Nedy john cross biography of abraham

STEM Publishing:Magazines:An Outline of Sound Words:Volumes 11 - 20: The Life of Abraham.

Practical Reflections from the Life of Abraham.

Genesis 12
Genesis 13
Genesis 14
Genesis 15
Genesis 16
Genesis 17
Genesis 18
Genesis 19
Genesis 20
Genesis 21
Genesis 22
Genesis 23
Genesis 24
Genesis 25

Introduction

The extremely colourful life of Abraham — the pattern man of faith — provides the Spirit of God with material eminently suitable for the enrichment of every child of God as they pass through the scene of their pilgrimage and strangership. The outstanding characteristic of this remarkable man, who is spoken of as the friend of God, is faith. Paul speaks of him as one who "found strength in faith" (Rom. 4:20); and how the Spirit delights to draw our attention to the infinite variety of ways in which faith was exemplified in all its diversity of action and energy in him who heard and responded to the call of God. This call signified a new departure in God's ways with men, and was entirely sovereign in its choice and activity.

When the call of God reached Abraham he was found among the worshippers of other gods on the other side of the Euphrates (Joshua 24:2). It is very remarkable that in Peleg's days (Gen. 10:25) men were possessing themselves more than ever of the earth, but in the call of God Abraham is called to a life of strangership on the earth, for the essential characteristic of the life of faith is strangership, but this founded upon citizenship elsewhere (Heb. 11:13-16). Faith dwells in the unseen with the substance of things hoped for (Heb. 11:1). The terms of this divine call is "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." The new course proposed calls man to rise above all visible influences and simply to rest upon God and His all-sufficient Word. Man had fallen into flagrant independence of God; the call is now to depend entirely on Him. Observe the char

Sermon delivered on Lent 2B, Sunday, March 1, 2015, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22.22-30; Romans 4.13-25; Mark 8.31-38.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

During this young Lenten season we have looked at what we mean by Good News, the story of what God has done for us that has changed our world forever. We have seen that the gospel of Jesus Christ is Good News precisely because in Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has acted decisively to defeat evil, sin, and death and has launched the beginning of his promised new world, a world free from all vestiges of evil—this despite the formidable resistance of the dark powers and principalities and their human agents. But we have also seen that to really believe God has done this requires faith because while evil has been defeated and judged on the cross, it is not yet fully vanquished from God’s good creation. Neither is death vanquished despite the reality of the resurrection. It is this notion of having faith that I want us to explore briefly this morning. Specifically, what does faith have to do with us who try to observe a holy Lent?

In our OT lesson, we read the story of God renewing his covenant with Abram. This is the beginning of the gospel, of course, because it was through Abraham and his descendants, culminating with Jesus, that God promised to restore his good but corrupted world. As Paul tells us in our epistle lesson, God’s promise to Abraham that he and his descendants would inherit the world came through the righteousness of faith. But what did Paul mean by that?

It is easy for us to gloss over the story of God’s covenant with Abram and the latter’s faith if we are not careful. In Genesis 12.1-3 we see God making his covenant with Abram when Abram was 75 years ol

Abraham: "From One Man..."

by Dennis Pollock

Men have always pondered the nature of their Creator. Throughout recorded history and throughout the world, various religions have sprung up daring to declare that they have discovered the truth about God. Some suggest a harsh, demanding deity, while others present an easy-going Creator who has little interest in His creation. Whatever the truth about God, one thing is for sure about men and women: we are inherently religious. Few have it in them to go through their lives with a purely secular outlook. Take any group of babies, isolate them and raise them to adulthood in complete ignorance of all religious influence, and they will soon come up with some deity, religion, or metaphysical force that lies behind and beyond the visible world. We human beings are an incurably religious people!

But of course the question becomes, “Which group is correct?” Those who study and embrace the Hebrew Scriptures discover that, in them, the Creator of the universe has revealed Himself in a definitive way unlike that found in any other religion or religious writing. And it is through the Bible that God has provided the only legitimate “authorized biography” of Himself in existence in the world today.

Abraham’s Background

Interestingly it started with a solitary man, the man we know as Abraham. This nomadic wanderer, hailing from the land of the Chaldeans (which is present-day Iraq) did not start out to found his own religion. Abraham was in fact from a family and a people who were, along with all the rest of the world at that time, idolaters. In Joshua’s final words to the people of Israel before his death, he reminded them, “Your fathers, including Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, dwelt on the other side of the River in old times; and they served other gods” (Joshua 24:2). Abraham grew up in the large city of Ur in what was then called Mesopo