Good morning. So for those of you that don't
know me, I am Claire Mulroney and I get to be part of our
wonderful church here at Verso St.
Albans and and you have the joy of hearing my voice this
morning. And for those of you who haven't
been around, we've been in a series on hope and Mark has been
doing a phenomenal job, hasn't he, Of laying the foundation for
us on what biblical hope is and how we walk in it and why we
should have hope and all that good stuff.
So I encourage you, if you're online this morning or if you're
in the room for the first time, to go back and have a little
listen to his talks, because I promise you they will bless you
and they will help just unravel this whole topic in a better
way. So I have the privilege of being
a mum to four teenagers and I say privilege because it is,
it's a privilege. But my youngest son, Trey, who
actually is technically not a teenager, he's six months off,
but he likes to think he is. He has always had this
entrepreneurial kind of spirit. He's always been my kid who will
find the best deal, the way to find a good giveaway.
He's always coming to me. Mum, have you seen this?
If we did this, if we entered this, we could get this much
money. And he's always kind of, yeah,
he's just always had that about him.
He's always had this incredible, optimistic view on life, and
about a year ago he nudged past the screen that he placed his
Xbox on and the screen fell and it cracked.
And as you might imagine, in a teenage boy's world, that was
devastating. It was even more devastating
when he learned that his mum and dad were not going to buy him a
new one without him having to work a little bit to earn some
money to replace this screen. And he walks into the kitchen
one day and he's like, Mum, I've found this thing.
If I do this for this company, they're going to send me a brand
new monitor. I was like, dude, how many times
have we had this conversation? They're not going to send the
monitor. They just say that they just
want you to do the hard work for them and they're not going to
give you a monitor. I've lived a lot of life.
I know how this works. Lo and behold, he did it anyway.
And a week later this three £400 monitor arrived on our doorstep
and he was like I told you so Mum, I told you, nothing more
delightful in a teenager's world than to tell their parent that
they knew better than them. But it got me thinking, because
you know what? I think that we approach God's
provision a little bit like our eye approach that situation.
I think out of wanting to protect Trey's heart, I was
going to give him this guarded expectation of the promise.
And I think that I approached God like that, despite him being
the God that says in Philippians 419 that I will meet all of your
needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.
I treat him a bit like a finicky company and I've built a guarded
expectation around those promises and that's what I want
us to dig into. That's why I felt like the Lord
put on my heart for us to dig into here this morning.
So we're going to look at who walks in confident expectation,
because that's what hope is. Confident expectation in the
promises of God's provision this morning.
So I want you to turn with me to Genesis 22 and we're going to
look at the story and if you are brand new to the Bible, I just
want to give you a pre warning. This passage can seem a bit odd,
but if you're brand new to the Bible, come and talk to me
afterwards. It's never a good idea to take a
passage without reading the whole thing, and there's some
great stuff online to help us unravel that, but bear with me
as we stick into Genesis 22 and it says this.
After these things God tested Abraham and said to him,
Abraham. And he said, Here am I.
He said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,
and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt
offering. On one of the mountains of which
I shall tell you so Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled
his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son
Isaac. And he cut the word for the
burnt offering, and rose and went to the place of which God
had told him. And on the third day Abraham
lifted his eyes and saw the place from afar.
Then Abraham said to his young man, stay here with the donkey.
I and the boy will go over there and worship, and we will come
back to you again. And Abraham took the word of the
burnt offering, laid it on his son Isaac, and he took his hand,
and in his hand he took the fire and the knife.
And they went both of them together.
And Isaac said to his father, Abraham my father.
And he said, Here am I my son, He said, Behold the fire and the
wood. But where is the lamb for the
burnt offering? Then Abraham said, God will
provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.
So they went both of them together.
And when they came to the place of which God had told him,
Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, and
in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar
on top of the wood. And then Abraham reached out his
hand, and he took the knife to sacrifice his son.
But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said,
Abraham, Abraham. And he said, Here am I.
And he said, do not lay your hand on the boy, or do anything.
For now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not
withheld your son, your only son, from me.
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and he looked, and behold,
behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by his thorns.
And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a
burnt offering instead of his son.
And Abraham called the name of that place the Lord will
provide. And as it is said to this day on
the mount of the Lord, it shall be provided.
So what is going on here in this story?
It's a bit odd, isn't it? But essentially, God is asking
Abraham to walk a road that makes no sense.
God is asking him to take his son Isaac, who was given to him
as provision in response to a promise that God had made on
Abraham to make him the father of many nations, which meant he
needed Isaac, that son, that heir, to carry out the promise.
And after her. In this moment here, he's saying
take the thing I've given you and give it back to me.
It seems crazy because if he gives it back to him and he
kills his son, surely this whole promise can't be fulfilled.
And what's more crazy is that Abraham actually does it.
He walks up this road on Mount Moriah.
But we see in Abraham a man who has confident hope in God's
provision and we see it in verse 5 and verse 8, verse five.
It says stay here with the donkeys talking to a servants.
I and the boy will go over there and worship and come back to you
again. And we noticed that he says it's
not. I will come back to you.
He says we will come back to you.
He's got this confident expectation that God is going to
provide. And verse eight, it's the same
Isaac. They're further into this
journey and logically Isaac starts to see, well, hold on a
minute. What?
What's going on here? Like the questions arising.
And he's saying, Dad, like we don't have anything for the
sacrifice. And Abraham again speaks out
this confident hope. Don't worry, Isaac.
God's got this. He's going to provide.
It's intriguing. And it got me thinking, what's
led to this moment? And you have to kind of
understand a little bit of Abraham's life.
If you look back to Chapter 12, where he enters the Bible, we
see that God commissioned him right to leave his home country,
and he gives him this promise to make him a great nation and to
be a blessing to the nations around him.
But what we noticed in Abraham's story, if you take time to read
it, is that this is a man who navigates relationships, spousal
relationships, relationships in community, relationships in
politics, relationships in leadership.
He navigates the tension of wealth.
He navigates the tension of waiting, of being given a
promise and not seeing it to be fulfilled immediately.
He navigates what it looks like when he thinks God's been too
slow and taking the promise into his own hands and trying to make
it happen. And he watched God's
faithfulness stick with him and patiently walk with him.
And we watch as this promise of a son is fulfilled.
And he's given Isaac his first born son.
And so, as he walks into Chapter 22, God calls his name, and what
do we see? Abraham responds.
Here am I. He knows the sound of God's
voice. And as we look at the reality of
what it means to walk in the promise of God's provision, we
need to take note. There's something about being
familiar with who God is. There's something about walking
with God growing in relationship, something about
being fuelled by testimony. Abraham had so many testimonies
of God being with him, but no doubt when he was walking up
that mountain, they were running in his head, right?
There's power in our testimony. We know this.
There's something about speaking out the truth.
Abraham speaks it out, and what happens is he speaks it out.
Even with Isaac, he the truth becomes the ground that Isaac
walks on, right? He brings the truth before the
feelings of the moment, and the truth transforms the ground on
which he's walking. But I also want us to notice
that in the 11th hour, Abraham is not walking in defeat.
OK? He is at the 11th hour staying
obedient to what God has said to him, and he is interruptible.
He knows the sound of God's voice, and he knows what God
shows up like, and he's interruptible, and he allows God
to shift his perspective and show him the provision for the
moment. This is challenging, right?
But actually, as we see this picture building, I don't think
it comes as a surprise if we've been in church a while.
We know power of testimony. We know this good stuff, right?
We we know this. It's not much of a surprise.
You know, my question for this story, the thing that I've been
grappling with as I've looked at this how does Abraham actually
put one foot in front of the other and keep walking up that
mountain? Like, what is going on inside of
him that enables him to put one step in front of the other?
Knowing that if God doesn't come through in this moment, in the
way that he would like him to come through, he's going to
experience one of the most painful and heartbreaking
impossibilities of surrendering the most precious thing in his
hands. What is going on inside of him?
That he can walk in these seeming contradictory realities
of a promise, but the road before him looks like nothing.
Anything's going to happen but the promise.
Because it's this in between part of the journey that for me
is the most relatable, because I've known what it's like for
God to give me something and say Clara, I want you to give it
back to me, and I don't know how it's going to work out.
I know what it's like to be thrown into circumstances where
I'm not sure how the story's going to end, or into
circumstances where the story doesn't end the way that I want
it to end. And somehow God tells us that we
can walk in confident hope of His provision anyways.
And I think to understand this fully, we've got to start with
what is it that God promises us? So let's do a quick scan through
God promises, as we wrote at the beginning in Philippians, to
provide all of our needs. Not some of them, all of them.
He provides for our physical needs.
Matthew 626 Look at the birds of the air.
They neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns.
And yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not more valuable than they?
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, Or
what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear?
For the Gentiles seek these things, and your heavenly Father
knows that you need them all. He knows all of your needs and
He promises to provide for them. He knows our spiritual needs to
Peter 1/3 His divine power has given everything we need for a
godly life through our knowledge of Him who has called us by his
own glory and goodness, not some of the things that we need,
everything that we need to Corinthians 98.
God is able to make all grace abound to you so that in all
things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound
in all that you set your hand to all things.
Are we hearing it? What an amazing promise.
Not some all promises to provide for our emotional needs, Paul
writes in Philippians 412 to 13. I know how it is to be brought
low, and I know how it is to abound.
And in any and every circumstance I have learned the
secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.
How? Because I can do all things.
Through him who strengthens me, God promises to strengthen us in
all things. He promises us Rest.
Matthew 1129 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am
gentle and lowly and hot, and you will find rest for your
souls. For my yoke is easy and my
burden is light. If we take on Jesus way of doing
things, we find rest. Not if God feels like it.
He's not a finicky company. He's true to His word and the
promises in the Bible. Literally, it is like, rammed.
I could have just sat here and read promises to you all morning
and it would have been wonderful because they're true.
This is true, right? There's no way around it.
It's true. Let's be real and we walk out of
here and we get that phone call to tell us that we lost our job.
And despite months later not having a job, we naturally start
to question like, where is your provision?
God, you said all of my needs, my bank balance needs you.
It needs money. We endure long health journeys
and we're like, if if I could just be, well, I could do this
for you, God. And we don't see His provision
in the way that we want to see His provision.
We watch as a church is persecuted around the world, and
there's injustice. And we wonder, where are you
God? We grieve as we walk through
dreams dashed and weighed in disappointment, and we wonder if
God actually does see my needs. Maybe you've turned up on that
playground for the 15,000,000 time to try to tell a teacher
why your child needs this provision at school and it's not
coming, or you've worked faithfully being promised for a
promotion at work and yet it just never seems to come
through. But if you could have it, God,
I'd be generous. I would pour into the care
centre. I would do this.
I'd do this for you if you just could see this need.
Sometimes it's even more granular.
I know there are people in this room who this week will have
gone round a supermarket and decided they need to take food
out of their trolley because there's not enough in the bank
balance to put everything in it that you want.
It can feel like we're living in the reality of two polar worlds,
and these words sound wonderful until the rubber hits the road
in my life, in the path I have to walk, where sometimes, if I'm
honest, it feels like God's promises are teasing me and I'm
wondering if he's actually blind to what is needed in this
moment. And it's this mystery, guys.
It's this point that we become prey, that guarded expectation,
to become the director of our understanding of who God is, and
we package it as wisdom. And I want to ask myself, and I
want to invite you to ask yourself where this morning is
your guard up on your understanding of God's
provision? Because guarded expectation
looks a lot like I was trying to work out how we're going to
solve this on our own, how we're going to meet our needs.
And it sneaks in the form of independency, and it looks like
God's not working fast enough. So I need to solve it.
And we start to shift ourselves back into that lordship position
of our lives where we say, actually I know better than God,
I know exactly what I need. And if he can't see it, then I
guess I have to take it into my own hands.
And I think that some of us in this room this morning need to
dare to believe that God is who he says He is.
Again, dare to believe, like Abraham, that God really is who
He says He is, even when our circumstances want to cause us
to question it. And we need to see in Abraham
that he was doing something. Each step of that journey with
what he saw, what he felt, what he was thinking, what he was
longing for, what was holding precious, what was he doing
internally. He was surrendering.
And I believe it's the only way forward to fully experience what
it's like to live in the confident expectation of God's
provision. One step at a time is found in
surrender. And here is why.
Because this passage in Genesis 22 at the start of the
Scriptures is the foretelling of what God Himself works out when
we get into the New Testament, where we see that God did not
ask Abraham to do something that he wasn't willing to do himself
right. Just as Abraham walked in
willing obedience to give his only Son the Son whom he loved
and treasured the precious thing that God had provided, God
looked on our world, and He saw what was needed right now, here
in 2024, and he was willing to give his one and only much loved
treasure to Son. And just as Abraham called that
mount that he walked on Jehovah dera the Lord provided.
And we see the fulfilment of that second part of the verse on
the mount of the Lord. It shall be seen and provided
when Jesus walked up the hill of Calvary.
And there's that much loved precious sun carrying the wood
of cross on his back that he put, then laid on to become the
ultimate sacrifice of provision that is readily available for us
in this moment. And get this, Jesus endured the
moment when God turned his face and the darkness care of the
earth wise so that you and I never have to endure God turning
his face on us. We never have to experience what
it's like to have God turn his face on us through any path that
we have to walk. Jesus eradicated the
separateness and made us join heirs so that we could have
access to the fullness of the person of God.
Our inheritance, like Jesus right now, right here, and as
Abraham calls that place on Mount Moriah, Jehovah Jireh, I
want us to see what he was doing when he cried Jehovah.
What he was saying is bored. What is he also saying?
If he's calling him Lord, I am not Lord.
And when he calls out Jihad Jira, he's saying it's the Lord
who sees and provided. And So what he's also saying is
that I am not the Lord and I don't fully see and I don't
fully know what is needed. But I surrender to you.
Jehovah Jireh is a declaration of surrender.
It's a declaration of our surrender.
And so I want us to see that hope in God's provision isn't
something we conjure up. It's not something that we have
to stiffen up our backs and be like let's go.
Yes, God's going to provide because it's not based on you
and me and how good we are. It is based on the goodness and
the kindness and the love of a Father in heaven who sees you,
and he loves to pour out His good gifts upon you.
And God's provision was made a reality for Abraham when he
surrendered over and over and over again, giving God access to
the most precious part of who he was to the truth and the person
of God. Provider hope came alive when
God sent Jesus into the world. But it was made a reality when
Jesus surrendered to the will of his father, and he cried in that
garden of Gethsemane. ABBA.
Father, everything is possible for you, But would you take this
cup from me? Don't make me walk in this
moment. But he says, but not my will,
but what you will and I will go. And he walks that road of
obedience, trusting his father, saw what was needed and provided
provision made a reality. Our confident expectation comes
alive in you and me every time we choose to bring our whole
lives in surrender to God. Each step the good, the hard,
the ordinary. Giving God back our questions,
giving him back our lack of understanding.
And when we do, our lives become the place that we can call
Jehovah jireh. And we then get the opportunity
to be a demonstration of who God is to every person that we
encounter around us. And I've come to understand this
not honestly, just by reading the Bible or by amazing
testimonies of his provision. I could have stood here and I
could tell you some miraculous, crazy stories of provision,
right? Because we've seen that.
We've spent years in on the mission field, and we have seen
God do crazy stuff. But most of the stories of my
life have been like this story on Mount Moriah, of having to
learn the beauty of surrender that has led to a confident hope
in the provision of God in the nitty gritty of Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And those testimonies help.
They fueled my faith. For these moments, the word has
fueled my faith. But the end of the day, the
place where the confident hope has come alive in me has been
when I've said God have it all. And I've learned that surrender
is not holy chitchat. Let's be Let's be clear, OK?
It's not this like, nice. I pray this and I get this.
Surrender is a wrestle, right? Sometimes it's ugly.
It's not like ugly crying in my car yelling at God.
Like, what are you thinking? What is going on?
Even as our family in the last eight months, we got that phone
call 8 months ago to say that because of the financial crisis
my husband was being made redundant.
We were like, what is happening? We are in the most expensive
season of family life. God, where are you?
We're eight months into this journey and guess what?
The provision of a job, which to me is like the most obvious form
of provision. It's not a made a reality yet,
and in this season I have learnt about the beauty and the power
and the truthfulness of surrender, and God has been
reminding me in the days that it's hard.
In the days when I read his promises and they just don't,
they feel a little bit like he's teasing me.
He here reminded me of Psalm 23, where he says, You know what,
Claire? If I'm your shepherd, you lack
for nothing, and that even in the valley of the shadow of
death and in the presence of our enemies, I prepare a table for
you to feast on even now. But what do I have to do to
feast at that table? I have to receive his invitation
to come and take a seat at the table, and I can't sit at his
table. If I'm too distracted by where
I'm going to get to you, or if I'm trying to wrestle to get
through this valley, or if I'm trying to figure out how it's
going to work out, you say no. Clara, will you come take a
seat? So I've got what you need for
this moment. I'm not going to force it on
you. I'm not going to throw it in
your face. But I'd love to hear how you're
feeling today. And I'd love to meet you there
and provide for you. And the beauty of his provision
as a reality has not looked like that job coming through, but it
has looked like me. So learning to surrender my
pride and my independence, to say thank you to the radical
generosity of friends who've walked in this road with us.
It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
God's provision is beautiful. This looked like surrendering,
the tiredness. Why?
Because God wants to give grace. He wants us to give us the bread
of grace, so that we'd give grace to ourselves.
It's looking like a million things, but it's been in the
car, it's been at that playground, it's been in the
nitty gritty of Monday to Friday and this is what I have learnt
and this is where we're going to end.
Hope in God's provision does not need to be guarded because hope
in His provision and never puts us to shame.
Why? Because God never puts you to
shame and your expectation can be confident in His provision.
Because we are confident in the goodness and the kindness and
the love of a God who sees your every need and he promises, as
you give Him access to show you His provision for this moment,
He will never put you to shame. So stand with me.