As we see to follow Jesus, we sometimes have to wrestle with the tension between waiting and going.  Some people should go when they should wait, and others wait when they should go.  If we pay attention to some of the details in the story of Abram, there are some key lessons to help us follow Christ.  

 Here are some observations:

1.  We all have a tendency to settle. Terah set out to go to Canaan, but he didn't make it. 

 Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

My grandfather used to take me fishing on the Little Ocmulgee river outside of McRae, Georgia. The anticipation would grow as we would pack tackle and food and supplies and stop to pick up live bait. The thrill was at an fever pitch while we backed the boat down into the water and he cranked the engine as it started to get just a bit light. As we wound down the river, I would see a spot where I knew fish would be, and he would calmly say, "There's a better spot over here." That back and forth would replay several times until we finally got to the spot he intended and where, sure enough, there was an abundance of fish.

If we let him, God will take us to a great place.

2.  God's Leadership Is Different From Our Expectation: Abrham Didn't Know Where He Was Going.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  Genesis 12:1

 Can you imagine the conversation Abram had with Sarah?

A: Honey, back your bags, we're going.

S: Where we going?

A: I don't know.

S:  What should I pack?

A: Everything.

S:  What's the weather going to be like?

A: I don't know.

S:  You're not being real helpful.

A:  God says it will be good if we go.

S:  Go where?

A:  I don't know.

God leading his people into the great unkown is normal. That's why Christianity is called "a faith."  More than a set of propositions, God actually expects us to  trust him.  

3.  God Promises Stuff Only He Can Do:  His supernatural blessing is greater than anything we can concoct on our own.

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  Genesis 12:2-3

We can't make ourselves a great nation, and we can't bless ourselves.  God makes some audacious promises to us, and in Him those promises are met.  

4.  There is Provision for the Plan: Don't Forget The Moneybag 

 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan.  Genesis 12:4-6

If Haran served any strategic purpose it was to give Abram and Sarai an opportunity to let God fill their money bag.  The Lord is a good shepherd who leads us by green pastures and still waters.  He restores our souls.  He lets us rest when we need it.  And he gives us abundant provision for the journey.

APPLICATION

So what do we do with this?  What do we learn?

1.  Terah went and settled; Abram separated and followed.

2.  Starting the journey is more important that the final destination.

3.  God knows the end; sometimes we don't.

4.  God makes God-sized promises to us that only He can keep.

5.  Provision is for the purpose of possessing, not to sustain settling.

The Bottom Line:  God has more for us - He is "the architect and builder" of an eternal city, and He beckons us to follow Him with abandon.  We may not know exactly where we're going, but He does.  And the point of the journey is God Himself - HE is our reward, our destination.  As long as we get God - the 'where' is really not an issue.

 If you feel like your in a fog and unsure what the future holds, it's OK, if you have the confidence that God has you firmly in his hands.  

Wow.  What do you say that?  What's the come back?  "Oh yeh?  Well my father will spray water on your father .  . ?"  I was stunned in silence:  His dad would come and burn our house down.  I couldn't top that.  But I still knew my dad was best.

In the same way that sons look up to their fathers, fathers want sons who grow up and join them in the family business.  That's why it's not surprising that a major theme of the New Testament is maturity:    God is calling his children to grow up.  Consider these verses:

I Corinthians 13:11  - When I became a man, I put away childish things.  Playing in the sandbox is normal and expected for 5 year olds; it looks odd if a 45 year old is playing in the sand with Tonka Toys.  To step into maturity, there's stuff we have to give up, and stuff we have to embrace.

I John 2:12-14  - I'm writing to you: little children, young men, fathers.  God acknowledges our growth trajectory.  We don't mind it (too much) when babies have messy diapers, toddlers throw tantrums, or  teenagers have bad moods.  But its embarrassing when a 30 year old acts 12.  We cuddle with babies, put toddlers on our laps, and create loving environments for teenagers.

• Little Children:  they understand their forgiveness and their security with the Father.
• Young Men:  they're fighting the Father's battles.
• Fathers:  they know him who was from the beginning:  they've embraced the Father's eternal perspective.

Genesis 1:26:  Let us make man in our image . . . let him rule.  The Father wants children who look like him and who participate with Him in the family business.  Part of the separation from God that results from sin is that it disfigured us and pushed us away from the Father's intentions.  This is what Jesus came to restore:  to make us look like Him (Romans 8:29 - conformed to His image) and to bring us back into the family business (Ephesians 2:10 - created in Christ for good works). 

John 4:34:  My food . . . is to do.     Our older brother Jesus sets an amazing example of maturity: the thing that gives him life, that inspires him, that feeds him, that really gets him going is doing the will of the Father.  

This brings us to an observation about the Christian life:  we distort what it means to follow Christ if we make too big of a distinction between being and doing.  We can say that doing flows from being, and that abiding must precede acting - but if there is no doing, there is no being.  These are two sides of the same coin, like faith and repentance; to separate them distorts the gospel.  Consider this chart:

 With most of these, the movement is from left to right.  But with some of them - the only way to arrive at the one on the left is to engage in the one on the right.  For example - God worked for six days, then He rested.  Jesus (Luke 4) was engaged in ministering all day and all night, then had to go be alone with the Father.  To gain perspective, we often have to engage in practice.  That is to say, it is deception to think that we've learned something because we understand the concept.  

The Hebrew understanding of knowing is doing - we only know something whe it is really being lived out in our lives.  We don't get points for knowing (intellectually) the 10 Commandments; we please God when we live the 10 Commandments.  Maturity, then, is both a matter of knowing and doing; to separate these is to introduce an Arostotilian false dichotomy into the Christian life that distorts what it means to follow Jesus.

To summarize:  Our Father wants children who look like Him and who participate in the family business.  This is what we call maturity.  To grow, there's stuff we have to give up.  To follow, there's stuff we have to do.  Maturity starts when we start understanding who the Father really is; maturity is manifest when our Father sees us beside him, working in the Father's harvest.  

Wherever we are in our spiritual journey - God has more for us.  Let's enjoy walking with the Father - and working with the Father - today.   

Ivan Voronaev

There was no perceptible Pentecostal movement in the Soviet Union before the 1920's.  Ivan Voronaev was a Russian Baptist preacher who had fled persecution from the Tsarist regime.  He experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in New York City, and after establishing a church there, felt called to return to his homeland as a missionary.  He arrived in Odessa in 1921.  By 1928 there were 350 Pentecostal churches with a membership of over seventeen thousand in the Odessa region and in Ukraine.

The Soviet regime eventually caught on to the danger that evangelicals posed to their utopian/statist dreams and began an intense persecution of Baptists and Pentecostals in 1929.  By 1935 the number of evangelicals had been reduced by half.  Whatever happened to Ivan Voronaev?  I'm glad you asked:

Ivan was arrested after midnight one night in 1929 by Stalin's secret police.  He was accused of being a spy for imperialist America.  The fact that he had received some financial support from American Assemblies of God and the Russian and Eastern European Mission was used against him as evidence.  Ivan was shipped off to the gulags of Siberia, to be followed by his wife in 1933.  Katherine was released from the Gulag 24 years later, after Stalin had died.  Ivan never came home.  He was last seen in 1937.  His life ended when he was placed in a cell with hungry, vicious dogs.  He lies in an unknown Siberian Grave.

The Soviet Union died in 1991.  At last count, there are over 7,000 evangelical churches in Ukraine. 

The gospel has often made progress in less than ideal circumstances.

We're going to start at the end and work backwards:

5.  Progress  So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily (Acts 19:20).  That is the story of Acts - God's Word winning.  In won in Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, and eventually conquered the Roman Empire.  Jesus prophesied it through promise (Acts 1:8) and parable (Matthew 13:31-33).  And it happened.  This wasn't the spread of religion; this was the spread of the Word of life (John 6:68).  But how did this happen?

4.  Proclamation  And immediately he proclaimed Jesus . . .  (Acts 9:20).  The formula here is pretty straightforward:  the gospel spread because it was proclaimed. Over and over and over:  Acts 26:1-23, Acts 24:10-21, Acts 17:22-31, Actst 14:14-17, Acts 13:16-41, Acts 11:34-43, Acts 8:35, Acts 7:1-53, Acts 5:29-32, Acts 4:8-12, Acts 3:12-26.  Perhaps the two most famous gospel proclamations in Acts are Paul on Mars Hill, preaching to Gentiles, and Peter on the day of Pentecost, preaching to Jews in Jerusalem.  The common denominator that runs through the book of Acts is the consistent speaking of God's gospel  There is no gospel progress without it.

3.  Power  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4).  The proclamation of the gospel wasn't just a human endeavor, it was animated by the Holy Spirit.  God Himself endowed his followers with spiritual power to be bold witness.  And this didn't just happen once:  And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:8), And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:31).  The believers were continually being refreshed and refilled with the Holy Spirit who empowered them for bold witness.  But why did they have so much power in their lives?

2.  Prayer  And these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer (Acts 1:14).  These early Christians were hooked on prayer.  They just loved haning out with other Christians and praying.  They did it so much the Bible describes them as being devoted to prayer.  And so we're not surprised to find multiple mentions of prayer throughout Acts:  And they devoted themselves . . . to the prayers (Acts 2:42), And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God (Acts 4:24-31), But we will devote ourselves to prayer . . . (Acts 6:4).  These Christians were onto something.  But what would motivate them to spend so much time seeking God in prayer?

1.  Promise  But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you (Acts 1:5).  Jesus told his followers to wait for power.  They waited in Jerusalem for 10 days, praying and seeking God, and then the Holy Spirit was poured and they were filled and dramatically empowerd.  So since they got the power, they didn't need to pray any more, right?  Not at all!  They kept praying - because they kept living in the promise of Jesus.  We often look to that instruction to wait and the subsequent day of Pentecost as a one off thing.  But these early Christians seemed to live in the promise of Jesus.

So let's turn all this around and see how it is that the gospel of Jesus spread so dramatically throughout the Mediterranean world.  What did those early Christians do?

1.  They lived in the promise of Jesus that they would be empowered.

2.  They were devoted to prayer.

3.  They were empowered by the Holy Spirit.

4.  They proclaimed the gospel boldly.

5.  The result:  amazing gospel progress:  So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily (Acts 19:20).  

This isn't a formula; it's a paradigm - a map - of how the early Christians saw such great gospel progress.  And this paradigm is being lived and experienced in many places around the world today.  the big question God is asking us:  Are we willing to pay the price of prayer to walk in God's power paradigm for gospel progress?  Honestly, I don't think there are any short cuts.  And very honestly - there are about 1000 distractions to keep us from praying the way those early Christians did.  But it all goes back to living in the promise of Jesus.  Let's make this our prayer:

God, we want to see PROGRESS in the advance of your purposes on the earth: draw us back to your PROMISE so that we'll seek you in PRAYER and walk in your POWER to PROCLAIM your gospel.  Amen.  

Go HERE for more on the GOSPEL.

As we take a moment to reflect on 2011, one observation I make about every year, is that every year is a mixture – in each year there are good bits and bad bits, challenges and blessings. It will be another year of life:  victory and celebration, tragedy and turmoil.  There will be tokens of God’s common grace, as well as examples of the consequences of sin.

• Somewhere in the world, there will be conflict.
• Somewhere in the world, a business will succeed and another will fail.
• Some families will experience the beauty of a baby being born, others the death of beloved family member.

In the midst of a world that sometimes seems out of control, God is inviting us to a life of eternal substance.  We can discover this life through the WISDOM of SEEKING GOD.

One of the most interesting set of characters in the Bible are the Wise Men who arrived to worship Jesus some time after the Nativity events.  They travelled some great distance because they thought they saw the sign of a newborn King in the sky.   In the Greek text they are called magoi – often translated as wise men.  Many scholars think they were priests from Persia, possibly from the Zoroastrian religion.

We don’t know for sure.  We don’t know exactly how many there were or exactly where they were from. The key to understanding the Magi isn’t in trying to decipher what the text doesn’t say, but what it does say.  And what it tells us is that these MAGI were seeking the new born King.

They were God seekers.  They dropped whatever it was they had been doing to seek God.  We don’t all have the luxury of dropping everything – but we can walk in the wisdom of the Wise Men and SEEK GOD, even in the midst of our usually busy, often messed-up, modern lives.

THE BIBLE has a lot to say about seeking God. The Bible gives us some very clear directions – some specific instructions – on what it means to seek god and how to go about it.  To put this in context:  We are launching into a new year.  I believe this can be a year of blessing, a year of growth, a year of increase, a year in which God’s purposes break into your life, into your family, into our church.  I believe that God DOES have good things in store for us this year.  But I believe that GOD wants us to seek Him.

Let’s consider a few of the instructions God gives us about seeking Him. 

1.  Seek God Whole-heartedly

You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.  Jeremiah 29:13

But from there you will seek the LORD your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.  Deuteronomy 4:29

 Whole-hearted seeking of God means to make this the dominant priority of your life.

2.  Seek God Earnestly

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; 
my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.  Psalm 63:1 

 Earnestly seeking God means to treat this like serious business.  It’s important. 

3.  Seek God Continually 

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near;  Isaiah 55:6

Continually seeking God means to build our lives in a God-oriented direction – daily, not waiting until things are bad before we call on Him.

4.  Seek God PERSONALLY

 You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.”  Psalm 27:8 

Seeking God personally is to seek Him for who He is, and not what we can get from Him.  Yes – it’s important to let our requests be known to Him – but in seeking his face, we are seeking to walk in his presence, setting our hearts and minds on God. 

Walking with God – seeking Him – is a process.  Perhaps you’re like me and you don’t like the idea of process.  I’ve grown up with microwaves and I like push button solutions:

• Push-button problem solving

• Push-button relationships

• Push-button conflict resolution

Seeking God, however, is a matter of walking with Him.  Practically, it means that we seek Him in his Word and in prayer.   When we read the Bible, we are feeding our spirit, and our mind is being washed with God’s Word.  We are interacting with the very thoughts of God.  When we pray, we are bearing our soul to God.  Praying with our minds, and with our spirit – we pray because we have a need to commune with God – not only to lay before Him the burdens of our soul, BUT to enjoy his presence, just to be with him.

Think about these wise men for just a moment. For them seeking God wasn’t easy.  They didn’t have a Bible; they had to search the sky to figure this out.  They travelled a way.

And what did they do when they got there?

Verse 11:  And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him.

They travelled all that way – just to worship.  It reminds me of the story of the woman who poured the costly ointment on Jesus’ feet.  Someone said – you could have sold that, and the money could have bee given to the poor.

These Persian Wise Men could have been teaching literacy in Madagascar.  But they understood something that only a few people on the earth at that time understood.  There’s no greater human pursuit than worshipping Jesus.  As the Westminster Confession says – The chief end of man – his primary purpose - is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.  These Wise men were enjoying – and glorifying – as they worshipped. 

So, I commend these Wise Men to you as a model for seeking God:

1.  Seek God Whole-heartedly

2.  Seek God Earnestly

3.  Seek God Continually

4.  Seek God Personally

In closing, I want to leave you with a POWER PROMISE about seeking God.  This whole thing about seeking God – it’s not something to be embraced as a duty – but as a delight.  Yes, we NEED to seek Him.  But it’s more accurate to say we GET to seek Him.

Listen to Hebrews chapter 11, verse 6:

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. 

God rewards those who seek Him.  And He wants you to BELIEVE that He rewards those who seek Him.

THE BIG IDEA IS THIS:

God has a BIG REWARD for you in 2012.  That reward comes from seeking Him.  The reward of seeking GOD – is GOD HIMSELF.  We Get God!!!  When you understand that you get God when you seek Him – you really do drop everything else.  These wise men threw down these costly gifts – gold, frankincense, myrrh.  Those things were worth a whole lot of money.  But they were the ones who came out better in the end.  They went back richer – because they met Jesus.  They went back fuller – because they had given themselves away in worship.

God is inviting us to make this year 2012 – the year that we seek God.

Let it snow

And all this snow got me meditating on this bit of scripture.  Snow is a picture of many things – but in this text, it is a picture of God’s Word: 

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there but water the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; 

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:10-11

What a great promise!  As we start a new year, God has given us a picture of his word covering the earth like snow.  I’m especially encouraged by the power of the phrase “it SHALL accomplish that which I purpose.”  God speaks, and things happen.  God purposes, and his will is done.

As we start this new year, I want to encourage you that God will accomplish his Word. God will fulfill his promises.  God will do all that is in his heart to do.  He asks us to pray, to believe, to join him in faith - trusting that He is good, He is mighty . . . He is God!  

And because He is who He is, we can say in confidence - it's going to be a good year.  Not perfect, not problem-free, but good.  And we say this in faith believing that the best is yet to come!