One Thing To Boost Your Faith - Genesis 12:10-20 Series

Well today we’re going to get out the faith meter and we’re going to measure the faith of the superheroes in the Bible. We’re going to look at one of them in particular. We’re going to look at Abraham and we’re going to ask the question how is his faith doing.

Now Abraham is one of those guys we see a tremendous amount of faith. I would say his faith is rather strong when he is called out of Ur. He says leave your family and he brings Terah his father with him. So maybe it wasn’t as strong as it could be. But then God calls him out of Haran again and they go back down 400 miles to the Promised Land. You’ve got to imagine his faith level is pretty high at that point. I would suggest his faith level is high because he’s going around in the promised land and he’s planting these flags. They’re called altars. He’ s putting this altar to the Lord here and he’s building another altar to the Lord over here. These altars are all planting the flag of God’s presence in the land.

I think in our own lives if we look at the faith meter and we see where we are, we really want to have a faith that’s high, a strong faith. Because when your faith is high it helps you so much in life. When it starts to get low, bad things start to happen. For example, when it starts to get low we start to feel more anxious or angry or disappointed with life. But when our faith is high then we’re able to relinquish control to the Lord instead of having to control everything. When our faith is high we don’t have to be angry and get justice on that person. We can rather allow God to be the one to take on the justice of the world and we can be the ones that are more focused on what God is doing what He wants to do. I think when our faith is low we’re easily tempted to go the wrong direction and do what’s wrong. Low faith is dangerous. It’s faith nonetheless, but we want to do things to increase our faith. I would encourage you to think about ways you could increase your faith because as you do increase your faith, good things will happen and you’ll have a strong faith. Be prepared for the various situations that you can face in your life.

So as we come to Abraham, what we see with Abraham is that he is going to be challenged in his faith now and we’re going to get to a low point. So if we’re looking at our faith meter, he’s really on the low side now in this story. So let’s look at it and see what’s going on with him starting in Genesis 12:10-20. So get out your Bibles, open them to Genesis 12:10-20 and we’re going to read through this. Because everything is going great until verse 10. Verse 10 says – Now there was a famine in the land.

You know even if we’re following the Lord and we’re doing the right thing, bad things come into our lives. We live in a broken world and the brokenness affects us on every level. Even Christians are affected by the brokenness and we suffer, we have bad things that happen, we have challenges in life. So Abraham faces a challenge. There's a famine in the land. The famine means not just they couldn’t eat, but remember this is a guy who had a lot of animals, sheep and cattle in particular, and so they didn’t have anywhere to graze. He’s got a problem. It's a serious problem. So it says in the next phrase – So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.

Now I’m going to give Abraham the benefit of the doubt here and suggest that he wasn’t wrong in going down to Egypt. Other people would say he wasn’t trusting the Lord, he should’ve stayed there, and God could have provided for him there. But I’m going to suggest here we don’t see anything in the passage that says he’s doing the wrong thing. He’s going down to Egypt as part of his solution to the problem, recognizing that God is very much in control. Maybe God’s leading him down in order to do something.

Egypt in the Bible is often an escape from something. We see it regularly as an escape and it’s not always bad, but many times it is. There's almost this sense that Egypt represents the world and sometimes we escape to the world for solutions and sometimes we find ourselves in trouble.