God’s Story Is Our Story: From Genesis To JesusSample

Reflecting on the last week: This week we’ve seen that Abraham and his children are complex characters. At times they follow God with remarkable faith (as here). At other times they turn to human machinations (Abraham sleeping with Hagar and deception of Pharaoh/Abimelech) to try and grasp at the things God promised apart from God’s grace. How often do we follow the same pattern in our lives? Forgetting God’s goodness and settling for seemingly wise (but truly foolish) manmade plans? We all do it, and in the worst cases we wonder whether we have forfeited God’s promises and lost his grace. Abraham’s story shows us that God’s grace in your life cannot be stopped by your failures. He can turn lying Abrahams and mocking Sarahs into faithful followers. He can turn a man who sleeps with his servant to get a child God promised to give through his wife, into a man who is willing to lose this child because he trusts God to bring him back (Heb. 11:17-19). This should give us profound hope in the face of our failures: God cannot be stopped. Yet, we must not overlook the fact that God prefers to use our obedience to bring about his purposes. As this passage shows, God ultimately uses Abraham’s obedience (in spite of his failures) to bring blessing. God calls all of us to be changed, but not merely for our own sakes. He calls us, so that through our righteous lives he might show himself to the world, draw the nations to his presence, and bring about his ultimate mission: blessing the world with his life, love, justice and mercy—with his reign on earth as it is in heaven. So the next time we sin and justify it by saying, “This won’t hurt anyone else,” we must remember that while this sin does not disqualify us from God’s grace, it does impede his purposes. We do hurt people, because our sin obstructs them knowing and seeing God in ways we may never fully understand.