Well, we're going to launch into this new sermon series on the great man Abraham. Let's ask for God's blessing. Holy Spirit, it is truly amazing that you are the same one who worked thousands of years ago out of a very bleak situation to erupt in the life of Abraham and to flood his life with your promises and how I pray that you would teach us what you want us to know this morning that we might be people of promise that you've called us to be and having found that in the one who is the promised one, that we might be a blessing to others in his name and for his sake we pray. Amen. Well, it was a uniquely remarkable week, wasn't it, in a number of respects. I'm not sure in my own life that I've ever witnessed the celebration of another life as I did this past week seeing the millions of mourners flock to the Vatican pay respects to John Paul II. You know, regardless of what your theological perspective is, what you think about the Pope is truly amazing to see the reaction, wasn't it? I mean, I don't think the officials in Rome were expecting just that mass of flood of millions of people and it's the all these dignitaries and foreign leaders and then to see certainly the unique picture of three of our American presidents kneeling together, it was amazing. Well, also it was a remarkable week when you contrast that and all of those events over against the event that Pope John Paul II's funeral preempted was the wedding, the royal wedding of Prince Charles, the future king of England. And boy, it's a contrast in so many ways but they preempted the wedding and they finally were married. But when you think about the contrast, it's pretty remarkable because here's one, Prince Charles who was a great person of promise, a lot of you are too young to even remember but I remember back when Prince Charles was first married to Lady Diana and I mean captivated, not just England but the entire world, there was kind of this sense that everyone's hopes and dreams were to be realized in this couple and I don't know, I mean just the weight and the pressure certainly that they had to bear imploded their relationship and there was disillusionment, there was scandal, there was disgrace and now years later Prince Charles is remaring quite a contrast and I think in a lot of ways a picture of how life is, how we hold out promise and all sorts of places and we think of greatness defined in human categories and it just crashes, it's just massive disillusionment and we all kind of long for lives of meaning and value and lives that become a blessing to others. Well when you look at the Bible, God himself holds up one that he calls great, one that he says here's going to be a life of promise, here's going to be a life of blessing, here's going to be one through whom countless others will find hope and future and promise, it's the great man, God literally calls him great, the great man Abraham and it's going to be fun looking at this series together for the next couple of months as we explore really not just Abraham but through Abraham we come to understand what it means for us to be people of promise, are we people of promise because there's things in our own lives and gifts and attributes, things that are leading us to be great or do we find that we are people of promise in a totally different respect. Well as we look at that we come this morning to the very beginning of his recorded history in the Bible, the call of Abraham, the end of chapter 11 and beginning of chapter 12 and in a lot of ways it's the key, as many commentators will say, to understanding the Pentateuch, the first five books, the Bible, you understand the print, you want to understand the Pentateuch, you got to understand this small section of scripture but as Bruce Walkey, probably my favorite commentator on Genesis put it, this passage is much more than that, it's really the sneak preview to the entire Bible and really what you come to see is that Abraham was great because God flooded him with promise, it wasn't anything unique to Abraham or anything in Abraham inherent to him, it was the God placed upon him, his promises and Abraham's life became defined by that. The author of Hebrews in the New Testament informs us on these things in chapter 11, he's talked about all these different heroes of the faith so to speak and he spends a lot more time talking about Abraham than any of them and he summarized it this way in chapter 11, verse 9 and 10, by faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, he airs with him of the same promise for he was looking forward to the city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God. Now, if you've been with us for the past several months, you know I can't pass up the reference there to the city because that's been the constant theme for this calendar year, we started the year talking about the great city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah and the Old Testament was called to go to and he didn't want to have anything to do with that, he went the other way. Then we looked during the season of Lent at Jesus who in the gospel of Luke set his face toward the city of Jerusalem, he was relentless in that pursuit until he gave up his life. We've been looking at all of this and we're going to look at the Abraham series in a similar respect to kind of get at some of the deeper questions. Why has God placed you, providentially, where you are in this city, in the city of Houston? Why has he placed you here? Why has he created this church? Why are we here meeting in this community college? Has he called us to be something different? Has he called us to be a church that doesn't simply exist in the city or individual simply existing in the city but existing for the benefit, the blessing, the promise of this city? What you learn with Abraham is that he left all these humanly promising backgrounds, great city of Err, the Caldeans and the great city of Heron, to go to basically a nothing of a place, that he might import the place, the city of God, the place with real foundations, whose architect and designer was God, that he might import that city among the places of this world. That's the idea. So kind of in big picture respect, we want to get at how we can be people of promise, how we can make a lasting impact while we're here. I think that's really what captivated so many people, more than anything else about Pope John the Pope, Pope John, Paul the second, is that he made an impact, made a lasting impact, and a life that was given in a lot of respects to other people. So we want that. Don't we? Don't you want to have impact? Don't you want to be a person of blessing? Don't you want this church not simply to build itself unto itself, but to be here, to be a blessing to others, to this city I do, and I know you do too. So let's take that kind of perspective as we look at the life of Abraham together and get this morning a sneak preview into the story of the Bible and the story of the Gospel. So what is it? Well, it's a sneak preview, the Call of Abraham, this first section of Abraham, is a sneak preview into all of the Bible, in that it highlights the unpromising plight of human beings. It reminds us of what you know, we'd probably rather forget, not really deal with that much, but that human beings left to themselves, it's disaster. And this is the story of the early chapters of the Bible, one through eleven, God blesses creation and he blesses the crown jewel of his creation human beings, gives us the responsibility of being fruitful in multiplying and basically governing and stewarding all of creation and what the human beings do, and we'd all do it if we were in Adam and Eve's shoes, it threw it away. We got a better plan, God. And as a result chaos and destruction and disillusionment all flooded in. And you see that throughout the early chapters of Genesis leading up to where we are now, at one point Moses is the author says, you know, it's gotten so bad that every thought, all the inclinations of all the thoughts of human beings was evil, only evil all the time. And then it crescendos up, it's slow, steady, sad to sound, it crescendos to chapter eleven where you have people gathered in the place called Babel, and listen to the way it's put in chapter eleven. Because you need to see the tower of Babel and all of that as a backdrop for what God does with Abraham. And it says in chapter eleven, verse four, then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city. There it is. And a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves. That's the way of human beings, isn't it? We crave making a name for ourselves. We want to be great. We want to have a reputation, a hope in a future, and so we craft by ourselves that kind of future. And that's what the picture is in the story of the tower of Babel, is they're building a city to make a name for themselves and this great tower to get all the way to heaven if they could. And God says, no, you can never do that on your own, all of that human ingenuity, all the best gifts that you can muster will only lead to destruction and disillusionment. And God judges them and disperses them. And you get this sense that everything's bleak right now. Yet there's one little flicker of hope. After the flood, you know, Noah in the ark, after the flood, God blesses Shem, one of the sons of Noah. And so there's this last flicker of hope with Shem and his family line and it trails all the way down to a man named Tara who lives in Er of the Caldeans. And with Tara is this last flicker of hope, but then you see where the problem lies, because in the verses in chapter 11 that were read a few minutes ago, you see that even with Tara things are bleak. And what you can't see in the English is that the word Tara, the name Tara, and you know, in the old world names and what they meant were incredibly significant, Tara meant moon. And Er of the Caldeans and Heron where they moved were the two principal centers of idol worship for the God of the moon, all right, doesn't sound all captivating today probably to most of us, but that was incredibly tempting back in that time, in that place. And they say, well, how do we know that they weren't good, honest seeking people after the real God? Well, because to remove doubt in the book of Joshua, if you fast forward a little bit, Joshua chapter 24, Joshua giving a speech to the people of God, the people of promise says this in Joshua 24, too, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, long ago your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Tara, the father of Abraham, and of Nahor, and they served other gods. The candle that last flicker of hope just went out. It is totally dark. And to symbolically emphasize how hopeless, total lack of promise existed with humanity talks about Tara. And in essence, it says that Tara had a son who died and left two children orphaned. This is horrible in the ancient world, horrible anytime, especially it's symbolic in the ancient world of utter hopelessness. And even more so, it says in verse 30, and look at the way this is emphasizing it. Now Sarah was barren, she had no child, and let me just stop for one second, give a little pause here. You have now these code names, Sarah, I become Sarah, Abraham later, what we think of him, he's now Abram, don't let it throw you, don't let it confuse you. There's meaning in these things, Abram means daddy, Abraham means big daddy, and it's a picture of the blessing of God overflowing through them, so don't let that throw you at this point. Notice how that verse is driving home, this woman is barren. That means she has no child, and we know, as the story plays out, she's beyond child bearing years. And in the ancient world, and this is sad at any time, terribly difficult, but in the ancient world, this is like throwing up a massive billboard and saying, no promise exists, there's no hope, it's complete sadness. You just want to weep at this, so these are verses that we tend to just brush right over, and we go right into chapter 12, it's so important you see the backdrop in the context here that the first thing we see in this preview, this sneak preview is humanity left to itself, we'll always go the way the Tower of Babel. We think we have all this promise, we think we're going to do so great, we've got all these gifts, got all these resources. We fall in our faces, utter bleakness, and the reason is because of other gods, now look, I don't think it's very tempting for most of us to worship the moon, but we're created to worship, and if we don't worship the moon, we're going to worship something else, we'll worship our career, we'll worship our family, we'll worship pleasure, fill in the blank, question is what is it that you worship, and as Calvin said many years ago, the heart is an idle factory, it's just one thing after another, is that conveyor belt, we're just completely spilling out all over the place, all these different things that we give our heart to, and what is being emphasized here, as the promise, when you go to an idol, when you give your heart to something, you do so because it holds out a promise for you, you think it's going to give you something, and what the Bible is saying is it never gives you what it promises, right? It never delivers, it's an empty treasure chest, I'll give you a picture of this, a number of years ago, the eminent renowned journalist, Heraldo Rivera, was making a big splash because he had uncovered the long lost secret treasure chest of Al Capone, and you know, this was, I mean, this was going to be it, and so it was all over the news, and it was going to be covered live where, wasn't going to be opened until they're live, the excavators revealed it, unveiled it, and you could see all the treasures, you know, the stolen money, the secret papers of Al Capone in there, and so, you know, you tune in, and for an hour, you see this ridiculous hype, and the digging and ad libbing, and then finally, the excavators reveal it, and they back off the lights and cameras zoom in, Heraldo in his dramatic moment, opens the treasure chest, and you got it, it's totally empty, nothing's in there, see that's the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we're running after all these things, we're building our cities and names unto ourselves, we're doing all these things frantically spending our time, investing ourselves, giving ourselves to the promise held out by these silly idols, and it's always the same in the end, it's always an empty treasure chest, which idol, which idols are you captivated by this morning, this past week? That's the backdrop, and with that as the backdrop, chapter 12 bursts onto the scene of the Bible as a spectacular display of God's grace, because not only is this a sneak preview of the unpromising plight of humanity, this is a sneak preview of the wonder of the God of promise, the one who is the promised seed of Abraham, you know, when you think of Abraham's situation, he was worshiping other gods, he was not seeking God, but God called him to come out of his experience and worship him, and you see in this passage the repeated use of the first person pronoun, did you notice that? You ought to just highlight it in verse one, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you, and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing, I will bless those who bless you, so on, so forth, that's grace, look, to get pretty vivid for a second, Sarah was barren, they were past childbearing years, they were functionally impotent, and it's a spiritual picture for us, it's not that God came to some really good neat folks, these people were worshiping other gods and give a flip about the real God, and furthermore, like all of humanity since Adam and Eve, they're spiritually dead, they had no power, Paul picks up on this in the book of Romans when he says at just the right time, I like the way the NIV puts it, at just the right time when we were still powerless, impotent, Christ Jesus died for the ungodly, see that's the picture that we have with Abraham, God erupts into his life, I'm going to do this, this, this, and this, not because you're a great guy, Abraham, but because I'm going to do great things through you, he is the God of grace, and he brings out of the bleak display of humanity's plight in one through eleven, he brings the bright glory of his grace in and through Abraham, and what you have here really is in enigmatic but beautiful fashion, the gospel in a nutshell, because what you see the New Testament do over and over is pick back up on these promises, and say this is where we find the beauty of the gospel in veiled form, if you go to Galatians in the New Testament chapter three, let's put this way, verse 16, it's one of the 316 verses in the New Testament, now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, doesn't say it and to his, it doesn't say and to offspring's plural, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ, and then if you turn over to verse 29, he says, and if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, he is according to the promise, and so what Paul was doing there in some creative language is basically saying these promises were given to Abraham and to his seed, to his offspring, but the reality is they all drive you like a bullet to the New Testament, to Jesus Christ, he is the offspring, the promised seed, and you and I become sons of Abraham and daughters of Abraham, how? Not because we follow Abraham, but because we are by faith followers of Jesus Christ, who is the seed and therefore because of faith in Christ, we're children of Abraham, look, Abraham is great in a lot of ways, I mean just from the human vantage point, three of the major world religions looked to him, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, they all consider themselves sons and daughters of Abraham, but the Bible is saying it's only through the offspring, Jesus Christ, and faith in him that you can actually become a true son or daughter of Abraham. Do you see the backdrop of the call of Abraham? It is God's brilliant, vibrant grace. Do you see your own life that way? Do you see that we're busy ourselves doing all these things? There's no promise that they're all dead in streets, the last flicker of hope has gone out, but God has given a pinhole of light through the person of Abraham, and in essence he has called us to that pinhole of light, like a peephole in a door, you can just see that little glimmer of hope, but you follow Abraham and what happens is a magnificent doorway opens up to you, a whole new beginning, a whole new creation, a whole new life, Jesus in the new testament. John chapter 10 says, I am the door. If any enters by me he will be saved. I am, it's one of the many I am statements. He said, before Abraham was, I am. I am Abraham's son, but I precede him. I am, meaning I am God, the one true God who called Abraham out of darkness, who brought light into this world. I am the door. Walk through me. See the pinhole of light given through Abraham, but don't stop there, because that's a dead in street. Go through that door, through me, Jesus, and you will find the treasure chest. And really, when you think back to the empty treasure chest of Al Capone, you think of the heavenly, magnificent infinite treasure chest that we have in Jesus, and that's what the way Paul puts it, in Ephesians chapter 1, that all of the riches of heaven are given to us in Christ. And so this passage is this pinhole of light, this sneak preview, not only into the bleakness of humanity left to themselves, but to the vibrant, glorious beauty of God's grace, given to us through Abraham, but through Abraham that we might go to his offspring, to his ultimate son, to Jesus, who swings open the door of paradise to us. Have you gone through? That's what the Bible's begging you to see. It's not, are you basically a pretty good person? It's not have you gone to church frequently or infrequently. It's not how scandalous your life is, how much promise your life holds out. It's whether you see that without the bright ray of God's grace in Jesus. There is no promise in life. Now this passage also, it doesn't stop there, it gives us I think doorways into seeing how we live by that promise because the treasure chest is not just there to forgive us of our sins. It's there to live by, to put on those jewels, to cling to the promises of the gospel that are found initially through Abraham, but spread out to the scriptures ultimately into Christ. So how do we cling to the promise? How do we live by faith? Four things very quickly. First, believe in the promises of God over against what you see. We'll talk more about this next week, but really Abraham had to believe in this hope and future that was out there before him even though he couldn't see any of that. It was the bare word of God who was calling him out of having a life where he had plenty where he had probably everything he always wanted to leave that behind and trust in the God of promise who would through him build this city, whose architect and builder is God, the city with real foundations. And so you've got to trust in the promises of God. And really what this encourages us to do is to look in our own life and see where there are pockets of discouragement, pockets of bleakness, where has the candle gone out in your life? See, where have you been building your city for yourself to make your name great? Where are these areas of real sadness, of real rebellion? And recognize that what's happening there is their other God, just like with Abraham and his family. And those gods are holding out promises, but they're really lies. What the Bible is showing is through Abraham and this sneak preview is to call that lie lie and believe in the promise of the gospel in Christ at that very point. And as you believe something simultaneously is happening, you're leaving. You've got to believe first, but then you cling to the promises by leaving something else behind. Now what was Abraham leaving behind? Essentially everything. He left behind what was comfortable to him. He left behind his family. And the wording there in verse 1 where the Lord says, go from your country and your kindred, it's really not forceful enough in the English. It's literally get you out. Get out of there. And there are some evidence in the text, sorry I made a baby cry over that, but you know it was a little frightening. There is some evidence in the text that Abraham didn't respond initially. It took him some time. The past, perfect tense is actually there in verse 1. God had said, and in the New Testament in Acts 7 and Stephen's speech it literally says that God called him when he was in error. Seeing they traveled to Heron and then just hung out there until Tara the father died, then they went. So it looks like God is magnetically pulling Abraham. And Abraham is resisting. He doesn't want to leave behind all this stuff. And you and I can say I can identify with that. What do you need to leave behind? Ambitions, fears, bitterness, someone burned you bad and you are not about to move beyond that. You don't want to leave that behind. But just think about this for a second. Abraham left a lot behind. He left a lot behind. But compared to his ultimate son, the one who was truly great, he didn't leave anything behind. Think what Jesus left behind? Jesus had the plush, fittingly plush, the royal luxury of heaven, of the glory of his father, that he left behind to live a life essentially in anonymity for 33 years. Imagine being the king of all creation and no one even recognizes. You then when people started to pay attention to him, he was completely rejected, despised, tortured beyond human comprehension executed. Look, look, whatever God called you to leave behind, the way your heart is melted so that you will be willing daily to let that go is by looking to Christ. I mean, this is what the author of Hebrews, I think, had in mind when he talked about this in chapter 12. He said, look, we have this great cloud of witnesses, chapter 11. These heroes in the faith, but compared to Jesus, they were nothing. In light of those people, Abraham and others, but ultimately in light of Christ, let go of those silly things that bind you. He says, let us also lay aside in view of this great cloud of witnesses, every weight and the sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking ultimately not to Abraham or to any other human being, but to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith who for the joy set before him endured the cross despising the shame and is seated fittingly at the right hand of the throne of God. Believe and leave. And then notice in closing here how there is a upward and an outward bent to the blessing of God and what it means to cling to those promises. It's first upward. What did Abraham do when he got to the promise land? He did not notice what he did not do in contrast to the people in Babel. He did not build a tower to himself. He didn't build a city to make his name great. What did he do? He bowed and he built altars in at least three different places that are mentioned and God was pleased to appear to him. I mean, he had served this silly moon God for God knows how long and that moon God I assure you never appeared to him. He never delivered on his promises and now the God of promise appears to him as Abraham bows to him and worships friends. That's what life is all about. We were made to love God, to adore him, to prize him over against all the false promises of this life. And finally, not only is this blessing, this cling to the promises of God shown to us in the sneak preview of Abraham upward, but it's outward. Did you notice that? God doesn't simply say, Abraham, I'm going to make you a blessing. So you're going to have a great life and you'll be a great guy and you can build a tower to yourself. No, I'm going to make your name great. Why? So that you, verse two, will be a blessing. God used Abraham to not only bless his little family and his little life, but an entire people of promise. And that never was a design to be just to one ethnicity, but the nations. So that you see in the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible that all the sons and daughters of Abraham, from all the nations, every tri-tongue nation and people group, are worshipping not Abraham, not another human being, but the one who is truly great. Abraham had a great name, but it was never an end in itself. It was to lead us and a host of others to him whose name is above every name, so that the name of Jesus, the truly great one, every knee should bow and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Don't you want a life of impact? I think that's really the bottom line and what intrigued so many people about this Pope. A life of impact, a life that isn't just lived for the silly things of this world. Don't you want to be used to bring healing to those who are sick, literally and spiritually? Don't you want this church not just to build a tower unto itself, but to be a blessing in this city, nation, and world. Friends, that will happen as we leave behind the silly things that bind and entangle us in this life and cling to the promises of the gospel and to the God of promise in Jesus, bowing to him, adoring him and saying, God, use me to be a blessing to the nations. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.