young church. It means we've got careers ahead of us and we've got jobs and we've got retirements. We've got all of this life ahead of us. And we need to be faithful now and trust God with what will come in the future. What else do you need to live by faith with? You need to live by faith with your money. I'm just trying to touch on the things that are closest to our hearts. And some of you might go, well, I don't want you to talk to me about my money and what it means to live by faith. And I say, oh, so I can talk to you about Abraham having to give up his son, but we can't talk about money and what it means to live by faith? That's off limits? No, it's not off limits. Not if you understand what God requires of you in this area. Do you want to know what it means to live by faith with your money? You say, well, it might hurt. I say,

What's the other option? You think you can build barns that can keep away God's will? You need to trust God with your money. I think oftentimes, and generally speaking, what faithless living looks like is these two hands and this mind are all that I have in this world to provide for me and to care for me and to look after me. And so what I do with them has to make sense. It has to be safe. It has to be wise. I've plotted out where I want to be and how I'm going to get there, and I have to get me there. Well, in that way of thinking, there's no place for saying, what would God have me do? Would he have me do something that would alter my plan? Would he have me do something that would entirely prevent me from getting what I want? Not just delaying it, not just minimizing it, removing it. You are not going to get that, ever.

To live by faith is to say, what would you have me do today? And then do it. Another way of looking at this or asking it is to say, in what ways could you describe to somebody, just honestly, that you depend on God? Where if he fails you, and he doesn't keep up his end of his word, it will cost you. In what ways do you depend on God? Where you say, if he doesn't provide, I will not have. If there's no area in your life, that you can think of, you're in a very bad place. If there are only very small places in your life where you depend on God just a little bit, you're not where you should be. We ought to be able to say in our lives, I trust God to provide. When Abraham went up on the mountain with his son and he offered up his son and had the knife drawn and was ready to kill him, the Lord called out from heaven and said, stop, and showed him a ram. And what did he name that mountain and that place? I don't remember the Hebrew word for it.

But translated, it's the Lord will provide. That's what he named that place. This place is called the Lord will provide. And that's what it means to live by faith. To entrust yourself to God and to entrust yourself in such a way that you won't have what you want if he doesn't provide it. And if you think, well, then I'm never going to get anything I want, then what we have to do is come back and say, so do you want the things that God wants for you? Or do you want something else? Because if you want something for yourself that God doesn't want for you, if you want something bad, for yourself, you ought not to expect God to give that to you. If you want something good, you ought to expect God to give it to you. You ought to trust him to give it to you in his time and in his way. And you ought to be cheerful all the while, faithful all the while, until he gives it to you. Small acts of faithfulness are what lead to big acts of faithfulness. Another way of saying it is small acts of faithfulness lead to big acts of blessing.

Because when we trust God, he takes care of us. He provides for us. He loves us. He doesn't leave us or forsake us. He had promised Abraham, in your son, all the nations of the world will be blessed. You're going to have descendants like the stars in the sky or like the sand on the seashore. That's what he's going to become. And Abraham said, yep, that's what I want. And in him, all the nations of the world will be blessed. That's what I want. And if what you're calling me to do right now is to sacrifice my son to give up, then that's what I'm going to do. So Abraham is given to us as an example, the primary example of living by faith. And I believe that it's such a dramatic example is given to us because it's meant to guard us against thinking that we've been asked to do too much when we face trials in our life, things we have to endure. Instead of seeing living by faith as a loss,

We ought to see it as an opportunity to glorify God. That's really how we ought to see it. And because it's an opportunity to glorify God, we ought to be eager to take advantage of that opportunity, to make the sacrifices that living by faith require of us, so that God would be glorified, and as a result, we would be blessed. All right, let's pray.