Sermon Central
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Overview On Genesis 12: Abram's Availability
Contributed by Bruce Ball on Jan 31, 2009 (message contributor)
Summary: This message hi-lites Abram’s willingness to be available for God, as shown in Genesis 12. Because he made himself available to God, God blessed Abram. And God will bless us today if we make ourselves available to Him, too.
Last Thursday night, we learned how man fell away from God when we chose to partake of the forbidden fruit, and how that has caused mankind to be in sin ever since.
God gave Adam and Eve a set of rules to live by, but they decided to do what they wanted to do instead of what God wanted them to do. Doesn’t that sound a lot like the ancient Israelites? Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like our society today, doesn’t it?
Our entire walk with the Lord is based upon one thing: Taking our focus off what we desire and keeping it on Him to see what He desires for us. The more we focus on Him, the more we will desire to walk in His ways. But as much as we want to do that, we seem to get distracted by those things of the world that we find pleasurable.
What we fix our focus on determines what our life will be like. The Apostle Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord. Jesus taught us that where our hearts are, our treasures will also be. If we keep hanging on to the things of this world, our main focus in life will be worldly, but if we start trying to turn our eyes from the world to God, we will be righteous and holy.
In our last message, we followed society from Adam down to Noah, and saw that every generation had become more evil than the one before it. Even after the flood, we saw where the sinful nature of man caused him to build the Tower of Babel, not because he loved God enough to try and reach up to Him, but because he thought he could get to heaven by his own works, ignoring God every step of the way.
And as much as we might not like to admit it, we are much like that today. We are determined to rely on our own abilities without relying on God.
Scripture tells us that every inclination of their hearts were evil all the time. Scripture could have been talking about us just as easily as it was talking about the people of Noah’s day. But as much as we turn our backs on God; He continues to love us enough to protect us and offer us a way back to Him.
We continue in tonight by talking about a man named Abram. He lived in a place called Ur, which is in the southern part of what we call Iraq. He lived there with his father, Terah, and all of his relatives. Terah decided to take his grandson named Lot, and his son Abram along with Abrams’ wife and travel to the land of Canaan. They ended up stopping in a place called Haran, which was about 600 miles to the north. They ended up staying there, and that is where Abram’s father, Terah, died many years later.
Let’s talk about;
1. FINISHING WHAT WE START
Have you ever started something you didn’t finish? Terah set out to go to the land of Canaan, but stopped in Haran and ended up staying there until he died.
Sometime after his death, God spoke to his son Abram.
Let’s turn to;
‘The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
‘So, Abram left as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.’
As a Christian, our goal is always supposed to be on the Promised Land, following Jesus towards Heaven, but all too often, we let the things of this world capture our focus and our desires, and we stop in Haran. In short, we make a choice to settle for less.
Abram’s father did the same thing that we do today; the one thing that causes us not to pursue what God wants from us. We let the world steal our focus. We get sidetracked and the vision we had from God just doesn’t seem so clear anymore.
Tonight, we are going to see how God worked in Abram’s life, and how He still wants to work in your life. Abram let God call the shots in his life and was rewarded greatly for doing so. Are you letting God call the shots in your life today?
