Today's scripture reading is from the Book of Genesis chapter 15 verses 1 through 21. That's Genesis chapter 15 verses 1 through 21. After these seats, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram, I am your shield. Your rewards shall be very great. But Abram said, O Lord, God, what will you give me for I continue childless in the air of my house is Alizarra Damascus. And Abram said, behold, you have given me no offspring. And remember, my household will be my heir. The Holy 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 numbered stars if you were able to number them. He said to him, so shall your offspring be. Do you believe the Lord, and he can count it to him as righteousness? And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from earth the caldians to give you this land to possess. But he said, O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove and a young pigeon. And he brought him all of these, cut them in half, and lady chaff over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcassus, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, no for certain that your offspring will be sojourners and a land that is not theirs, and will be servants there. And they will be afflicted for 400 years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve. And afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers and peace. You shall be buried in a good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation for the iniquity of the amirites is not yet complete. When the sun had gone down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot 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 Kennesites, the Cadmenites, the Hittites, the Parasites, the Raphane, the Amirites, the Kennenites, the Gurgashites, and the Jebysites, the Word of the Lord. I think Conor deserves a round of applause for that. Thank you, Rachel Morgan and Conor. You probably think, what did Conor do wrong to be tortured with that list of impossible names? And you just nailed it, buddy. It's unbelievable. Incredible. Well, it's great to be able to look into God's word with you for a few minutes. Let's ask for his help as we do so. Our Lord, we do come before you. The sovereign of the universe, and ask that the words of my mouth, the meditations of all of our hearts, might be acceptable on your side. And we know that's only possible through your acceptability for us, Lord Jesus, for you are our rock and mighty Redeemer. And in your name we pray and look to you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we are going through a sermon series right now in the life of the great Patriarch Abraham. And one of the things that I marvel about in the Bible is how, you know, in other cultures, when the great Patriarchs, the Paragons of Faith are lifted up to us, they are powerful and basically perfect creatures. And what the Bible does is it goes out of its way to show that these great figures have feet of clay just like we do, that they're weak and that they struggle. Now, Abraham has just come out of a great triumph, we've had a couple of episodes the last couple of weeks where there's just been tremendous triumph. And Abraham is strong. He's just had a military defeat. His poor nephew Lot had to be delivered from these four marauding kings. And now you'd think Abraham is just going to be self-assured, confident, strong, but evidently he's in a panic. And so the opening words of this passage give us a clue as to the direction of the passage. Genesis 15, the Lord came to Abraham in a vision, fear not, Abraham, I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great. Why did he need to worry about fearing? Well, it's probably because he had just won this great military battle. He'd knocked down these foreign rulers and you would expect they're going to now come back after him. And so he was a bit in a panic. And what this did was this struck up a conversation with God where Abraham began to unload. We don't know how long he had buried questions, fears, doubts. But now they're all going to get out on the table. God, you've promised these things in the past that from my own loins, from my relationship with my wife is going to come not only a neat little family, but all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed. And Abraham's sort of looking at his watch and going the clock is ticking. And I don't know how in the world this is going to be accomplished. And this LEAs are here that he's mentioned early on in the passage, presumably as a servant in his household. And an ancient law said that if you didn't have any relatives to inherit whatever it is you had, I mean the guy's basically homeless, but nevertheless very blessed, very wealthy, but not a place to plant himself in the land and not a promised seed yet coming forth from his marriage, this LEAs are going to carry over. God, how can that be? God assures him that this isn't going to be the case and on go the questions and doubts and fears. Doubting is inevitable. It's not that some of us doubt and some of us don't. Some of us have very pronounced intellectual doubts. Some of you this morning are probably questioning the very existence of God, the truthfulness of Christianity. Maybe it seems too narrow to you. Others of you have all sorts of different questions. And Christianity is a faith that embraces doubters. Now there's a brand of Christianity, no doubt, out there. Some of us have been there, done that, where there's a culture that you feel like you can't share your honest questions and fears. You feel like if you're doubting that you have been pronounced as condemned, you may have scored it out, that's not allowed here in this place. And we've also been probably many of us in environments where it's really intellectually sophisticated to doubt. And you're supposed to doubt in everything, that you have no knowledge, no ability to learn and grow, unless you're doubting all the time. Well, the biblical direction is in either of those places. The Bible says the Bible never encourages us to doubt. It says like in the book of James that people who are characterized throughout their life by doubt are going to be like someone tossed about in the mighty waves of the ocean. And so our life isn't to be driven by doubt, but the Bible also welcomes doubters, right where they are. They don't encourage, the Bible doesn't encourage doubt through and through, but it takes us where we are. It meets us exactly in our own experience and engages us at that place. In some of you are saying, you know, Leo, this is great, I'm so glad that someone's here to listen to this, but I'm not really a doubter. I don't struggle, I take the Christian faith, I believe it, it's bedrock. That's me, I'm not sort of in the doubting Thomas mode. But see, doubt has a thousand and one faces, doesn't it? It's not just the intellectual doubt that many, many people have, many of us have. It's also dealing with any area of our life where there might be what the Bible calls sin. Because what sin? Sin is just moving away from God's norm. It's choosing to do something opposite from what God's word has told us. And if you go, I mean, this goes way back, this isn't anything new. This goes back to the original sin, the connection with doubt. Do you remember Adam and Eve and the garden? Everything was blissful, everything was harmonious, and then the messenger of the evil one, the serpent comes along and does what? He casts doubt on God's word. Did God really say, isn't God confining you, isn't he holding you back? And so what Adam and Eve learned early on is that doubt is at the heart of temptation. It's doubting that your sufficiency, everything you need is found in this one great being who created you. He's also going to care for you and provide for you at every need. And here's the Mother's Day application. What Eve learned in a painful way is that when we give way to doubt, it doesn't just produce consequences in our own existence, in our own life. There is a ripple effect, isn't there? I mean, you see that with Adam and Eve, there's a considerable ripple effect as in all of humanity. And so the question is, you know, not are you doubting because doubting is inevitable. You may not be the intellectual, you know, racking your brain, kind of sold doubts about God's existence, but it may be other areas of your life and you'll see the repercussions of that in other people, the effect of it in other people. You say, what kind of doubts are those? Well, it might just be something like, you know, what do you need to be happy and comfortable and fulfilled in life? I mean, that was really the essence behind the lie in the Garden of Eden. They didn't have everything. The serpent was saying that they needed. Some knowledge was being kept from them. Some experience was not theirs and they could find that if they deviated from God's path. What about you? You might call it self-doubt. You have an image issue, you fear people, you feel good if people around you like you and accept you, but if you don't feel like you're liked and accepted and loved, then you give in. You implode in your soul. You see, those self-doubts are really reflecting God doubts that you don't trust that everything you need is found in this one true God, that he has made you in his image, that he's adopted you through faith in Christ as his child and your identity isn't found in one other people think of you, it's found in what God thinks of you. That's just one example, but you could look at any area of your life. Plumb the depths of your soul by looking at the negative emotions, your fears, your disappointments, your sadness as pull up those rocks underneath, the worms that you see there are those worms of doubt that have caused you to pull away from God's word in some level. The question that we want to consider is we look at this very important passage. One of the most important passages in the Bible from the New Testament perspective, we want to see how do you deal with doubt? Because here is this paragon of faith, three great world religions look to him as the ultimate in faith. In fact, his name means father, so he is the father of faith, and yet here he is racked by doubts and questions and fears and concerns. How do you deal with doubt? And we are going to see that you deal with it by bringing before God your doubts, by being honest with him and also by beholding his word. Now this is such a profound passage, we are not going to get through with it today, we will bridge over next week into this passage as well as we look into the final aspect of how you deal with doubt. So first of all, how do you deal with doubt? You bring it before the Lord. Now think about it, when you are going through maybe discouragement, depression, maybe intellectual doubts. The last thing that you naturally do, it is not intuitive, is to go to God. He seems, you know, a thousand in one mile away, and so it is not the natural need or thing to do, but it is what this story and what the Bible encourages us to do. Abraham has these questions, and the cork is popped, and his questions spill out. And you say, but you know, if I were to bring my questions to God, I just can't do that because I feel like he is disappointed in me. Certainly the way that I have lived, these questions, these fears, the various sin patterns in my life reflect doubt in God being all that I need. Certainly God has disappointed me, I just can't come before him. But I want you to notice the loving, caring tone that God has in this passage. When Abraham starts unloading, he doesn't shake his head in disappointment. He is not saying, here he comes again. What does he do? One of the commentators that I studied this week said, it is almost like God has put his arm around Abraham. He said, Abraham, I love you. It is okay. Let's talk about these things. He goes out and shows him the sky at night, all the stars. And I know that living in Houston you have forgotten what that looks like, but you know, really there are a bunch of stars, you know, like Carl Sagan used to say billions and billions of stars. Remember him? And so Matt, you go out and you see all these. God is being so patient, so loving, so kind with him. He is slow to anger, abounding in love. The God of the Bible is definitely a God of judgment. But as we are going to see, because of the promises given to Abraham, finding their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, there is no condemnation for those who come to him through faith in Jesus and opening up their heart to what is going on. So what are your doubts? Where are you in your relationship with the Lord? What kinds of concerns and fears and questions do you have? Because remember, until you bring those to God and tell you take them seriously and deal with them, you are going to be stifled as an individual in your relationship with God, but remember the Mother's day application. There is an impact in your doubting upon other people. And so it is incumbent upon all of us to take it seriously and to deal with it. So bring it before the Lord as he did. But notice that when he brought before the Lord his questions, his concerns, that God met him with his own word. That is there is a conversation now that is going on and we are called not only to bring before God our doubts but to behold his word. Notice how in verse 4 it says, and behold the word of the Lord came to him. That phrase is used a couple of times in this passage and over and over it says, and God said and God said. Now I recognize that for us today we do not have God speaking to us in audible voices and this is a dramatic passage. You know you have not only the audible voices, you have got visions, you have got dark and mysterious things going on. He is put into a deep sleep and you have an incredible display of God's power and glory as you have this mysterious smoking fire pot. And a flaming torch, all these bizarre signs in the world is going on here. These are always through which God is communicating to Abraham. And the author of Hebrews in the New Testament tells us that in previous days, that is before the first century, the Old Testament days, God spoke to us in all sorts of ways. But in these last days, and that means from the time Jesus Christ came on the earth until he comes again, in these last days God has narrowed the ways in which he speaks down to speaking through his son Jesus Christ. And how do you know how he speaks to us through his son Jesus Christ? Because Jesus, the living word, has perfectly given to us his written word in the 66 books of the Bible. This is the inspired, revealed, inherent word of God. Simply because I can't make full sense of it at every point doesn't mean that it isn't perfect at every point. It is God's word and God cannot air and this becomes his perfect vehicle. One of the Bible authors calls a surgeon scalpel that is used by God to go into the deepest parts of our heart and do surgery. It's what Paul said to the Ephesians is a sword. It's a sword of the Spirit is the word of God. And Abraham had just finished, of course, this military campaign and God shows up on the scene and says, I am your shield. And later the Bible says, the word of God is your sword and your shield and your protector. And so we believe into it as that which shows us the counter argument to our doubts. If you're going through doubts what you need, what Eve needed and she didn't call for was the word of God to trump the questions in deceitful ways of the evil one. So we need the word of God. But we also need to behold the word of God because every single person in this room living in this country where we have freedom of religion, we all have access to the Bible. And regardless of where you are in your faith, commitment, if you're someone who's been a Christian for 25 years or someone who's still thinking about these things, we've all been there where we've heard the word of God. And it seems just like information, mumbo jumbo perhaps. You remember in the Charlie Brown cartoons when they're turned into television shows? Remember how the teacher always talked to Charlie Brown and his friends? And some of you are saying, yeah, that sounds strikingly familiar what I'm experiencing right now as I listen to you. We'll see, that's not my fault. The preacher bears a responsibility. But don't you see, unless the spirit of God moves you from information intake to sensation transformation, then the word of God will just be functionally mumbo jumbo to you. It'll be information. It won't lead to transformation unless you behold it. And I love that word in verse 4. Behold, in the old days, if you wanted to emphasize a word, you know, you didn't have the, we have today putting someone in italics or a big font, a different color. You had to do something grammatically. And so in the Hebrew, you could throw a word out of its natural order. And that's exactly what happened here. To the Hebrew reader, this shouts at you. Behold, it would have stopped Abram in his tracks. It's saying Abram, don't simply allow my word to be information. But don't let it remain in the abstract, like a mathematical problem, like an engineering textbook, sorry, engineers, but allow it to move into the transformational realm by beholding it. But so what God does in this passage is he takes the abstract and makes it concrete over and over again. So he shows them the stars in the sky. I didn't just say, I really do promise you, I'm going to make you, and your descendants as big as you could ever think. He gives them a visual. Look at all the stars in the sky. And then he tells them to go, take a bunch of animals, and some of you go, and this just sounds horrid. It takes a bunch of animals and slaughters them. And he's getting ready to perform some ritual rite that we'll get into in more detail next week. But it's a visual here. Then you have this deep, dark sleep and this mysterious, smoking, flaming pod in a fiery torch. What's going on? These are all God's ways of making the abstract concrete. Listen, if the Bible simply remains words on a page, it will not challenge you. It will not change you. It must be beheld. It must get into the deep fabric of our soul and connect in such a way that, like the Apostle Paul said in Colossians 3,16, where the Word of God takes up residence in you. And I'm here to tell you, as someone who is supposed to be able to be an expert at this professionally, this is very difficult in my own experience every single day. It's particularly difficult because in our fast-paced world, you know, we've got time for our Rita Bible verse and move on for the day. And so, somehow, in the rhythm of our life, and I'm not going to lay a guilt trip by giving you a formula here, but somehow, we have to, in our experience with God's Word, move from information to sensation, to where we behold the Word that has come to us. Let me give you just a couple of ideas, a couple of thoughts. Pretend that you are going to a counselor. Maybe you're too scared to go to Robert Cook here in our church as a counselor. Don't ever be too scared to go to Robert Cook, but let's say you've got some issues. We all have issues, okay? Pretend that you are going to a counselor. You're sitting down with someone and you're going to have a conversation about the Bible. Pretending to your specific issue, identify where a doubt area is in your life. You doubt that God is ever going to make something meaningful of your marriage. You've gotten to a point in your marriage where you're going, I can't believe how dead this is. How in the world is anything can ever happen? You doubt God's goodness and bringing you together with that person. Now you need to engage with God's Word. So talk to yourself using God's Word and His good and sure promises that He will never leave or forsake you. So go to the counselor, so to speak. It's basically talking about meditation, taking the Word and chewing on it so that it becomes something that lives in your heart. One of the silly things that actually helps me is vigorous exercise. If you ever notice when you get the endorphin release from running or something like that, some of your most creative time is right after you've exercised and you're going, yes, that's after I'm getting sick. I mean, really, you have that moment or moments where you just seem a little euphoric and there's more of a creative energy. Use that energy to interact with God's Word in areas of your own doubt and struggle. Maybe it's some music that will kind of reach a different entryway into your heart than other things will, but find in your own experience. Maybe it's journaling. It's certainly it is a fellowshiping with other people at a deep level, having people that you can talk to about the issues of your life and be honest and lay them out there where there's no threat. The they can bring the Word of God to you in a personal way. Find ways in your own life where you move from simply reading the Bible to sensing it, be holding it upon your heart. And certainly one of the places where that should happen is here on Sunday morning because this is where the God-appointed means for doing that converge. Whether it's prayer or fellowship or worship, hearing the Word, reading the Word, the sacraments, all of these things are ways in which God brings us to behold the Word. And when we behold the Word, what happens? We believe it. See, a lot of us believe in God. But we believe in God like we believe that one plus one is two. It becomes nothing but a mere fact. And when you behold the Word in such a way that it affects your heart, you begin to rely on it. You begin to live based on that. And that's what this very important verse in verse 6 is talking about, where it says, and he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness. Abraham wasn't coming before God as one who had a spiritual resume to commend himself. We've already discovered that. He was a weak man. And yet God is declaring him as acceptable. How in the world can he do that? How can Abraham come before God only on the basis of God himself? There was a righteousness, a rightness, not about him, but about God himself. And so he believed that as he trusted that God was true, reliable, right and good. And on that basis, he was accepted before a holy God. This is the verse that's picked up on in a powerful way by the New Testament. It was a verse and a concept that became really one of the primary issues in the 16th century when an Augustinian mutton named Martin Luther decided that the church was missing it. The church always tends to heap upon us the guilt that if we just clean up our act, if we just try harder, if we just study harder, if we just do better things and stop doing the bad things, then everything will be okay. It wasn't anything new in the 16th century. It's certainly nothing new today. And what Luther recovered and what Abraham discovered and Paul in the New Testament emphasized in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 is that the only way to live, the only way to triumph over doubt is by trusting that God is who he claims to be. That he is sure and certain and willful fill what he has pledged to do. St. Anselm in the 11th century is a quote that has been very meaningful to me. He said, I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. Christianity is a rational faith. It's not a blind leap into a bunch of darkness. Christianity is offering light to the world. If you test it out, it will show to be true. But the rational way to getting there will never work ultimately. It's always by faith. Faith becomes a doorway, a way into a whole new world. If you aren't a weight, for instance, if you're not a Christian this morning or you're not sure where you are, maybe you said, well, I thought I came in here as a Christian. Now you've cast me into a terrible swirl of doubt, well, I'm sorry about that, but regardless of where you are, faith is a doorway into understanding. That's what Anselm was saying. Christianity says trust in the One True God and Jesus Christ who lived and died and was raised and ascended for you. And when you do that, you begin to understand. Life begins to make sense. We'll always have questions until we go to be with him in glory, but this does of understanding are opened up as we do that. I've shared with you before that when I was going to seminary, that seminary, not cemetery. This is where you study to become a minister. When I entered into seminary, I thought I had it all together. I thought this was great. I'm going to be a professional Christian now. I got there in that first year of seminary and all of a sudden the most bizarre thing happened. I started doubting. Everything. I doubted the existence of God, I doubted the truthfulness and Christianity just seemed some narrow. I couldn't share it with anybody. I did finally go to a professor who was kind of, this guy was the guru on the rational proofs for the existence of God. I got schooled in all those things and it still just didn't ultimately satisfy. And so I was extremely discouraged and one day sitting in this big lecture hall in a church history class, man began to talk about someone named John Calvin. He was a closed designer, but this guy was a very important figure in the Christian faith back from the 16th century as well. And Calvin's institute is one of the great books the Christian faith and he started reading at length from Calvin's institute. Now that may sound to you like that Charlie Brown teacher. I mean just boring, but I'm telling you the spirit worked in such a way that I began to weep right there in that lecture hall. And that was a major turning point. It was sort of a second conversion for me because my God had become far too trivial, too small, too manageable. And the God of Calvin was this glorious grand magnificent three times over holy God who I could never control. And gracious at the very same time. And that entered me into by trust this entirely new world of understanding. I still have questions. Thankfully I have never I can say by God's grace returned to that kind of horrible season of doubt. But look, wherever you are in life, whether it's the deep intellectual questions that you've got or the issues of your soul, the struggles, the fears that is rooted in doubt, realize that you can bring those issues before God. You can be honest with him. He is a loving and gracious God. And as you do that, let his word come to you, not simply his information on a page, but his words to behold that they might catch fire in your heart and transform you. And that will happen as this great and glorious God comes to dawn on your heart that he is also a gracious God who fulfilled all his promises in Abraham through Abraham's ultimate son, Jesus Christ, who would bear the curse for us. Who would enter into unbelievable suffering, resisting at every point the temptations of the evil one that he might be for us, the righteousness of God. Do you trust in him? Do you believe in him? You say Leo, I'm not strong. You know, listen, you know what the hardest thing about being a believer is? Being a believer. And next week we're going to look more into that. How to move into more of an assurance of our faith in Christ? Let's pray. Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for all that you are for us in Jesus. Thank you for this wonderful passage where we can begin to explore things maybe that we've buried for a long time, that we might come to enjoy the life that is truly life. Found only in Jesus. Amen.