Wednesday
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” - Genesis 12:1
In this meeting, Abram came face to face with a command. Abram was commanded to do three things: leave his country, his people, and his father's household. This is exactly the command that comes to every person who hears the call of the gospel today. We are called to leave our country—the place where we have been living, our residence since birth. This does not mean, of course, our physical residence, but rather the old life with all its ambitions, its loyalties, its worship of money and fame and power, and its imagined independence—which is really slavery—all that we have been by nature since birth. This is clearly a picture of the world-organized society with its philosophies and value systems.
Abram was also told to leave his relatives. In the spiritual sense, these are the moral forces that shape our lives. Just as blood relatives affect us greatly on the physical level, so these moral forces at work today change our lives constantly and color all that we think and do. Others' opinions, human traditions, pressures from family and friends, the attitudes of our employers and others around us—these are the relationships we must be willing to forsake when we hear the call of God. We are to renounce this concern about what others think and be preeminently concerned about what God thinks.
Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. - Luke 14:25-27
This is one of the really hard sayings of Jesus. However, when we consider it in light of the story of the call of Abraham, we see that this has always been part of what it means to answer the call of God. Jesus is not telling us to actually think and act in hateful ways toward our family members. He is showing us that answering His call means we love nothing, not even our dearest friends and family, more than we love Him.
The third thing Abram was to leave was his father's house—that is, the ties with his “old self”, his old identity and nature. In ancient patriarchal cultures, a man was identified by the name of his father, i.e. the “house” he came from. We are called to leave this, to no longer put any dependence upon our looks, talents, heritage, or any of our normal resources, but to begin to walk in dependence upon another to do through us what we cannot do ourselves.
Perhaps you have heard the living God of glory say to you, “You must no longer depend upon what you have been depending on—the opinions, the attitudes, the philosophy in which you have been reared. These are wrong. They are based upon the lies of Satan, and you must not live on this basis any longer. You must learn to accept the truth reflected in the Word of God, though it cuts right across the philosophy of this world. You must, above all, leave your father's house, which is dependence upon yourself.”
It is a simple but vital decision—you cannot stay in Ur and go to the land at the same time.
Lord, grant me the grace to follow You, regardless of what I must leave behind - Amen.
Jeff Frazier
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1 comment:
We need to pray for courage for one another.
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