God’s Protection and the Failure of Faith | Genesis 12:10-13:4
Brian Hedges | May 26, 2019
When I was about 11 years old I fell in love with reading, and it wasn’t theology books at the time. It was, rather, novels written by America’s greatest storyteller, Louis L’Amour. Anybody ever read a Louis L’Amour book? That’s quite a few hands. Someone introduced me to Louis L’Amour, and I started reading. A lot of these were Westerns, historical novels.
What I really loved were the Sackett stories. The Sackett stories were a series of books (I think there are 17 of these books) that chart the journey of a family, beginning with Barnabas Sackett, who’s in England, Elizabethan England (this is in the early 17th century), and Barnabas Sackett stumbles onto this long-lost treasure. Then he finds himself, inexplicably, on the run. People are hunting for his life, and it forces him onto a ship, where he takes a journey to the New World and begins to forge out a new life for himself and then eventually his family in the American wilderness. The story is part swashbuckling, high seas adventure, it’s part historical novel.
I’ve thought a number of times that there are some parallels between the story of Barnabas Sackett and the story of Abraham. Both of them were men who were called or forced in some way to leave their homeland. Both of them found themselves journeying, sometimes in a dangerous way, into a new country, pioneers in a new land; and both of them were fathers of significant families.
However, one of the key differences between Barnabas Sackett and the story of Abraham is simply this: in the story of Barnabas Sackett, you never one time see him act of cowardice. Not so with Abraham. Louis L’Amour’s heroes are always heroic to the last. They’re always bold, they’re always fearless, they never act out of cowardice, they’re always protecting their families. In fact, that was one of the themes of the Sackett novels, is "if you attack one Sackett, they all come running."
But Abraham was a much more well-rounded character, he’s a much more realistic character, and, like all the saints in Scripture, Abraham had his faults, he had his failures. We see one of those failures in the passage we’re going to look at this morning, in Genesis 12.
Last week we began a new series on the life of Abraham. We’re calling this series “God’s Promise and the Life of Faith,” and last week we looked at how God called Abram by his grace. He called him out of darkness, out of the paganism in ancient Ur, this city of ancient Ur. God called Abram by his grace, called him by his word, and called him to live a life of faith. Abram obeyed; he heard the call and he went out, not knowing where he was going. Abram is the man of faith par excellence in Scripture!
But this morning, in the very next passage, beginning in Genesis 12:10, we see Abram not as the man of faith, but as the man of fear, as the man of unbelief, a man who’s acting not at all like a saint; he’s acting pretty much like someone of the world. This morning we’re going to read this story together, and rather than reading the text all at once I want us to just kind of experience this story by reading the passage as we go along.
Abram's Crisis
So we’re going to begin in Genesis 12:10, and it all begins with a crisis in the very first sentence. Let’s read it. It says, “Now there was a famine in the land.” “Now there was a famine in the land.”
Now you remember, this is Canaan’s land. This is the land of promise. This is the land that, in verse 7, God said, “I’ll give this to you and to your descendants.” But Abram faces a crisis, because this land of promise turns out to be not a land of plenty, but a land of famine. Abram here is facing his first crisis in the journey of faith, and notice what he does in the next sentence. He takes the Egypt option. Verse 10 continues, “So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.”
Now we have to ask ourselves, was this a sin? Was it a sin for Abram to go down to Egypt? There are certainly times in Scripture where it was not a sin for God’s people to go to Egypt. We’ll find at the end of the book of Genesis that God actually sends Joseph to Egypt. You remember how Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, and Joseph eventually finds himself in Egypt, and again there’s a famine, and God uses Joseph’s presence there as the prime minister of Egypt to provide for all the children of Jacob, the whole family of Israel. That begins their 400-year sojourn in Egypt.
But most of the time in Scripture when God’s people go down to Egypt, most of the time it’s an indication that they are choosing the world and the resources of men rather than of God. Isaiah 31:1 says, “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord.”
I think there’s one clue in the text that shows us that Abram probably was in sin, and it’s simply this, that when Abram goes to Egypt, he builds no altar. You remember how last week we saw that as Abram journeys through the promised land, he comes to Shechem, he builds an altar. He comes between the cities of Bethel and Ai, he builds an altar. He’s calling on the name of the Lord, he’s worshipping God, he’s praying, he’s proclaiming the name of the Lord! He’s maintaining a very vibrant witness in the midst of a pagan society. But not in Egypt. When he goes to Egypt, it seems that there’s no prayer, it seems that there’s no worship. There’s certainly no altar.
Abram is facing this crisis of faith, and in this crisis he fails the test. He probably felt justified in going to Egypt, because this wasn’t an ordinary famine. Verse 10 tells us “the famine was severe in the land.” This wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, everyday trial; it was a severe trial. It was a trial that in fact was threatening everything in his life. In fact, it was threatening the promise itself.
You can imagine how Abram might have reasoned. “God, you promised me this land, but there’s no food in this land! How are my children going to inherit this land if we all die? How are we going to inherit this land if we starve to death? How am I ever going to have a son if I don’t even live long enough to have a son?” So he chooses what seems to be the only logical choice, and that is to go where there is food. So he heads down to Egypt.
You see, Abram had not yet grasped a foundational truth that every believer has to learn, and that truth is simply this: tough circumstances do not change God’s plan, but they do test our faith. Tough circumstances don’t change God’s plan. God hadn’t changed! He hadn’t changed his promise, he hadn’t changed his plan for Abram, but he was testing Abram’s faith. Abram faces a crisis, his faith is being tested, and he fails the test. Until we grasp this, we will all do what Abram did. When life gets hard, we’ll hit the eject button.
A number of years ago I heard about a family who kind of had a bad reputation for moving over and over and over again. They would just move from house to house to house. Here was the deal: they weren’t very handy, they didn’t really know how to fix things, maybe they were too cheap to fix things. So they’d move into a house and something would break and they wouldn’t fix, and then something else would break and they wouldn’t fix it, and then something else would go wrong and they wouldn’t fix it. Finally, the house would get so bad that they would just sell the house and buy a new one and start all over again!
I think that’s how some people live life, isn’t it? Imagine, here’s a young woman. She meets the love of her life, she gets married, she has hopes and dreams of what her family life will be, what marriage will be like, but she’s not too far into marriage before the honeymoon is over, things start getting hard. This guy doesn’t seem to be Mr. Right anymore, he doesn’t seem to be as great as she thought he would be. She doesn’t particularly enjoy her life anymore. She’s not happy, so what does she do? She gets a divorce and she starts all over again. It happens over and over and over again.
That’s not to say that there aren’t many people who experience divorce unwillingly, many people who go through that tragedy and that trial. But when people choose that simply because they’re not happy, especially for a believer, it’s often because they’re going the way of the world instead of facing the crisis of faith in that moment.
People also do this with church. A Christian family finds a church, the church seems friendly and the pastor preaches from the Bible and it seems like there are great options for their family, so they join the church, they become a part of a church. But before long, they experience the truth of that terrible poem that’s actually true to life:
“To live above
With the saints in love,
Oh, that will be glory;
To live below
With the saints I know,
That’s a different story.”
Somebody rubs them the wrong way, the preacher maybe fails to show up for an important event, they find themselves getting disillusioned, and before long they hit the eject button. “Let’s look for another church.”
We also do it with friendship, don’t we? We start a friendship and we think the friendship is going to go well. We’re enjoying getting to know someone. But then there’s a conflict, and rather than leaning into the friendship we just kind of back away and we let things cool off, and before long we’re friends no longer.
Well, this is what happens in our lives when we don’t learn this lesson, that the tough circumstances are not there to change anything about God’s plan, but they are there to test our faith. This is what Abram faced. The famine came, and Abram failed, and he took his family to Egypt.
Now, we can just imagine what he thought when he got to Egypt. He was probably impressed, initially. By the time Abram had visited Egypt the pyramids would have been built. It’s no doubt the first time he’s been there, so he’s impressed by the magnificence of the architecture, he’s impressed by the abundance and the advanced agriculture of the day. He sees all of this opulence, and he has to be wowed. He’s getting his first taste of a new world!
But what Abram doesn’t know is that disaster is riding on the heels of his mistake, and it all happens in verses 11 and following. Look at the next few verses. Verse 11 says, “When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, ‘I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you they will say, “This is his wife.” Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.”
One mistake is leading right to another, isn’t it? Abram has failed to seek God in the midst of famine, and not only has he left the promised land, not only has he failed to built an altar, but now, when he’s coming in, he begins to feel fear. So he devises a scheme, he devises a plan in the midst of his fear; rather than exercising faith, rather than trusting God, he devises a deception, a deception that he thinks will protect his family.
Now, to be fair, it’s true that this is only half of a lie, because we learn in a very similar episode some years later, in Genesis 20, that Sarai was his half-sister. She was the daughter of Terah, his father; she had a different mother. Now, let’s make no mistake, the Bible doesn’t approve of that. In fact, in the book of Leviticus the Bible goes out of its way to show that any kind of relationship that hints of incest is out of bounds.
But you have to remember that God called Abram and Sarai once they were already married, and he called them not as we would have them be, he called them as they were. He called them out of this darkness into light, and he’s starting something new with this family. So it was a half-truth, but it was still a deception, because Abram’s intent was to hide the fact that Sarai was his wife.
This is probably why he wants to do it - I don’t think it’s so much that Abram wants to pawn her off on somebody else. Rather, by pretending to be her brother, Abram would have had the right, common in that time, of negotiating her betrothal and eventual marriage to someone else. You see this arrangement later on in the book of Genesis, where Laban is negotiating the marriage of Rebekah. No doubt Abram planned to just extend the negotiations, to demand such a high dowry price that Sarai would never be married to anybody else. He wants to just wait out the famine in the land. He doesn’t want her to actually end up in the arms of another man; he just wants to delay and keep secret the fact that he is her husband so that he won’t be killed.
So that’s his plan. Nevertheless, his actions are rooted in fear, not faith. We could even say that his actions are almost the exact opposite of that wonderful passage Proverbs 3:5-6. Abram is not trusting in the Lord with all of his heart, he’s leaning on his own understanding, he is not acknowledging God in all of his ways, and consequently he is getting off of God’s path.
He’s somewhat like Christian and Hopeful in that great allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. I’ve mentioned it many, many times. You remember when they find themselves in a hard part of the journey and they decide to take an easier path, and they find themselves in Bypath Meadow. Before long it lands them in Doubting Castle, the prisoner of Giant Despair. Of course, they get out with the key of promise. Well, Abram also finds himself in Bypath Meadow, but unlike Christian and Hopeful, Abram fails to use the key of promise. In fact, this is at the root of Abram’s problem in this whole passage. [I owe this illustration to Dale Ralph Davis, Faith of Our Father, p. 19]. In Luther’s words, “He has let the word get out of his sight.” He has lost sight of the promise of God.
You remember what God had promised in Genesis 12:1-3. He had promised to make Abram great, to make him a blessing, to give him a son, in verse 7 to give him land, to give him these descendants. But had also promised Abram protection. He had said, “Abram, those who bless you I will bless, and I will curse those who disdain you.” That was a promise of protection, and Abram is not believing that promise in that moment. He’s not responding in faith, so disaster is riding on the heels.
It teaches us another lesson in this passage: when we don’t respond to trials with faith, sin and trouble are never far behind. Abram fails to exercise faith. He’s living in fear, not faith, and that fear will lead to trouble.
Proverbs 29:25 says, “The fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” Fear brings a snare. Fear leads to trouble. For example, fear of not having enough money can lead you to unethical business practices, it can lead to hoarding or to greed, a lack of generosity in your life. A fear of people not liking you can ensnare you in patterns of avoidance, avoiding conflict at all costs, or maybe in a habit of lying. Abram fell prey to the fear of man, and he finds himself in a snare.
How much better Abram would have been if he had just prayed, if he had built the altar, if he had trusted the Lord, and he had held onto the promise of God. You remember the words of that old hymn, “Oh, what peace we often forfeit, / Oh, what needless pain we bear…” Why is that? “All because we do not carry / Everything to God in prayer.”
Well, Abram didn’t pray, and his problems only get worse once he’s in Egypt. Look at verses 14 and 15. “When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful, and when the princes of Pharaoh saw her they praised her to Pharaoh,” and here’s the unexpected thing: the woman was “taken into Pharaoh’s house.”
You see, Abram’s plan completely backfires! He thinks that he can pretend that she’s just his sister and delay any kind of betrothal or marriage of Sarai. What he doesn’t count on is the fact that the king of Egypt has power to take her into his harem, and that’s exactly what Pharaoh does.
Can you imagine what Sarai must have been feeling in these moments? Here she is, like a pawn, being negotiated by these powerful men. Can you imagine the betrayal that she felt, the fear, the uncertainty? And what did Abram feel in these moments? No doubt he was worried as well. What was going to happen to his wife? What was going to happen to the promise? How was he ever going to bear a son now? He finds himself right on the brink of losing everything, losing his family, because deception has brought his family into an even deeper crisis than he was before.
God's Intervention
It leads to the point in the text where the only thing that can extricate Abram and his family from this difficult circumstance is an act of divine intervention, and that’s exactly what you get in verse 17. Notice just the first three words of this verse: it says, “But the Lord…”
This is one of the great “buts” of the Bible. You know, Martyn Lloyd-Jones one time preached a sermon on just these two words, “But God.” The whole sermon on just those two words! “But God.” This is the gospel in a nutshell, isn’t it? When we find ourselves in the worst possible circumstances, we’ve made a mess of our lives, we’ve made a mess of things, God comes to the rescue. Abram in the story here in Genesis is meant to be something like a second Adam. God’s beginning anew with Abram and his family, a new start.
But here’s what we discover, is that, like Adam before him, Abram completely fails and makes an absolute mess of things. But the Lord comes to the rescue. Here’s the gospel solution in this passage. To quote Lloyd-Jones, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” So as we keep reading, this is what we see in verse 17, “But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife.”
Now just pause and think about that for a minute. Does that sound somewhat familiar? Here is Abram’s family in Pharaoh’s house in Egypt, they’re in a circumstance they can’t get themselves out of, and the Lord afflicts the Egyptians with plagues. One of the things we have to remember when we’re reading this story is that the very first people to read these stories would have been the Israelites coming out of Egypt in the first exodus, and it’s showing us here a pattern. It’s showing us a pattern of God’s redemptive, rescuing, saving work. The whole story of the exodus is being foreshadowed right here, it’s prefigured right here.
This leads, then, to Pharaoh’s confrontation of Abram in verses 18 and 19. So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “What is this that you’ve done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her and go.”
Here you have one of those cases in Scripture where the world rebukes the church. It happens with Jonah. You remember when Jonah’s on the boat, running from the presence of the Lord, and these pagans on the boat, these pagan sailors, they rebuke Jonah because he’s running from the Lord. He brings disaster on them. That’s what is happening here with Abram as well. Pharaoh rebukes him, and, in words that almost exactly echo the words of Pharaoh in the book of Exodus, he says, “Get out! It’s time to go.” He sends Abram away. Verse 20, “Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.”
This whole episode reminds us of one of the great central truths of the Scriptures. The third lesson from this text is simply this, that God’s faithfulness depends not on his people, but on his covenant promises. Here is God coming to the rescue in the life of Abram, not because of anything that Abram has done. Abram hasn’t done anything here except make a big mess of his life; and yet God comes to the rescue.
Yesterday I got in the mail some Reformed bookmarks. This is great. They’re bookmarks with little pictures of my Reformed heroes, and one of them is Jonathan Edwards, and each one of the bookmarks has a quote, and the quote for Jonathan Edwards is this, “We contribute nothing to our salvation except for the sin that makes it necessary.”
Well, that’s pretty much what you see in this story with Abram. He’s contributing nothing to this, but God is faithful, and God’s faithfulness is not dependent on Abram, it’s dependent on the promise that he’s already made to Abram.
Another one of the books that I read when I was a kid was another allegory, not The Pilgrim’s Progress this time, but an allegory that was written in the 1950s by a woman named Hannah Hurnard. The story is called Hind’s Feet on High Places. It’s a wonderful story; it’s a story of a girl named Much-Afraid, who is born into the Fearing family, living in the valley of Humiliation.
Much-Afraid walks with a limp and she has a deformed mouth, so she speaks with something of a lisp. She’s been brought up by her aunt; she’s an orphan, she’s been brought up by her aunt, who’s named Mrs. Dismal Forebodings. Her cousins are named Gloomy, Spiteful, and Craven Fear.
Much-Afraid meets someone. She meets the son of the King, who is a shepherd. He’s a very good shepherd, and the shepherd offers to take Much-Afraid on a journey, a journey into the mountains. This mountain’s called the high places; it’s the kingdom of love. He says that if she will come on this journey he will teach her how to walk and to leap so that she will have hind’s feet, deer’s feet, on the high places.
But it’s a difficult journey. There will be steep mountain climbs, there will be a detour in the wilderness, there will be a period of waiting on the shores of loneliness, there will be battles with Much-Afraid’s old enemies, Pride, Self-Pity, Bitterness, and Resentment. So to help her on the journey she’s given two companions. They are two sisters who are tall, slim, silent, strong, serious, with veiled faces; not at all the companions that Much-Afraid desires. She’s hoping for companions named Joy and Peace; these companions are called Sorrow and Suffering. But these are the companions that the shepherd gives her to help her in her journey to the high places.
One of the things that stood out to me in that book (it’s been years since I read it) is how, over and over and over again, Much-Afraid just comes to the brink of despair and thinks that the shepherd has forsaken her. She thinks that she’s left all alone, that he’s forgotten all about her; but then when she cries out over and over again he comes and very gently reminds her of his love, restores her to his grace and to his fellowship, until eventually she does make it up into the high places. When she’s there, she’s given a new name; no longer Much-Afraid, but now her name is Grace and Glory, and her companions, Sorrow and Suffering, are transformed into Joy and Peace.
It really is the story of the Christian life, isn’t it? I think in many ways it was the story of Abram; Abram, who is much afraid, and yet, in God’s good grace, over time Abram will learn to walk by faith, and eventually is given a new name, Abraham, father of a new nation.
Abram's Recovery
This leads us to the final part of the story, in chapter 13:1-4. We’ve seen the crisis that Abram is in, we’ve seen God’s intervention, and now the final part of the story is Abram’s recovery. Look at these first four verses of chapter 13.
“So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the Negeb. Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold. And he journeyed on from the Negeb as far as Bethel to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he had made an altar at the first. And there Abram called upon the name of the Lord.”
Really briefly, there are two things for us to note here in these last few verses. The first thing is Abram’s wealth. Notice how he went into Egypt poorer than he came out. He comes out with greater wealth. You see it in verse 2, where Abram leaves “very rich” in livestock, silver, and gold. This follows upon verse 16 of the previous chapter, where Pharaoh is loading Abram down with sheep and oxen and male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels. He’s just giving him thing after thing after thing. No doubt it’s a dowry for Sarai. Abram is growing rich at Sarai’s expense.
I think a couple of things are going on here, again, following the pattern of the Israelites coming out of Egypt in the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus tells us that when the Israelites left they left with the goods of the Egyptians, so that they plundered the Egyptians. The Egyptians were so ready to get rid of them that they’re just loading them down with their goods and saying, “Get out and leave!” So they leave with great wealth. Something similar is happening here.
But on the other hand, the wealth here is something of a portent to more trials and more crises that are on the way, because in just the next episode, Abram’s great wealth leads to a conflict with his nephew Lot, and in just a few chapters, one of the Egyptian female servants, that no doubt he had picked up in Egypt, is a woman named Hagar, and it’s another dark episode in Abram’s life. So right here the text is foreshadowing some of the trials that are yet to come.
The more important thing to notice in these verses is actually the geography. I know we don’t necessarily get excited about geography in Scripture, the geography here is actually really important, because Abram is actually going back to key places in his journey of faith. You see this in verses 3 and 4. Let me read it again. “And he journeyed on from the Negeb as far as Bethel [Bethel means the house of God] to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he had made an altar at the first. And there Abram called upon the name of the Lord.”
Dale Ralph Davis in his commentary rightly says that “the geography here is an expression of Abram’s repentance.” He’s going back to the places where he had met God before, and it teaches us a fourth very important lesson about the life of faith. It teaches us that repentance always requires returning to the place of atonement and the life of prayer. Notice he goes back to the altar. God, in his revelation to Abram, had somehow shown him the importance of building altars, and altars were built for only one purpose: to offer sacrifices. To Abram goes back to an altar where had offered sacrifices.
All the way back in the book of Genesis - in fact, you see it in the story with Adam and Eve as they are banished from the garden, and then God slays animals so that they are covered with these animal skins, their nakedness is covered. All the way back to Genesis 3 you have an institution of sacrifice, where a substitute must be slain in order for a human being to go free.
That same principle is right here. This principle is expressed in the book of Hebrews: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Abram goes back to the place of atonement, he goes back to the altar, he goes back to Bethel, back to the altar, no doubt this blood-stained altar. He remembers there how he had first met the Lord, how he had known the Lord before. He returns to the place where had met with God, and he meets with God again. He calls on the name of the Lord.
Without the shedding of blood there’s no forgiveness of sins, but our gracious God has made a way, hasn’t he? The psalmist says, “If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared.”
Listen: for the New Testament Christian, that means we go not to an altar, but we go to the place where the supreme and ultimate and final sacrifice was made; we go to the cross. We go to that place where Jesus Christ as our substitute bore our sins. We look to him in his bleeding, in his suffering, in his dying. The only way of repentance is the way through the wounds of Christ! The only way back into a relationship with God, if you’re a backslidden Christian this morning, is the same way you came to know Christ in the first place: it’s at the foot of the cross. It’s going back to the cross of Christ.
I wonder this morning where you are in your relationship with God. Are you walking by faith, or are you living in fear? Have you taken the Egypt option? Have you started to live in cowardice or in compromise with the world? The only way back is to retrace your steps and get back to the cross of Jesus Christ.
It was Spurgeon who said, “True repentance has a distinct reference to the Savior. When we repent of sin, we must have one eye upon sin and another upon the cross, or it would be better still if we fix both our eyes upon Christ and see our transgressions only in the light of his love.”
Look to the cross, go back to the altar, to the cross, to the place of atonement, and find forgiveness there. Repentance requires returning to the place of atonement, and repentance requires a return to the life of prayer. Notice that Abram, when he got back to Bethel, when he got back to the altar, he once again called upon the name of the Lord.
Isn’t this always how restored relationship works? Get in a spat with your spouse and the only way things are really repaired is if you have a conversation, you talk it out. You have to find the way back into resumed fellowship and friendship and conversation, and that’s what happens with Abram. His friendship with God is restored when he comes back to prayer. There’s no renewal without it, no repentance without it. It all happens with prayer.
But listen: don’t think of returning to prayer as some duty to be done. Don’t think of it as some duty that you perform to make yourself right with God. Think of it, rather, like this. Think of it as reunion with your best friend. Think of it as going back to your father’s house after you’ve been away in a far country. Think of a it as the lost sheep who’s coming back into the fold of the gentle and loving and good Shepherd who has already laid down his life for his sheep.
Let me encourage you this morning, if you’re a Christian and you’re far from God you can be restored, and if you’re not a Christian this morning, if you’ve never known the sweet smile of God’s grace in your life, you can know it. You can know the forgiveness of your sins, you can know peace with God. You can know that you are forgiven once and for all, and you can know it by going to the cross of Jesus Christ, finding there favor and reconciliation with God. I encourage you to do so. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious God, as we’ve now heard your word, we come into your presence to respond and to acknowledge once again that we are sinners in need of salvation; we are, perhaps, backslidden, in need of recovery; we are lost, in need of being found. We are so much like Abram, we are so much like Much-Afraid. Rather than living in faith, we are trusting in our own devices, we are looking to ourselves rather than look to you, and we pray this morning that you would forgive us, that you would restore us, that you would speak to us afresh, that you would drill the gospel deep down into our souls, that we would remember your word, that we would take the key of promise and find our ways back into your fellowship.
Lord, as we come to the table this morning we pray that you would help us to take the bread and take the juice with faith. We don’t believe that the bread and the juice themselves convey any grace, but rather, as we take these physical emblems, we feed our souls on Jesus Christ and on what he has done for us. We express our faith for him in a tangible way. By taking and eating we say that we are taking Christ himself. So may we do so with that heart this morning, and we pray that you would draw near to us in these next moments of worship, and that Christ would be glorified. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
