If you could pick three words that would describe you, three words that would describe who you are, what would they be? It would be a great fun to have some open-ended discussion, just some sharing about that, but this isn't the environment for something like that. I'll just ask you to think about it. What are three words that would describe who you are, that would summarize for people who you are, what your life is all about? What would those three words be? Would they be smart, witty, attractive? Would they be handsome, charming, rich? What would they be? Humble, serious, hard-working? What would be the three words that you would use to describe who you are or would they be words that would describe what you would like to be? I believe that there are three words that emerge from this passage that describe who you are as a Christian, who you are and what your life is all about. If you're somebody who has gotten to the place in your life where you know that you're in trouble, you know that you're in deep, deep trouble. These biblical language you know that you're a sinner, and you're exposed to God's judgment and His justice and His wrath because you are a sinner. If you're a person who has gotten to the place where you know who you are and you've gotten to the place also where you know who Jesus is and you've abandoned yourself and you've abandoned all hope and all help, and you've looked to Jesus to do something for you that you're powerless to do for yourself. You've looked to Jesus to take away the guilt of your sin, the shame associated with your sin. You've looked to Jesus, hanging you because you're powerless to change yourself. There's no therapy, there's no drug, there's no self-help manual that has gotten it done, you're helpless at that point. You know you need something outside yourself, something alien to you in order to be changed. If that is you and you've come to the place where you have entrusted yourself to Jesus, then you're a Christian. And this passage says three things about who you are and what your life is all about. There are three themes that are central to the Bible. They're present in the first chapters of Genesis and they don't go away until the last chapter of the Revelation. Three things summarized by three words. They were true of Abraham and as Abraham is a model, an example, a paradigm of what it means to be a believer in the one true God in so far as these things are true of Abraham. Abraham and he is a model for us. They are true of every believer and here are the three words. Here are the three things. Here are the three things that are true of you if you're a Christian. Number one, you are dying. Number two, you are so journey. And number three, you are hoping. You are dying. You are so journey. And you are hoping. What are you as a Christian in the first place? You are dying from the moment of your conception through the course of the entirety of your life until you breathe your last breath. You are a dying man. You are a dying woman. You are a dying boy. You are a dying girl. As a Christian, you are dying. It is a harsh reality but it is the most pressing reality we face. Abraham in chapter 23 is confronted with the reality, the specter, the undeniable and harsh reality of death. He was a dying woman and she died. This passage in its context is really sort of jarring if you think about it. What precedes chapter 23, of course, is chapter 22. And in chapter 22, you have this incredible act of faith in the life of Abraham and you have this incredible act of deliverance on the part of God. Remember, a few years ago, seven years ago, Barbara and I had the opportunity to go to Russia and we were in Moscow for three days and then we were in St. Petersburg for three days. And during the time that we were in St. Petersburg, and I think I told you this story in the past, we had the opportunity to visit the Hermitage, one of the three or four premier museums and collections of art in the world. And there is a huge Rembrandt collection at the Hermitage and one of the Rembrandt pieces at the Hermitage is the piece that describes Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice before God. And when we got to that painting, even though the person who was leading our tour kept trying to rush us along and move us from one exhibit to the next, I had to stop and I stopped and I looked at this painting and I sat across the room from it for as long as I could until they came looking for me. So that I could catch up with the group and the thing that staggered me and stunned me about the painting and if you ever see a good representation of it, I'd encourage you to look at this feature of it. The thing that really impressed stunned me as I looked at this painting was the hand of Abraham upon the chin of his son, pressing the chin of his son, the head of his son back. This massive hand with these tendons and muscles flexed in his arm, pressing that head back and the arm raised, the other arm raised with a knife in order to bring the knife down on the exposed neck of his son Abraham was not reluctant when he sacrificed his son. It was an extraordinary act of faith, a heroic act of belief in God that no matter what happened, God was able to preserve the life of his son, bring his life back to life. He told his servants that they would come down from the mountain, they would come back to the servants. The Abraham had commanded to stay at the foot of the mountain and Abraham exhibits this extraordinary faith in the sacrifice of Isaac. But then God, as it were, grabs the wrist of Abraham by an angel and the knife falls from his hand and God affects this act of deliverance for Isaac, the one who is to be slain. It's a powerful picture, both of faith and of the deliverance of God, and immediately following that in these last few verses versus 20 and following, there's some of this genealogical material. And the reason that that genealogical material is there has to do with chapter 24 and what will come next, because Rebecca is introduced at the end of chapter 22. And that's the stage for the union of Isaac and Rebecca and an enlarging of the fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham. And if you think about chapter 2, it's like a great symphony that rises to this glorious crescendo and everything is hopeful and everything is positive, and everything is filled with grace and mercy and deliverance and hopefulness. And then boom, there are no chapter and verse divisions in the original. Your devotional readings may tell you to stop at the end of chapter 22, but the narrative continues and it moves immediately from this grand conclusion and this grand note of hopefulness to Sarah being dead. And it's like everything comes to a screeching halt and it's like God through the Holy Spirit and then through Moses, dust it in our face again. Death never goes away. It's a constant thing in Genesis. Go back to Genesis 5. I encourage you to read Genesis 5. At several points in that narrative, there is the simple phrase, and he died. Adam lived so many years and he died. The descendants of Adam lived so many years and each one of them died and he died and he died and he died and he died. It's a constant theme in Genesis. The patriarch's deaths are all recorded. Read through Genesis. Just do some spot checking. The death of Sarah is recorded. The death of Abraham is recorded. The deaths of Isaac and Rebecca are recorded. The death of Jacob and Leah. They're all recorded and all of those people are buried in this same plot of ground that Abraham bought from these hit heights and he died and it stands in stark contrast. It does to the creation and what was intended, God creates this world filled with glory and beauty and bounty and fullness and blessedness and he creates the man and the woman and he sits in the midst of it all and he says to them in effect as people created virtuous and holy and righteous. You remember that? Months and months and months ago. It's been almost two years ago now. Memory serves. It's been a long time ago as we looked at Genesis 1 and 2. God planted the man and the woman in that garden and gave them the command that they delight themselves and eat of every tree in the garden except one. They were to satisfy themselves and revel in the bounty that God had given them. In other words, they were to know life. Life was to be characteristic of their experience every year for the last eight or nine years. The Malone family said the opportunity to go to North Carolina or Virginia or West Virginia and either spend some time on a farm or camp in some state parks someplace. They get away from all this oppressive heat and humidity and enjoy some at least lower humidity and some cooler temperatures and it's always wherever we are. It's always an environment surrounded by the singing of birds. You have noticed that birds not only sing in the morning when they wake up but they sing at night before they go to sleep. You ever notice that? They do. I noticed this when I was up in North Carolina several months ago and I took some camping and did an overnight thing. I camped on cold mountain for those of you who care about such things. As the sun was going down about quarter to nine, the birds start singing. It's like taking a bath. It's like having your soul washed to be out in the glory of this world that God has made. We were made for life and every time it seems that we begin to taste a little bit of it. Boom! There it is. It's right back in our face and he died. Death takes the sweetness out of all of it. Doesn't it? An enjoyment of the blessedness of God and the life that he's given us. It's always, it's always tensed it seems with a bit of bitterness and the real ability to delight in it to enjoy its sweetness. It's tensed with the specter and the reality of death. It's everywhere. And Abraham as he confronts and as he has to deal with this reality that his wife was a dying woman and so he is a dying man, Abraham grieves. It is a real grief. Let me say to you as Christian people. Let me say to you that you don't do yourself and you don't do the outside world, the watching world, you don't do it any favors by submerging the reality of death. You don't do yourselves and you don't do the outside world any favors by sucking it up somehow and pretending through our smiles and through our hims of triumph that it's something other than what it really is a ghastly and incalculable tragedy. Versus two and three of this passage indicate that Abraham grieved over an extended period of time. Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weak for her and the commentators tell us that when you put those two verbs together, the verb of mourning and the verb of weeping, it's a little phrase that describes what was customary for Abraham and for those around him this protracted time of grief. Over the intrusion of death into their experience, in verse three, the time comes when Abraham stands up from before his dead, doesn't shove his dead off to the side, entrusting his dead into the care of a mortician, someone who specializes in death but he stays before his dead. And he grieves and he mourns and it is a real grief and his tears are real tears and his heart is really broken just as Jesus faced the incalculable tragedy of the death of his friend Jesus in John 11, 35 weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. Romans 12, 15 tells us that we're to weep with those who weep, if we're to weep with those who weep, it must presuppose that there are things worth weeping about and if there aren't things worth weeping about the command would not be there. Abraham faces the fact that his wife was a dying woman and did in fact die and he does not gloss over it and we must not either, we must not euphemize, we must not say that so and so has passed on and we must not say that so and so while these things are true, has been promoted to glory, we must stare it in the face and before the watching world affirm what everybody knows to be true, that we are dying men and women living among the dead and he died and she died. Jonathan Edwards had a number of resolutions, one of his resolutions was think often of death. John Piper, I've told you this before John Piper in his church in Minnesota at the end of every year the last Sunday service in every calendar year he reads the names of those who have died in the previous year. Sarah lived 127 years and Sarah died. Let me ask you to contemplate this, are you ready? Are you ready for death? Are you ready for death? I trust you know and if you don't know this then I'd beg of you to see somebody, see me, see somebody I trust, you know that if you are one who has as I said a bit ago come to terms with who you are and you come to terms with who Jesus is, that Jesus having lived and died for sinners has been raised for sinners, he possesses the keys of life, he is the door to life, he is life itself and if you have come to Jesus, if you are hidden in him then death while a reality not to be euphemized, not to be shoved to the side, is in the end a final threat to you. Do you know that? Are you safe? And do you know that you're secure in Jesus? First thing that's true of you is that you're a dying man, a dying woman, a dying boy, a dying girl and Jesus is the door to life. Second thing, you're also a Sojourner, verse 4, Abraham in his negotiating with the Hittites and with Ephraim in particular in this public negotiation that he has with Ephraim and with the whole of the community of the Hittites, it's a public deal, it's not a private deal done off in a corner somewhere, it's a real estate deal that's done in the public square. With the leadership of the community, witnessing it, that's what that phrase means a little bit later, when Abraham does this, verse 16 and 17, when he does this in the hearing of the sons of half, he's doing it among the elders, among the leaders, when he's engaged in this negotiation with them over this parcel of ground, he identifies himself as a Sojourner. You're a Sojourner, a foreigner, a visitor among who are you? You're a Sojourner, you're just like Abraham. You're a dying man, you're a dying woman and you are a Sojourner, a Sojourner, a Sojourner woman. Abraham was an alien and a stranger, this is the ironic thing about this, the interesting thing about this, Abraham was an alien and a stranger in a land that belonged and that God had promised to Abraham. Folks, you are Abraham, you dwell in a land that belongs to God, this world is not the world of the devil, it is not the world of the prince of the power of the air even though he may have been cast to this place in some sense and may have his role to play and may exercise some measure of authority, it's not his world, it is God's world belongs to him. And Jesus in the Beatitudes says, the meek will inherit the earth, it's God's and it's yours, but you're just like Abraham, a Sojourner and a traveler and there is this very real sense in which this world is not your home. And try as you might, you can't make it your home. When contemporary writers said our current generation is plagued with the disease of fromlessness, plagued with the disease of fromlessness, I know where I grew up, I'm from Niles Michigan, I go home and it's not home. On our 10th anniversary I surprised Barb and took her to Boston because that's where we courted. I was in seminary, she was in Pittsburgh and we had all of these wonderful dates eating in all of these wonderful restaurants in the North Shore of Boston. And on our 10th anniversary we went back and we went back to Gordon Conwell's seminary where I went to school and I walked through my old classrooms and through the old chapel and I walked through the library and the new buildings and all the rest. And after we went there I was depressed and the reason I was depressed is because you can't go back, you can't go back, you're a Sojourner, you're a pilgrim. And no matter how you try to make this much slips through your grasp, fromlessness. I don't know if it's a word, but it sure works fromlessness. Hebrews reminds us in referring to Abraham and referring to the patriarchs. Hebrews reminds us of this fromlessness. These all died in faith not having received the promises but having seen them afar off were assured of them. They embraced them and they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. This is Abraham we're talking about. This is all the patriarchs we're talking about. And their models for us, and truly if they had called in mind that country from which they had come out they would have had opportunity to return, but now they desire a better that is a heavenly country. And as a result of this God is not ashamed to be called their God for heave and love it has prepared a city for you. And as a result of this God is not ashamed to be called their God for heave and love it has prepared a city for you. You're from us here, you're homeless here, your residence there. All has that in mind when he writes the Philippians. See this theme that has taken up in Genesis this theme of being aliens and strangers and a pilgrim people. It's all freed up in Genesis. Paul has that in mind when he writes the Philippians. See this theme that has taken up in Genesis this theme of being aliens and strangers and a pilgrim people. It's all freed up and captured and taken up in the New Testament. Paul reminds us in Philippians 320 that our citizenship is in heaven. Where's your home folks? It's talking with a good friend of mine the other day. A person I'm privileged to be called a friend and I don't drop names. I hate it when people do that. So if I'm name dropping for give me because I really don't like doing it but I was talking to my friend Ken Myers the other day. Some of you know who Ken is. Ken's real concerned about how we as Christians live as aliens in the midst of this world. And he said you know the thing that distresses me about most youth ministry and this really challenged me. The thing that distresses me about most youth ministry is that there is an underlying assumption that children, teenagers need to be segregated off because they are a culture all by themselves. And the only way that you can deal with them and minister to them and relate to them is to get into their bedrooms and see what life is like inside their bedrooms, in their culture. And translate things into that culture so that they'll understand them and he wants to say no it's not true. My child is not a citizen of youth culture. My child is a citizen of the kingdom of God and more than anything else I want my children to understand that this is their affinity group and not that. This is their home and not there. You're sojourners, your aliens, your strangers, your citizenship is in heaven. You're not an American, you're a Christian. And don't confuse those things. You're not a member of some socioeconomic group. You are not identified by the university you went to by your SAT scores, by the fraternity or sorority that you participated in. You are a Christian and your citizenship is in heaven. And here you are an alien and a stranger. Who are you? You are dying, you are sojourning. And last you are hoping. Genesis 22 and 23 are perhaps the most staggering faith acts in all of scripture. Genesis 22, Abraham believes God will provide for his son. In Genesis 23, Abraham buries his wife as an act of faith, a pledge of his belief that God will fulfill his faith. God will fulfill his promise and give to his descendants the whole land, the whole land. He puts his wife in that grave. He puts his wife in that tomb to declare to the world that God is faithful. And God has promised to give him the whole land and he will do it. It's really interesting. The only land that Abraham owns is a grave. The only land he owns is a grave. And let me suggest to you the same thing is true of you. The only land you'll ever really own is the piece of ground you'll bury in. The only land it will be yours forever is the piece of ground that you're put in. When you make your last mortgage payment, you're still going to pay some local municipality for the privilege to stay in that house. You're still going to pay taxes. And when you die or when you move, somebody else is going to move into that house and they're going to put their kids pictures on your walls. They're going to put their furniture in your living room. The only piece of ground that yours forever is buried in. And beloved, every time we do a funeral, every time Christians gather around a grave site, and every time we put a body in the ground, it is our declaration to the world. It is our declaration of faith that God who has promised that he would give to the meek the whole earth is a promise to be believed. When we put a person in the ground, it is our declaration to the world that we are not going to grieve as those who have no hope. Yes, we will grieve. But we will grieve with an eye to the future. We will grieve with an eye to Jesus returning and that person coming out of the ground. I talked to somebody the other day when it was grandmother's funeral, said to his brother who was not a Christian, leaned over in the midst of the service. He was taken up in it. He was caught up in it. His grandmother was a believer. He said, she is going to come out of that thing. When Abraham deposited his wife in the ground, it was an act of faith believing and declaring to the world that God who had promised to give him the whole land. And if you read Hebrews closely, Hebrews 11 closely, you realize that what was in view for Abraham was not this particular parcel of ground, not his grave for his wife. Not that piece of ground between Egypt and Syria, but a heavenly place, a heavenly land, a far greater blessed land that could even be conceived in this fallen, broken world. Abraham looked beyond that grave to the God who promised that he would give him that land. And he declared before the world that God is faithful. Every time we bury a Christian, it is a declaration, hope in the promises of God, that God will be faithful to fulfill everything that he has promised to his people. Who are you? As a Christian. You're dying. You're so journey. You're hoping. You read a few verses from a poem that's familiar to you. John Dunn. Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful. Thou art not so. Those who thou thinkest thou dost overthrow, die not. Poor death. Nor yet canst thou kill me. Thou art a slave to fate, chance kings and desperate men and dust with poison war and sickness dwell, and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke. Why swellest thou then? One short sleep passed, and we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death thou die. That is the promise of God to you, and in which you hope. Lord Jesus, make us ever mindful of who we are. Make us ever mindful that you have gained the victory as we come to this table. Our hearts be encouraged that this sacrament does not memorialize a dead man but celebrates a risen and raining king of glory.