Good morning. Is there anybody out there? Good morning. Well, we're welcome here this morning, and glad to have you.
There's a number of people that are away for some event, kind of like last week when the number of the men were away for the men's retreat in PEI. And we did have a wonderful weekend. It was a great weekend of lots of food and zero sleep. So just a way men's retreat should be.
So I encourage the men next year if you're interested, or if you're not interested, you might get interested and we can go to the men's retreat together next year. It would be great. Lordwin is now going to be the official ambassador for the men's retreat, having tasted it for the first time. And I do believe that he put on five pounds last weekend.
So that was great. But we go for the teaching. That's what it's for. So let's pray.
Thank you Father for bringing us here this morning. We thank you for the Lord Jesus, our Savior. And Lord as we have just been singing, may this be a prayer that you would keep us near the cross. And that we would be there thanking you for what you've done, that we would be trusting the cross alone, the work of the one who was on that cross alone for our eternal future and for our life and our hope in this world.
We thank you for the Lord Jesus. And I just pray that you would guide us this morning and open our eyes and our hearts to hear your word and that you would make us more like him. For anybody who's here this morning, it doesn't know Christ as their Savior. Lord that you would draw them to you and that they will see that Christ Jesus is the only hope.
We thank you in his name. Amen. So I'm continuing in our studies in the book of Genesis, but it takes a turn after chapter 11. It's very interesting.
So in the first, here's my summary of what we've done so far. Chapters 1 to 11, the events of chapters 1 to 11 are a little over 2,000 years of history, of chronology. So you've got roughly 2,000 years in chapters 1 to 11. Chapter 12 to 39, we've got roughly 300 years, 350 years of history.
So it's amazing that that is so compacted that many, many, many books have been written on chapters 1 to 11. There are some books on the next chapters, but that concentrated little part of the scriptures is roughly 2,000 years of history. So in the first 11 chapters we saw the formation of the universe, the formation of life, the formation of mankind, male and female, God made them. The fall of mankind into sin.
And in chapter 3, verse 16, we see the promise of the deliverer who would come to deliver man from the sinful state, the new sinful state they just had found themselves in. The promise through the seed of the woman would come and deliver, who would crush the head of Satan. We see the first children in chapter 4 and the first murder in chapter 4. So then we see this ferocious reign of sin.
I tried to start all of these with F, just for fun. Fun starts with F as well. So there you go. The ferocious reign of sin and death, you keep reading in chapter 5, so and so live so long and they have children and they live so much longer and then they died.
And then the next person lives and they live so long and then they die. And so you read that through a bell ringing through chapter 5. And then in chapter 6 we read that man had degraded so far to the point that every imagination of the heart of man was only evil continually. Then God brings judgment to the world.
So we read of judgment in 7 and 8 when the flood comes. The flood became and wiped out the entire population, animal population and human population of the world in chapter 7 and 8. We also see the first mention of the word grace and Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. So we see the first salvation and the first grace in chapter 7 of Genesis.
And then we get to what I call the fresh start. A covenant with Noah chapter 9 and the ark has settled down into the mountains of Ararat. It has opened up and mankind, which at that point in time is now down to eight people, go out into the world and start populating the world. And then we get a little further over into chapter 11.
And chapter 10 is more or less the genealogies that go from that event of going out of the ark to this point in chapter 11 where we've got a few thousand people on the earth and they all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, they practice what they've always practiced, which is sin and rebellion against God and they build the tower of Babel. And from that man was sent out by the confusion of the languages God said we will go down and confuse our languages and that they wouldn't understand and had to stop the building and they were sent out throughout the world. And that's where we have, and we kind of spent a little bit of time looking at all the different cultures of the world where they have come from based on that event. So now we are going to look at, I don't know if we will do 50 chapters of Genesis, but we will definitely, Lord willing look at the life of Abraham.
Abraham is the first, the scriptures seem to change from recapping events in the first 11 chapters to going to the lives of people in the next 39 chapters. So the first 11, it's events, it's the creation, it's the flood, it's the tower of Babel and so on. And now we're getting specifically into the lives of people, it's almost like biographies from here until the end. So you've got Abraham, you've got Isaac, you've got Jacob, you've got Joseph going through the rest of the chapter, of the book of Genesis.
So in Genesis chapter 12 as we begin we see the formation of a nation, God says to Abraham, I'm going to say Abraham probably throughout, I will his name at this point in time is Abram, okay, his name is Abram at this point, but it will be later changed to Abraham. So Abraham is a very interesting character. As I studied through and thought about Abraham, first of all his name means exalted father, very interesting. This man is walking around, his name is exalted father, hi what's your name, it's exalted father, how many children do you have?
None, oh interesting, but I have one promise, really, nice to meet you. And so this is Abraham, but he's also called in scriptures, he's the father of those who believe, you will see as we go later in scripture that Abraham quite simply believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, and that is the pillar of salvation that is given in Romans chapter 4. He is revered by the three major religions of the world. So Christians, Jews and Muslims all hold Abraham in the highest of esteem within their religions.
I would say Judaism and Christianity would probably be almost identical where they see Abraham historically, but if you read the Quran, which I haven't, but I know what's there, they depart as Abraham is kind of the founder of their faith going back, but it's not through Isaac, it's through Ishmael, the son that Abraham generated on his own where he has this habit of saying, I know what God said, but I'm going to try to do it my way. He was the first rank Sinatra of the world. So those of us who are old know what I'm talking about. He has this famous song called I Did It My Way, and it's almost like an anthem among those who are materialistic.
So Abraham kind of had this whole thing and we'll see this today where he kind of did it my way. So there is a departure there from Islam where they believe that Ishmael is the promised son. The scriptures teach otherwise for sure. So he has held as an example in the New Testament of justification by faith.
He's read that in Romans chapter 4, Galise and chapter 3, and Hebrews chapter 11. He's also called a friend of God. What an amazing title to be given to somebody, to be called a friend of God. That's Abraham and we will look at him in death.
So I'd like to read the scriptures. I will put it up there for you to see. A little disclaimer here. I do try to put the scriptures up there as much as I can.
But if the font is too small for you to read, there are Bibles available. There's some at the back. You can bring your own and put it on your lap and open it up and read it. So it's always nice to hear the leaves turning when you're up here where people are scrolling through their Bible to find stuff.
Or now it's this rub, rub, rub, rub, scrolling through your Bible. Alright, I'm going to read this. Genesis chapter 11 verse 26. When Tara had lived, 70 years he fathered Abraham, Nahor, and Heron.
These are the generations of Tara. Tara fathered Abraham, Nahor, and Heron. And Heron fathered Lot. Heron died in the presence of his father, Tara, in the land of his kindred, in Ur, of the Chaldeans.
And Abraham and Nahor took wives. And the name of Abraham's wife was Sarai. And the name of Nahor's wife, Milka, was the daughter of Heron, the father of Milka and Iska. Now Sarah was barren.
She had no child. Tara took Abraham, his son, and Lot, the son of Heron, his grandson, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law, and his son, Abraham's wife, and they went forth together from Ur, of the Chaldeans, to go into the land of Canaan. But when they came to Heron, so here's where there could be some confusion. Heron, I'm going to pronounce it that way.
Heron was the son of Tara, okay, Abraham's brother. But there's also a place called spelled exactly the same. Okay, so I'm going to call that Heron, like Iran. Just to try to keep them distinct, if I can.
Okay? So they went forth from Ur, the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. But when they came to Heron, this is in verse 31. They settled there.
The days of Tara were 205 years, and Tara died in Heron. Now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and Him who dishonors you, I will curse.
And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abraham went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was 70 years old when he departed from Heron. And Abraham took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son, and all the possessions that they had gathered and the people that they had acquired in Heron.
And they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abraham passed through the land to a place at Shechem, and to the oak of Mora. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land, and the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, to your offspring, I will give this land. So he built there an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him.
From there, he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and A on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord, and he called upon the name of the Lord, and Abraham journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb. So Abraham, as we can see, he descended from Shem, and who was Noah's son. His father was a man named Tara, and they lived in a place called Er in Mesopotamia.
And I've put that up there on the map. So this is over. Here's the Euphrates and the Tigris River, and this would be today, modern day Iraq. So that's where in Mesopotamia, where Abraham was brought up.
His father, Tara, was there. So we see the father had three sons, Abram, Nahor, who was named after his grandfather, and Heron. So they lived in Er, as I said, in southern Mesopotamia. Now Er was an interesting place.
The archaeologists have gone in, and they've dug up much of the area around Er. And they discovered that it was a great and the most advanced city of its day. It had a university. It was a very cultural, bountiful place.
There was music and crafts and a library. There was roughly 300,000 people living there. And it seemed to specialize in things like astronomy and mathematics. But it was also the center of idolatry.
They worshipped the moon god. There was a large temple with whatever they called those bases, or ziggurat, ziggurat, for the base, similar to what the Tower of Babel would have had. And they worshipped nature, the moon god. The moon gods by coincidence name is sin.
And then we read this in Joshua. It's at the bottom here. Joshua, this is in 24 verses 1 to 3, and Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to check them, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges and the officers of Israel. And they presented themselves before God, and Joshua said to all the people, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, long ago.
So he's referencing back to a long time ago at the start here, where we are in Genesis. Your father's lived beyond the Euphrates. Terra, the father of Abraham and Nahor, they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and led him through the land, all the land of Canaan.
And made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac. So even Joshua knew the story in the background of Abraham. That Abraham came from a place where there was much idolatry.
Abraham's family served other gods. It's very interesting. It's very interesting. It's believed that, first of all, there's a legend, Jewish legend that says that Terra was a dealer in idols, a manufacturer of idols, and that Abraham at the time, when he lived in her, may have been his assistant.
So the whole family was fully idolatry, but somehow Abraham found the living God of heaven amidst all of these idols. And I found that interesting, because sometimes I listen to a number of men give their testimonies over at Charles' Bible or at the Emmanuel Bible camp last weekend. And I noticed in a couple of them, some of them grew up in the church, some of them grew up around hearing the gospel and so on. But some had never heard anything about it.
They grew up in Ur of the Caledese. They grew up around idolatry. They grew up around homes that had never even mentioned the name of God except as a swear word. Yet somehow they found the God of heaven and the God of heaven found that.
So here's Abraham who is living amongst all this idolatry, living in a family that was pagan and idolatrous. Yes, God found him. God pointed him out and pulled him out of that. It says that Heron died.
This is Abraham's brother. So this tragedy, I'm sure, must have impacted Abraham. So now, in one way, they impacted him, he has to be the guardian for Heron's son, Lot. So Lot is now joined to Abraham because his father has died.
There's also, and this is a very interesting, it's a Jewish fable. So fables, I don't know what a fable means. It's not true or fable just means it's kind of like made up, but could be true possibly. I'm not sure.
But there's also a story that's told that Terra told Heron to worship the gods of fire. And he refused to do so. And his father threw him as a sacrifice. Before the gods.
And I thought about that. I thought, okay, that's just a fable. But then I started thinking about later when Abraham was asked to take his son and offer him as a sacrifice before God. Did he so willingly go and do that because he had seen that in his own family?
I don't know. And it's 100% conjecture on my part. But I'm wondering if the two were linked. Just the way my head thinks.
Anyway, Abraham gets married and then we're introduced to his wife, Sarah. We read that in 1130. Her name means princess. And she's barren.
She's about 75 years old, married to the exalted father. So we have the princess married to the exalted father. She's 75 years old and has had no children. Interesting.
In ancient cultures, barrenness is viewed as a curse. There were others that were, were throughout the scriptures and you read of the grief of these ladies, the deep, deep grief of these ladies. They were outcasts in their society because of their inability to bear children. And I'm sure Sarah says she's a beautiful woman but was not able to have children.
She went through all of this time. I'm sure it was a deep grief to her. So they started off on this spiritual journey. Now, they made this journey in partial obedience.
Abraham left, first of all, they went so far and then they delayed. They went to her aunt and they stayed there. Secondly, Abraham was told to go and leave his family behind. Leave his father's house behind and just go.
Who did he take with him? His father. His father, I think, was a very type A sort of guy, a lot of influence in Abraham's life. And when they got to Her aunt, he probably said, boy, we're staying here.
And that's where they stayed. And they parked there for a while. Now, if you read the King James or the new King James, the first verse says, now the Lord had said to Abraham, get out of your country from your family and from your father's house to the land I will show you. It seems in verse 1 of chapter 12 that God is reminding him against saying, I already told you.
Get out. Leave your family and leave your father's house and go to this land. The Lord is very patient when it comes to us being, doing it our way, isn't he? Do you ever find that there's times in your life you do it your way?
You fail and you flop. God doesn't slap you around necessarily. God just says, hey, he takes the way he speaks to us and he reminds us. You know, maybe try it my way.
And so here he is speaking to Abraham and saying, I already told you to get out of that land. Follow me. In Joshua, I'm sorry, in Acts, everybody remember who Stephen is? Stephen was the one of the deacons in the early church and he was very, very bold and then he was taken before the council and they decided, you know what, that testimony is worthy of stoning him to death.
So that's what they did. They took him out and they stoned him to death. And that's where you first are introduced to Saul who became Paul, became known as Paul. But before he died, he's giving this testimony and he says in Acts chapter 7 verse 2 to 4, he said, and Stephen said, brothers and fathers, hear me.
The God of glory appeared to our Father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamias. That's in the earth of the Chaldines. Before he lived in Heron and he said to him, get out from your land, from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you. Then he went out from the land of the Chaldines and lived in Heron.
And after his father died, God removed him from there into the land in which you are now living. This is in the middle of Jerusalem. Okay, so Stephen in his testimony backs up what we already believe from reading in Genesis. So he didn't fully obey.
Abraham wasn't leading. It seems that his father, he didn't leave his parents behind like he was told to do and the tarot came with him. It seems like his father probably had a major influence. They didn't go to the Promised Land until his father died.
They stopped in Heron which is a, I read the Greek on that or the Hebrew word and it means, it means parched. If you're in a place where God has asked you to go somewhere and you decide you're going somewhere else, you'll probably find that land is parched. Dry, empty, a wasteland, a wilderness. And this is where they are.
Abraham is later, he decided, okay, once his father dies, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm following the Lord. And he followed the Lord and he did what he was told to do. Abraham later is known as a giant of the faith. Even in Galatians chapter 3 verse 7 he's called the father of the believing.
And he didn't start out as a hero of the faith. In fact, the more I read of this, the more I realized that in my own life I blow it like Abraham did. Like Abraham does in these accounts. And so what faith is, is faith is each time you come back and say, okay God, I'm sorry, I did this my own way.
Now I believe you. It's believing over and over and over again. You have to come back and I don't believe me. I'm not saying, there's word belief.
I'm not saying you have to keep your your your salvation alive by believing over and over and over again. That's that's that's an error. When you are saved, you are placed in the Lord's hand and no one, nothing can pluck you from his hand, forever you're his. But the walk is different.
The walk sometimes is a stumble. The walk is two steps forward, five steps back, five steps forward, one step back. And that's where we we really need to just get back to the Lord and trust him and believe him. And that's what Abraham was known for.
He was known for his belief in God. Genesis chapter 12 verses what the three exercises explains, I got promised Abraham a land, a nation and a blessing. In verses one to three, it says, now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country from your kindred, your father's house to the land. I will show you.
I got it. There we go. His go from the land that I will show you and I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great.
You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you. I will curse and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. You see, there's no doubt that Abraham had it tough.
His brother died. His father was an idolater. He's stuck in a place that's parched. He's got a wife who was barren.
He's got all of these things going on. He had to care for a nephew. He wasn't expecting that. And he made choices that delayed him in going and following the will of God.
His past was honking him as he went along. He kind of kind of hitched himself to all of this stuff that was from his past and it delayed him. It held him back. And I was kind of thinking about that.
I was thinking about how it just as an application for our own life. You see, my family upbringing, my heritage, my past sins, all of these things, I can use those as a hitching post. I can just go and just tie myself to it like that horse is tied to that hitching post. And I can say, this is where I'm stuck.
I just keep, I can't stop thinking about my past. I can't stop talking about my past. My past brings me down. My past is this.
I used to be this and I'm still that and I can't, I can't, I can't just can't get past any of that. That's a hitching post. But I think what the Lord wants us to do is see it as a signpost. Pointing us, don't go back there.
Take this direction. Those are behind you. You've passed that. You've passed that sign post.
You're moving on to the next place. It can hold you back or we can learn from it. Be shaped by it and move forward. It seems that whenever we bring our, whatever we bring into our new life, whenever we bring into our new life in Christ, stuff from the old life, it's going to become a problem.
It's going to tie us down. It's going to bog us down. Hebrew talks about the sin that so easily ensnares us. Now every time I read that verse, I think of one thing.
I think of Don Salmons up here talking about the time he was walking through the field and a big sunflower got wrapped around his boot and he was walking home and he was trying to drag himself home like this and he's got this awful limp and he gets home and his mom says, what's wrong with you? And he goes, I don't know. And here he's got this great big sunflower tied wrapped around his leg. It reminds me, the sin that so easily ensnares us.
Just wrapped around us. We need to be past that. We need to say, okay, that's the past. It's behind me.
I'm going forward. So then we see this covenant with God. Abraham is blessed by God in Genesis 12 again, the same verses. He says, I will make you a great nation.
I will make you a great nation. Israel is what's in the future. Israel is what he's talking about as the future. He had to leave his past behind, he had to go where God was sending him and Israel was what the future was going to be for him.
That land. That land that right now they're fighting over. That land that, that what's going on in our world today is so horrible. This is a land that was promised to Israel by the God of heaven.
Israel, just so you know, God has blessed the country of Israel in huge ways. In fact, it's number four in the world in citrus production. It's number three in the world in flowers. It's a great nation.
God says, I will make your name great. He identifies himself with them. 66%, no, sorry, 0.66% of the world's population are Jewish. But did you know that they've won between 25 and 35% of the Nobel Prizes from that tiny little population?
God has greatly blessed the Jewish people in modern days. We see it. But in the past, he has blessed them. Through Israel was going to come the Savior of the world.
Nothing is greater than that. You can produce all the flowers and citrus you want. But when you produce the Savior of the world coming from your nation, you are truly a great nation. And it's all pointing to this.
Not only was Abraham promised blessing, but God promised to make him a blessing, even to the point where all the families of the earth would be blessed in Abraham. And this was fulfilled when Jesus Christ came into this world as a Jewish child to grow up as a Jewish man to go to a cross to die for you and me. That is how all the families of the world have been blessed through Abraham. God says, I will bless those who bless you.
I will curse those who curse you. Those who turn against Israel will be judged and cursed by God. And people say, well, really? Is that true?
I think that that is one of the biggest fears that we should have in North America right now. Our land, our country, and the United States are turning their backs on Israel in all of this. They're supporting things that are directing hatred at Israel. And I think we need to be very, very concerned about that.
I think we need to be praying about that. We're told to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We are told to be praying for the Jewish people. Just as an example, when the Greeks overran Palestine and desecrated the altar of the Jewish temple, they were soon conquered by Rome.
They didn't get away with that. When Rome killed Paul and many others and destroyed Jerusalem under Titus, Rome fell. Spain reduced to a fifth-rate nation after the Inquisition against the Jews. Poland fell after the programs.
Hitler's Germany went down after the horrific events that took place there. Britain lost their empire after the treatment of the Jewish people. Both loads of Jewish people trying to escape what was going on in Germany and Poland, coming to Britain only to be turned away, sent back to concentration camps. That was the end of the British Empire as we know it.
One time they said that the sun always rose all the time on the British Empire, not anymore. All of these things, I really believe that when God says, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you, he means it. So God told Abraham to go. I don't know where he was going, but he just believed the promise and he left.
That act of faith when he left her aunt and went and followed God. So that's a wonderful thing you'll read about Abraham. This is kind of my overview, just from the first few verses. Many times throughout Genesis you read about Abraham and he believed God and he believed God and he did this and he followed God.
So what do you do when you read the promises of God? Abraham believed them. When God made promises, Abraham chose to believe them. Do you read them?
And that's it. Perhaps you memorize them. That's a good verse. I think I'll memorize that.
Maybe you just underline them in your Bible and say, I'll come back and read that again. Or do you just believe them and stand on them and put your hope in them? See, that's action. God wants us to not only read his promises, but to act upon them, to take them for me, for you.
Abraham did that. He followed this route, he went around, it's all laid out for us where he went, and then he arrives in the promised lands. Now we get into the last part of this chapter where Abraham has tested. His first test and his failure.
We all face trials of faith. Sometimes faith is like a muscle that must be exercised. Sometimes we fail in that, but we need to exercise our faith more, just strengthen it. Abraham gets to the promised land and he says, whoa, this is the promised land.
There's a famine here. You know what? I think I'll go down to Egypt. Once again, I'm going to do it my way.
I'm going to go to Egypt on my own. So he goes down to Egypt. When he gets there, he says, I've got this beautiful wife. I can see the way these Egyptian guys are looking at her.
And Pharaoh, he's got many beautiful women in his place, palace. He's going to want her. Okay, you know what? Sarah, it's not going to go well for me because they're going to want you, and they find out that you're my wife.
The easy way to get my wife is to kill me, and then you're a widow, and then you're easy picking. So how about we tell a little half-truth? How about we go and say, you're my sister? Well, it was half-truth.
She was his kind of half-sister from way back, but it's a lie. So he told Pharaoh, it's my sister. Pharaoh's people take him in. Excellent.
What a wonderful woman she's going to be for Pharaoh until they all got sick. And so they had a plague. I don't know what happened to them, but it was pretty gruesome to the point that they had. What did we do here?
And then they come back to Abraham, and they say, Abraham said, okay, you know what? First of all, you lied to us. Secondly, like, now we've got this plague. It's all over us.
Take her and get out of here. So he went outside God's commandment, and he thought he was going to get away with it. God plagued everybody around him. Isn't that what sin does?
When we sin, we sometimes think, oh, I kind of did that privately. Nobody's going to know. It affects somebody else. And then it affects more people and more people and more people.
Sin spreads like a plague, like a virus. We were talking, I believe it was John said last week, one of the sins that we can fall into is compromise. And sometimes, and he was speaking to men, but I think this is everybody. We think, okay, I'll just do this one little compromise here.
Now I'm kind of stuck in that. I got to make another one to kind of fix that last one, and they do that. And then by the time you get to compromise number five, you've gone so far down the road, and you're so tangled up in sin, and you've affected so many people, they're so difficult to get out of. This little quote, I don't even know who came up with it, but I've read this now for 25 years.
Sin will take you further than you want to go. Sin will keep you longer than you want to stay, and sin will cost you more than you want to pay. And that's so true in our lives. And we need to cut sin off in our lives, to be freed from it, to get away from it, to remove it from our lives.
How do we do that? How do we do that? Well, I'm going to steal John's outline from last week, because I really, really liked it. It was probably the third time I heard that message.
What can we do? How can we walk with God? How can we avoid failure at times of testing? First of all, we meditate on the word of God.
Joshua chapter one verse eight, meditate on the word of God day and night. I kind of like what we're doing here. I'm doing Abraham, John studying through Joshua, the character of Joshua, and anyways, taking us through, through Barnabas. Great man who are great examples, but men who have had to do, had to learn how to walk with God.
So first of all, we mortify, we meditate on the word of God. Secondly, we mortify sin. I thought I'd put that up in pictograms as well, because I heard that there were going to be kids up here. So the easiest way to do it is to put it up, sin is a snake.
Sin is a snake that's going to bite you and kill you. That's what it is. Mortify it. Cut its head off.
Kill it. Drive it out of your life. Next, move and step with God. Walk with God.
Walk with Him each way. Now, here's the interesting thing about these four steps that came from John's sermon, but I've given him a credit so I haven't stolen them. You can't do one without the other. You can't mortify sin if you're not meditating on the word of God.
You can't walk and step with God if you're stained with sin if you're living in sin. You have to meditate on the word of God. You have to mortify sin and then you move and walk and step with Him and then you finally serve Him and Him only. And it's, I believe He had, keep free from idols in that one.
Free from idols. Abraham had to become free from idols. We need to be free from idols in our lives. You're thinking, idols, what idols are you talking about?
There's a car out there with a windshield that's just blazing in my face here. I can't really look at anybody. There we go. Move.
How do we, do we have idols in our lives? Yeah, there's entertainment. There's business. There's money.
There's prestige. There's power. There's all pride. There's all these things that can be idols in our life.
We need to be free from those things and singleheartedly serve the Lord God. I pray that we can do these things. I pray that we will walk with God. I pray as we go through the life of Abraham, we will see where He has tested and where He comes back to God and that like Abraham, that if you're here and you don't know Jesus Christ, you simply believe Him and is credit to you as righteousness.
You see, Abraham is held up as the one who is the father of the faith in faithful in the fact that he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. That's how a soul is saved in this world. That is how you pass from death to life. That's how you are freed from your sins.
If you're lost in your sins and you want to be free, you simply believe God. God sent His Son, the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me to die in your place, to take your sin and by simply believing that you have eternal life like Abraham, believe God and his count of his righteousness. Father, thank you this morning for the Lord Jesus our Savior. We thank you for our life and Him.
We thank you for this great example of Abraham. We thank you for one who believed you and Father, may we like Abraham, believe God. May we walk with him. May we be faithful to him.
Father, I pray that you would help us through the Lord Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.