Good morning, everyone. My name is Dallas. I'm one of the interns here at Bridgewater, and it really is a blessing to be here with you guys this morning. I had not heard of all of the losses that many of you guys have had over this past week, but I can sympathize with how something you feel. This in January last year, lost my grandmother, and then two weeks later, my father-in-law passed away from complications of having a heart transplant. Something that shouldn't have happened. It's difficult for me to hear some of the losses that you guys are going through as well. But I know because of the ways that I've seen God working in my life that he is going to be there for us. So I'm going to share with you guys part of my story in a way of introducing our Christmas series and sharing how the same God that was working in my life in the past is the same God that is working in my life now and is the same God who has worked throughout all of Scripture. So growing up, my parents never went to church. So I didn't have a church foundation, but regardless of that, my parents tried their best to set as solid a foundation as they could for me by having me learn from their failures and continue on with their successes. But my parents, like everybody else in the world, was not perfect. So they had issues. They struggled with alcohol. They would be drunk constantly, and that alcohol would lead to them fighting constantly as they were home, and it's something that would keep me and my siblings up at night when we were young kids when I was eight, nine, and ten years old. Thankfully, it didn't last too long as my parents had separated and gotten divorced. But one of my parents, quickly after the divorce was finalized, had met someone else and remarried. But they hadn't changed their habits, and the person they married had a similar habits that they did. So the alcohol continued to have this grip on their lives. And as their relationship continued to grow and move along in time, the fighting and the alcohol just continued to get worse. And through that, all I can remember is my parents fighting. It had progressed to the point where I'd come downstairs after a fight one night, and there would be some type of picture, some type of painting on the wall, just covering up a hole made in the wall that night. It was easier to use a picture than to do it the right way. And then everything came to a climax, and I was about to leave for college. I was 20 years old, so I had been dealing with my parents fighting for over ten years of my life, over half my life at that time. And I woke up in the middle of the night, and there were police cars all in my driveway. One of my parents had a gun in their mouth, but couldn't pull the trigger. At this point in my life, witnessing my parents fighting for a majority of my life, having to witness this abuse, witness, heartache, witness addiction, I had found myself asking many questions. Why are my parents a slave to alcohol? Why can't I have a normal life? Why am I stuck in the middle of this? And one question I think every one of us has asked sometime in our life is this. What is going on? This does not make sense. One question that I find myself asking in the middle of difficult times, in the middle of times where things just keep seeming to get worse and worse before they ever get better. You guys relate to that? And most of us in the middle of those difficult times when we're having this thought, we go into fight or flight, where we'll either go into fight. We'll be fighting hands in feet defending what it is that we believe, or we'll run. And we'll start to question what it is that we believe. And in that moment, we are trying to figure out why we believe what it is that we believe. And it's during these moments that we see what someone chooses to rely on, what someone chooses to trust. Today, we're going to be looking at a story of a man named Abraham. And we're going to be looking at his life, how God was working, asking him to do some crazy things in his life, and we're going to see what Abraham chooses to do. And we're going to see why he chooses to trust God the way that he does. And today, we're going to look at this text a little bit differently. Because when we're in the middle of difficult things going on in our lives, we're not thinking back to all of the timeline of events and trying to make sense of everything we are just thinking in this moment, what is going on? This does not make sense. We're actually going to start towards the end of our story and work our way backwards and see how we can make sense of this event going on in Abraham's life. So we're going to be reading in Genesis chapter 22. You can turn there, open it up in your phone, or it'll be right here on the screen with me. In Genesis 22, verse 1, "Sometime later, God tested Abraham's faith. Abraham, God called. Yes, he replied, "Here I am. Take your son, your only son, yes, Isaac, whom you love so much, and go to the land of Moriah. Go and sacrifice him as he burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will show you." Okay. So right off the bat, I am finding myself asking that question, what is going on? This does not make sense. I thought God did not want us to sacrifice people, let alone our children. And then along with that, this man, Isaac, someone who is a prominent figure in the Bible, he's not going to go on and listen to what God is saying, right? He has to know that this isn't what God wants, right? Let's keep reading. The next morning, Abraham got up early, he saddled his donkey and took two of his servants with him, along with the son, Isaac. Then he chopped wood for a fire, for a burnt offering, and set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day of their journey, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. Stay here with the donkey, Abraham told the servant. The boy and I will travel a little further, we will worship there, and then we will come right back. So Abraham placed the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac's shoulders while he carried himself, carried the fire in the knife, as the two of them walked on together, Isaac had turned to Abraham and said, "Father, yes, my son, Abraham replied. We have the fire in the wood," the boy said, "but where is the sheet for the burnt offering?" God will provide a sheet for the burnt offering, my son, Abraham answered, and they both walked on together. When they arrived at the place where God had told them to go, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it. Then he tied his son to Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood, and Abraham picked up a knife to kill his son as a sacrifice. This does not make sense. We see that Abraham is following, he's going along with what God has asked him to do. What is God doing and why is Abraham following what God is asking him to do? I want to pause here for a second, because I think each and every one of us can think back to a time in our life. If not a time that's happening in our life now where we have asked the question, "What is going on?" This does not make sense, and we can relate to what we are reading here, relate to the fact that this really is not something that we would think would ever be happening, but it seems to be happening. It's events like this that happen in our lives that make us ask questions like, "God, why is my marriage falling apart? God, why can I not overcome this addiction? God, why did that person have to leave me? God, why did that person have to die? God, what are you doing?" I don't know what that event is in your life, but who I do know is in the middle of that event, we aren't thinking, "Yes, something great is going to come as a result of this difficult time that's coming in my life." While that's true, it's not our first thought that's not helpful for us in that moment to help us get through and process what is happening in our lives. So we're going to take a look at the reason that Abraham is listening to God, the reason that he's going through and following him in this difficult circumstance. You see, God made promises to Abraham. God made promises because God is a promise-making God. We're going to take a look back, we're going to jump back to Genesis 18, and we're going to see some of the promises that he was made to Abraham by God. On Genesis 18, verse 1, "The Lord appeared again to Abraham near the oak tree, belonging to Mamre." One day Abraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the day. He looked up and noticed three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he ran to meet them and welcomed them, bowing low to the ground. Here's Sarah, your wife, the visitors asked. She's inside the tent Abraham replied. Then one of them said, "I will return to you about this time next year and your wife, Sarah, will have a son." Sarah listened to this conversation from the tent. Abraham and Sarah were both very old by this time. And Sarah was long past the age of having children. So she laughed silently to herself and said, "How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master, my husband, is so old?" So in this passage, we see God makes a promise to Abraham. He makes a promise that him and his wife are going to have a child. They're going to have a son. That is an incredible blessing. But there's a couple of problems. You see, at this time, Abraham was about a hundred years old, and his wife Sarah was about 90 years old. That is, for a past the age of being able to bear a child. And yet, God was going to give them a child at that old age, but not only that. They had yet to have a child. It seemed that Sarah's womb was barren, that Sarah couldn't have children. And back in this time, not being able to have children, people looked at that as God was looking down upon you and closing your room so that you couldn't enjoy that blessing because it was the greatest blessing that they could have in that time to have kids and to be able to erase them and continue their family line. How in the world is God going to work in this improbable situation? I think Sarah's response to this is something that all of us can relate to. Her response is laughing, silently laughing, because she's in disbelief of what's going to happen, like she's thinking, "Yeah, right." I think that's something that we can relate to. I think when we think back to the situation previously in her life where we were thinking, "What is going on?" We had a moment where someone had told us, "Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to work out." And our thought is, "Yeah, right, I don't know how anything good can come from this." And yet when we look back at chapter 22, we see that Abraham and Sarah did indeed have a son. They were blessed in this improbable situation where they really should not have been able to have a kid, but God worked, God fulfilled the promise that he made. But if we also remember in chapter 22, Abraham is supposed to sacrifice this child that he was blessed with, this really doesn't make sense. It makes even less sense than it just did it before as we're continuing on in this story. What is going on? And in the middle of all of this, we have to remember God had made Abraham promises. And it's because of these promises that God had made Abraham, that Abraham is going to continue to be faithful and follow after God. So let's continue to go back to Genesis chapter 12 where we see God call Abraham. We're going to take a look at some of the promises that he made. Genesis chapter 12 verse 1, "The Lord said to Abraham, 'Leave your entire, your native country, your relatives and your family's family and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you unto a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All families on earth will be blessed through you." So in this, we see Abraham is being told, "You are to take everything. Take your wife, take all of your livestock, take your money, take everyone in your household and leave. Leave your family, leave the land that you always have known, you've known, you've grown up on and go to a place and I will tell you what that place is when you get there." Now, I don't know about you guys, but I hate moving. That does not sound fun to me. I very much enjoy where I live. I also very much enjoy my family. Me and my family still do many, many things together. My parents still take me and my wife out for dinner. They still won't let us pay whenever we go out and I do have another confession to make. I'm 24 years old. I've been married for over two years and my parents still pay my car insurance. I really should take care of that. My wife pays for her own car insurance and next year I'm getting kicked off of it. So I really need to get that taken care of. Now I say these because this is why it's difficult for me, but for Abraham this is far more difficult to just pick up everything and move. He doesn't know exactly where he's going. He doesn't know how God is going to work everything out. He's just getting up and going. Now why would Abraham leave everything? Why is he trusting God? Why is he following exactly what he told him to do? He's following because Abraham has seen how God has worked in the previous chapters of Genesis. He has seen God work. He has heard how God has made everything through creation. He has seen how God has worked through Noah and the flood to rid the earth of evil. He knows the promises he made back then and he knows the promises that God is giving him in these couple verses are going to be fulfilled. So let's take a look at those seven promises that we see in chapter 12 and the one that we see in chapter 18. So he says, "I will make you into a great nation." He says, "I will bless you." He says, "I will make you famous. You will be a blessing to others." He says, "I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who treat you with contempt. All families will be blessed through you. And I will return to you about this time next year and your wife, Sarah, will have a son." So Abraham saw God answering promises even before this time. So Abraham knew God was going to keep his promises now because God is a promise-making, promise-keeping God. And as we've already talked about, Abraham and Sarah, we're able to have a child, this promised child that they were given at the ages of 90 and 100 years old through an improbable situation. God fulfilled his promise then. But if we look at these promises that we just talked about and we compare them to what's happening in chapter 22, are we going to see that those line up? So let's take a look at those promises that were made. So one of the promises that was made, he says, "I will make you into a great nation." So he's telling this to Abraham. But Abraham knows if he used to be made into a great nation, he has to have descendants. He has to have children who are going to continue on that family line. But if we remember, Abraham's supposed to sacrifice that child that he was promised. How in the world is he going to turn into a great nation if he doesn't have any descendants? He also makes this promise that he will bless Abraham. And Abraham was blessed with a son. And then he was asked to sacrifice that son that he was blessed with. He also says, "I will make you famous." But how in the world is he supposed to be famous if his family line is cut off then? It seems that all of these promises are actually being broken by Abraham going through and following what God has asked him to do in chapter 22. But Abraham chooses to be faithful to God. Let's take a look at how our story in chapter 22 finishes. "And Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice. At that moment the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven. Abraham, Abraham. Yes, Abraham replied. Here I am. Don't lay a hand on the boy," the angel said, "do not hurt him in any way. For now I know you truly fear God and you have not withheld from me even your son, your only son." Then Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering in place of his son. See, Abraham chose to follow God. Abraham was faithful to him. And just as he was about to sacrifice his son, God intervened. You see, God was never going to have Abraham sacrificed his son. It was never going to happen. Abraham was being tested by God to see if Abraham truly feared him, if he truly was going to listen to what God had to say. And he did. And it turns out because Abraham chose to follow after God, he was blessed in incredible ways because of his faith. You see, we're going to take a look back at these promises that before seemed to be broken. We're going to see how they were actually fulfilled. He says, "I will make you into a great nation." So Abraham lives, or Isaac lives, I'm sorry, Isaac marries and he has a children. He has a son named Jacob, Jacob marries and he has twelve children. Those twelve children make up the twelve tribes of Israel. The people that God is going to lead and work through and guide through the rest of the Bible. God kept his promise. He also said that God will bless Abraham. And we see he blessed him with a son, but he didn't only bless him with a son, as we see later in Scripture, Abraham was blessed with salvation. Because Abraham was faithful to God, God gave him forgiveness. The greatest blessing that we could ask for, forgiveness from our sins and this exactly what Abraham was given. He also says, "I will make you famous." And we're reading Abraham's story in the Bible, enough said. He also says that all families will be blessed through you. You see, the line of Abraham eventually leads all the way down to God's son, Jesus. And Jesus would live a perfect life on earth, living sinless life on earth. He lived the life that we should have lived. And then went on to die a death on the cross, a death he did not deserve to die, a death in place for us to pay for our sin. He did that so we could have a relationship with the God who created us. He did that even though we are sinners, even though we go against what God has told us to do. This is the greatest blessing that anyone could have, any family, any person can have is to be able to have a relationship with God even though we don't deserve it. You see, God was faithful to Abraham in every single promise that he made. Even in the middle of the situation that made us go, what is going on? This does not make sense. God is in control. God used that situation to bring honor and glory to him. This isn't just the only example that we can look to in scripture. Because the same God that is working in this situation, in this story of Abraham is working throughout the entire Bible. And not only is this the same God that is working throughout all of scripture, it's the same God that is working in your life. It's the same God that's working in my life and it is the God that we worship here at Bridgewater. See, when we look back and we think of the situations that happened in our lives, or that situation that's happening in our life now, then we just think, this does not make sense. God, what are you doing? I want you guys to think back to this story of how God kept promises to Abraham. Because we see this, we know that I can take God at his word. We can take God at his word. He has proven it in scripture and he is going to prove that to be true in your guys' life as well. You can trust and obey God. You can trust and obey him. So let's take a look back in my story. My parents had fought, separated, divorced when I was 10 years old and one of my parents got remarried when I was 12. They moved to Vestal, New York and it was their Vestal that I met my best friends, future groomsmen in my wedding, the guys I spent a majority of my childhood with. We would go and we would walk over to Ross Corner's Christian Academy, Ross Corner's Baptist Church and we would play basketball outside because they had a full court basketball court and we were young boys and we just wanted to go and play basketball and do something outside. It was then that the youth pastor who was living in the Parsonage came out and started building into our lives. We ended up going to Word of Life's snow camp in 2017 where each and every one of my friends and I gave our lives to Jesus and made Jesus the leader of our lives and the forgiver of our sins. It was then at a future camp that we went to as a youth group that I met, my future wife. Then my step parent who had a gun in his mouth went to AA, cleaned up his life and he accepted the Lord into his life. Not only that, my mom in the middle of the trial that she was going through went to church and realized her need for Christ as well and accepted Christ as the leader of her life. I'm going to forgive her for sins. And as I look back at everything that happened, I can see God was working and God was faithful to me in keeping his promise. This is the promise that I believe he kept to me. Psalm 8 28 and we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God. See, I gave my life to Jesus, gave up everything, followed him and God had been working from the very beginning in incredible ways, ways that are beyond what I could even imagine, especially in the middle of that moment. God was working and God kept this promise. You see, God has promised us that if we give up our life to him, he will help us through everything that will happen in our lives. So I'm going to encourage you guys, those of you sitting home online and those of you in Hancock, to do one thing for me today. I want you to think back to a time in your life where you thought, this does not make sense. What are you doing, God? I want you in a journal, in the notes app, on your phone somewhere, write down that event that God was working through and the promise that God made in the middle of that event. So that the next time that you are going through a difficult time, the next time you find yourself asking that question, this does not make sense. What are you doing? You can refer back to that as a reminder that you need to choose to trust God in that moment. That God is going to be faithful to the promises that he has made to you regardless of what is happening in your life. See, Abraham gave up everything in his life. He gave up his family. He knew he was even ready to give up his son. And God brought about incredible blessings as a result of Abraham being faithful and choosing to follow him. That is the same God that is working in our lives today. Same God that will work everything in your life for good when you give your lives to him. Let's pray. And we are so thankful for the ways that you have worked in our lives. God, I know I am personally incredibly grateful for the ways that you have worked in mine and ways that I could not imagine, I could not fathom. I pray that as you continue to work in our lives, you would help us to trust you. You would help us in those situations to rely on you and trust in you as we know that it is only through you that we are able to do that. God, I pray that we can think back and write down something in our life, a promise that you have kept to us so that we can continue to remember and be thankful for the ways you work. God, we thank you and we praise in your name. Amen. And then words so often leave.
