MAR 3 2024 | Genesis: Behind the Curtain S3E6 | Abraham Swipes Right

Sea Change Church · Genesis: Behind the Curtain · "Abraham Swipes Right" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · March 3, 2024
Genesis 24:1-9
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Now today's reading. Genesis 24, 1, 9. Abraham was now very old, and the Lord had blessed him in every way. He said to the senior servant in his household, the one in charge of all that he had, Put your hand under my thigh. I want you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites. among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.

The servant asked him, What if the woman is unwilling to come back with me to this land? Shall I then take your son back to the country you came from? Make sure that you do not take my son back there, Abraham said. The Lord, the God of heaven, who brought me out of my father's household and my native land, and who spoke to me and promised me an un-oath, saying, To your offspring I will give this land. He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there.

If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from his oath of mine. Only do not take my son back there. So the servant put his hand under the thigh of his master, Abraham, and swore an oath to him concerning this matter. This is the word of the Lord. Right on. So fun backstage before coming out into that music. Chris is acting like Scotty Pippen, giving me high fives. You got this. We'll see if I've got it or not.

We will see. Hey, quick, mark your calendars. We get to go in front of the city for one of our final times where they're going to vote about our children's building. This Thursday night, 6 p.m. This Thursday night, 6 p.m., Bishop's School in the cafeteria. All right? So we're hoping for 100 of you guys to show up. We got some cool little pins made that say safe space for kids. So how many, just take a raise of hands.

How many of you think that you would be willing to show up to that at 6 p.m.? There we go. Good. Okay. Write it down. 6 p.m., that's great. A little show of enthusiasm and support would be awesome. Be praying for us. It is our final vote. We're super stoked. And then we'll see what the city says after that. So we're still pushing on that. If you have your Bibles, open up to Genesis 24, 1 through 9. Genesis 24, 1 through 9.

Thank Garrett for reading that. There's a word I want you to write on the top of your notes. That word is measure. Measure. We're going to talk about measures and how God measures different things like blessing in our life. And you're going to see in verse 24 at the very beginning there, well, this isn't the one I'm preaching on. And I think it's going to have a circumference around the message today. Abraham is now very old, and the Lord had blessed him in some ways.

Mistake. It says, Abraham was very old, and the Lord had blessed him in every way. There's a marked difference between living a life that opens up doors for God to bless us in every way, in full measure, and living a life that depends solely upon the saving grace of God. And the Bible is really clear about the ifs, you do this, but they did this instead. And we see this here with Abraham. We see Abraham changing. There's a massive pivot shift here with Abraham, and maybe you didn't catch it as you've read through the story this year in Genesis with us.

And it's that Abraham moves from one who accepts covenants. He's accepting covenants, right? God tells him to do something. He kind of is a little bit middling in it, but eventually he gets the point, and he accepts what God does out of obedience. It's not proactive. It's reactive, right? And that's fine. Reactive faith is awesome. I mean, God tells us you get into a situation, and then we live reactively. But now we see Abraham moving from the one who receives the covenant to one who is making a covenant.

You see, there's a difference when you're living your life proactively, looking at the situations that are in front of you, and beginning to make decisions based on the proactive nature of where you want to go as opposed to getting somewhere and then looking backwards and having to make a decision retroactively. See, it's a massive pivot shift. So he's not making a covenant with God here in this place, but he's following the covenant of God as he talks to a servant.

And this servant is one who is giving him a little bit of pushback. I want to talk again about measures. Different measures. There's a scripture. If you Google the term measure in the Bible, you're going to see the word used multiple times. And speaking about the way that God doles out oftentimes blessing and things in full measure. Two points today. One, how do we integrate the promise? How do we integrate the promises of life?

It's good to remember the promises, right? I've been talking a lot. This whole series has been about knowing the promises of God, holding on to the promises of God. But integration of the promise actually happens beforehand. You begin to make decisions based on the direction you're going to go, the decisions you're going to make, who you're going to marry, the way in which you're going to court. These are all decisions that we make proactively.

And we see that Abraham here has become a covenant maker. Sure. If you look at the title of the sermon, it's called Abraham Swipes Right. And if you're in the dating world, you know what I mean. If you are not in the dating world, you've been married a long time, you have no idea what I mean. But that's okay. On a dating app, you find someone you like, swipe right. It connects you to them. Swipe left, they're mid. They're out.

And so you're not with them no more. Abraham's swiping right. He's swiping righteous and not just right. And we see him doing that there as he's integrating the promises. We must not only embrace the promises of God, but also integrate them into our lives, allowing his promises to shape our actions, beliefs, and decisions. Second one is no half measures. I don't want to be a person of a half measure. I don't want to give half measures of faith.

I don't want to give half measures of intimacy to my friends and family and loved ones. Half measures of obedience. Half measures are oftentimes followed by God with half measures. Half-hearted faith, I wrote in the notes, must give way to resolute dedication as believers, wholeheartedly following the path of God. And I talk about that in the scripture about, and oftentimes, about how as we begin to follow God, there are the ifs and the different splits in the road of your journey where we make decisions.

We see throughout the Bible, you see in your notes, a consistent pattern of where God's promises, the ones we've been listening about, are contingent upon certain conditions. Obedience, faithfulness, and adherence to God's commandments are frequently highlighted as prerequisites for experiencing the full blessing of his promises. A lot of people have a problem with that. They think, well, that's too much based upon us.

It's all about grace. It's all about grace. It's not about what we do. It's not about works. I really agree with that situation. I believe that that is actually true. But I believe there's a difference between the blessing that comes with God's grace and the blessing that comes beyond God's grace with a fulfillment because of our obedience. I wrote it this way. The grace that comes with being in Christ is a different measure than the blessing that comes through obedience.

It's just a different measure. If you are in Christ and you accept Christ and you know him and you're a child of God, one, you've already been blessed enough. You're going to spend eternity with him. And there is a measure that comes with his grace. There's a measure of blessing in this lifetime, in this moment, in this time that comes with grace. No one is going to say that that isn't true. But then there's an addendum.

There is more blessing that God gives beyond just the saving grace that comes with obedience. And it's a different measure. There's a, I was listening to a podcast of a pastor and he spoke about how in the day when they said, you know, your cup runneth over, that you'd go before a king and he would hold the cup. You'd hold your cup out. And if he didn't want you at the table, he would pour nothing into your cup. And if he kind of liked you and wanted you to sit somewhere on the table, he'd fill half your cup or he might fill it to filled.

But then if you were really favored, if you were someone that was favored because of your relationship with the king, he would come and he would just hold the bottle of wine over your cup until it was running over. And he would empty the bottle in your cup. Now, it wouldn't be great for your outfit and your fit for the day. But it would give a sense of what the king, what you meant to the king. That doesn't change how much God loves us.

It doesn't change all those things. But there is a different measure. And the question is, what measure do you want? By the measure you give out, Jesus says, it's the measure you will receive. Now, he's speaking about judgment in that case, but we see that. And so I guess the first question with the word measure is, what measure are you satisfied with? Sometimes I'm just satisfied with half that cup, right? So there's two things, integrating the promise and no half measures.

Let's go to verse three, integrate the promise. I want you to swear. This is Abraham speaking to the servant now, the covenant maker, not the covenant taker. I want you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanite women among who I am living. Now, at this point, he's X-ing out a lot of potential candidates, right? It's everyone who lives near him.

Because remember, he's living with his clan. He's not going to get something from his own clan, from there, from the one he's living with. He's actually asking the servant to go back to his family and find someone from his family on the other side. And so that's what he says in this promise. But he basically has gotten to a man who's willing to sleep with Hagar, his servant, in order to get the promises of God fulfilled, to someone who says, I'm going to X out this entire countryside because God has said, I don't want you to be with this line.

I have separated you from this people. It's interesting that when he's looking at how his son, when he's swiping right, so to speak, and looking for what he wants for his son, he swipes right, left, or excuse me, he swipes straight past and to the left for all the Canaanites that he was living with. And he does that for a reason because he was looking for a pathway that God would create, and he was allowing the promise to create the path.

You see, when you know God's promises and you proactively live according to the promises, you make decisions proactively that create the path. People are like, I don't know which way to go. The Bible is really clear. If you walk in his ways, he will make your paths straight. And so he is saying in this moment, I want the promise to create the pathway. And so oftentimes, we just want to create our own path, right? And he was doing that for years and years, but now Abraham was old.

In fact, he was old. He was very old. And now God had blessed him in every way. You see, there's a different measure. There's a different measure when you integrate the promise at the beginning and you allow the promise to create the path. Abraham began to prioritize the promise over his fears, and that now guided all of his decisions. You see, this wasn't a question of preference for him. What would be a better wife?

This one, what does she do? What does she offer to him? He wasn't negotiating with the promise anymore. It wasn't a preference. This was about preservation. Because God had said, the only way I'm going to preserve your line and preserve the things that I have for you is if you walk not in your preference, but in the preservation of the promise. You see, the promise will preserve you. The promise will bring you a path.

And will we go into those promises? Now, why would God do this? Why would God just X out a whole group of community? Isn't that, you know, whatever word we want to use, whatever ism we want to use? Because God is a God of the heart. And he understood that the women of the Canaanite clans and those nations that lived in the place where the Israelites were living at that time, hearts were not with God. And with God, it wasn't about the personality.

It was about the heart. And so he had said multiple times later on in Scripture, in Deuteronomy, he tells why. He says, do not intermarry with any of them. That's Deuteronomy 7. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods. And the Lord's anger will burn against you and destroy you quickly. What will they do?

They will turn your children away. They will turn your children away. That is, if you're looking for a preservation of the promise, because this was a big promise that God gave to Abraham. He said, I'm going to give you descendants that are unnumbered. If you can count the stars or the sand on the sea, then you would be able to count your descendants. And from them, you will have an eternal generation that leads through Christ into eternity because of Jesus Christ.

That's a big, big promise. And not to be messed with, with someone who might turn your heart away. The other one was in 1 Kings. The Lord had clearly instructed the people of Israel, you must not marry them because they will turn your hearts to their gods. Yet Solomon insisted on loving them anyway. Solomon is known as the wisest person who will ever live, has ever lived, and will ever lived. There's a difference between being wise because wise is knowing what to do.

Righteousness is doing what you know. There's a verse after Solomon secures the kingdom in the 1 Kings. He secures the kingdom. And everyone's trying to take it from him. Remember, he's David's son through Bathsheba. And it says, and there's a verse, and it says, and God firmly established the kingdom into Solomon's hand. And the very next verse says, and Solomon went and took a wife from the Egyptians. The very next verse.

We want to make sure that when we're living in the promise, when we're living in the perseverance of the promise, when we're integrating the promise, that we're keeping an eye on what the promise is for you so that we don't make decisions like that and we live in righteousness, not in our own preference. Are you living in your preference? Are you living in the preservation of your blessing? You see, if you're in Christ, there is an amazing blessing for you.

God's gonna bless you. You're gonna feel his presence. He's gonna be there for you. You're gonna know him. But there is a different blessing that comes with obedience to the promise that is above and beyond. And Christ is very clear. And as you look up the verses, if you Google the verses on measure, just look up the word measure in the Bible, you're gonna see there's a different measure. You're still gonna get that grace.

Let's go to the second point. No half measures. There's an interesting character here, right? There's an interesting character who kind of is almost, kind of reminds you of the devil in the garden, right? I'm sure this was a great servant and I don't wanna turn him into the devil. But the role in which he's playing here is the role of the questioner. The role of the person who comes in and tells you to doubt the promise, to maybe not believe.

And if you would, go to verse five. The servant asked him, what if the woman is unwilling to come back with me to this land? Shall I then take your son back to the country where you came from? Now here's another option, right? First option is the ladies, the hookups that he's got there in the area, right? He's got these ladies there. He's done it before. He can do it again. He's used to walking that path. But no more.

He's very old now and God's blessed him in every single way. So he says no to the women that are around me and he tells the servant, you need to go to my father's country. You need to go to that country and find a wife for me there. And then the servant rolls up and he's like, hey, but wow, what if she doesn't come? What if she won't show up? Should I just take your son there? We can figure it out because wouldn't it be better if they met this guy?

Isaac's a stud. Like if the ladies got an eye on him and the fathers, more importantly, got an eye on this guy and all the money you have and all the riches that you have, when they saw him, that would seal the deal. You know what Abraham says? Don't take my son back there because God had said to him, you shall leave that land and you will never go back. How many times do we just want to go back? I want to go back to Egypt.

Keith Green had a song back in the day. It's called I Want to Go Back to Egypt, if you heard it. Remember they were complaining to Moses later on in the story, we could have just died in Egypt. Let's go back there as opposed to die out here. But see, he was no longer negotiating with the promise because he didn't want half measures anymore. And he said, no, I won't take a woman from here and you may not take my son. You will go back and you know who's going to go with you?

It says that an angel of the Lord went with him. You know, sometimes we just got to believe that God can sort it out. That when it comes to your life, when it comes to this country, when it comes to the things that God is doing, that we begin to believe in the promise and the promiser of that promise more than our own decisions to try to save ourselves. And so we see that there. Abraham was done with half measures. Go to verse six and seven.

This is his answer. Make sure, circle make sure, that you do not take my son back there, Abraham said. The Lord God of heaven, who brought me out of my father's household and out of my native land, his native land where he was used to, and who spoke to me and promised me an oath, saying to your offspring, I will give this land and he will send an angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. He's no longer willing to negotiate with the promise.

Abraham was now living in the realm of full measure. Abraham was living in the realm of full measures that we see. I want to say there's a difference. I've been cooking lately. I've been working on my blondies. Now, I didn't really figure it out. This should have been easy to figure out, but you like a brownie? Anybody a brownie person? You like a brownie person? Who's the brownie people? Who's chocolate chip? Okay, who's chocolate chip cookie people?

All right. Are you both? It was both. All right, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay. So I made this blondie recipe. It's legit. And I put a cup of butter, but it was supposed to be a half cup of butter, but it still came out really, really good. My daughter, Lucy, tries to do my magical arts in the kitchen because even when I make mistakes, it turned out right, right? Because God's grace. And she put like a cup and a half of butter in there and we got this soupy thing that went on.

You know, measures matter, right? Right? And what I want to say, when it comes to blessing and how God wants to bless you, he wants to bless you beyond just the saving grace. He wants to bless you in the full measure, and measures actually matter. I want to say there's a difference between this. This is a quarter cup, right? It's a good size for a cookie dough, right? If you're making a cookie, it's the perfect size, right?

Quarter cup or third right here. There's a difference between this and this. There is a difference between this and this. And I want to say God wants to bless you with this. There's a verse in Ephesians 4 that I love, and it talks about this very measure. It says this. So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers to equip his people for the works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in faith and the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness in Christ.

Attaining to the full measure of Christ, the whole measure of Christ. So two practical takeaways. One is prepare for the promises. When you make a decision on where you want to live, the house you want to buy, the car you want to buy, the person you want to serve, the community work you want to do, the person you want to marry, how you're going to discipline your children, whatever decision, I mean, big decisions, not navel gazing of like what, you know, every single decision, but on the major decisions, integrate the promise.

What do God's promises tell me on the front foot as opposed to being on the back foot? On the front foot of making a decision, what do God's promises tell me before I do this, before I get on a dating app, not saying you shouldn't be on a dating app, but ask God, do you want me on that dating app? I remember when I was dating and I had stopped dating, God said take, God kept telling me through people, take a year off.

Took a year off. There was no internet back then. It was me and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball and my Sega and I just sat there and I remember a few things. I remember watching OJ being chased around during that time. I just remember certain things because I was alone. There was nothing to do. It was crazy too. I took that year. Within like the first month, I had girlfriends from high school calling me like, where are you from?

Like it just bam. It was just like all of a sudden the servant was there, right? Hey, remember me? She was awesome. First year. Second year, God's like take another year. I'm like, dude, no dating, nothing, don't ask nobody out. I got game, God, let's go. He's like, no, you're done. And it was amazing what God did in those exact two years because I wanted to follow him and I want to say what God has brought from just a few decisions.

I mean, there's probably three to five major decisions you make a year. Three to five. I think like with the church here, there's three to five major decisions I make a year that are important that really shape what we do. So the first thing is prepare for the promise, make decisions based on the promise and then commit to a fullness of measure. Say, God, I want a fullness. I want the fullness of measure. Amen? Let's stand.

It's time for communion. Thank you.