Abram the Blessed 04/26/2026

Genesis 12:1-9 (Robert Altar's translation)
And the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse, and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” 
And Abram went forth as the LORD had spoken to him and Lot went forth with him, Abram being seventy-five years old when he left Haran. 
And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew and all the goods they had gotten and the folk they had bought in Haran, and they set out on the way to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan. And Abram crossed through the land to the site of Shechem, to the Terebinth of Moreh. The Canaanite was then in the land. 
And the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your seed I will give this land.” And he built an altar there to the LORD who had appeared to him. And he pulled up his stakes from there for the high country east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, and he built there an altar to the LORD, and he invoked the name of the LORD. 
And Abram journeyed onward by stages to the Negeb

Morning Talk: chuck smith, jr.

Intro: Prior to this moment, Abram was merely a name on a list

Now he becomes a person; he’s given an identity
- he emerges from the genealogy into space and time
• he has a history and he is given a destiny
where he is from and where he is going is what has defined him
◦ where he is from: “your birthplace and your father’s house”
◦ where he is going: “to the land that I will show you”
• God is in the process of redefining Abram’s life
◦ he will no longer be the person shaped by family history
◦ he will become a person living in a covenant with God
- normal course of a person’s life: grow up in family system
• each person has there place and is assigned a role
◦ this does not happen consciously,
◦ it works itself out in interplay of each personality
• psychology would encourage us to ask two questions:
◦ how did I get were I am?
◦ where do I go from here?
▫ and this may require that we escape from our family system
▫ or the neighborhood where we grew up
			
But let’s move on with Abram

God tells Abram he is destined to be the epicenter of his will
- that his life, through his descendants,
• will move outward in ever-widening circles, until,
“all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed”
• but this will not happen if he stays in his family’s settlement
◦ he and his wife are going to be traveling, and
◦ for the rest of their lives, they will live among strangers
- so we join them on their journey westward
• when they reach Canaan, God appeared again to Abram
◦ we can learn a lot from these two verses, 7 and 8
• God speaks to Abram, and in response, he builds an altar
◦ then Abram wants to call on God, so builds another altar
◦ the altar it is central to Abram’s contact with God

Growing up in a conservative Christian home,
- my siblings and I learned that the circumference of our home,
• revolved around the “family altar”
◦ that prayer is what held us together – and to the Lord
• our regular practice was to go there together
◦ and especially when facing challenges–an illness or a move
- Abram going to the altar was his response to God’s initiative
• but he also could take the initiative to approach God
• I don’t think prayer was ever meant to be a monologue,
◦ with us doing all the talking
◦ a lot of our spiritual development is focused on learning to listen and to hear

The last line in which we’re introduced to Abram reads:
“And Abram journeyed onward by stages to the Negeb”

The Negev is the desert south of Canaan, stretches all the way to Egypt
	- the first point I want to stress is his entire life was a journey
		• years ago, I spoke at a family retreat in Western Australia
			◦ a couple told me how grateful they were to be learning Bible
			◦ “We thought we had grown in the Lord as far as we could”
		• No! We haven’t arrived–we never arrive in this lifetime
			◦ the writer of Hebrews describes Abram’s life this way:
“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. And he went out not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents . . . .” (Heb. 11:8-9)
	- Abram could only journey “by stages,”
			traveling with extended family and servants,
				and herding and pasturing livestock
		• that is another lesson we learn about our spiritual journey
			◦ the progress we hope to make does not come all at once

I realized something for the first time just a couple weeks ago
- reading through the Book of Acts, I kept coming to the familiar phrase where someone was, “filled with the Holy Spirit”
My meditation: “I have assumed I knew what it meant to be filled with the Spirit–and now it seems I was partially correct. I have conceptualized it as a static condition, that once a person was filled with the Spirit, they remained filled. We used to refer to some people as being ‘Spirit-filled.’ But now it is becoming apparent to me that people, like the apostle Peter, were filled with the Spirit multiple times on different occasions.
What is it to fill a glass with water? Similarly, with each ‘filling,’ the Spirit is ‘poured’ into someone in that moment and for that moment. Then somehow an energy or power flows out of them. This reminds me of what happened with Jesus in Luke chapter 8,
‘And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me”’ (Lk. 8:45-46)
Now I remember reading something Francis Schaeffer wrote: ‘Though we today are immediately indwelt by the Holy Spirit when we accept Christ as Savior, being indwelt is not the same thing as having the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . There are to be many “fillings.”’”
• I don’t often talk like this any more
◦ partly because it verges on sounding like “working magic”
◦ and partly because of the weirdos who always talk this way
• but still, the life we have in God is mediated by his Spirit
- how are we to make sense of this? 
• how does it become real to us?
• St. Paul’s answer would be, “we walk by faith not by sight”
◦ no one really likes this answer,
◦ but once we begin to trust God for his Spirit, we emerge into a new knowing and experiencing

I skipped a part of Abram’s story

But now I want to work my way back to it
- in my late twenties, a cousin recommended a book:
• Seasons of Man’s Life
◦ a longitudinal study that tracked stages of male development
◦ not unlike Gail Sheey’s Passages
• lots of young men stress over turning thirty
- I think, perhaps, God was preparing me for that transition
• as I read through the Scriptures, I kept bumping into thirty
◦ Joseph’s age when he entered the service of Pharaoh 
◦ the age at which priests could serve in temple
◦ David’s age when he became king
◦ and “Jesus, when he began his ministry was about thirty years of age” 
• I began looking forward to turning thirty
◦ I felt it could be a positive turning point in my ministry
◦ perhaps becoming more effective, more skilled

If I continue living to the half-way point of this year,
- I will turn seventy-five years old
• if you had asked me at thirty where I’d be at seventy-five,
◦ I’d probably say, “I hope to be dead by then”
◦ or else retired
• I don’t mind confessing, that if for my next birthday,
◦ God told me, 
“My biggest plans for your life’s work will begin this year,”
◦ I would feel completely discouraged and overwhelmed
- but we read, “Abram went forth . . . being seventy-five years old when he left Haran”
• I began meditating on this January 3rd,
◦ the same day my oldest son turned fifty
• and now I’m going to burden you with the possibility,
◦ that God may be telling you,
“You have not yet hit your stride. Your best and most important life’s work is still ahead of you.”

All I will add to that is:
- don’t let the world tell you, “You’re too old”
• or too poor, too uneducated, too unqualified
• if God is calling you to something, 
◦ you aren’t too anything that would disqualify you

Conclusion: God’s call on Abram’s life was to be a blessing

A blessing that spread out to “all the clans of the earth”
Can you imagine anything lovelier than that?
You and I and all Christians everywhere, being a blessing to the world