[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
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[00:00:14] i wonder if anybody recognises this gentleman. Any idea who this person is?
[00:00:20] Do you want to hazard a guess at where in history he might be?
[00:00:26] Sorry, say it again. Sorry.
[00:00:31] Well, Atelio. Is that what people say?
[00:00:36] Wow, that is a really insightful answer.
[00:00:40] His name is Francesco.
[00:00:45] In 1619, he was born into a noble family in Venice. Nepo baby.
[00:00:52] He became a successful military commander and took territory from the Ottoman Empire. Venice, back in the day, had its own empire and he was one of the foremost military strategists. In 1688, he became a lifelong ruler of Venice, known as the Doge.
[00:01:13] Does that mean anything to anybody? He's not important to most people, but important to me because, as most of you have guessed, his full name is Francesco Morosini.
[00:01:28] He is my ancestor.
[00:01:35] When I discovered this in my late teens, early 20s, I also discovered the rather macabre fact that the Morosini family in Venice had a murderous feud with the Caliprinis.
[00:01:49] Not something to be proud of. The Morosinis fighting and assassinating the Caliprinis. And it made me think, I've heard of two families like this in another context. Have you heard of another context like that?
[00:02:04] Sorry.
[00:02:07] Very good. Romeo and Juliet. Thank you.
[00:02:11] Yeah, very similar. But here in Romeo and Juliet, it's not Morosini, it's Montague and it's not Caliperini, it's Capulet.
[00:02:20] So I entertained myself with the charming notion that I was descended from Romeo.
[00:02:27] I was a young man, single man, why wasn't I?
[00:02:31] No one who pointed this out to Helen, my wife, she was less than impressed.
[00:02:41] She said I couldn't be descended from Romeo.
[00:02:45] Bit harsh, really, isn't it?
[00:02:48] Because the whole point of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is they died before they had any kids.
[00:02:56] Now, I don't know if you've done any sort of ancestry.com type things or looked into your own background and history and those sorts of things and found someone interesting like that.
[00:03:08] Now, in all probability, I'm not related to Francesco Morosini, because if you go back a few generations, for all of us, it all gets a bit muddled, doesn't it, really? He was from Venice. My people are all from down south, near the Naples area. But you do sometimes discover some interesting things and really, it's just down to the numbers.
[00:03:30] You see, everybody has Two biological parents, four grandparents eight great grandparents. 16, 32, 64. And you go back and back and back, and the amount of ancestors we've got just grow.
[00:03:45] I was going to say exponentially, but I'm not sure that's the right word. Okay, so somehow we're mostly descended from someone. But today we're going to talk about not our genetic inheritance, but our spiritual inheritance. We're going to talk about Abraham, our spiritual ancestor.
[00:04:03] Now, Abraham is seismically important in the history of the world and certainly in the history of the Bible, because without Abraham, there's no Isaac.
[00:04:14] Without Isaac, there's no Jacob. Without Jacob, there's no tribes. Without the tribes, there's no Moses. Without Moses, there's no scripture, no David, no Solomon, no Jerusalem, and no thousands of years later, Jesus coming into human history.
[00:04:32] So we're going to look at Abraham, not our genetic ancestor, but our spiritual ancestor, and how the promise that God made to him flows down through history down to Jesus and is actually the reason we're sitting here today.
[00:04:48] But before we do that, before we do that, we need to recap, as Gary was saying, where we've been.
[00:04:56] So many people who've not had a chance to study their Bibles or not been around church might think that the Bible is just a hodgepodge of battles and miracles and wise sayings and almost a completely random collection of things. In fact, some people do, and I'm not judging them, because people do. They look in the Bible almost at random to find something to help them.
[00:05:20] But the Bible is a big story. It's a huge story. It's a family story. It's a cosmic story. It's a spiritual story with a beginning, middle, and an end. And what we're trying to do over these next few months, maybe years, is show how the whole story hangs together. Okay? And today we've come to Abraham.
[00:05:39] But what I want to do is just very quickly recap where we've got to. And we're going to recap by awarding gold medals to the first. Okay, so the first thing we saw was the creation, and it was the first opportunity for an emoji, because God looked at the world and said it was good.
[00:06:01] Secondly, we have the first excuse where humanity is found to be open to temptation and doubt and shame.
[00:06:11] Okay? And so as we know, the fall, Adam and Eve, we get the first excuse. The woman made me do it.
[00:06:19] Now, at this point, preachers like to have a little joke, but the woman made me do it is actually really dark.
[00:06:28] How many men have abused women emotionally, financially, physically, sexually and then said, she made me do it.
[00:06:43] If any of us men in this room have hurt a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, a partner, a mother, sister, daughter, and said, well, she made me do it.
[00:06:56] We're going way back.
[00:06:59] The third gold medal goes to the first murder.
[00:07:03] Cain kills his brother Abel. And you could say, because it's all to do with worship and who had the better sacrifices. The first religious motivated murder.
[00:07:12] Then we had the Noah and the flood. The first severe weather warning. God said, it's going to rain. And then last week, Gary helped us going through the first large building project. So that's where we've been so far.
[00:07:25] We're going to talk now today about Abraham. And this is how we think about Abraham.
[00:07:31] Quiet, complementive, meditative, spiritual, looking into the distance. But I think a better way to think about him is as the first rock star.
[00:07:47] And I'm going to give you seven reasons why Abraham is a rock star. Okay? And as we're going through the readings today, we're going to do three readings. I want you to look out for these rock star references.
[00:08:00] I hear groaning. What's going on?
[00:08:04] The first thing, he has a big fan base.
[00:08:07] Jewish people genetically consider him as they should, their founder, their ancestor. Christians claim him, as we're going to see today, as a spiritual ancestor. Muslims also claim him as their spiritual ancestor. If you add all of that up, it's about today, 4.7 billion people who claim a connection to, to Abraham. Big fan base, Taylor Swift, less than a million.
[00:08:37] I looked it up.
[00:08:39] Secondly, he traveled with a huge entourage, okay? Rock stars are always going around big entourages, as you see in the readings today. He's always got lots of people with him, livestock and all sorts of stuff.
[00:08:50] Thirdly, he is controversial. Rock stars are controversial. And we're going to see about this promise that was made to him that he would have this land, this physical piece of land in the Middle east, which is very controversial definitely today.
[00:09:04] Fourthly, he's married to a supermodel. The Bible says Sarah was very, very beautiful. I'm stretching it a bit, but there you are. Supermodel.
[00:09:14] Five, he was very rich.
[00:09:16] Six, he changed his name.
[00:09:20] Now in the readings we've got today, it's Abraham. And depending on my breathing, I might say Abraham or Abraham.
[00:09:26] But later on, he changes his name. He's the rock star formerly known as Abraham.
[00:09:32] And lastly, he had a child at a very late age.
[00:09:38] Mick Jagger, in whose house we sit in 2016, had his eighth child.
[00:09:47] Mick Jagger was 73, little bit younger than Abraham, we won't get to that today.
[00:09:55] So what we're going to do today is we're going to go through the first part of Abraham's story by looking at three altars that he set up. Okay, so I'm going to do a reading, look at the altar, talk a little bit about it, and on we go. So there's three altars. We're going to look at the first altar, which is his calling. The second one, where there's a crisis, and then last altar, where. Where there is his full commitment. Okay, so that's where we're going. And as I go through the readings, just see if you can pick out these rock star references just to help us engage with this story, because there is a lot going on.
[00:10:33] So let's go to the first one, the first altar, the calling.
[00:10:41] The Lord had said to Abram, go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land. I will show you.
[00:10:50] 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.
[00:10:57] I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse. And all the peoples on the earth will be blessed through you.
[00:11:06] So Abraham went as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him.
[00:11:11] Abraham was 75 years old when he set out from Haran.
[00:11:16] He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired, and they set out for the land of Canaan.
[00:11:27] Abram traveled through the land as far as the great tree of Moreh. At Shechem, the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to your offspring, I'll bring this land.
[00:11:38] So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him.
[00:11:43] Now, this is one of the times when you're reading the Bible, you have to be really, really careful at the words. And I put that word had in red. Okay? God had called Abraham, not God called Abraham. God had called Abraham. And we know from Acts that God had called Abraham not when he was in Haran, where we get to this point of the story now, but in his home city way back in a place called Ur.
[00:12:11] Something had happened in Ur that had made Abraham aware of this promise on his life. It must have been something really seismic, really, really special, because it changed the course of his life.
[00:12:24] And the question is, why did God choose Abraham?
[00:12:31] Now, as we looked at our five gold medals there, Abraham wasn't one of those people in those stories. He didn't worship God.
[00:12:40] It says in Acts that he actually Worshipped pagan gods, idols. In fact, some traditions say he made idols. He wasn't a worshipper of God, as some of the characters earlier in the Big Story. He didn't offer a better sacrifice to God like Abel.
[00:12:56] He wasn't righteous and blameless like Noah.
[00:12:59] Culturally, he wasn't the firstborn in his family, so that wouldn't have made him particularly special. And he didn't have any children, and that would have been very negatively. So why did God choose Abraham?
[00:13:13] Now, the answer to this is really, really important and it affects every one of us in this room. And when I give you this answer, you need to memorize it because it's really important for your life. Okay? Why did God choose Abraham?
[00:13:25] Here's the answer.
[00:13:27] No idea.
[00:13:29] No idea.
[00:13:31] This is another place in the Bible, God says, I will have mercy on who I will have mercy.
[00:13:39] Now, sometimes, if we've been Christians for a long time, we can get into our heart. We would never say it publicly that maybe we're good enough, that God should have chosen us.
[00:13:53] We're nice people, we work hard. We don't swear, we read our Bibles, we say our prayers. And so God should have chosen us.
[00:14:02] Now, if ever you find that feeling in your heart, that's not spiritual insight, that's pride.
[00:14:09] Because if we feel that we deserve to be saved, that God was right to choose us, we're one of the good ones. We are in effect saying there's people who don't deserve it.
[00:14:21] That's not the gospel. That's not the gospel.
[00:14:24] But when we see in this story, we also see that Abraham hasn't really answered the call.
[00:14:31] The call was, leave the city of Ur, leave your family, and go to a place that I'm showing you. And Abraham is in a halfway place.
[00:14:41] He's not where God has showed him he should be. And he's with lots of his nephew.
[00:14:47] See, he's halfway. He's sort of halfway following what God has asked him to do.
[00:14:54] And at certain points, sometimes we think, when we get caught in a situation where we think, actually I'm a bit half hearted in my faith. But it's easy for Abraham because he had this spectacular call.
[00:15:06] And we think, oh, it would be so much easier in my faith and in my walk and all the challenges that I have in my life, if God just appeared to me.
[00:15:15] Some miracle, some angel, I'm not so sure.
[00:15:21] Jack dear, who wrote a book called Surprised by the Voice of God, says this God will give you momentous guidance when he's about to require something Significant, often something that will stretch your faith, disrupt your comfort, or involve suffering.
[00:15:37] The supernatural clarity is meant to sustain you through the difficulty, not make your life easier.
[00:15:45] You just have to think about Paul, who had that amazing encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. And it changed his life. But ahead of him, he would be imprisoned, stoned, put on trial, whipped, and so much more.
[00:16:01] So let's not ask for big miraculous signs, because they might mean big challenges.
[00:16:09] But God has called us. He's been very clear with us in what we need to do. The Bible says it, Jesus said, follow me. Love the Lord your God with all your strength, your soul, and might walk humbly and love mercy and so much more besides. We don't need an angel for that.
[00:16:28] But Abraham had arrived at his halfway place.
[00:16:32] Let's move to the second altar, where he gets into crisis.
[00:16:41] Genesis 12, 10, 20. And I've paraphrased it a bit to try and fit it on the slide.
[00:16:47] From there, he went on towards the hills of Bethel and pitched his tent. There he built the second altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.
[00:16:55] Now there was a famine in the land, and Abraham went down to Egypt to live there for a while, because the famine was severe.
[00:17:03] As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, I know what a beautiful woman you are, supermodel. When Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife. Then they will kill me. But they will let you live, say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.
[00:17:25] When Abraham came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman.
[00:17:30] When Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh and she was taken into his palace. He treated Abraham well for her sake. And Abraham acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female, servants and camels.
[00:17:46] But the Lord inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abraham's wife, Sarai.
[00:17:53] So Pharaoh summoned Abram. What have you done to me? He said, why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, she is my sister?
[00:18:04] So that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go.
[00:18:09] So Abraham left, and Lot went with him. Abraham became very wealthy in livestock, in silver and in gold.
[00:18:17] He went from place to place until he came to Bethel, where his tent had been earlier and where he had built an altar.
[00:18:24] There he called upon the name of the Lord.
[00:18:28] Abraham gets into a crisis. There is a famine and he doesn't seek God about how he's going to sort this out. He decides to find his own way through.
[00:18:40] Now, what this shows us is Abraham is prepared to do anything to save his own skin.
[00:18:47] It's not just that he's lying.
[00:18:49] That's the least of it. He is selling out his wife. Okay? At the end of the story, he is richer than when he started because he's selling out his wife. Would it be too horrible to say he prostituted his wife?
[00:19:06] Now, the key thing isn't the depravity of his heart.
[00:19:10] It's what we're learning about God.
[00:19:14] Because the gods that Abraham would have worshipped before God had appeared to him.
[00:19:20] They were power gods.
[00:19:22] They were fertility gods, the pagan gods and the idol gods. They're the ones you had to worship if you wanted your crops to grow and your livestock to reproduce and your family to grow, all of what you needed to survive.
[00:19:35] And those gods also were your power gods. If you had to fight another army or a raiding band of bandits, whatever it was, you needed power gods.
[00:19:47] Those gods weren't moral.
[00:19:50] Those gods didn't care about the way people treated each other. And so in this, we're beginning to see in the big story, God revealing something of his character and showing to Abraham. This is not a power God and a fertility God. This is a moral God who cares about the way people treat each other and the way people treat God.
[00:20:15] And when Abraham gets into this situation, he just, whether he knows it or not, he doesn't know it's going to end up in this way. He sort of pushes these principles to one side.
[00:20:26] Have you ever found it? When a crisis comes into our life, it's just easier to push aside the Christian principles.
[00:20:34] They just become a bit of a burden. You know, if you've got a tough situation in family or in work and you think, I've got to resolve this in a way that honors God, but do I have to be honest? I mean, that's just an extra burden. Do I have to be nice to people? Do I have to forgive? Do I have to be gracious?
[00:20:55] Sometimes it feels like it's a restriction to do it the Christian way, but that's who is the God that we serve. That's what we need to do.
[00:21:08] And so at the end of this story, he goes back to that first altar and it says he worships God there. He calls on the name of the Lord. There's that sense of worshipping and repentance.
[00:21:22] Last altar, Genesis 13, verses 1 to 18.
[00:21:30] Lot was moving about with Abraham, and they had flocks and herds and tents.
[00:21:36] But the land could not support them while they were staying together.
[00:21:40] And quarreling arose between Abram's herders and Lot.
[00:21:44] So Abram said to Lot, let's not have any quarreling between you and me or between your herders and mine, for we are close relatives. Is not the whole land before you? Let's part company.
[00:21:58] If you go to the left, I'll go to the right. If you go to the right, I'll go to the left.
[00:22:04] Lot looked around and saw the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered. So Lot chose it for himself and set out towards the east.
[00:22:13] The two men parted company.
[00:22:15] The Lord said to Abraham, look around where you are to the north and to the south, to the east and to the west, all the land that you see I will give you and to your offspring forever.
[00:22:26] I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring will be counted.
[00:22:34] Go walk through the length and breadth of the land that I am giving you.
[00:22:38] So Abraham went to live near the great trees of Marmot Hebron, where he pitched his tents. There he built his altar to the Lord.
[00:22:47] And this is the controversy of the land.
[00:22:50] It's really, really difficult.
[00:22:53] God gives Abraham a promise, a physical promise that he will have this land and his descendants will have this land. It's going to belong to them geographically, politically. And we know from later in the big story, the children of Abraham are going to use military means and violence to take the land.
[00:23:14] And people use this promise to say that violence and warfare is justified today to take the land. And I'm not just talking about the land in the Middle East.
[00:23:26] Christians, and we can argue whether they were Christians, maybe in past have used this promise to take other land in other parts of the world.
[00:23:35] So what does this promise mean today?
[00:23:38] Because it seems to be at variance with what comes in the New Testament.
[00:23:44] Andrew Allerton, a theologian, has written a book called An Honest look at the Bible's seven Toughest Topics. Get it on your Christmas list.
[00:23:55] And he says this promise of the land is a signpost. It's not the destination.
[00:24:01] It's pointing to something greater to God's plan to restore creation and to bring his presence among his people.
[00:24:09] So today this means the promise is not about modern borders, but about God's kingdom coming on earth. So this promise, this line that starts with Abraham, stops being political, stops being geographical, and becomes spiritual and about the kingdom of God. Because one day the Glory of God is going to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
[00:24:32] And one of the reasons we know that this promise doesn't stand today is because Jesus didn't affirm it.
[00:24:39] Now, so much of what we see Jesus teach in the New Testament actually reaches back to the Old Testament. He mentions. He quotes from Isaiah, he mentions Jonah. So many things go back, but never once does he say, because of this promise to Abraham, we're going to take this land. Okay? Lots of people wanted him to do that, to become a political leader, but he didn't do that. Something had changed. So the land promise is a signpost to something greater, which is the kingdom of God.
[00:25:08] And I'm going to give you another example. Try and get this in our minds, right?
[00:25:12] If you go to Sunday school, you will know the story of Jericho. Joshua goes around Jericho, blows the trumpets, walls fall down, and they take that city by violence.
[00:25:23] In the Gospels, it says Jesus doesn't go around Jericho, he goes through Jericho, and that's where he meets Zacchaeus. And salvation comes to Zacchaeus, the tax collector.
[00:25:36] Joshua goes around it, walls go down, Jesus goes through it, and he brings salvation. Now, here's the thing. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, just sort of slightly different accents, okay? So it's important that we try and understand this now. It is a gnarly, difficult, tricky problem of what happens to the land in the Old Testament. And it's something that we have to deal with.
[00:26:01] But what's great about the Bible is it doesn't sugarcoat humanity.
[00:26:08] We love war.
[00:26:10] We love killing each other. And Jesus said there'll be wars and rumors of wars, but it doesn't mean that the promise is that we use violence and warfare to take land today.
[00:26:24] The second part of this is that he parts ways with Lot. So Abraham splits with Lot. He lets Lot take the part of the land that he wants. He acts generously, he acts trustingly, and he acts graciously. Abraham is beginning to be more like God.
[00:26:44] And at the end of this, we find that Abraham's now in the right place, right? He's left his father's house, he's left his family. Lot has gone, and he's in the place that God has called him to.
[00:26:57] He's in the right place after all these adventures, waiting for the next adventure, and there's going to be next coming along.
[00:27:05] So let me finish them, just by going back to ancestors and inheritance and also identity. And Gary really helped us with this last week.
[00:27:20] You see, even if Francesco Morosini is my ancestor. It means nothing really, does it?
[00:27:26] I mean, unless I inherited some piece of land in Venice.
[00:27:31] You know, if you go to Venice, I know people do go there as tourists. Maybe you've been there as a tourist, you probably wouldn't have noticed. But there is a Morosini piazza.
[00:27:40] There are Morosini palazzos. There is even an Italian navy base called Francesco Morosini. Wouldn't it be great if I inherited a bit of that land?
[00:27:50] I probably would only inherit a bit of the water, wouldn't I?
[00:27:55] Or if I inherited his title and I'm the rightful doge of Venice.
[00:28:01] And if in some outlandish circumstances I did inherit any of that, it still would mean nothing unless I act on it.
[00:28:11] Now, at least three times in the Bible it refers to what we receive in Jesus as inheritance. I'll just put three things up there, okay? We receive these things as our inheritance. It's. It starts with our spiritual ancestor Abraham. This promise begins to grow and become more full and it comes down to us.
[00:28:31] But they mean nothing unless we act on them. We inherit eternal life.
[00:28:38] Having that as part of our psychology changes the way we would live in this life. We inherit the kingdom. Not an earthly kingdom, but a kingdom that's a little bit here and it's going to flow fully come. Having that built into our identity changes us. To think there's more than just my family or my community, forgiveness, adoption, and the Holy Spirit, all are seen as inherited things. But they mean nothing unless we act on them.
[00:29:09] If anybody's made that clear headed, serious, lifelong decision to follow Jesus, then this is, is our inheritance and it should change us.
[00:29:21] David didn't defeat Goliath because he had superior weapons technology.
[00:29:26] He defeated Goliath because he had a strong sense of who he was in God.
[00:29:32] He looked at the giant and he said, well, who is this would stand against the armies of the living God? David knew about the tribes, about Isaac and Jacob and Abraham. He had that strong sense of who he is in God. It made him brave, it made him courageous.
[00:29:51] All of our identities in life, most of our identities in life change.
[00:29:56] You're a child, you change to an adult, you're an adult, you change to a mature person.
[00:30:02] Some of us get married, that can change. Some of us have job titles, they change. Some of us even have responsibilities in the church that can change. The one identity that is constant is who we are in Christ.
[00:30:16] How we inherit that.
[00:30:19] But is this inheritance changing us? Is it changing our priorities? Is it changing the way we live? Or are we like Abraham in the first altar, wandering around, half hearted, not really sure, and then compromising when the faith comes, when the crisis comes. To challenge our faith, we need to progress to the third altar, to the place of commitment, to be in the right place, using our inheritance to live righteously and to live righteously for everyone around us, Everyone who's made that clear headed, lifelong decision to follow Jesus, that's, that's their identity.
[00:31:04] And if that isn't a decision that you've made, then it can be made, it can be arranged. Make yourself vulnerable. As Hugh was talking earlier, bring some courage.
[00:31:16] Talk to me, talk to the people who brought you, talk to Gary and grab ahold of this inheritance that God has got for us.
