FEB 13 2022 | Genesis: Behind the Curtain S2E4 | Abraham

Sea Change Church · Genesis: Behind the Curtain · "Abraham" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · February 13, 2022
Genesis 13:5-17
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning, La Jolla. My name is Reed. I'm with the Safety and Welcoming Committee. Many of you have probably seen me outside right over there where I'm normally welcoming people or mean-mugging people that look scary. I'm going to be reading today's scripture, and that is coming from Genesis 13, 5 through 17. Now Lot, who was moving about with Abraham, also had flocks and herds and tents. But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together.

And quarreling arose between Abram's herders and Lot's. The Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at the time. 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. It's not the whole land before you. Let's part company. If you go to the left, I'll go to the right. If you go to the right, I'll go to the left. Lot looked around and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan towards Zor was well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.

This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out towards the east. The two men parted company. Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom. Now the people of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord. The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had parted from him, Look around from 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 to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you. The word of the Lord. Good morning, church. Welcome back on this incredible day. It's so beautiful today, just being here. And hey, what's up, patio people?

I see you guys out there, all my patio people in the house. Good to see you. Hope you're enjoying it out there. Good to have you. It was awesome. We're starting to get back to our pre-COVID numbers, which is awesome. You know, it's nice to see. We've had tons of people online, but to see us kind of get back to that is fun. Great to have everyone back. Hope you're enjoying it. And thanks, Reed, for reading that scripture.

So I felt like I was wondering if I was looking as good as you do up here. Somebody said, is that your daughter's shirt? I said, no, it's not my daughter's shirt. What are you talking about? What's that supposed to mean? Yeah, I can't help that I'm ripped. 52-year-old ripped. Dad bod. I'm going to pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for this time to be together. We're going to have a good time today. We look in your word. We love the Bible, but we love the God of the Bible more than the Bible.

Let your word lead us. Very practical teaching today. We don't want to worship the idol of mine. Lord, we just bless you. Thank you for this example. As Abraham moves towards faith, let us do it in the same way. In Jesus' name, amen. Three super important practical passages, practical points today out of this passage. If you look in your notes, the first one is this. We're going to highlight three things in this passage.

One, there is always a cost to partial obedience. Always a cost. We will see that in just a moment, that Abraham is walking in partial obedience. He has. And now he's hit a fork in the road where there's a cost that he has to pay. So we'll see what that is. There's a cost to partial obedience. The next is faith does not worship at the idol of mine. What do I mean by that? This clutching of our pearls sometimes. We clutch at this shiny thing that we have in our life.

We're clutching at this thing that are like our pearls. And so we sometimes worship that thing, that precious thing in our life. Can we let it go? What do you consider mine and are you willing to let it go? And then the next one is this. God recalibrates the errors of the righteous. God recalibrates the errors of the righteous. It means the Bible is very clear throughout that when you make a mistake, even if you do it on purpose and it's not a mistake, it is an intentional sin, that when we get back right with God again, he can recalibrate us in the right direction and cause that to work together for good.

Romans 8, 28 and 29, one of my favorite passages, says this. All things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to his purpose. Let's look at the first one. There's always a cost to partial obedience. Go to verse 5. Now Lot, who was moving about with Abraham. Let's stop right there. The problem right here in this passage, if you've been following this sermon series, there is a person in this verse who shouldn't be in this verse.

And that's Lot. Now in verse 12, chapter 12, God had come to Abram and it said to him, send you out, go to the place that I will show you. It takes a lot of faith to follow God into the nothingness and I'm going to show you where to go. But there's one little requirement. Leave your family. Don't take anybody with you. Now for one reason or another, he chooses to take Lot, which is his wife's brother. Chooses to take him and he comes along and so he's traveling with him and they get to this place now where God has blessed him so much, Lot that is, that it's actually encroaching upon Abram's blessing.

Now the question is, why is God blessing Lot? Why doesn't God just not bless Lot and give all the camels and the donkeys and the sheep and all those things just to Abraham and kind of box out Lot? Lot because remember God said in chapter 12, I will bless, what? I will bless who you bless. And so obviously Abram is blessing Lot and the result of that is that Lot is becoming increasingly, increasingly more wealthy and he is being blessed by Abraham.

One of the things that's interesting is when they finally part ways here, Lot's blessing starts going by the wayside. We know that he moves to Sodom and Gomorrah, he starts making compromises with his faith. He ends up in a cave at the end with his wife having turned to a pillar of stone with his two daughters in a cave and what becomes one of the most horrific, gross stories in the entire Bible, I'll save you from it at the moment, but his entire life goes sideways when he leaves the presence of Abram.

And so he chose to move away from him. But it says, now Lot was moving about with Abraham. Now here's the thing that I want to ask you. Do you have a lot? Do you have a lot in your life that is moving along with your blessing? Do you have this thing that God has called you to do and you're living in partial obedience? You're doing this thing, but you have a gossip issue or whatever your thing is, you have this lot, this thing that you are holding onto and you are walking in partial obedience.

Do you have a lot in your life that is going with you? Verse 5 again says, now Lot was moving about with Abraham. What's moving about with you? Or are you able to move in integrity without the accoutrements of partial obedience? He said he also had flocks and herds, but the land could not support them while they stayed together for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. Abraham, it says in the notes, was experiencing the result of partial obedience.

Lot was never supposed to be on the journey and now we have the potential for a broken family relationship where he has to send Lot in the other direction. I want to say something about obedience. There is no such thing as partial obedience. It doesn't exist. There is either obedience because obedience is mutually exclusive from partial obedience. Actually, that term should not exist. There is obedience and there is disobedience.

Now we see that God is long-suffering and willing to bless us even when we have some areas of our life that aren't completely turned over to him. He continues through grace and we see this happening here. He's continuing to bless Abraham. Even though Abraham, from the very beginning of beginning to follow the promise, takes something with him. Do you take baggage along with you on God's journey? Do you have any baggage that you've kind of picked up and taken along the way on this?

And now he's at a place where there could possibly be a broken relationship. I want to say that, once again, there's no such thing as partial obedience. And partial obedience will always soil your promise. Maybe you've heard of John Calipari. There's a picture right here. John Calipari is the coach of Kentucky. That's him winning the national championship. I believe that's Anthony Davis over his right shoulder there.

And I was listening to an interview from John Calipari. And he was talking. And he said, I had this, he said, how do you deal with when you have a player that's difficult? He says, I got a story for you. He's talking. He says, one day I had a player and he was difficult. And I made a little bit of an accent. I brought him into my office. And I said, son, I need to talk to you. And he says, well, what's the problem? He says, well, I want you to picture 1,000 gallons of ice cream.

He says, OK. Picture that. He goes, now I want you to picture a teaspoon of poop. And he says, my mom's going to hate this analogy, but I'm going to tell you. And he says, now I want to ask you something. If I take that 1,000 gallons of ice cream and I take that teaspoon of poop and I put it in that ice cream and I stir it up. You can eat that ice cream? Kid says, no. He says, but it's 1,000 gallons. It's only a teaspoon.

He says, coach, I'm not eating that ice cream. He says, son, I got to tell you something. You're the poop in our ice cream. I was like, OK, motivational talk. I want to say, no matter if it's a million gallons of ice cream, if you put one teaspoon of poo in your ice cream, are you going to eat it? Absolutely not. I want to tell you what. Partial obedience is the poop in your ice cream. I hate to be, to an analogy. Now, somebody said, it's kind of like when Jesus said it's the yeast and the leaven and the blood.

This is like a modern day analogy. Are you willing to soil the thing of your, are you willing to soil your obedience? This is from John Calipari as he talks through that. It is partial obedience. Go to part two, number two. Next thing is this. Faith does not worship at the idol of mine. What do I mean by that? Go to verse nine. It says, is not the whole land before you. This is God now speaking to Abram after Abraham, Abram gave away a part of his promise.

He had to give away a part of his promise, and we oftentimes do that, because he brought something baggage along with him on the journey. He brought Lot with him. And so he goes up there in verse nine. He says, is not the whole land before you. Let us part company. If I go to the left, he says, if you go to the left, I'll go to the right. And if you go to the right, I will go to the left. It's really interesting. He takes him up here.

Now, you have to understand with Abram, Abraham, he knows the promise is his. The entire, the entire promised land is his. He could have just said to Lot, you go wherever you decide to go. This land is mine. God has actually given it to mine. But instead of clinging to that one thing, instead of clinging to the thing that he thought was his, he ends up in faith saying, you take what you want, and in generosity, I will take the leftovers.

So often we settle for the leftovers when we walk in partial obedience. But he's also showing faith here, and he's willing to let go of that shiny thing. This is where he starts making a change for the positive. This is the place where Abraham says, I'm not going to cling to the blessing. I'm not going to cling to the shiny thing. Perhaps you remember Gollum. There's a picture here of Gollum. It's one of my favorite pictures of Gollum.

Look at his eyes. When, Gollum, what is he looking at right now? What's he thinking about? The precious. Somebody in the last sermon said, the precious. Yes. I said, oh, you're a big fan of the movie, obviously. I loved how they did the accent as well. What's he looking for? He's looking for the precious. He has that thing that he's willing, that he won't let go of. He'll do anything to get the precious. You see what we see with Abraham, which is so interesting?

He's not holding on to the precious. He's beginning slowly, and he has a lot further to go until he finally gets to that place where he can be mentioned in the Hebrews 11 hall of faith. But it is in the journey that he's beginning to walk in faith. And we see him walking here in this faith as he moves forward and lets go of the promise. He lets go of the promise because he gives it away because he had made a mistake.

You know what's interesting is how oftentimes we cling to the things we want, especially wealth. When you think about wealth in the scripture as one of the things that we cling to, I've been going through the Bible. I was looking through verses this week about promises on wealth and the promise. And one of the things I realized is that there were so many warnings in the scripture about wealth. You know, the church has gotten really good at talking about wealth being this incredible blessing.

And wealth is a blessing. But the dire warnings we have about wealth in the scripture, we need to be very aware of. I love that Abraham was willing to let his wealth go. If you look at this, Jesus says in Matthew 6 24, That is definitely a warning as we hold on to things. Hebrews 13 5 says this, I think it's really, really interesting here that he is finally willing to start letting go of the promise, letting go of his security.

You realize this, he has all these donkeys, he has all these camels, he has all this wealth. But if Lot, which he does, takes the best land, he goes down by the Jordan, he takes the fertile land, then Abram is going to be, and I've been to Israel in this exact spot, is going to have to go live in the desert lands. His wealth is in jeopardy. He has to start digging his own wells. He no longer can just walk up to the river and feed his sheep.

All of a sudden he puts himself into a dry and arid place. But he's willing to do that because he's willing to trust God. I think it's super interesting in what happens to our faith when we're willing to trust God with these things. And this is where we come to part three. Because the third part of this is when we start to live with that, when we don't hold on to the shiny thing, when we don't walk in partial obedience, then God begins to recalibrate the direction of our life.

Before I get to that, I want to read a quote from Max Lucado. Max Lucado said this, Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It's the belief that God will do what is right. Let me say that again. Faith is not the belief that God will give you what you want. It is the faith that he will do what is right. Abraham is now in this space. This is the space that Abraham is starting to live in. That if I walk in faith, God will do the right thing by me.

I might not get what I want, but he will do the right thing by me. So Abraham is in a quandary now. He's walked in partial obedience. He's brought Lot. He's had to give away part of his promise. And so often we give away, we make bargains, you know, and give away parts of our promise. But we're still in a lot of blessing. But God is for us. What do you do when you get to that place? Well, you depend on God to recalibrate.

Go to verse 14. After this deal was made, the Lord said to Abraham, after Lot had parted from him, Look around from where you are, to the north, to the south, to the east, to the west, all the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. However, this recalibration happened in the moment where God said, No matter what you have done, I am still faithful to my promise. Now, I want to say, when I got back from Australia and I got sober, I was about six days sober and I was reading the Bible.

My friend said, my mentor at the time, said, Highlight anything that's important. And I got to this verse. And in this verse was the first truth that the Holy Spirit ever gave me once I rededicated my life to Christ. In this verse, in Genesis 13, chapter 14. And here's what the Holy Spirit gave me six days sober, 30-something odd years ago. Basically, he said, Then the Lord said to Abraham, after Lot, parted with him, Look around from where you are, to the north and the south, to the east and the west, all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.

At that point in my life, I was looking around and thinking to myself, I have given away so much of my life. How am I ever going to get this territory back? The Holy Spirit said to me, As soon as Lot was gone, he took Abraham up to the hill, and I've been there. He says, I want you to do a 360. So Abraham does this 360. He looks at the entire land. And then God says, All that's yours. See, God was like, Hey, I'm glad you made that promise.

I'm glad you let Abraham, I mean, Lot choose what he chose. But I'm going to give you this land, and this land is yours. Because God recalibrated, and we started over again. And God reminded him that everything that you see is in your dominion. And so he sees that. He says, I'm going to give you that forever. I looked up this idea of recalibration. If you see a picture of Google Maps, you ever use Google Maps? Now, it definitely screwed me up on occasion.

But you ever use Google Maps, and you're going in a direction, and then all of a sudden it's like, You can save 32 seconds if you go this direction. And I'm like, Okay, yeah, boom. We did that once in Mammoth, on the way home from Mammoth. I ended up in a cornfield, I don't know, somewhere in the middle of Ojai. I don't know where I was. We got totally lost. What does that do? It basically changes your focal point. When I looked up recalibrate, this is what came up.

It said systems gradually drift off course. So the navigator periodically needs a fresh point of reference to recalibrate the navigational system. You see, after all the mistakes, after going through Egypt, after giving his wife away to be safe, after bringing Lot, after giving away part of his promise, it's time for recalibration. And for me, sitting on a bed in my grandma's house in 1989, as I read this verse, God said, Are you ready to recalibrate?

He said, I want you to go to the top of the land. Basically, he said to me, You can never lose as a believer. He says, You can never lose because if you get back on course, God blesses the righteous. It's one of the reasons I remember thinking at this exact moment when I read this. This is the thought I thought. You cannot cheat a believer. It is impossible. You might cheat them for a moment. But if a believer walks in righteousness, it will always end up in their favor.

It's funny. This week, we bought a cover for the deluxe golf cart that was donated to us, which I love. I drive it more than my own car now. I just love driving that little limousine around here. Everybody waves to an eight-seater golf cart. I don't know why, but everybody waves. Or they try to run you off the road. So I order the 172-inch cover for it, and I send it to 627 Arenas Street next door, not to 627 Genter Street.

So I find out we didn't get it. I'm checking cameras, and I'm like, Oh, I sent it to the wrong place. So I walk over there, and it was an older lady, and this is a big cover because it's an eight-seater golf cart. She goes, Hey, I left it outside. I was going to call you and let you know that it was here. Someone stole it. I was like, Oh, oh, oh. Someone stole the cover. Now, I know that Amazon has this policy where, like, I can call them and say, You guys left it out.

Some of you shouldn't have left it out. You didn't get a signature, blah, blah, blah. But I also knew that I sent it to the wrong place. Like, I sent it somewhere else, and I didn't send it. And it was basically my fault. And I was like, Should I call Amazon back and tell them they should fix this, which they would? Or should I just own it? And one, pray for the person who stole from the church. Because I'm just telling you, I don't think that goes well.

It's like going up to the tithe and, like, I'll just take a little bit of that myself. No. I'm a little concerned about that. So pray for them. They didn't know. It's like when you don't know that you stole from a mob boss. You know what I mean? You see those movies. It's like he has no idea that the blessing of God is on this golf cart cover, and he's just going to go steal it for himself and then sell it on eBay, not knowing what, nonetheless.

And so I basically just ordered another one. You know why? It goes, that decision, it was an easy decision. It wasn't like a Mother Teresa or nothing. But that decision literally goes back to something God put in my heart on this bed in my grandma's house a long ago. You can't cheat a believer. Granted, it was an extra $152 to buy another one. But you can't cheat me. I don't believe you can cheat me. I don't believe you can steal.

You might be able to for the moment. It will always work out in my favor. Always. That might not be what I want, but it will be the right thing at the right time. I'm going to say over and over again, decision after decision, no matter what has happened, this verse, that first thing God gave me has been foundational. This verse right here, foundational to how I lead church, how I lead family, how I do business deals.

Whatever it is, this verse has been foundational. It says these systems gradually drift off course so that the navigator periodically needs a fresh point of reference to recalibrate the navigational system. Do you need a recalibration? Do you need a recalibration of your system? I would go up to the mountain. I would ask yourself, am I walking in partial obedience? I don't want to walk. There's no such thing as partial obedience.

The next thing that I would look at is am I holding on? Am I clutching my pearls? Worshiping at the idol of mine. Faith does not worship at the idol of mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. It lets it go. And the final one, are you going to allow God to recalibrate the errors that you have made that you might walk in righteous? The final thing is this, and then we're done. I love verse 17. Verse 17 says, go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.

I love that he says to Abram basically this, you have dominion over this territory. I am giving you this. You know the scripture says that wherever the righteous, wherever you put your feet, that it is yours? Now it doesn't mean it's yours that you own it. And it's not a hyper-powered dominion. It is a dominion of the heart. It is a dominion of the soul. It is a dominion of encouragement and a dominion of love, of forgiveness.

I got to say, last night as we went and I ran this party for the Lady Vikings, and I wear my hat. I'll wear it again for you like this. I know, it looks amazing, doesn't it? We bought the coach an actual metal one. We bought him a sick metal one with like real horns and everything on it. He was super stoked on it. I went there last night to Woodstock Pizza, and here's what I know. I know that believers in our congregation own that pizza place, and it was in our dominion.

I just knew it. I know when I walk on there, I know that that pizza place has God's blessing and anointing on it. That's why I had the party there. And so we went there. Forty people showed up. I sat there. I talked to one girl about Jesus Christ. She's been struggling a little bit, and talked to her. I told her about my life. I said, you know, you got to get your stuff together. I missed my senior year of football because I got kicked out of school, and I regret that.

And so I began to talk to her about that shared Christ. Another family came and said, hey, my one daughter wants to know where your church is. We were thinking about coming and visiting the church, and just sharing and high fives, and people were going through announcements. The whole time, I'm just praying, and I tell you what, taking dominion. I just thought, you know what? That's part of my land. I don't own that pizza restaurant.

I don't own PB, and I don't think it's this power dominion, but I think in the heavenly realms that we have dominion over that. I think we have dominion over this city. I want to encourage you, walk the breadth of your land. Do you walk the breadth of your land? Do you, when you go to Trader Joe's, when you go to the eight places that you go, do you walk in there with authority and with love? I'm going to say, I love, by the end of the year, I love that basketball team.

I just love them. One of the parents said to me, she goes, I learned all the names because when you cheered, you knew all the kids' names. I realized that was amazing. That's how I learned the team's names. Made it a point to know those girls' names. Made it a point to do, you know, we bought socks for them. We got Nike socks for all the girls. They made Christmas your church. I mean, we paid for it. The church paid for socks for the entire team.

Little handwritten notes to every single kid on the team. That is what we want to do to take dominion. And I want to walk to the land, not with like, hey, we're dominant, we're taking over. No. But with the blood of Jesus, with the love of God, take dominion. And if you need to recalibrate, go back up to the mountain. Heck, go up to Mount Soledad and stand there and show God, show me what you've given me dominion over.

Not a dominion of power, a dominion of the heart, a dominion of care. I had the time of my life this year being a kooky, goofy dad who's just, and it's awesome having a daughter that is not embarrassed by you, which is amazing. I'd be so embarrassed by me. All the other parents say, my daughter doesn't let me cheer. My daughter like hugs me and says, cheer dad, I don't care, do whatever you want. Take dominion. Take dominion.

No more partial obedience. There's no such thing. Straight obedience. Get tired. Do you want, you want, don't keep stealing your blessing. It'll steal your blessing. It'll besmirch your blessing. It'll be the poison in your blessing. Do you want your full blessing or do you want a partial? But you're going to be, you'll be chopping off bits of your blessing. Every, the more you walk in partial obedience, the more a little, you'll still be blessed.

It'll still be A minus Christianity. I love A minus Christianity. You don't know I want A plus, not perfection. I'm saying in obedience. I don't want to chop my blessing off anymore. I want God to recalibrate. I want us to take the land. I want you to take the land. This is what we do here. This is what we want to see you do at this church. Amen? Let's stand if you would. I want to bless you. It says who Abraham blessed, I will bless who you bless.

So the Bible tells me I can bless you and I want to bless you. In a world full of curses, it tells you how you should be, who you should be, what you can say, what you can't say. I want to bless you. Before I do that, I want to tell you, if you need prayer after the service, we have a prayer team that's going to be here. I know my mom's part of it. She's awesome at praying. Again, you come up here and get prayer. And if you need to find out about our church, go to Next Steps in the back.

If you want to find out about knowing Jesus, go to the very back and we'll be there and have some people there. If you want to extend your hands, let me just bless you today. Lord Jesus, I want to bless these people today, Lord God. We bless your church. We bless them, God, with a desire for obedience. God, no more partial obedience. No more partway following. God, they would release. They have a shiny thing in their hand.

They're precious. They would release the precious, Lord God. They would just release that, Lord God. I know somebody came up to me after this first service and said, oh, it's body image. I've got to let it go. I've got to let it go. I said, it's my precious. Body image is my precious. I said, okay, let it go. Also, that you would recalibrate the errors. If you feel like you've lost all your blessing, that you've wasted too many years, there is no wasted years in eternity.

There's no such thing. That God will turn you around, look everywhere, 100% around in all directions. And he says, that land is yours now. Go walk it and take dominion. Walk it and take authority. So we give you authority in the name of Jesus Christ. We give you dominion in the name of Christ. We give you love in the name of Christ. And we bless you. And we want to send you out just the energy and the current of God to make a difference in this world.

Bless this corner, Lord Jesus, for the next 100 years. Bless these people, Lord Jesus. Fall upon them. Reign upon them. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We'll take you guys later. Bye-bye. See you now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. especially-bye.