From the first pages of Genesis a promise to Abraham looms large on the horizon. “I will make you,” God said, “into a great nation.” Like ours, Abraham's story leads us to God's grace and mercy.

God’s Promise Comes True

Friday, January 6, 2012


At last the long promised, long-awaited event occurred. No I'm not speaking of the birth of the Savior, but I am speaking of the birth of a son. God’s promise came true for Abraham.

Swell

Welcome to haven today. I'm Charles Morris sharing the great story that's all about Jesus as we invite you to read the Bible in 90 days at the beginning of a new year. Ever since we 1st that Abraham in the pages of Genesis, a promised event looms large on the horizon. “I will make you,” God said, “into a great nation.” With false starts, inadequate faith, and the incredulity of a promise made years before, God made good on his word. The real action in life always lies with God. He has the divine plan. He is the only director who can fit all the ingredients together into a coherent whole. Abraham's story, like ours, features the God who is always coming in with his grace and mercy. He sets the pace. He determines the content. He sees to what matters most, through all the changes of life. He sees to that personal relationship with himself which is eternal life. He sees that this relationship is constantly growing. And so Abraham was constantly being exhorted, encouraged, and enabled to have growing faith in the living God. This is a program for a new year called "God's Promise Comes True".


HAVEN Today opens with the music of Shannon Wexelberg

OPENING SONG – All His Promises Are True – Shannon Wexelberg

All His Promises are True, Shannon Wexelberg opening this HT and a program called God’s Promise Comes True”. As we start this new year and look again today at the life of Abraham, I want to invite you to join me in reading The Bible in 90 Days. If you use the large-print NIV Bible we have, it’s carefully marked every 12 pages so you can read all of God’s Word, cover to cover, in less than three months. We will send you that with your gift to HAVEN Today. Just visit our website, haventoday.org. If you want to use a different version or your own Bible, you can download the plan at haventoday.org. If you don’t have Internet access, you can call us to get the specially marked Bible or for us to mail you a copy of the plan. Just call us after the program at 1-800-654-2836. That’s 1-800-65-HAVEN.

All week, we've been talking to people who have read the Bible in 90 days and from Florida, I asked Becky Borgstrom what has encouraged her spiritually from reading God's Word?

Borgstrom clip

Thanks Becky, working with Moody Radio in Florida.

What a blessing, God’s Word, God’s promises that always come true. And that was the promise come true for Abraham. In day two of reading the Bible in 90 Days, we hear the conclusion of a promise made to Abraham and his wife, Sarah, in Genesis 21:


1 Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what he had promised. 2 Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him. 3 Abraham gave the name Isaac[a] to the son Sarah bore him. 4 When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. 5 Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.
6 Sarah said, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” 7 And she added, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”

God's word from Genesis 21. Did you notice how 3 times it’s stressed that this birth of the son Isaac is the fulfillment of a divine promise.



Did you hear, “Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said.” That’s one time. “The Lord did for Sarah what you promised.” That’s two times. “At the very time God had promised.” That’s three times. We aren’t left in any doubt as to why this amazing event happened. Therefore, we aren’t to live our lives in any doubt that what God promises he produces. Our faith is both stimulated by the word of God and finds its anchor in his unchanging truth. In many Christian circles today faith is growing, but it’s an anemic faith. We seem prone to rely on visible evidences of God's presence and power, with the danger that we walk by sight, not by faith. There's a great famine of the word of God today around the world, and I see it were I live in Southern California. And that's why I'm encouraging people to read the Bible with me in 90 days. In an age which has the Bible available in more languages than ever before, where biblical research is more developed than ever before, when there are more Christian books and teaching aids and when communication is so sophisticated, too many Christians know the Bibles less and read the Bible less often than in prior generations. The habit of daily Bible reading has never been established by many of Christ's followers. In many churches, God's word is not preached much less read to much of any extent. There is no nutritional substitute for God's promises speaking through God's word. We can’t know God's word too well or trust it too much. We cannot build more securely than on God's self-revelation in Scripture. For what Scripture says, God says, and the least of his whispers in Scripture is solid rock on which to ground our lives. But we can only be sure of God's word when we are often in God's word. “What does the Bible say,” should be the first question to spring to the Christian’s mind on any issue. It's in God's word that we find the mind of God. As we pray that the Holy Spirit, who inspired the authors of Scripture, will open our minds, as we read to understand God's message, there can be a meeting between ourselves and the Lord every time we open his word. This is how faith grows and spiritual maturity develops. The alternative is to rely on other people or on ourselves, and that ultimately means impoverishment. Of course God can speak to us through other people, but how are we to judge when another Christian comes to us and says, “I really feel you ought to take a certain action?” Or some Christians even say, “the Lord has told me to tell you to do whatever.” If we don’t have the objectively given revelation of God in his Word by which to judge, we're thrown back on someone else's ideas of what may be right or wrong but are certainly not infallible. Or we are thrown back on our own subjective feelings, which can be notoriously fickle. So often Christians look at circumstances that have come together and think it must be God speaking to me. It may well be, but it is not necessarily so. The advice of friends and circumstantial evidence both need to be tested by Scripture. Not by searching desperately for a proof text, which is often out of context and so becomes a pretext, but by the whole weight of God's revelation and specific passages pointing to God's answers as we seek his will and prayer. The only solid rock on which we can rely absolutely is what God has promised in his word, understood in its true context and interpreted by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If God has said it, we can rely on it, just like Abraham. Other Christians can be wrong. Circumstances may point in conflicting directions. Our emotional experiences in prayer may be confirming OUR desires rather than God's will. But God's word alone is the infallible linked to our own paths which will never lead us astray. The birth of Isaac is also all about God's grace. The delay that Abraham and Sarah experienced, we must remember, was not to make them good or worthy, but to receive the fulfillment of the promise. Isaac was a gift of God's grace. However strong our faith may grow, it will never be the ground on which God works in our lives, though it may be the key. Grace precedes faith. That's true of our personal salvation. Saving faith in Jesus, which God grants as a free gift, is itself an evidence of his grace. So when Isaac was born, it was at God’s set time. There was in fact no delay from God's perspective. He knew the time the child would be born when he first made the promise 30 years before, and now was the strategic moment. None of those years were wasted. None had been unnecessary in the purposes which God was fulfilling in Abraham's life. So faith is not something we do in order to persuade God to act. It is simply taking God at his word and letting him work out his time schedule. What we call waiting, he calls trusting. As God gave the child, he had already named him Isaac, which means “he laughs”. The laughter sprang from the incongruity of the child being born to this elderly couple and yet the joy of its reality. On the one hand there was the physical inability of Sarah and Abraham and on the other just the word of God's promise. The birth of the boy was a demonstration of God’s power and grace. And all who heard about this birth of a boy named Isaac, would make others laugh with joy at the grace and power of the God who could do such things, who makes and keeps promises. So for Sarah, the name, which might have rebuked her for her earlier unbelief, becomes a source of joy. She says, “God has brought me laughter.” We must never forget that where God's grace exists, there is joy. Whenever a newborn Christian is added to the family of faith, if there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God, surely there should be joy and laughter in the church on earth. It is a travesty of Christianity to imagine that holiness is measured by long faces. Thank God for all the joy that he pours into our lives. It should be a mark of us as Christians that we have ever increasing reasons for rejoicing, for fun and laughter. For our God, as 1 Timothy 6:17 says, “richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.” Our joys in this world are real, but they are mingled with sorrows. If they were not, we might become changed to this world rather than seeing beyond this world. Marvelous things happen when we respond to God's grace in faith and obedience, for our God always keeps his promises. We can rely upon his word. That was what Abraham needed to know more clearly than ever before as he faced the greatest test of all, the challenge by God to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah. But that is another story to read in Genesis, if you join me and read the Bible in 90 days. May it be true of us all that the blessing given to Abraham – as we read in Galatians 3:14 – will come to us through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we may receive the promised Holy Spirit.
SONG – Count It All Joy – Shannon Wexelberg (in a project with Charles Billingsley and Scott Krippayn)

Prayer
God’s Promise Comes True here on HAVEN Today in a week where I’m inviting you to read join me in reading the Bible in 90 days. Have you started yet? I did last Sunday and quickly feel one day behind, but now am caught up again. If you use the large-print NIV we’re offering, it’s 12 pages a day and it tells you at the top of the page where to start and stop.
Song if needed (Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus – Selah)