I received the call to stand up here this morning and bring God’s Word in the back room of a skid row deliverance center mission in Spokane, Washington.  I was helping out at the center with some friends while going to college.  God’s call came as a silent but very deep knowledge that God had something in mind for me to do and that, in response to His goodness, I should obey Him.  I knew that it was from God, partly because it was not the outworking of my own thoughts and desires.  It came out of left field.  Me being up here this morning is not the result of a teenage wish – far from it.

       Why is this significant for our text this morning?  Because the God who calls people today is the God who has called men and women for thousands of years – starting with Abraham about 1900 years before the birth of Jesus.

       Apart from Jesus Christ, Abraham is probably the most important person in the Bible.  Abraham is a giant in scripture.  His stature is far greater than that of Moses, David, Mary the mother of Jesus, or Paul.  These were great people.  God used them in powerful ways.  But each of them would have agreed without qualification that Abraham was his or her father in faith.

       The story of God’s liberation of humanity begins with God’s call to this man.  The story of Abraham contains the first mention in the Bible of God’s righteousness given to people as the sole means of salvation and that this righteousness is given as reward of faith.  Luke declares that the birth of Jesus occurred in response to God’s promise to Abraham.

       Abraham is first introduced to us in the closing verses of Genesis 11.  His name was originally Abram.  It was not until years later that it was changed to Abraham.  The reason for this change is very significant.  We will look at it later.  But for now, let’s get acquainted with Abram.

       I have read several books, which attempt to depict Abram as an ignorant, unlettered Nomad of the desert who lived in a primitive mud-walled village.  But the spade of the archaeologist has since turned up the ruins of Ur.  We have learned that this was a city of great wealth and considerable culture, containing a library and a university.  You may remember from the first Gulf War pictures of an Iraqi fighter parked next to the archaeological treasurer of the great Ziggurat of Ur to keep the fighter from being bombed.

       The spirit of God in the writing of scripture passes over Abram’s early life in Ur with only sketchy details.  The detailed record begins with his encounter with God.  This is where life truly begins!

       What was there about Abram?  What made him the chosen one.

       A Baptist pastor named Henry Blackaby, in his book, Created to be God’s Friend, suggests that there just had to be something special about Abraham.   Blackaby writes:  “We know little of Abram’s life before God called him.  But the rest of the Bible throws light on this significant moment for Abraham.  Several scriptures can help us know what was on the heart of God as he came to Abram, for example, ‘For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself  strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him’ (2 Chronicles 16:9).  And later it was said, ‘The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart.’ (1 Samuel 13:14).”

       Blackaby writes, “When God ‘chooses’ a person for His purpose, He does so according to the person’s heart.  The person must have a loyal heart full of trust and faith.  God must have a person who loves Him ‘with all the heart, with all the soul, and with all the strength.’  Anything less than this is unacceptable to God for the carrying out of His purposes.  Unless the person has such a heart, God would find the person arguing with God, rejecting God, disobeying God, and ultimately straying from God.  The eternal purposes of God could not be accomplished in such a person’s life.  Only a heart that is thoroughly loyal to Him is acceptable to God.”

       Now the only thing wrong with Blackaby’s statements is that they aren’t true.  They aren’t true because Abraham didn’t have a heart full of trust when God called him.  He didn’t love God with his whole heart.  He wasn’t always loyal – to God or to anyone else.  And he did argue with God, reject God, disobey God, and stray from God.  It may be true in the movies that there’s something about Mary.  But it’s plain in the Bible that there’s nothing about Abraham – except the fact that God, for God’s own reasons, said, “You’re my boy!”

       It is impossible to apply Abraham’s story to our stories unless we realize that there was nothing in Abraham that made him different.  God does not look down from heaven to find a person who has a bit of wonderfulness of a bit of faith and then say, “Oh, isn’t that special!  I’ve found somebody with a bit of faith.  I think I’ll save her.”  When God looks down from heaven He sees that all people are without faith, and He passes universal judgment as recorded in Romans 3:12 “they are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that does good, no, not one.”  That indictment included Abraham.

       Now we know from Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 that God’s call came first to Abraham when he lived in Ur of the Chaldees.  The city of Ur was devoted to the worship of the moon goddess.  Abraham came from a family of idol worshipers.  And he was undoubtedly an idol worshipper himself.  This truth is clearly stated in the last chapter of Joshua, where the aging leader delivers a final spiritual charge to the people of Israel.  Joshua begins by reminding them of their pagan past.  “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, you fathers dwelt on the other side of the river (the river Euphrates) of old, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they served other Gods.  This passage is a black and white statement of the fact that Abraham was chosen by God from the midst of pagan idol worship.

       There is nothing in the ancestry of the Jewish people that makes them special – except God’s call.  Why did God call Abraham?  The answer is simply that this was God’s will.  In Deuteronomy 7, Moses tells why God chose Israel to be the nation through which He gave the law and through which He would one day send the Savior.   We read, “The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people.  But because the Lord loved you.”

       Why did God love them?  Because He loved them.  Why did He choose them?  Because He chose them.  This is not human logic.  It is divine logic.  It is the logic of grace.

       This is the way God loved Abraham.  And, now it comes to us, this is also the way God loves us.  We are like Abraham.  There is nothing in us to earn approval from God.  And yet God loves us.  And just as God sought Abraham, God seeks us in order to draw us into fellowship with Himself.

       People hate this teaching in our day.  Witness the rise of the cults, all of them with a common thread, that salvation is something we earn.  “We get saved the old fashioned way, we earn it.”  But Jesus says no you don’t, because you can’t.  You have it as a gift or you don’t have it at all.

       No person ever seeks God.  I wasn’t looking for God when I became a Christian.  And when I was 18, being a pastor was close to the last thing I wanted to be.  I wanted to be an obnoxious journalist instead of an obnoxious pastor.  Abraham’s faith, like my faith and your faith, was preceded by God’s call.  God calls him when he is without faith and promises to bless him.

       Stephen, in his speech in Acts 7, declares that the God of glory first appeared to Abram in Ur.  We have no knowledge of the form this appearance took.  But whatever it was, God took the initiative.  This is true throughout history.  People may think they are feeling after God, but that feeling itself is because of the drawing of the God who seeks them.

       So here then is God, suddenly breaking into the life of Abram as he lived in Ur, worshipping the moon and kneeling before his idols.  In this meeting Abram comes face to face with a command and a promise.  He is commanded to go, and he is promised a land.

      As a result of this, Abraham believes God and sets out on the journey to Canaan.

       I saw a cartoon that shows a man loading a donkey.  A woman holding a small baby says to a woman cooking in front of a tent, “We’re moving to some place called Canaan.  It’s an entirely new concept in group living.”  It certainly was.   It ultimately led to the experiment in group living God calls the church.

       We look at events in the life of Abraham and say, “I couldn’t do that.  I couldn’t do what Abraham did.  I don’t have that kind of faith.”  But neither did Abraham when he started out.  We need to recognize that Abraham is not a model of discipleship maturity.  He is a mirror of our discipleship reality.  Our walk is like his walk.  That’s why we are looking at it this spring and summer.

       When I say that our walk is like his walk, I mean that the first thing Abraham does is fail to finish what he starts.  He blows it.

       When he was in Ur of the Chaldees, God called Abram to go to Canaan.  Ur was in the Mesopotamian River Valley, east of the great Arabian Desert.  Canaan was west of the desert and bordered the Mediterranean Sea.  To obey God’s call, Abraham had to leave Ur, travel north along the great Euphrates River, cross the northern end of the Arabian Desert, and pass down along the Lebanese Highlands, entering Canaan from the north.  Abraham began the one thousand mile journey.  And yet, at the end of Genesis 11, we find that Abraham stops with his family at Haran, a city in Syria.  Yes, he’s hundreds of miles from his starting point in Ur.  But he’s still several hundred miles from Canaan.  Like Ur, Haran was a center of moon worship.  It feels like what he’s left.

       This is where a person stands when he or she first hears the gospel.  A person may have grown tired of the land of Ur for it is a land of darkness, of spiritual hunger and death.  And yet when the call of God comes, there is suddenly a lot that seems desirable in the old life.  He hesitates to leave.  She feels the pull of these things.  Undoubtedly, Abram felt this hesitance.  The land to which he was called was unknown.  I cannot be known until it is experienced.  So Haran, a combination of “sorta obedience” and “sorta disobedience” is safer.

       Abraham stayed at Haran until his father died.  Was Abraham strong in faith?  Not at this point in his life.  But, and this is key, God’s promises were not taken away from him.

       God had called Abraham once and he sorta obeyed.  Then Abraham disobeyed and stopped at Haran.  Years later God came again, calling, “Get out of your country, and from your kindred, and from your father’s house, unto a land that I will show you; and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make you great; and you shall be a blessing”.  God called Abraham a second time, and He calls us a second time.  God always persists in His calling.

       This truth is found many places in scripture.  It is found in the story of David.  God called David to be the political and moral leader of Israel, but David fell into sin with Bathsheba.  Still, God did not write David off.  Instead, he came to him through Nathan to expose his sin and lead him to repentance.  God came a second time to David.

       When God first called Jonah, He said, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before Me.”  The way to Nineveh was east.  Did Jonah go east?  No, Jonah went west!  The Bible tells us that Jonah rose up to flee west to Tarshish.

       At this point in the action, God sent a storm.  Jonah ordered himself to be thrown overboard by the sailors.  He was swallowed by a great fish and was later vomited out on dry land.  He was on the shore, right back where he started.  Then God came to him to repeat his original commission, “And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time” (Jonah 3:1).  These are the most beautiful words in the entire story: “…the Lord came unto Jonah a second time.”  He doesn’t write him off.

       This is the way God is with us.  The word of the Lord comes to us once, twice, and, if need be, several times.  He calls us to follow Him.  And we are so ready to stop.  We have many Harans, Bathshebas, or ships to Tarshish.  Yet, God calls again and again.

       This second call has also been my own experience.  God called me to the ministry when I was 18.  But I ran  away from this call for four years.  I had had seen ministers all the time I was growing up and I didn’t want to live in the very uptight way I saw they lived.  I didn’t want to have to wear a suit while mowing my front lawn just in case someone from the church saw me.  Then the Lord called me a second time at 22 – and I don’t even wear a necktie while mowing the lawn.  I don’t even wear one at church.

       My life between 18 and 22 was in my version of Haran.  I wasn’t really obeying God.

       From God’s point of view, Abram’s years in Haran were wasted.  Abram learned no new lessons there.  And that happens to us when we stop and sit down spiritually.  We must not sit too long.  We must recognize the emptiness of such moments, yield to God’s repeated calls, and let Him lead us into all the blessings He originally intended.

       Let’s personalize this.  Where do you stand?  It may be that you have never responded to God’s call the first time.  If God is prodding you to believe, if you feel unhappy as you are, if you are looking for something better in life, if you are questioning the truths of Christianity, this is God’s working.  You must give way to Him.  You must trust Him.

       Or perhaps you have stopped at some place in your walk with God.  Perhaps God has given you a command to do something and you have put it off, a step to take and you have refused.  Maybe it’s not on your whole Christian life but maybe it’s one hard issue like sexual morality or your career goals.  You prefer to be where you are.  You need to know that the fullness of blessing is never going to come to you until you obey God and do what He has set before you.  It is a simple but vital decision, you cannot stay in Ur or halfway in Haran and go to the new land at the same time.

       Or, perhaps, you are one to whom the Lord is now coming a second or a hundredth time.  Respond to Him.  And rejoice that you serve a God who won’t write you off -- who, in the words of Philippians 1:6, will not abandon the work that He has once set out to accomplish in your life.

       Again and again in the New Testament Abraham is held up as the example of how God works in the life of a person to fulfill His promises of grace.

       This is why we begin the study of this man’s life with a sense of excitement.  Because in Abraham we  find ourselves reflected.  And by looking at his life we will discover the ways by which the Spirit of God intends to transform us from faltering pilgrims, like Abram the kinda, sorta, semi-obedient, into men and women of stalwart faith that He can both truly bless and then use to be a blessing in the lives of other people.