Abraham - “The Blessing Journey: How God Re-routes a Life”
Happy New Year! New Year, new you?...Maybe. But the best news is: the same Jesus—yesterday, today, and forever!
We’ve just been through the Advent and Christmas season, and this is...the first Sunday of 2026. Christmas of course is the celebration of the Incarnation, the day when God arrived in the flesh
- the day when the transformation of the world began, because the salvation and transformation of every life that would believe in the name of Jesus, became possible.
So the pastors and elders discerned that it would be good for us to consider the impact of God on a life for the first number of Sundays of the year.
The shift that occurs when a person becomes a follower of God, a follower of Jesus Christ.
Let me ask you something: if God asked you to leave everything familiar, what would you say? If God said, “Pack up—leave Toronto, leave your friends, leave what you’ve always called home… and go to a place you’ve never been,” what would your first response be?
Because I’ll tell you, on most days, mine wouldn’t be, “Here I am, Lord.”
Mine would be, “Okay Lord… quick question: where?”
And right behind that: “When?”
And then: “Is there Wi-Fi?”
And then, if we’re being honest: “Can I bring my wife, my people? Can I bring my stuff? Can I at least bring my favourite chair?”
What questions would cross your mind? Maybe:
“Uh… what now?”
“How can I know for sure it’s God and not just indigestion?”
“Who… me?”
Or, “Lord, I’m too old, too stressed, too tired, too weighed down by life to be starting over.”
And that’s exactly why the story of Abram matters—because God doesn’t only call the young, the brave, and the unbothered. He calls real people. And real people ask real questions.
So, we’re going to look at a snapshot of the life of Abram, who God would later rename Abraham.
Now, Abram is 75 years old when God says, ‘Pack up and move.’ So again, if you’re thinking, ‘I’m too old to start something new’—Abram would like a word.
Let’s read again from our passage today from Genesis Chapter 12:1-4, which is our introduction to Abram, or Abraham. Abraham is one of the most important people in human history.
Genesis 12:1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran.
Here’s where we’re going in this message:
Big idea: God reroutes ordinary lives by His word, for His purposes, by His promises.
Roadmap: Call (God speaks) ? Cost (we leave) ? Covenant (God promises) ? Commission (we bless others).
Abram. We don’t know much about him at this point, so after a brief introduction to his family,
and after learning that he starts out this story as an older man – again a spring chicken at the age of 75 - we’re let in on a one-way conversation between God and Abram.
God told Abram, ‘Go (from everything that’s familiar)… to the land I will show you.’ That’s it so far. Not go to the east, or the west. No more details about the where that he is to go.
So if you feel like you don’t have the full plan for 2026—congratulations, you’re in very biblical company.
But let’s be honest: most of us don’t love that kind of uncertainty. We want a map. We want details.
We want God to show us the destination, the route, the pit stops, and the timeline. We want spiritual GPS. An invite with the location would be nice.
There’s a scene from The Office TV show that is quite famous, where Michael and Dwight are delivering gift baskets to win back clients.
Michael is following the GPS, and it calmly tells him to “make a right turn.” Dwight looks up and says, “Michael… there’s a lake there.” But Michael insists, “The machine knows where it is going,” and he turns anyway. And sure enough—splash. Right into the water.
Later, Michael tells everyone, with total confidence, that he “drove [his] car into a lake” because a machine told him to… and he uses it as proof that technology can’t be trusted.
Now, most of us haven’t literally driven into a lake. But plenty of us have had a “Michael Scott moment” —maybe not into Lake Ontario in our case, but close.
You trusted your inner map: a relationship, a plan, a job move, a coping strategy, a decision you were sure would fix everything. And then—splash. You realise, I’ve been following the wrong guidance.
Genesis 12 is the beginning of a different kind of guidance. God doesn’t hand Abram the full itinerary—He gives him a command and a promise.
Not a suggestion. Not a recommendation. A command: “Go.” And attached to it is a promise so big it reaches all the way to us: “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Early, early on, we discover that God is for all people—that God is not a national God or a tribal deity. He is the one true God for all nations.
And that’s ultimately why you and I are here: because the Saviour, the Messiah, came through Abraham’s line, and the blessing of salvation reached “all peoples on earth.”
And Abram—astonishingly—goes. Verse 4: “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.” One act of obedience on the part of one man becomes the start of world-altering events.\
Now here’s where it gets honest—and encouraging. Abram didn’t follow God perfectly. He had real detours—real “splash” moments.
When famine hit, he ran to Egypt in fear instead of staying in the land God promised (Genesis 12:10).
He deceived Pharaoh about Sarai, calling her his sister to protect himself, and he put her at risk (Genesis 12:11–20).
He tried a human workaround for God’s promise through Hagar, and the fallout was enormous (Genesis 16:1–4, 15–16).
He repeated the “she is my sister” deception with Abimelek (Genesis 20:1–18).
And even when God reaffirmed the covenant, Abram laughed in disbelief at the promise of a son in old age (Genesis 17:17).
So what did God do in response to Abram’s failures? Did He cancel the calling? Did He walk away? No. God stayed faithful.
Abram’s calling was real, and God’s promise was not fragile. Despite Abram’s detours, God remained committed—and He fulfilled what He said He would do.
And that’s part of what we need to hear at the start of 2026: God’s guidance is NOT like a dodgy GPS that sends you into a lake and then shrugs. God’s call is steady. God’s promises are sure.
And even when we take detours—sometimes costly ones—God is still able to lead us back to Himself, and still able to fulfil what He has spoken.
I'm at the age when I sometimes get asked by new pastors for a word of advice or encouragement. I often say: “Well, when God called you, He factored in your stupidity”.
There's usually an awkward pause, and then laughter, and then some comment that expresses relief - “I don’t have to be perfect. I can still be who I am and serve God to the best of my ability by His grace”
Let’s get back to Abram. You know, we don’t know what Abram had been doing the 75 years before God called. But somehow, some way, he was being prepared to say ‘yes’ to God. Something is being cultivated in Abram.
So here, in the absence of God giving Abram specific co-ordinates, a specific destination, God gives Abram a promise.
2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
We have more than Abram had. In the absence of a clear picture of all of the mountains and valleys that God will take us through, of how He will use us in detail, we have the promise of eternal life with God.
We have the promise of His presence with us and inside of us by the Holy Spirit.
We have the promise of His leading. Is that enough for you? That’s a big question that deserves pondering.
Are God’s promises sufficient for you. Can you take God at His Word? That’s good for all of us to think about.
At this point in Genesis 12, when God reveals Himself to Abram, Abram didn't, as far as we know, recite the list of questions and rebuttals that we imagine he might have.
He simply did as God commanded. And of course, this changed the direction of his life. His encounter with God altered his future. Let’s pause for a moment.
Think about your life. Think about your walk with Jesus. Think about your life before Jesus. (Pause)
Now think about your life after Jesus. I want to ask you to name one thing that changed in your life when you came to Jesus, or, if you were raised in the church, around the time you first made the personal choice to follow Jesus, what changed? [Patiently receive and repeat answers]
You might be able to name one thing, or perhaps in reality you can name a great many things in your life that changed when you encountered Jesus, when you received him as your Lord and Savior.
I encountered Jesus at a relatively young age, 17.
So there is literally not one thing in my life, externally or in my internal world, that has not been directly impacted by Jesus.
Literally everything good in my life is the result of God altering the course of my life. I was an atheist, and through a series of very strange and special moments, where God moved in my life and because of that I came to trust in Jesus.
How does God direct us when His light comes into our lives? How does God change the course of our lives?
Well, in Genesis 12, that’s the moment God steps into Abram’s ordinary life and everything pivots. “The LORD had said to Abram, ‘Go…’” — God initiates. New direction begins with God’s word, not Abram’s self- improvement plan.
The command has a cost. Obedience has a price. There’s an element of sacrifice involved. God tells Abram to leave “your country, your people and your father’s household.”
God gives His promise, based on His character, His faithfulness. And so the promise has a future: “I will make you into a great nation… I will bless you… I will make your name great…”
That seems like quite an appeal to Abram’s self-interest in a way.
It’s like God is saying “So much more will come from your life when you trust me and obey me and follow my commands”.
But the ultimate purpose is not Abram’s welfare; God’s great objective doesn’t end with Abram’s honour. The purpose of God’s call is outward: “and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Let’s step back for a minute and consider what came immediately before Abram’s call in Genesis 12, to what happens in Genesis chapter 11.
To sum it up very quickly, people united by one language settled in Shinar and built a city and tower to make a name for themselves, but the Lord confused their language and scattered them across the earth, stopping the project.
So humanity is doing its best to build our own reputation, to chase our own spotlight, to elevate our own status, to seek significance apart from God.
To try to establish our identity on their own terms. We try to reach for greatness without God’s guidance. That’s the human story
But with Abram, God says, “I will make your name great” (Gen 12:2). That’s a shift from self-made direction to God-given direction—and it sets up the whole Bible story that climaxes in Jesus bringing blessing to the nations.
So this is what happens when we make ourselves available to serve God: God interrupts (the call): New direction starts when God speaks, not when life is convenient.
When I came to the mission for 3 months as a summer missionary in 1985, I was literally making a pit stop on my way to serve God as a missionary in Africa - Liberia and Ivory Coast. I was all in.
Then God interrupted my plans by clearly calling me to serve among those who are struggling in Toronto. It took months for me to process this redirection. It was not what I planned and not what I hoped for.
How might God be interrupting your sense of call, your plans? That’s good to think about, or, when that happens, good to have a line of sight toward.
When we make ourselves available to serve God: God reorders (the leaving): God often calls us to release old securities/identities to follow Him.
Before I received the call to be a missionary, I was planning on being a musician and song-writer, maybe writing worship songs, getting into film scoring, writing jingles etc.
Accepting the call to serve God here, I needed to abandon those plans. Quite wonderfully, God used my training as a musician to serve as a worship leader and band leader and eventually a pastor at the mission. I didn’t see any of that coming.
When we make ourselves available to serve God: God sends (the blessing): God enters a life so that our life becomes a channel of blessing to others.
It’s up to others to assess the impact of God’s calling and faithfulness in my life, but I know that I know that I know that I have been blessed far beyond any expectation I had when I first received God’s call.
I’ve mentioned before that one of the very few times I’ve had a clear sense of God speaking audibly to me was when he said, before I showed any promise in music, He said: “Be faithful in music and I will be faithful to you.”
That was terrifying and deeply encouraging. I think that’s probably a common assessment of God’s grace and His calling on a life.
God enters our lives and changes our identity and our destiny, allowing to, as He did with Abram, who made a lot of mistakes, slowly learn to trust God for everything.
A quick summary of Genesis 17, added to the narrative in chapter 3 that we’ve been looking at is this:
God establishes an everlasting covenant with Abraham, promising a people, a land, and blessing for the nations; He marks His people with a sign of belonging (circumcision) and calls them to walk faithfully before Him.
The covenant unfolds through Isaac and Jacob, Abram’s sons, but its ultimate fulfillment comes in Jesus Christ,
the true Son of promise, through whom the blessing of Abraham finally reaches all nations—God entering the world to bring that blessing to the nations.
In Christ, we become the covenant people God promised from the beginning—marked not by circumcision, but by the Spirit, and invited into the same faithful walk Abraham began.
God rerouted Abram’s life. Abraham learns to trust God’s promise over time; and Abraham’s faith—imperfect but real—becomes a model in Scripture.
I’ve told you a little about how God rerouted my life. How has God rerouted your life?
How might God currently be rerouting your life, shifting you from self-made direction to God-given direction, in order to bring greater glory to Himself, in order to bring blessing to those around you,
in order to bring the knowledge of the risen Saviour, whose birth we have just celebrated at Christmas?
Finally, I want to leave you with a call on this first Sunday of the year, for you to consider in your own time. You should be able to find this in this week’s daily devotional guide.
Name one “leaving” God is asking of you (a security, a pattern, a fear).
Name one “going” step (one act of obedience in the next 7 days).
Name one “blessing” target (one person or place you will intentionally serve).
Let’s pray. Lord Jesus, You are the King of kings and the Lord of lords. You are the most high King of the universe. Our lives matter to you.
Thank you that you proved this when you went to the cross for us, to reconcile us to God. And you call us afresh to follow you into this new year. We desire to do so. We desire to hear Your voice as You speak.
We want to obey you and thereby demonstrate that we love you because You first loved us. Walk with us, Lord Jesus, into the unknown of this year, and give us the faith to believe that You are with us in this journey - whatever the valleys, whatever the mountains.
You are with us and in us by your Holy Spirit. We thank you for this reality. In Your perfect name we pray.
