When You Trust The Lord You Get The Better Deal - Genesis 13 Series

I’m sure that you know someone whose life is so complicated because they made bad decisions. They make one bad decision, it leads to other bad decisions and then life gets so complicated. You get to a place where you wonder how are they ever going to get out of this problem. It is so deep of a hole they dug themselves in. That is the question I asked on Wednesday night as one of our small group questions. I was expecting a rather involved dialogue about how do you get yourself out of holes when you make this big mess. But I was so impressed by the simplicity of my wife’s answer. She shared it. We talked about this in the group. I want to share her answer with you.

So here’s the question we asked. The question is: What do you do when you make a big mess of your life, life gets complicated and seems overwhelming? What do you do? The answer is what you do is do the next right thing. Or do the right thing next. One thing. See, you may not know how to deal with all the problems, but you know what to deal with right now in the moment. You know what to deal with right now in this day. And if you do one right thing, you start making a right step in the right direction, then what happens is things start to open up.

God does miracles in the lives of people. When you start taking a step in the right direction things open up. So now there’s other right things that you can do. God starts to now pour blessings on you and you’re able to start moving out of the big holes. That doesn’t mean all the consequences of our decisions are removed. But God offers all of these things to us that are so powerful and important in our lives. The peace that we need to overcome the anxiety. The love that we need to overcome. The love that we experience in our lives. The joy that overcomes the sadness or discouragement that sometimes we feel. All of those are available to us. We do the next right thing.

So I was very grateful that it’s not that complicated. It's complicated to get into our problems. It’s not that complicated to get out of them many times. We just need to do the next right thing.

And that leads us into our study this week because we see that last week you remember the reason we come to this question is because Abraham went to Egypt and he lies. He says about his wife that she’s my sister. I wonder if he actually expected that Pharaoh would come and take his wife away. Now he’s got a big problem. His wife is not with him and he’s stuck in Egypt and he can’t get out of there. He probably wondered how am I going to get out of this problem? And then they start giving him all kinds of gifts – camels and donkeys and people, servants that he would have. Now I can imagine him at night saying, “I have made such a big mess of my life. I do not know what I’m going to do now.” God in His mercy steps into the situation and provides for him the next step, the next plan, the next what’s going to happen.

So that’s when we go to our story now in Genesis 13. Notice that we see what Abram does in the passage. Geneses 13:1-4. Let’s look at those verses first. It says – So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the Negeb.

Now the Negeb is this part in southern Israel below Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and so on down there. It's a wilderness area. It's where Mount Sinai is when the Israelites, remember, came out of Egypt, they came into the Negeb, they went to Mount Sinai. So now Abraham is going to come pass this way and he’s heading up to Israel.

It makes a statement about him in verse 2. It says – Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold. This is the first reference we have in the Bible to someone who is wealthy. Someone has a lot.

I think it’s important to point out that here’s a guy who has money. He’s rich. But he’s still got some problems. I think some people believe that if I could just have a lot of money, if I could just get rich then I wouldn’t have problems. The reality is that even if you have money you have problems. He’s going to not only have problems from the past in Egypt that he just left, he’s going to have another problem in this passage with his nephew Lot because of the money. The money is causing the problem is what is happening.