When I say the word “Viking”, what comes to mind? For me, the word conjures up medieval people of the sea, who terrorized the poor land lubbers on the coasts of Europe and other places. However, the Vikings didn’t see themselves that way. They thought of themselves as farmers and ranchers, among whom owning cattle was a status symbol.
A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for a big Arctic island known today as Greenland. At the time, it was uninhabitable, but the Norse colonies in Greenland were able to thrive, reaching a population of 5,000 people. They lasted for 450 years, and then they vanished.
Their precious cattle had grazed the fertile but thin soil of Greenland into oblivion. The wind and water carried away the topsoil, and the Norse people starved to death. This happened despite the fact that they were sitting on top of the richest food source in the world – an ocean teaming with fish. In fact, all archeological evidence suggests that the Norse would rather starve than eat fish.
When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement on Greenland, they found all kinds of animal bones, but no fish bones. They found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, suggesting that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, indicating that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. Strangely absent were the fish bones. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse refused to change their diet. (Tim Suttle, Shrink, Zondervan, 2014, pp. 87-90, 93-94; www.PreachingToday.com)
It’s like what Virginia Satir, a therapist, once said: “Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty” (www.PreachingToday.com). People just don’t like change, unless you’re a wet baby; and even then, you cry about it.
Yet our society today is changing at a rapid rate. What was unthinkable just a few years ago is quickly becoming the cultural norm. I mean who would have thought that a major retail outfit like Target would allow men in women’s bathrooms. Whether we like it or not, change is here in a big way.
So what do we do about it? Do we hide in our churches and Christian ghettos, hoping the change doesn’t affect us too badly, or is there a better way to handle the change? What does God want us to when our world is changing so much? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Genesis 12, Genesis 12, where we see what God told Abraham to do in the face of some big changes coming in his life.
Genesis 12:1-3 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (ESV)
Now, this is commonly called the Abrahamic Covenant. It is God's promise to Abraham of land, seed, and blessing, which forms the foundation for the rest of the Old Testament. It's a very important promise, but I want to focus on the two imperatives contained in this promise.
There are two commands that activated the promise and changed the entire course of human history. They are two commands, which helped Abraham face a world of change, and I believe will help us face the changes ahead of us today.
The first command is found in verse 1, where God tells Abraham, "Go from your country." When your world is changing, don’t retreat and hide. NO!
GO FORWARD!
Move ahead! Leave the known. Leave the familiar for the unknown and the unfamiliar.
That's exactly what God told Abraham to do (vs.1). Go from your country – leave its wealth and affluence. Go from your kindred – leave the people you know and love. Go from your father's house – leave even your own family! “Go away from all of this,” God said, “to the land that I will show you”. God calls Abraham to leave the known; leave the familiar, and advance towards the unknown and the unfamiliar.
Genesis 12:4-9 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the LORD and called upon the name of the LORD. And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb. (ESV)
Even though he was 75 years old at the time, Abraham left the familiar for the unfamiliar, and that's what God calls us to do sometimes. Matthew Henry put it this way: "Our country is dear to us, our kindred dearer, and our father's house dearest of all, and yet they all must be hated."
Jesus Himself said: "If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Does that mean we have to show animosity toward our families? NO! It just means that when Jesus says "GO!" we must be willing to get up and go, even if it means leaving our families, even if it means leaving those that are near and dear to us.
An old farmer was fishing in a tub of water in his back yard. His neighbor saw it and chided him. “Man, there ain't no fish in that tub. Why are you wasting your time like that?”
“Yeah,” came the reply. “I know there ain't no fish in here, but it's just so powerful convenient.”
Sometimes God calls us out of our comfortable, convenient spots, so we can be more productive. And when the call comes, we must go!
I think of 86-year-old Joy Johnson, a veteran of 25 New York City marathons, who died just a couple of years ago with her running shoes on. Johnson, was the oldest runner in New York City’s 2013 marathon. She fell at the 20-mile marker, but got up and crossed the finish line at about eight hours. Then she returned to her hotel room, lay down with her shoes on, and never woke up.
Amazingly, Johnson didn't run her first marathon until she was 61 years old. The only hint of the sport was the verse from Isaiah 40:31 which hung on the kitchen wall in her family farm house in rural Minnesota: “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Ironically, for most of her life, Johnson didn’t exercise much even though she had been a career gym teacher. Then she took a three-mile walk in 1986. That led to jogging and eventually competing in 10-K races. By 1988 she had competed in her first New York City Marathon. Three years later, in 1991, she recorded her best time at age 64 with a time of 3 hours and 55 minutes.
A few years ago she told a reporter about her exercise regimen. She would wake up at 4 A.M., drink her coffee while reading her Bible, and then set out on an eight-mile pre-dawn run. “When you wake up it can either be a good day or a bad day,” Ms. Johnson said. “I always say, ‘It's going to be a good day.’”
As a committed follower of Christ, she ran every day but Sunday so she could attend church. Johnson sang hymns to herself to pass the time while running. According to Johnson's daughter, “She was always a happy runner—and besides her faith and family, this was something she loved the most.” (Michael Winter, “NYC marathoner, 86, dies after her 25th race,” USA TODAY, 11-5-13; Natasha Velez and Bruce Golding, “Marathoner dies happy after chasing dream to last mile,” New York Post, 11-5-13; www. PreachingToday.com)
I love Ms. Johnson’s attitude. She was willing to try something new at age 61, and she enjoyed it right up until the day she died with her shoes on!
Abraham was 75 when he left his country for a land that God would show Him, and Moses was 80 when he obeyed the call of God to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. My dear friends, It’s never too late and you’re never too old to start a new journey with the Lord.
So when He says, “Go,” GO! Go forward into the future with a holy boldness, confident that God will be with you all the way. It’s the only way to face the changes that are upon us. Don’t run away and hide. Instead, Go and…
BE A BLESSING.
Don't go grumbling and complaining. Instead, go enriching the lives of others. Go sharing the joy of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's what God called Abraham to do. God said to Abraham, "Go from your country…"
Genesis 12:2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. (ESV)
Or better, "And so BE A BLESSING." It's an imperative in the Hebrew, the 2nd command we have in these verses.
God promised Abraham tremendous blessings, and God fulfilled His promise to Abraham. God made him into a great nation and gave him a great name, just like He said He would.
Now, why did God so richly bless this man? So he could keep it all to himself? NO! God so richly blessed Abraham, so that Abraham could in turn be a blessing to others. God never blesses His people so they can hoard it all for themselves. Rather, God wants us to be channels of His blessing to others. Just like Abraham, God calls us to share his blessings, to bless others with the blessings He has given us.
At age 12, Robert Louis Stevenson was looking out into the dark from his upstairs window. He was watching a man light the streetlamps. Stevenson's governess came into the room and asked what he was doing. He replied, "I am watching a man cut holes in the darkness." (James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited, pp. 178-179)
Do you know, that's exactly what God calls us to do? He calls us to cut holes in the spiritual darkness of our world.
In 1965, a thin, soft-spoken man walked into Pittsburgh's WQED, the nation's first public television station, to pitch a show targeting young children. The concept was simple enough: convey life lessons to young children with the help of puppets, songs and frank conversations. It didn’t sound like much, but the man was Fred Rogers, and the program was Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Fred Rogers was what Gabe Lyons in his book, The Next Christians, described as a “restorer”. Now, a restorer is someone who views the world as it “ought to be.” Faced with the world's brokenness, restorers are “provoked, not offended,” according to Gabe Lyons. They work to make the world a better place by “creating, not criticizing” and by “being countercultural, not relevant.” In fact, using this definition, Rogers may have been one of the greatest American restorers of the 20th century.
Rogers got into television because he “hated” the medium. During spring break of his senior year in seminary, he watched television for the first time and what he saw repulsed him. “I got into television,” he recounted, “because I saw people throwing pies at each other's faces, and that to me was such demeaning behavior. And if there's anything that bothers me, it's one person demeaning another. That really makes me mad!”
In the wake of WWII…, [Fred Rogers] worried that many of the common TV programs would create a generation of emotionally-bankrupt Americans. Faced with the decision to either sour on television itself or work to restore the medium, he chose the latter. He dropped out of seminary and began pursuing a career in broadcasting. Fourteen years later, he would create one of the most loved American television shows of all time, and one that would shape entire generations of children.
Rogers was a devout Christian that almost never explicitly talked about his faith on the air, but his show infused society with the beauty and grace of God. “You've made this day a special day by just you being you,” he'd famously sign off. “There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” (Jonathon Merritt, “Restoration in the Land of Make-Believe,” Q Ideas, May 18, 2011; www.PreachingToday.com)
Instead of cursing the darkness, Fred Rogers decided to cut holes in the darkness, letting the light of Christ shine through. He sought to restore the world through impassioned creativity and craftsmanship. And for nearly four decades, he came into our homes and our hearts, every day leaving our neighborhoods a little bit more beautiful.
My dear friends, that’s what God wants us to do in our changing world. Don’t be offended that sinners sin; be provoked to do something positive, something counter-cultural. Don’t curse the darkness; shine the light of Christ into a world that so desperately needs Him.
You see, when God told Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” God was referring to Jesus Christ, who would come nearly 2,000 years later (Galatians 3:8,16). God was planning to bless the world through Abraham's seed, i.e., through a descendant of Abraham, and that descendant was Christ.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as well as the Son of Abraham, came into this world to die on a cross for our sins. Three days later he rose again, and now he offers eternal life to anyone who believes in Him. Jesus Christ is the source of every blessing, and it is only in Him that people find life! It's not in you or me. It's not in our charm, our personality, or in our gifts and abilities. It’s only in Christ that people find the answer to their need. So if we're going to be a blessing to others, more than anything, we must share Christ with them.
In Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, Thor Heyerdahl tells how he and a crew of five crossed the Pacific Ocean from South America to the South Pacific Islands on a crude raft of balsa logs bound together with hemp rope. During the three-month journey in 1947, they had little control of the direction of the raft and no way to stop its forward progress. They learned early in the voyage that anything dropped overboard was almost impossible to recover once it passed behind the raft.
Two months into the voyage and thousands of miles from land, Herman Watzinger lost his footing and went overboard. The raft, driven by a strong wind in heavy seas, moved ahead faster than he could swim. The five remaining men were horrified for their friend. They tried to throw him a life belt on a rope, but the wind blew it back at them. In seconds, Herman was all but lost to their sight in the tumble of waves.
Suddenly Knute Haugland grabbed the life belt and dove into the water. He swam back to Herman and wrapped his arm around him, holding his exhausted friend and the rope while the men on the boat drew them back to the boat. (David Denny, Leadership, Vol. 19, no. 3)
For me, that’s a beautiful picture of what God calls us to do today. With the currents of change, carrying people so swiftly away, God calls us to jump in the water and take the life-belt of Jesus to those who are perishing.
In other words, go and be a blessing! In our rapidly changing world, don’t retreat and complain. Instead, move forward with the good news of Jesus Christ in word and in deed.
I don’t like what’s going on any more than you do, but it’s about time for the church in America to be disturbed into action. So I close with this prayer from Sir Francis Drake, an English sea captain who was the first to circle the globe in the late 16th Century (1577-1580):
“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we have sailed too close to the shore.
“Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity; and in our efforts to build a new Earth, we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim.
“Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes; and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.” (www.PreachingToday.com)
