Sermon: "Called to Change"

1st in the "Meeting God in Change" series.
Delivered June 3, 2007 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

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I want to show you the calculator I used when I first got to college. This was it right here. The great thing about this is the batteries never wear out. By the time I was a junior in college we had the Texas Instruments, I think it was Texas Instruments, calculator and it cost at that time 300 and something dollars and only the engineering students, a few chemistry students had it. Everybody else was still using the slide rules even then. Now, I ceased having any reason for using a slide rule once I had gone through three or four majors and I was no longer in the sciences, but since then a lot of things have happened. Since I went to school with a slide rule, we've had microchips come. We've have cassette tapes make their appearance and leave the scene. Videocassette recorders didn't exist. In fact, xeroxing, making photocopies, you could only get black copies with white writing on it when I first went to college. No fax machines. CD's came later. DVD's have come since then. The mapping of the human genome, MRI's and CAT scans. We are now at the point where someone can make an appointment, go to a doctors clinic in a mall, get surgery done on their eyes where no knives are used; only amplified light and they can walk out and never have to use their glasses again. Changes happen. Amazing changes have impacted our lives just in one generation. And many of you here take it for granted, because you are young enough to never have lived any other way. The pace of change is fast and it's accelerating.

A guy named Walt Mueller who is a respected authority on youth ministry says that when it comes to music style, cultural heroes, clothing style and even values, the generation change among students is down to 3 to 5 years. What that means is that the skills you build and the programs you build last 3 to 5 years before you have to do a major overhaul because the new students coming in are that different. It's an incredible pace of change. And those changes have impacted the family. Since I went to college with my slide rule, the values in America changed from the value when I was a kid of "marriage is the way to the American dream" to the changes that were starting to happen when I was a teenager that "divorce is the way to personal fulfillment." That change has happened in one generation. And that divorce has brought fulfillment to some people. In fact, 80% of the couples who divorce say they feel like they have done better since they divorced, but only 20% of the kids who live with divorce say that they feel like they are doing better. It's impacted the family. We can't ignore it; whatever our personal feelings are.

We have a whole group of young adults who have grown up in this different environment and these young adults are putting more priority on family than their parents did. And yet, they have more anxieties than any generation in recent history about the relationships between men and women, and the capacity to have an enduring relationship. And whatever else has happened, this younger generation of young adults is dealing with their stresses differently. Twice as many young men drink in order to get drunk than one generation ago and three times as many women do. Change has impacted us. No matter what we do everything changes. Our jobs change underneath us. Our children grow up and sometimes that involves incredible celebration. We get older. Illnesses come and go. Accidents happen. It gets exhausting. Change takes something out of us. And so we are having a series on Meeting God in Change, because we need to think about change because change is inevitable. Change is accelerating. Change surrounds us everywhere and sometimes, in fact very often, God is calling us to change. So we are going to look at a passage in scripture that deals with God calling a specific person to some major changes in his life. It's in the Book of Genesis. We are going to go in to the Old Testament. The first book of the Bible; Genesis, Chapter 12 and we are going to look at Verses 1 to 9. Genesis, Chapter 12, and I will begin at Verse 1.

Let's pray. Lord, as we read your word and as we think about it together, help us now to respond with faith and respond with obedience. For we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.

"The Lord had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people 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 whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." So Abram left, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five 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. Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev."

This is a story about Abraham. He hasn't been renamed yet. He is still called Abram in this passage. But this is a story; this is the first time we get a close look at a person who becomes one of the central models of faith in all of the Bible. He also is the one that God has used to build an entire nation from which God was going to bring the savior of the world. God did amazing things through this person and here we are right at the early part of his experience with God. Now it's easy to be blind to how big a deal these few verses are. Not just theologically, but how big a deal this was for Abraham. We read it in a few verses and we think oh hero of faith and just run on. But lets think about it for a moment. Let's use our imaginations with narrative passages where we are talking about how someone walked with God and experienced God, we should slow down, plug in our brains and our imaginations and kind of think about what we would feel like if God did this in our lives, because this is a real person that was dealing with God. Here's Abraham; he's a real person, he is comfortable, he's growing in wealth and he's at the age where he does not expect new adventures. Let's just admit it. He's 75-years old. And God comes and says, "Leave." Leave your country, the place where he knows the land. He knows where the fresh water is. He knows where good pastures are and what the shortest routes are to important places and what the best trails are. Leave all of that. Leave your people; the customs and languages that you already know. You know who to trust. You've got friends. You are respected and comfortable. Leave all of that. Leave your father's household. Leave your family. Leave the companionship that they afforded you; the support that comes from them and the common memories. Leave all of that.

And what does God give him in return in terms of direction? He says, "And go, go to the land that I will show you." Now we know from a few verses earlier that Abraham knows that it is the land of Canaan, but what does he really know about the land of Canaan? In a time before satellite photos and GPS maps and encyclopedias, what does he really know about something that might be 400 miles away that he has never been to, in a different culture, surrounded by people he has never interacted with? "Go to a land I will show you." God calls for massive change in Abraham's life. Let's remember that. It's God who has taken this settled down person, interrupting his life and saying "I want you to change."

And then he gives a promise. "I will bless you" Verse 2; "and you will be a blessing." Then a few verses later, "all the nations on earth will be blessed through you." What an amazing world embracing promise that he gives to Abraham. I am asking you for some massive change, but I am promising that this is purposeful; it's not by accident.

Now what Abraham does doesn't come easy. Leaving wasn't an easy step. But Abraham believes God. He leaves his past in obedience and then he receives the blessing. This leaving involved sacrifice. It would have been a lot easier for Abraham to stay and even the promise that he is pulled together with: God's promise for him is not something he fully inherits in his own life. So there is a sacrifice there; that he is taking a sacrifice in order that others might receive the fullness of the promise given to him. But he still goes. It involved sacrifice and it was messy.

What Abraham does between now and the day he dies is full of mistakes. Mistakes that Abraham probably would not have made if he would have just stayed at home. God calls him to change. He obeys in this change and because of that he looks like an idiot, because he is faced with decisions and pressures and dangers that he was never prepared for and does not handle them all well and you see that in the start of the very next few verses. It's messy. And what Abraham did called for faith. Abraham could not have taken a step like that unless he actively trusted God. He had to believe God enough to leave in order to receive the blessing that God was going to give, and in order to become a blessing. God calls for change in Abraham's life. Change calls for faith and so now lets think a little bit about what that change and what that faith to face that change looked like. There are some lessons here. What does it mean to face change with faith? The kind of faith we see Abraham showing us here involves three major things that you see right in the text. He's got to believe. He's got to leave, and then he receives.

The first part is that he's got to believe. God called Abraham to change and he believed and trusted God enough to cooperate with that. God might be calling you to change; be calling me to change. We believe as Christians that God is unchanging, but let's never let that blind us to the fact that the creation that God has made is always changing. God has created a universe that is constantly expanding. It's never the same size twice. Everything orbiting in the universe is moving. It's not in the same place now as it will be at the end of this service. Nothing in the whole universe is static. No tree or river ever remains exactly the same. The courses of the rivers change. The trees grow. They add leaves. They drop leaves and they die. Park rangers have had to discover that they cant keep natural forest fires from happening when lightning strikes and all because the very crisis and fire is part of keeping the forest healthy and that when they stop it, it leads ultimately to greater dangers. Change is part of the fabric of everything we encounter. So we can't escape it. God is unchanging, but we are not. And God has promised to care for us in this change like he does for Abraham.

He gives Abraham a promise, but it doesn't mean that even though God is with Abraham in this, and God will actually walk with him and show him where the land is, that what Abraham is going to face is easy. In fact, Abraham ends up as we see at the end of the verses that we look at, he ends up in a country full of walled cities and it says, "and the Canaanites lives in the land at this time." What does that mean? It means he comes in to a land and it's not empty. It's not ready for him. There are walled cities and there are kings and there are armies standing between Abraham and inheriting anything. It's a frightening prospect. And then in verse 10, just one verse after the passage I read it says this: "now there was a famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while, because the famine was severe." So here's Abraham, he obeys God. He goes to this land following God. He ends up in Shechem. He checks out the whole land. It's full of people who are not happy that he is there and then a famine comes. Now what would you feel like? Let's use our imaginations. God I will follow you and you get there and then you starve. You start thinking maybe I didn't hear God and if I did hear God he's got a bad sense of humor. It wasn't easy.

When God calls us to change it doesn't mean that it will make us look good. Some of the changes God calls us to won't make us look good. Some of the changes God calls us to won't have overwhelming power. It won't be immediately evident: I have obeyed God, therefore, POW something happens. It does not work that way. It didn't work that way for Abraham. When God calls us to change it doesn't mean that all of the results of that change will come fast. Abraham had to wait for another generation to inherit things and then that generation had to wait 400 years before more of the promise happened. It does not mean that we will look like a success immediately and it does not mean that everything will work out the first time. We, just like Abraham, might make some real mistakes because God is calling us out of the comfort zone in to something we have never done before. All of that we can see in the story of Abraham responding to God. And yet God, just like he was with Abraham will be with us. He is here with us. He is there where he is calling us and he will take care of us all along the way. Now Abraham responded to that and he left. He believed God and then he was willing to leave. None of the rest of the Old Testament would be the same if Abraham hadn't left in obedience. Without a map, without all the answers, without all the tools he needed to win the battles ahead he left, trusting God.

What is it God is calling you to leave? Some of us, just like Abraham, have a missionary call in our lives. We need to leave country, people and family in order to obey the call of God on our lives and we as a congregation have sent out many. With all the mess and sacrifice of that, we have done it. Confirmation is a leaving. It's a smaller one, but it's leaving being a kid in the church behind and taking a position where you say I will now be a responsible adult member of the life. As parents our kids grow up and as our kids grow up we as parents have to leave one stage of life and move in to a new stage and when we get to points like this no matter what they are, we can fight and try to hold on to it. We can complain and say "I don't like this change" or we can cooperate. That's the heart of leaving. What leaving means for us is cooperating with God in what he is doing in our lives; to stop fighting it.

So we've got to stop complaining and begin cooperating with what God is doing. It could be all kinds of things. It could be that we have to leave a job, because it has disappeared underneath us. We have to move on not knowing where we are going. It might be dream that we have that has to die before God can create in us a new dream. It might be losses that have been caused in our lives by illness or age and that these things in our lives demand that we leave some of the expectations that we have behind. Maybe your favorite ministry has disappeared and you have to learn to do something new. It could be your favorite anything that's gone now and we can't really change that. And the challenge that you face, that I face, is to leave, to cooperate with God in what he is doing in our lives. And leaving, as hard as it is, is always going to be worth it, because when we cooperate with God good things happen and that comes to receiving.

Abraham received an incredible promise. "I will make you in to a great nation and I will bless you." This is God speaking directly to Abraham, "I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you." Folks, it happened. We are in this exciting place where we can actually see that it really happened. Abraham left, he obeyed God, he cooperated. God did bless him and brought through him a nation and from that nation a king was born, a Messiah, Jesus, and through that Jesus, all the earth is being blessed.

God didn't call Abraham to change, to sacrifice and to leave just to be mean or to test him. God wanted to bless Abraham, to wrap Abraham up in his worldwide purposes and to give him good things along the way. And we have to remember that even the process of change, even the battles that Abraham faced in himself and the faith that he needed to wrestle with in his life, even that was part of the blessing. It's not that all the blessing comes at the end; from the moment Abraham stepped out of Haran, God began to bless. Even in the changes that happened in Abraham's life, God was blessing. To give these new and good things to Abraham though he had to let go of something else first.

God wants to give us something new and good. No matter where we are in life, God wants us to have something new and good, but to get that or to receive that requires that we are going to have to let go of something. This year's verse is; "Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among us". Believing God, leaving what he tells us to leave behind is part of consecration. It's part of the meaning of consecration; where we trust God, we let go of what we have to let go of in life and take one step closer to God, that's consecration. And I believe that as we do that, one of the amazing things that God will do is bless us. Bless us individually, as we consecrate ourselves to him. God is not so concerned about his world-embracing program that he is going to do it at your expense. It's not the way God works. He loves you too much for that. He cares for you individually.

But even so, he is not going to stop the plan if you don't like it. Let's remember that balance. He loves you too much to use you, and will bless, but his goals and purposes in the world are too big to stop if you don't like it. And so the call for us is to cooperate: to believe, to leave, and God promises that we will receive. Sometimes, he will call us to believe and leave and that change is going to be scary, and leaving can hurt, but the message here in Abraham's life is that God can be trusted in that. Our God will bless us. We don't know the shape, but we can be sure that he will bless.

Let's pray. God we thank you for the model of Abraham's faith, for his willingness to believe you and to leave the things that he had to leave behind and to hold on to you for a promise that he later received in part and then others received in full. We thank you that you can be trusted. Lord, we come to this table that shows us how deeply you can be trusted, that your love for us stands out so greatly that you sent your son to die for us and become that world-embracing blessing that was originally given to Abraham. Through him, then through Jesus all the nations of the earth can be blessed. Lord, we know that there is so much in us that keeps us from believing you and trusting you despite the incredible assurance that we have at this table. And so Lord we confess our lack of faith, we confess our lack of obedience, and we commit ourselves in a fresh way to you, as we come to this table, looking forward to your purposes in our lives as we use the words that Jesus taught us: Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be the name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not in to temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

© 2007, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org