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Last year the Bible College I go to invited a Christian pastor to speak to us about his forty years of experience in pastoral ministry and some of the things he wish he knew before he got into it. One of the things he said was he wish he’d known just how much people suffered in normal life. He said he’d bet us five dollars that if he stopped an average person in his neighbourhood and asked them how they were doing, their response would be something like this “I used to have a life. I used to be expected. I used to be optimistic. I used to look forward to the future. And then everything fell apart. And now I’m stuck with this.” Have you ever felt like that? Like what’s the point? I have no future. Nothing I do matters. This American pastor’s observation was that that experience is sadly typical of human life. He wish he’d known just how much people suffer before he went into pastoral ministry to care for people and show them how the Gospel gives them hope in their suffering.

On another occasion, my college invited someone in to run a workshop on communication skills. And he said the key to good communication is good listening and if you listen, the thing you will discover that unites all human beings everywhere is pain. That was his experience. He’s a Christian, and though he doesn’t work for a church, he does have cancer. And apart from taking time out to speak to people like me training for ministry, pleading with us to learn to listen well, he meets with a group of terminally ill people in his church and they encourage one another to keep going with joy. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall for that group, to hear what they say to each other? What does God say to people when they feel like they have no hope and no future and everything they do is meaningless?

It may be that some of us are like that pastor at the start of his ministry, we don’t yet realise how much suffering there is in the world and we’ve not experienced much of it ourselves. In fact, we might be like Abram at the end of Genesis 14, things are going well. The pandemic’s been hard, but we’re surviving, we’re adapting. We’ve even discovered a new hobby or taught ourselves a new skill. And we haven’t let church drop off the agenda, but we’ve remained involved through zoom or YouTube or podcasts or whatever. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised in a gathering this size, that some of us aren’t feeling like Abram in Genesis 15.2:

O Lord God, what will you give me

My life’s a mess. I have no future. The things that brought me joy are gone. What’s left for me? If that’s you, thank you so much for being here. You may be a Christian, you may not. It’s so good you’re here because God does have something to say to you. There is hope. Your life matters. In fact, it’s of cosmic significance! If that’s not you, please don’t hear me criticising any of the good stuff we’ve been enjoying and that’s helped us live through the pandemic. But I do want to plead with you, don’t put your trust in anything so fragile as your circumstances. Don’t hang your happiness on your bank balance, or your achievements or your health. Because if you do then you’ll have nothing to say to the person who has none of those things and you’ll have nothing left when those things get taken away. In this passage, God shows us how to live to avoid despair. What Genesis 15 shows that:

1) In the End, Faith is the only thing we’re capable of
2) Amazingly, Faith is the only thing God asks of us
3) Faith is only faith when its faith in God alone.

So let me pray:

Father, The world is so complex and we are so small and vulnerable. Please teach us how to live with hope and joy in all circumstances. Please nourish us from your word and make us wise by it. Amen.

Genesis 15. We can take courage and have hope that God will take care of our future no matter our circumstances. God wants Abram to know for certain that he will deliver on his promises so that he will live by faith. Genesis 15.1, it is God who takes the initiative again. After the great accomplishment of Genesis 14 we might be thinking Abram is feeling pretty good. But Genesis 15.2 reveals Abram’s heart, which we wouldn’t know unless God had first spoken to Abram to reassure him that he’d made the right decision not to take the booty off the King of Sodom, but trust in God to make him rich. So God says Abram, you’ve made the right choice:

I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great…

But Abram replied:

…What will you give me for I continue childless… Eliezar of Damascus will be my heir

In other words, what’s the point? Anything you give me will go to someone else. You have given me no offspring Do you see Abram’s complaint? No children means no future which means no point to receiving anything from God. Now I’m more like that Pastor in this situation. I did not realise how painful childlessness is and how many couples I know, Christian and non-Christian have to deal with that sadness day after day. I’m grateful for a friend who pointed out to me how painful it is when the doctor says you are unlikely to be able to bear children. So I want to say that we are in a different situation to Abram in this respect. For him and Sarah having physical, biological descendants was the equivalent of having a future. The future God had promised in Genesis 12 of being a great nation. But for us today, we live under the New Covenant. Our future is not dependent on our offspring, but rather on the offspring of Abram – Jesus Christ. So for us today, the twin promises of land and offspring correspond like this: Land equals the Kingdom of God established forever in the New Creation – it is the world made new. Offspring becomes Israel, which becomes the new Israel which equals the believers from many nations of which Ab is the father or prototype. So if you are a Christian today, you are a Spiritual child of Abram and the promises concerning Abram’s offspring are promises about you and for you. If you’re not a Christian, then the only way into Abram’s family is through faith in Jesus Christ.

So for us the question is not can or will God give me children, but if I trust in Christ will or can God bring me safely through life and death into his perfect kingdom? Or, is my life meaningless because death and time will erase any trace of me? And here’s the thing, unless we give up in despair, we all look to something to answer these questions:

What do you look to to save you from death?
What do you turn to to assure yourself that your life has meaning?
What is the thing you return to comfort yourself that everything is going to be ok?
We all have faith, unless we are in complete despair. The question is what is your faith in?

In this bit of the Bible, God what we need. Faith is the only thing we’re capable of. Faith is the only thing God asks of us. So look with me at Genesis 15.4-5 God says:

“This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

There’s the promise – I will give you a son. Genesis 15.6 is the writer of Genesis telling us what Abram had to do to benefit from God’s promise. This is the 10/10, A+ answer:

And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

God says “look at my servant Abram. He trusts me. He’s my righteous one. All Abram does is believe and that’s all God wants. God willingly and freely takes responsibility for Abram’s future. All Abram is required to do is trust God to do what he has said. Faith says to God “if you’re in, I’m in”. It listens to his promises and trusts that God will keep them no matter what. And God is so happy when people learn to do that. People who trust God publicly demonstrate his greatness. Listen to this extract from Hudson Taylor’s diary and see what faith says to God. Hudson Taylor was a missionary to China – when he first went out to China, missionaries were only active on the coast, no one was venturing inland. He returned to England because he was desperately sick and discouraged by the limitations of the mission in China. He saw the need for a mission society that would concentrate their efforts on inland china but couldn’t see how it would happen. Listen to this extract from his diary:

On Sunday, June 25th, 1865, unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security, while millions [in china] were perishing for lack of knowledge, I wandered out on the sands alone, in great spiritual agony; and there the LORD conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to GOD for this service. I told Him that all the responsibility as to issues and consequences must rest with Him; that as His servant, it was mine to obey and to follow Him — His, to direct, to care for, and to guide me and those who might labour with me. … There and then I asked Him for twenty-four fellow-workers, two for each of eleven inland provinces which were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia; and writing the petition on the margin of the Bible I had with me, I returned home with a heart enjoying rest…

Well there are about 150 million Christians in China now. God came through for Hudson Taylor. Faith listens to God’s promises and believes them so it can say my future is your responsibility. God has taken on the responsibility to care for me. To direct me and guide me – according to his wisdom and his power for his good ends. Faith believes God and God counts that faith as righteousness. That’s how God wants us to live and he helps us to live that way. So remember, Genesis 15.6 is put there for our benefit – it shows us Abram’s heart trusts God. Which means that (Genesis 15.8) when Abram says “how will I know” is not cynical unbelief. This is not Abram bargaining with God, it is Abram prepared to put his life in God’s hands. Because Faith is only faith when it is faith in God alone.

If Jonathan Pryke says to me he’ll give me a lift to the train station and we’ll leave at 7am tomorrow morning from his house, trusting Jonathan means turning up with my bags packed ready to go. If I book myself a backup taxi, just in case Jonathan sleeps in, then I don’t really trust him to get me to the station. Instead I’m saying the taxi service is my fail safe. Jonathan is nice but not necessary. So (Genesis 15.8) Abram is prepared to show real faith to trust God alone to take care of his future. And he’s asking God to help him to do so.

This is a question God wants Abram to ask so that God can publicly prove his own faithfulness. And he does it through this gory covenant ritual in Genesis 15.9-18. Judging by the fact that Abram knows what to do with the animals God tells him to gather, it seems as though this kind of oath was already a custom in Abram’s time. When people wanted to make a binding agreement together that would require one to trust the other to hold up their end of the bargain, the two parties would gather animals, cut them in half and then walk down the middle. And they would speak the promise out loud, So in this case, God makes the promise (Genesis 15.12-16):

…Know For Certain…I will rescue your descendants from slavery and settle them in this land…and you Abram will live long and die peacefully

And then they would pass through the animals. And the oath is “if I fail to uphold my end of the deal, let me be like these animals”. Imagine if we did weddings like that. Imagine going to your girlfriend’s dad and saying you’d like to marry her. And he said “I’m so happy for you both. Let me get the animals just to see if you’re serious!” This kind of oath proves that someone is serious about keeping their promise. The key is who walks through the animals? Normally you’d either expect both parties to walk through, or you’d expect a powerful king to make his vassal kings walk through to pledge their allegiance. But in this case, only God passes through. Abram is fast asleep. God takes on 100% of the responsibility. It’s God’s name on the line not Abram’s. So listen to the words of the covenant God makes with Abram, promising both land and offspring to Abram (Genesis 15.18):

To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates

The offspring may not be on the scene. The land is already occupied by the kenites and so on.
But God says “I’ve given it. It’s as good as done. Trust me, I’ve gone through the animals”. In a similar way Paul writes to Christians in Romans 8.18:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

That is, no amount of suffering or disappointment can derail God’s plans. We may not enjoy the glory now, but we will. In fact he’s so certain he writes a few verses later (Romans 8.30):

…those whom [God] predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Because Jesus Christ has gone through death and is seated in Glory now. Do you see the supreme confidence God has in his own grace? He starts nothing he can’t finish. He promises nothing he can’t fulfil. God went through the animals for Abram. Jesus went through death and rose again for us so that we might learn to live by faith alone. God says to us “let me take care of your future”. Will you live by faith in Christ? Will you throw away your idols, your insurance policies, and trust in Christ alone? What will a people who live by that faith look like, do you think?

What would you love your non-Christian friends and family to see and experience if they were to walk into JPC? Wouldn’t we be a people who pointed away from ourselves and to the one we have faith in? So the thing on display wouldn’t be the preacher, or the musicians, or the posters of social action, or whatever. It would be Jesus – the Saviour. And I would love my non-Christians friends to get a good look at him every time they came with me to church.

Maybe you know you’re not a Christian but you know what Christians believe about God, about judgement day, about Jesus who died to make atonement for your sins and rose again to prove his power over death. You know that becoming a Christian means coming to Christ to live for him not yourself – trusting him to take hold of your life and look after you. If that’s you, may I go on record to say there is no one or nothing else who is able to do what Christ has done for you. No one or no other way to atone for sin. No one or nothing to sustain and protect you that doesn’t lean on something else to protect and sustain it. No God or master so gentle and patient, no Saviour so mighty and faithful. If you are not looking to Christ to save you, who or what are you looking to? Look with me again at Genesis 15.6:

He [Abram] believed the Lord and he credited it him as righteousness.

I don’t know what’s coming up for you this week. There might be something you’re dreading. There might be problems you don’t know how to overcome. You might hate yourself for you sin and terrified that it will be brought out into the light. God says let me take care of your future, through the work Jesus Christ and by the Power of the Holy Spirit. If you trust God to do that, you can go home this evening counted as one of God’s righteous ones. May we be a people who help one another trust God, let him take responsibility to lead us and look after us, so that we may go home this evening and go into a new day with hearts enjoying rest. To that end, one to one ministry is a real help, because it helps us apply faith in the nitty gritty of life. And Romans 8 says that the whole creation is looking forward to the day when God will vindicate your faith in him. When the ones who have been justified through faith in Christ are glorified with Christ in God’s Kingdom.