Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Pastor Adam reads the bargaining over Sodom as God disclosing his plan to someone he knows will argue — and closes with the eighteen-year-old who left his foxhole in 1968 to carry Adam’s brother out.

By the time the visitors promise a son within the year, this is the sixth time Abraham and Sarah have heard it. Rondi Pogue preaches the laugh behind the tent flap, the question God asks instead of a rebuke, and draws a careful line around what faith does and does not guarantee.

Abraham has a plan B and its name is Ishmael. Pastor Adam works through what it costs to settle, counts 2,774 failed light bulbs, and then undoes his own framework: asked what plan A actually is, the answer turns out to be your heart.

Abraham is ninety-nine and the dream has been dead long enough to stop being mentioned. Pastor Adam preaches against the discount — the not-talented-enough, not-young-enough markdown we apply to our own dreams — and insists that fulfillment is usually work, not miracle.

Genesis 16 is a family in ruins: Sarai desperate, Abram weak and then disengaged, Hagar running into the desert. And the one who gives God a name is the mistreated servant girl — El Roi, the God who sees me.

John 3:16 — arguably the best-known verse there is —… read more

The Transfiguration in Mark 9, brought by a visiting Scottish… read more

Ten years pass and Sarai proposes a solution. Joe Brandi organises the message around three substitutions — God’s timing or yours, God’s voice or hers, God’s gospel or yours — and notes that Abram was credited with righteousness one chapter earlier.

God says he is Abram’s very great reward, and Abram answers with “but.” Pastor Adam states the implication plainly — God himself was not enough for Abraham — and notes what God does in response: takes him outside, where the view is bigger.