Sermon 2 - A promise you can trust

There is someone in our household who we give a huge amount of trust too. You see she can be trusted to always give us good advice and guidance.

She may get a little annoying at times because she is so perfect – but as long as we give her the right information in the first place she always guides us the right way. Her name is Serena and she is the voice of the Sat Nav! And I have to say she is remarkably accurate. The things is as well is that we may decide not to follow her and to go off track – we may take the wrong turn, but when we do she just simply says “RECALCULATING” in a strange voice and she will bring us back into line to get us where we are supposed to be going. The other thing is that all though we may get annoyed with her inane voice she never actually gets cross with us even though we may completely ignore her- I long sometimes for her just to say something to me like – what on earth do you think you are doing I told you to turn right back there not left – you stupid idiot. 

So Serena is very reliable and trust worthy but guess what – she is actually a computer generated voice and even if I were to talk to her and to tell her how I was feeling – she would probably just say to me – take the next left turn.  She is trustworthy but I have no relationship with her.

So who else can I trust. Well I am fortunate that I have a lot of people in my life that I can trust. Members of my family, good friends, people who I know I can go to for advice, for guidance and I can trust there reactions because they know and love me.  But even within these people who I have a good relationship with there are times when they get things wrong, when my trust or their trust in me can be damaged by something stupid that is said or done. 

So we can trust a machine without a relationship as long as we give it the right information in the first place and it’s maps are up to date,  or we can trust our relationships with the proviso that sometimes we all get it wrong. BUT when we look at our readings for this week and the story of Abraham perhaps we are pointed to see trust in another way – the trust we can place in God who will actually always be right and who we can too have a relationship with.

So let’s get back to our readings and in particular this morning the promise we see given by God to Abraham – a promise that is pivotal to us all even now as Christians.  In Genesis 12 we read the promise that God gave:

            I will bless you and make you into a great nation

            …….and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

This is a promise that still applies today- that all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Through God’s relationship with Abraham and his descendents all people will be blessed – not just the chosen few but all people. God’s promise of blessing is to us all and of course this is revealed fully in the person of Jesus Christ.  We see that in Luke 4 when Jesus says of words in Isaiah – today this scripture has been fulfilled.   Man might have fallen and have failed but God promises renewal through Abraham – God promises his blessing to all people.

What does this promise mean to us now? Well it ultimately means relationship again with God  through Jesus Christ, and all the blessings that this brings us.  That following in his way will bring peace, that he will guide us the right way, that he will be with us – that he will never leave us or forsake us.  These are just some of the blessings that we receive and the whole of scripture is littered with words that show these blessings in so many different ways.

So this is the promise that is at the heart of our faith. At the heart of Abraham’s faith was this promise too –that God would fulfil this promise.  But our readings this week look further than just this promise to look into the lives of Abraham, his wife Sarah and their descendents their Son – Isaac and his children Jacob and Esau. And as we look into their lives we see how even though this promise was there they acted in ways that were wrong. That even though they had received this promise they still got things SO wrong.  They acted in ways that showed no faith in God at all. Abraham hadn’t long received the promise and he fled to Egypt due to a drought and even put his wife into Pharaoh’s household to protect himself.  When he was promised a Son in his old age he was convinced that this wouldn’t happen through his wife who was also old so he had a Son with a slave girl instead.  His faith was shaky at times we see.

And then they acted in ways that were very against the ways of righteousness and truth. We see this particularly in the deviousness of Jacob stealing the birthright of his brother Esau. Disguising himself with hair so he could appear more like him, and in turn getting the blessing that was due to his older sibling.  The story of Jacob and Esau is full of treachery not only by Jacob but also by his mother Rebekah –wanting the best for her favourite Son and deceiving her husband in the process. 

It’s a pretty awful story in many ways, a tale of what many would now would refer to as a dysfunctional family. But through it all is the underlying promise that God gave to Abraham, and we see God’s plan coming out of the mess and disaster of human relationships– or perhaps despite the mess and disaster of human relationships.  Because God’s plan and presence continues through this story and we will see it continue as we look on to the story of Jacobs’s descendents in particular his son Joseph – which we will look at in another week’s time.

So we see through all these passages this week – God’s promise and man’s reaction – sometime in faith and sometimes getting things wrong. So what can we learn from this ourselves. Well firstly and fundamentally is the truth that God is with us despite what we do and who we are. His promise is something we can trust in despite how we act. His promise isn’t dependent upon anything we do it is all about him.  We are so much into a culture of reward for what we do then we expect this not to be the case.  We are suspicious of anything that doesn’t require anything from us. We have to make sure we read the small print.  You can win a free holiday by just entering your name and postcode and then the small print tells us we have to go to a presentation, and then we can have a free holiday but it is only at this or that time, and then it’s free but we have to pay a fee for taxes for each person.  No wonder we are suspicious because a great deal of things in our lives are not free! Most things in our lives we either have to earn or pay for.  But God’s promise to us is free.  God’s promise to us as it was to Abraham was not dependent upon him leading a good life necessarily and we saw that in him getting things wrong, but God’s promise was all about that a promise based on the trustworthiness of God not on anything we could ever do to receive that.

And you know the amazing thing is that when we begin to grasp this – and I think this is something we need to go back to time and time again, or at least I do – when we begin to grasp this then it’s very liberating. We think we have failed in our faith, we think we have got it wrong perhaps monumentally wrong like Jacob or even Abraham, but God’s promise is still as true even after our mistakes as before. We can come back to God time and time again and ask for his forgiveness, we can come back to God time and time again and he will promise to lead us and guide us despite the mess we may have made in our lives. We can come back to God time and time again and say we are sorry and he will forgive us.

We started by thinking about the Sat Nav and the fact it was reliable but we had not relationship with it, and I think this helps us think about our second point of application too today. You see when you read through these passages in Genesis and you see the mistakes that the individuals made you see also several amazing encounters with God. God’s promise to us is personal – he wants us to encounter him and to learn from him.  When Jacob did wrong to his brother he fled from him. It was then that he encountered God in a dream.  When Jacob was wanting to return to his brother he set up an elaborate way of giving presents to Esau – he was concerned again as to how he would be received. It was at this point that he met with God again and we are told he wrestled for God’s blessing.  These encounters with God happened when he was low and vulnerable, when he needed the assurance that God was with him.  And it can be the same for us. Sometimes when we are at our most vulnerable, when we have made the biggest mistakes it is there that we can encounter God. Perhaps its something to do with us being able and willing then to receive from him, being open that perhaps we can’t do it on our own and we can only do it with him.  For whatever reason though the truth is there, even at our points of most vulnerability when we have failed big time, when in any human relationship we would be so embarrassed to even see the other person because we feel we have hurt them so much,  these are times when God is still with us. These are the times when he will reassure us once more of his promise to us. These are the times when perhaps we can grow in our faith and understanding of God more.

So this week as we read the passages about Abraham and his descendents we can see God’s promise for us all shining through. And as we see this promise we can realise that this is trustworthy and true. That God will never let this promise go and that he longs for us to know the reality of his promise and even though we may fail in our faith, he wants us to grow and experience his blessings  more and more in our lives.