Submitting To God In Times Of Famine

Submitting to God in times of Famine

Do you trust in God when the wells are dry? I begin today with a question. Where do you go when you are in a tight place? Of course, if someone in your house is having a heart attack, you would call the paramedics. If you have a fire, you would call the fire department. Well what do you do when there is no agency that can take care of your problem?

What do you do if your spouse walks out of a marriage? What if you are unjustly fired or unjustly accused? What then? What if the doctor walks into your room and tells you, “you may have cancer? What then? During times of broken relationships and pain, where do you go? In times of struggles, hardships, and famine, what shall we do?

I chose this title not because I think that America is going to have a famine, but we may face and experience times of financial downturns. Sometimes during those times of struggle, some of you will wonder ‘what to do’ and ‘where to turn’. In the Bible, we realize that the closest thing to economic hardship is really a famine because they didn't have an economy like ours. Today, we're going to look at the life of a man who experienced an unexpected famine and what he did. What he did right, what he did wrong, and where do we go from here. The man's name was: Abraham.

Having a testimony with God

The story takes place in Genesis chapter 12. As you may know, Abraham was actually there in Ur of the chaldeans. God told him that he was to go into a land that God would show him. And Abraham left and traveled without a map. Chapter 12:1, “Now the Lord said to Abraham go from your country and your kindred in your father's house to the land that I will show you and I'm going to make you a great nation.” Have you ever wondered how he convinced Sarah that he should do this? Can you imagine that, husbands? So Abraham and his people came into the land. And behold the Canaanites were there. But Abraham was in the land and the Lord confirmed, ‘this is the land I have chosen for you’, so Abraham builds an altar unto the Lord in verse 7 and he worships the Lord. In verse 8, he went to Bethel, on the west side, and has Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.

Abraham journeyed on going toward the Negev, which means ‘the desert’. Is he in the will of God? Yes, he was there by obedience to God. Yes, this land was a gift to him from God. And he was obedient in following the Lord. That’s why we're surprised when we get to verse 10. In verse 10 we read, “Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to dwell there, for the famine was severe in the land”. In the middle of obedience, in the middle of doing God's will, right in the place of blessing, the land of blessing, there was a severe famine.

Maybe you've experienced this too. You may have left one job, and you took another. You prayed about it, and you gave it to God. But now six months later, the company has downsized, and you've been let go. You may say to yourself, “how can this be? I must be out of God's will.” Not necessarily. Abraham was in the middle of God's will. He was also obedient to God. Remember in Matthew 14, Jesus tells the disciples to get into the boat and go to the other side. Were they in God's will by doing what Jesus told them to do? Yes. In obedience to Christ, they experienced one of the most devastating storms that they'd ever experienced. Don't ever think that the most holy path is always the smoothest path. Sometimes, the roughest path can be the holy path for you and for me.

Now, the famine came to Abraham and his family. And as trials do, they came without instructions. There was no tag on it from God's saying, “Abraham you will have a severe famine and I want you to do this.” However, no trial comes without instructions and without guidance. We have it right here, now in our bible. God has a purpose, but we sure don't know where it is, what it is, or when we will get through it.

Leaving God’s testimony:

Although you must be strong during times of hardships, I would like to emphasize that, in a logical sense, it may not have been wrong for Abraham to go to Egypt during the famine. As a matter of fact, there might be times where God often uses famines to move people. However, in this instance, Abraham, in the land that God gave him, experienced a famine, and he went down to Egypt.