Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
We haven't met. My name is Mandy.
I'm on staff here at the Garden Church.
I'm really excited to be teaching from God's Word this
morning. And we are just continuing our
exciting sermon series called The Story, which we've been in
for the last couple of weeks. So yeah, this fall, basically
we're going through a sermon series that talks about the kind
of through line of Scripture, right?
So basically we're going from creation to the fall to kind of
exploring God's redemptive story arc that the plan of the epic
plan of salvation and restoration of the world that he
is enacting. So basically we're covering the
entire Bible in 10 weeks. So no pressure, you know, But
given the title of our series, I actually wanted to get started
by talking a little bit about the concept of story.
So it's kind of at the center of what we're doing here trying to
get settled. So yeah, basically, whether
you're looking at, like, ancient hieroglyphs or like the latest
Hollywood blockbusters, humans seem to love stories.
Right. Let's do a quick poll of the
audience. I'm going to be that person who
has you shout things out from the crowd.
What are some of your all time favorite stories?
Just shout them out. All time favorite stories?
Is it the horse in his voice? Oh, that's a good one, Maggie.
I love that CS Lewis. I'm all about that.
What else did? What else did I hear?
Harry Potter. OK, Harry Potter.
Love that. I love that.
I love the diversity so far. And of all Anne of Green Gables.
OK. It sounds like you're just
listing my favorites. I appreciate that.
On behalf of everyone here. Yeah.
Where the. Oh, where the wild things are.
I can also kind of not. I can tell who has kids, but
it's like, maybe some of these things are a little bit fresher
in your mind. That's a good one.
Amazing. All right, Well, some of you
know me. If you do, you might know that
my undergraduate degree is in screen writing.
And when people find this out, one of the first things they
often ask is, you know, what's your favorite movie or favorite
TV show? And that question would give me
so much anxiety because as a storyteller, it's kind of, it's
hard not to feel like my answer says something, you know, deep
and important about what type of person I am.
Like to say that like, you know, this is the story that made me
want to write stories or that speaks the most to my soul.
So as much as I'd like to treat it as kind of a innocent
icebreaker, it's hard for me to kind of overcome this instinct
that my favorite stories are connected to who I am.
Why is that? When I asked for your favorite
stories, and I'm sure some of you thought of them and didn't
say them, it's OK. I also noticed that none of you
named like a legal document that you really like, or like an
encyclopedia, or even like a philosophy book.
Because if all we were trying to do is list rules or facts or
even principles we should live by, we wouldn't necessarily need
a story, right? Humans use story to make sense
of our experience of the world. We kind of grapple with the
strange realities of being flesh and blood, but also an eternal
soul, but also like this pulsing heart full of desire and emotion
by through story. And as we try to make sense of
what it means to be human and what are places in the world,
story seems to just come spilling out of us.
Because story helps us create meaning.
Scripture is a unique type of story because the meaning maker
here is not a mere human author, it's God himself.
And in a world of confusion that we live in, where like competing
ideas and narratives are kind of pulling us in every direction,
God's Word reveals who God is, who we are as his creation, and
what his plan is for humanity. So this revelation also comes
like, not in the form of these abstract ideas, but through
human history, through the lives of people who encounter God and
are changed by him. And so this story invites us
deeper into understanding God in his heart for humanity.
So as we dive into that today, I'd like to take a moment to
just pray for us in particular, that God would make himself more
fully known to us through his Word today.
Let me pray. Lord God, we thank you for the
story that you have given us, that it's not a mere story where
we are kind of trying to like take all the puzzle pieces of
human existence in the world and put them together ourselves.
Instead, we thank you that it's a revelation of who you are,
that we can know you, that we can know how you view us and
what you're doing in the world. God that we can have the
security of knowing the God that we follow, that he is faithful,
that he is gracious, that he is patient, that he is steadfast,
that he pursues US against all odds.
And so, Lord, we just pray that you would give us a clearview of
who you are this morning. And that if we came in today
with any anxieties or fears or just like just challenges and
difficult things that we're holding, we pray that this
story, this reality of who you are would speak to us and remind
us of who you are and remind us of how you see us and remind us
of where we fall in this grand plan of redemption that you're
doing. That there would be a security
and knowing that you are working in our world, that you were
working in the light of all the brokenness and all the
challenges and all the pain that we see, that you were constantly
at work and that we can count on you, God, to come through for
us. So we pray that you would open
our eyes to that this morning. We pray that in Jesus name,
Amen. Amen.
All right, so, yeah, in case you guys haven't been here the last
couple of weeks, I'm going to do a quick recap.
We started our sermon series with the story of creation as
one does. We learned that humanity was
created by a good God whose intent is for humans to live in
his presence and relationship with him and to partner with him
to bring about order and flourishing and creative
goodness in this world. But then comes the fall, the
tragic descent of humanity into sin, where we basically, instead
of trusting God and living in light of his wisdom and his
boundaries, humanity attempts to seize control, to go our own
way, to kind of become our own. Many gods and one sin has a grip
on the human heart. The downward spiral is rapid and
messy, like one sin begets another begets another, until
the world is just filled with deceit and envy and selfishness
and violence and death. So now we're in Week 3.
And so we're left with kind of a major question, which is, given
the dire state of this world, what will God do next?
Well, the good news is that God's response to humanity's
brokenness is to begin a plan of redemption.
So you're going to hear that word probably a lot through this
series, redemption. So what what do we mean by that?
Well, the 10 second version is that redemption means to be
released from bondage, specifically humanity's bondage
to sin. So God's plan of redemption is
how God sets us free from this cycle of self destruction and
death and brings us into a restored relationship with
himself. And how is he going to do this?
Well, the process starts with God making a covenant.
It feels like a very Christianese word, covenant.
I think if I had never become a Christian, I probably could have
gone my entire life and used that word 0 times.
Maybe you're like, I've used that word 0 times.
I'm not sure what it means. Tim Mackey, the creator of the
Bible Project, argues that covenant should actually be in
the top five words that we think of when we think of
Christianity. Mackie says God's covenant
promises Dr. The whole story of the Bible and are at the center
of the Christian faith. Well, if that's true, then the
answer to this next question is very important, which is what is
a covenant? Here's one definition that I
like. A covenant refers to a
relationship between two partners who make binding
promises to each other and work together to reach a common goal.
They're often often accompanied by like oaths, signs,
ceremonies. Covenants define obligations and
commitments, but they're different from a contract
because they are relational and personal.
So like a commonly used example is marriage.
This year I went to six weddings.
So that's a lot, right? But each one of them, a shout
out to the people in this room who invited me to their wedding.
I love you. I enjoyed your wedding also.
It was interesting, right? Because each wedding was unique
based on the couple's like culture and personalities, and
yet all of them had like these elements in common.
The couple made specific promises to one another.
They walked through a ceremony to symbolize their commitment.
And they came out on the other side with this new bond, a
deeper relationship than before and more clarity on what their
commitment entails, a commitment that they would then have to
live out, right. So these are all reflections of
marriage as a covenant. As it turns out, God is a God of
covenants. So the big four, as we'll call
them, are God's covenants with Abraham, with Moses and the
people of Israel, with King David, and then what we usually
call the new covenant, which is brought about through Jesus.
So today we're in the first covenant with a man to your text
will call Abraham. You probably know him as
Abraham, which is the fancy new name he receives in Genesis 17.
But we learned about this covenant in a couple of places,
but we're going to be in Genesis 12 and 15.
So these two parts that we might call the promise and the
ceremony, The promise and the ceremony, you know, it would be
really fun if I had like a device that turned pages for me.
I don't know, maybe I should just live in the 21st century
and not have paper. But I feel like I just, it's
tactile. I need it.
I don't know. But in Genesis 12, where we're
starting, God makes a promise to Abraham and it comes up like
kind of out of the blue. Like at this point, all we know
about Abraham is his name, his lineage, and that he's from a
land called ER. And then suddenly out of
nowhere, God speaks to him and says, go from your country, your
people in your father's household to the land that I
will show you. And then God speaks this five
part blessing over him. He says, I will make you into 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 whoever curses you, I will curse, and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you. So this is like a fairly unusual
way to introduce yourself to someone, right?
Because at this point Abraham does not know the Lord.
Like scripture confirms this in the book of Joshua.
It says long ago your father's lived behind the Euphrates,
Tara, the father of Abraham and Nahor, and they served other
gods. So Abraham was an idol
worshipper and aside from that, he appears to kind of just be
some random guy. And yet this obscure person has
instantly become the beneficiary of these like outrageous
promises from God. For a man like Abraham and his
time period and his culture, these promises are like
basically everything that he could ever dream of.
Like I don't know what you would think in your mind is like that.
I don't know, like maybe the answer to like that.
What would I do if I won the lottery question?
It's kind of like everything that he could imagine getting
out of life is encompassed in these promises that not only
him, but like his whole lineage would prosper and that his would
be associated with bringing about good for the whole world.
And even here in these promises, we see a kind of nod to God's
long term plan that God will bless Abraham's family so that
all the families of the earth will be blessed.
So that's the plan of redemption.
And it's going to work kind of like a ripple effect where the
blessing starts with one man, but then it kind of expands and
expands until it has reached the whole world.
Now here's something important to notice.
When God makes this promise, what does Abraham have to give
God in return? It's a rhetorical question.
It's OK if you don't. Nothing.
God makes these epic promises and then he just stops speaking.
Now the next verse does say that Abraham does his God asks him
and he leaves his home for a new land.
So there's an important action for Abraham to take.
Like God invites him to go to basically like say yes to these
promises and Abraham goes. But there's no like, exchange.
There's no like, quid pro quo. There's not like God doesn't
require some kind of payment or service like people might expect
the Pagan gods to require. God doesn't ask Abraham to,
like, follow any specific rules. The promises aren't really
contingent on anything except Abraham saying yes to God's
extravagantly generous offer. So kind of make a note of that.
Keep that in your mind, and we're going to jump to Genesis
15 where we see the ceremony, which is kind of a formalization
of God's covenant. So this chapter starts with
Abraham bringing 2 concerns to God.
So first concern, Abraham is no child of his own, which kind of
seems like a major obstacle if God is promising that Abraham's
offspring will become a great nation.
And the second concern is that along with these promises, God
also tells Abraham that he will inherit like a fruitful land.
But Abraham asks, how can I know that that will happen?
Well, in response, God tells Abraham to do this.
He tells him to gather these kind of sacrificial animals, to
cut them in half and place the halves into two piles.
It's kind of strange. Then a deep sleep falls over
Abraham and he has a vision. And in the darkness, Abraham
sees a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the
animal pieces. And the text says on that day
the Lord made a covenant with Abraham.
What does it all mean? Well, to unpack this, we need to
put on our Bible nerd hats for just a minute and talk about
ancient rituals. So here we go.
In ancient Mesopotamia, where Abraham lived, cultures didn't
really rely on the written word as much.
Now in our modern world, like, how would you normally formalize
an agreement? Like you would probably like
write out a document that like has all the terms and then you
would sign your names on it, right?
Well, what do you do in a culture where most people don't
read or write? Conundrum.
Instead, people in Abraham's world would seal a covenant with
a ritual where they would act out the consequences of breaking
the covenant. So it's very dramatic.
The animal pieces represent what will happen if the people
involved break the covenant. It's kind of a way of saying,
may what was done to this animal be done to me if I do not hold
up my end of the agreement? Now if the covenant was say
between like a king and a servant, one of two things could
happen. Either the king and the servant
would walk through the pieces or just the servant would walk
through the pieces, meaning there would be consequences for
the servant, but like not so much for the king.
So what is happening in the vision that Abraham has?
God, as represented by the fire pot and the burning torch, walks
through the middle alone. So the king seals the covenant
by himself. There's a teaching that I listen
to by I'm the late pastor Tim Keller that talks about this as
well, and let scholars talk about this as well.
But basically this act means that God is saying that he alone
will bear the consequences if the covenant is broken.
This is not an even sided agreement.
God alone initiates the covenant.
God alone seals the covenant with this ritual, and therefore
God alone is bearing responsibility for bringing his
promises to completion. OK, so that's our Bible nerd
moment. You can take your hats off.
Something profound and unprecedented is happening here.
But what is at the heart of this story?
Like what can we take away from all of this?
Here it is. Here's here's the main thing
that we're going to talk about this morning.
Understanding God as a covenant maker should fundamentally
change how we see God and understand his relationship with
us. God's choice to enter into
covenants should shape who we believe God to be.
There's a kind of common refrain I've heard might be familiar,
that the God we see in the Old Testament and the God we see in
the New Testament feel like two different gods.
I imagine you've like heard that or felt it yourself, right?
Like the feeling we get is that the Old Testament God is a God
of anger and punishment, but the New Testament God, as known
through Jesus is a God of love and grace.
Sound familiar? Feel like that's something I've
definitely heard before. So when I was in seminary, my
Old Testament professor started the semester by saying this,
that one goal of our time together in the Old Testament
was to prove. So all the books that including
the story about Abraham, like all the way from like creation
up until up until Jesus comes on the scene, that that selection
basically that the goal of our time together was to prove that
that dichotomy was a false dichotomy, that the God of the
Old Testament is not less gracious than the God of the New
Testament. They are, after all, one God.
The Bible actually reveals that grace has been there since the
beginning, and God's decision to make a covenant with Abraham,
especially kind of a largely 1 sided covenant, is one of our
earliest pieces of evidence of God's extraordinary grace.
And what is grace? Grace is a free gift.
Grace means receiving favor and blessing and love that we did
not earn. And because we did not earn it,
we cannot lose it once we've received it.
And that is how God chooses to relate to humanity.
He is profoundly and shockingly and beautifully and unimaginably
gracious towards us. So this is the first take away
that I want us to hold on to. God's grace has been present
since the beginning. If you look back to at Genesis 3
where the fall happens all the way through 11 to the part that
we land in today, we basically see, to summarize that whole
story, all that's happening is that humanity is just like
choosing evil again and again and again.
Like left to our own devices, we are rebellious and selfish and
very short sighted. We choose quick fixes and
instant pleasure over what is good and loving.
We are a danger to ourselves and to one another, and we would be
completely lost if God did not have the heart of a rescuer.
He pursues us as an act of grace.
Even when Abraham is introduced, it says nothing about his
character or his accolades, if he has any, because they're not
really relevant. God doesn't choose Abraham
because Abraham is good. God chooses Abraham because God
is merciful. And it's God's mercy that sets
His plan of redemption into motion and that leads us to take
away #2 because grace is the foundation, God's plan of
redemption is certain. So of the four main covenants I
mentioned that are in the Bible, only one is truly like fully
conditional or or breakable, at least by people.
The covenant with Moses, but that's a sermon for next week.
Every other covenant is primarily unconditional, meaning
it's core promises can't really be broken by humans.
Now this doesn't mean that there's nothing for humanity to
do. Like if we look at Abraham, he's
invited to leave his homeland and his idols to follow God.
And it's important that he does so to be a participant in the
covenant because an agreement has to be opted into.
So our steps of faith matter, our decision to say yes to God
matters, our character matters. And also God is aware that he's
partnering with wayward humans. So the unconditional part
basically means this. Our shortcomings can't stop
God's plan. If God's plan relied on Abraham,
then if Abraham made a mistake or struggled with doubt, God's
old plan would just get derailed.
But Abraham does make mistakes and struggles to trust God, and
tries to force certain outcomes along the way.
And yet God fulfills every promise he made without fail.
So what if the gifts of reading like the entirety of the Bible
is that you begin to realize that any time it feels like
maybe God is not going to show up, maybe he's not there, maybe
he's not going to come through. We discovered that he's actually
working behind the scenes and setting the pieces in place to
draw hard hearted humans towards himself.
And we see this through God's covenants very clearly.
Like God is the one who initiates this relationship with
Abraham. God is the one who blesses and
multiplies his family. God is also the one who
basically guarantees that a savior will be born from
Abraham's line, which is the the heart of the covenant with
David. It's basically that that a
righteous king will come from his his land and establish peace
on the earth forever. And finally, God is the one who
gives his own Son. To seal the final and the new
covenant where Jesus lays down his life to pay our debts, to
cleanse our sins, and to secure the redemption of this world.
So God is the one who does it all.
So these two takeaways are major.
God has been. God's grace has been present
since the beginning. And because grace is the
foundation, God's plan of redemption is certain.
So do we see how important this is?
Let's look at it another way. So what happens if we don't see
that grace is the foundation? Like what happens if we see
God's plan of redemption as conditional or uncertain?
Maybe it's not going to happen. Well, what likely happens is we
develop an anxious faith, which is an oxymoron.
And yeah, it's a state of contradiction that many of us,
maybe most of us, live out every day.
Like we say that God is our Savior, but then we worry he's
not going to come through for us.
We sing songs that God made a way of redemption for us, and
yet we act like we can't afford to make a mistake.
That acceptance is dependence on our perfection, which actually
makes it harder sometimes to repent and to change.
We pray for God's Kingdom to come on earth as it is in
heaven, but we don't really know if prayer works or that God is
at work. So we strive, we fight to force
certain outcomes sometimes like Abraham did.
So this is a question I had to ask myself this week and then
I'm going to ask you now, which is, are you living from a place
of anxious faith? Is there a part of you that is
afraid that you were too broken for God to accept you, that
maybe he's not able to bring beauty and renewal out of the
ashes in your life? Or is there a part of you that
looks at the brokenness of the world and on some level believes
that if you if we don't fix it, no one will?
When we see the effects of sin in our world and in our hearts,
it's it's kind of automatic that we go into fight or flight mode.
Like we try to run away and ignore our problems because they
feel too overwhelming. Or we try to fix things by force
by like trying to strong arm the world around us into operating
in a way that makes us feel safe.
Does that sound like faith or does that sound like anxiety?
The foundation of our faith is not that we are good enough or
strong enough or faithful enough that that God is.
He's perfect in his goodness, He's limitless in his strength,
He's eternally consistent in his faithfulness.
And in a world full of troubles, This is our source of peace,
that God does not give up on us. God does not start something
that he does not intend to finish.
So in light of who God is, how should we live?
That's our final take away. The story arc of God's
redemption is long, which means that faith requires patience.
So the timeline between God's covenant with Abraham and the
fulfillment of the new covenant through Jesus is about 2100
years. So it's an understatement to say
that God plays the long game. But second, Peter says this.
Do not forget this one thing, dear friends, with the Lord, a
day is like 1000 years and 1000 years is like a day.
The Lord is not slow and keeping His promise as some understand
slowness. Instead, he's patient with you,
not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to
repentance. So if we're going to live a
life, a life of faith, trusting in God's timing and God's way of
doing things, patience is a necessity.
And this is somewhat unfortunate because everything in our modern
world wants to disciple us in the ways of impatience.
We live in an age of constant stimuli and instant
gratification. I feel like I've even noticed
that we seem to want to form our opinions as quickly as possible,
like we want, like immediate and like compelling answers and
solutions, instead of taking the time to develop curiosity or
discernment. Our hurry, our dissatisfaction,
the reckless way we use our words like weapons, our
resistance to the the slowness required to cultivate wisdom.
All of this is the fruit of impatience.
And yet God is patient. He moves slowly because he is
motivated by grace and by love. And if we are followers of God,
why would we try to outpace him? Do we think we can improve upon
God's plan of redemption? Our reckless hurry is kind of
eerily reminiscent of the fall. Like Adam and Eve, we talked
about this last week. Adam and Eve are like eager for
wisdom. They want to become like wise.
They want to become more like God.
But they go about it by opting for a shortcut, like grasping
for control instead of coming to God with their desires.
And at the root of that, grasping for control.
And that kind of impatience is a lie, that God cannot be trusted,
that what God said won't happen, that we have to take matters
into our own hands. A church.
This is the opposite of what it means for God to be a covenant.
Maker forgot to be a God of covenants.
It means that he's so faithful that even though Abraham and
like generations of his descendants onward continue
making mistakes and doubting God and going their own stubborn
way, God still keeps his promise to bless and restore the world.
God has demonstrated time and again that he can be trusted
throughout history and in our own lives.
Recently in my community, the topic of testimonies came up.
So I was reflecting on like testimonies from my own life and
so many of them are about God as a provider, Like God coming
through when I had like a like a desperate financial or practical
need, when I couldn't pay my rent, when my car got totaled by
hit and run, when I needed a job, when I experienced a health
emergency, and the list goes on and on.
And often when I share these stories with people, if I share
them like here on a Sunday, people will be like, oh, well,
you know, wow, like God has worked all these miracles in
your life. It must help you to have so much
faith that he's going to provide for you.
And I'm like, yes, it, it must, right?
Like you would think that it would.
You would think that like the accumulation of all of these
testimonies of God powerfully answering my prayers would mean
that I just like never doubt that he's going to provide for
me. That would make perfect logical
sense if only humans worked that way.
It's it's true that as I've walked with God over the years
that he's worked like 1 miracle after another, that each one
kind of peels back the layers of fear and insecurity that I have
about not having enough. But The thing is like those
fears go really deep. Like deep into my past, deep
into my childhood, deep into places in my life where I wasn't
even like conscious of the decision to be afraid.
Like, I mean, that's kind of a weird way of putting it, but
basically, like those are things that that are deeply rooted in,
in the way that I'm wired. But maybe you can relate.
Maybe there are specific areas that you struggle to trust in
God's faithfulness where even though your head says one thing,
like your gut instinctively reacts with fear, like fear of
failure, fear of rejection, of conflict, of powerlessness, of
being trapped in uncertainty. I have grown a lot and trusting
God to provide and also I still struggle with fear.
But even this is a testimony to God's patience because he didn't
give up on me the first time or the second time or the third
time I doubted him. Like, you know, hey, I've
already shown him faithful. Like if you're going to doubt
me, you're on your own kid. His patience is persistent and
radical. So now as I'm looking to the
future and I'm looking at any area that I'm tempted to fear,
this is the truth that I want to rehearse in my mind.
God has always shown up for me. He is with me now.
He will be with me always. What do I have to fear?
Church? What if that was how we operated
in the world? What if that was how we spoke to
our fears? If when our anxieties are like
clamoring for our attention, we said, my God is a God of
covenants, He keeps his promises.
He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
So if he was faithful before, he's going to be faithful again
and again and again. Fixating on God's faithfulness
helps us to be patient. Patient for him to work in our
lives, patient for him to heal the brokenness of our world.
Patient for him to rework our patterns of sin and to teach us
to trust him. Because God cannot be anything
but faithful. That is who He is.
But often it is not until we walk toward God that we discover
He's faithful. This is true for Abraham when he
was called kind of out of out of obscurity.
Abraham learned he could trust God when he took a step of
faith. But Abraham first needed to go
and leave his country and his father's house.
He had to actually move toward God and God's promises to
discover that he was walking on a firm foundation that God was
going to keep showing up for him.
So that feels like an invitation for you today to like know God
as a covenant maker and a promise keeper.
I would invite you to move toward him.
And maybe this means turning your back on an old way of
living or thinking. Maybe it means rejecting the
voice of anxiety that like urges you towards grasping for
control. Maybe it means giving up an
idol, like something you sought comfort and purpose in instead
of God. Ask yourself, where am I
doubting in God's faithfulness and what am I trusting in
instead? Like what if I've been willing
to maybe confront or give up in order to follow God in the place
that He wants to take me? Today can be the day that we
take that step in trusting Him and discovering just how
faithful He is.