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Over recent weeks, I've been thinking deeply about success and how we steward God's blessing and promises as believers. We live in a time of endless self-help information, but as believers, we're called to a different standard. The Bible calls us to be salt and light and yeast—agents who change the world rather than being changed by it.
God led me to the story of Abraham, and I want us to turn to Genesis 12 together. Let me read a significant portion:
"The Lord had said to Abraham, 'Go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, and you'll be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse, and all the peoples of earth will be blessed through you.'"
Abraham was 75 years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all their possessions, and the people they had acquired—and they journeyed toward Canaan. When they arrived, the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, "To your offspring, I will give this land." Abraham built an altar there to call upon the name of the Lord.
Before Genesis 12, we have the creation story, the fall of man, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Noah and the flood—God resetting everything because of human wickedness. Then God initiates His first covenant after the flood, not with a nation, but with one man: Abraham.
At this point, Abraham is a pagan, worshiping stars, moons, and the sun. He has no Bible, no YouTube, no Hillsong worship to guide him. Yet God approaches him and asks him to leave everything he knows.
Abraham would have had an inheritance from his father, but God calls him to abandon all certainty. He must imagine walking over 1,100 kilometers from Iraq to Israel—with his wife, his nephew, and all his possessions—to a land he has never seen.
This is the time before the Bible existed. Hebrews describes it this way: "It was by faith that Abraham believed God and went to a place he didn't know."
God's promise comes in stages. First, He says, "Go from your country." Then, "To the land I will show you." God's blessing is sometimes geographical—tied to a specific place and people with a particular language and culture.
If you're visiting us today, I want to encourage you: find your people. Sometimes the blessing of God is tied to a geographic location where you can take root.
In Isaiah, believers are described as plantings of God and trees of righteousness—not the small decorative plants we keep on office windowsills in coffee mugs, but oak trees. These are majestic giants that live over 100 years. They have a tender, compassionate heart, yet a spine of steel.
Season after season, oak trees are battered by winds and waves, but they still stand. And when an oak tree finally falls, it becomes a gift that keeps giving. Mushrooms and small creatures still make their homes in the fallen trunk. God calls every believer to become an oak tree—rooted deep in a geographic location, growing strong, and blessing others even long after we've completed our earthly journey.
In verses 2 and 3, God says, "I will make you a great nation." This has multiple dimensions.
On one hand, there's the physical great nation—the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the people of Israel. But there's also a spiritual great nation that encompasses all believers. Through Abraham's lineage comes Jesus, 2,000 years later. And through Jesus and His blood, we are engrafted in. In Galatians, Paul calls us "children of Abraham." Every believer is a child of Abraham.
To help Abraham understand this, God uses two images:
Why these two? When we look back to Genesis 1, we see that God created man from the dust of the earth. So the dust represents natural descent. But the stars—countless and spanning the heavens—represent the spiritual family that would come through the promise, through Jesus Christ.
Both verses 2 and 3 end the same way: "Through you, others will be blessed."
Some of us need to understand: the things God has allowed us to have are not meant to end with ourselves and our children. The things we thrive in are meant to be a blessing for others too. But hear me carefully—it's not for others to demand those things from you. Rather, it's for you to catch the vision that what you have extends beyond yourself. You walk in perfect union and understanding of what you've been blessed with, knowing that this blessing is not only for me—it extends beyond myself.
God also promises Abraham divine protection: "Whoever opposes you, I will oppose. Whoever curses you, I will curse." There's nothing like sleeping peacefully at night knowing God has your back.
Abraham was 75 when God made this promise. It would be another 25 years before he saw this blessing fulfilled in its fullness. Not many of us have waited on God for 25 years for something to come to pass.
When Abraham arrives at the promised land in verses 6 and 7, he builds an altar and calls upon the name of God. God appears and reaffirms the promise: "I will give your descendants this land."
This is crucial: "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." When we hold onto God's promises, we must keep hearing His voice over them. When we stop listening, our faith destabilizes. Abraham needs to keep hearing confirmation of the promise.
But then in verse 10, something changes: "There was a famine in the land."
The promised land becomes difficult. It's not all roses and sunshine as Abraham may have imagined. He encounters hardship.
Notice something important: before verse 10, we see God appearing to Abraham in visions and dreams, God appearing to him physically, Abraham calling out to God's name—all showing communication and relationship. But when the famine hits, we don't see God telling Abraham to go to Egypt. We don't see Abraham seeking God's direction.
What we see instead is this: Abraham takes all he has and decides that Egypt is a better place than the promised land. He uses human wisdom instead of divine guidance. There is no indication in the text that God directed him to Egypt.
But Egypt is not why he left Iraq. He left Iraq so God could give him Israel, not Egypt.
In verses 11-13, as Abraham approaches Egypt, he turns to Sarai and says:
"I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife.' Then they will kill me, but 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."
Let me be direct: the man of God becomes a witch. What Abraham is doing here is witchcraft. He thinks about this deception during the journey, but he can't voice it earlier because Sarai might refuse to continue. So he waits until they're about to enter Egypt.
Consider what he's putting Sarai through. She faces an impossible choice: go back to a land filled with famine after days in the desert—a journey that might kill her—or go forward and be claimed as Abraham's sister, which means she will be taken to marry someone else. Abraham becomes a pimp. The mighty man of God turns into a liar and a schemer, all because the promised land became difficult.
Imagine if God didn't intervene here. The promise would die. Abraham would think he was called to Egypt. He and Sarah would have descendants of Egyptians, not Israelites. We would have no father Abraham in Sunday schools around the world. The whole story ends.
But God intervenes. In verse 14-15, Pharaoh's officials see Sarai's beauty and bring her to Pharaoh's palace. Abraham is enriched with sheep, cattle, donkeys, servants, and camels. But the Lord inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abraham's wife Sarai.
Pharaoh realizes he's been deceived. He confronts Abraham: "What have you done to me? Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say she was my sister?" Then Pharaoh orders his men to send Abraham away with Sarai and everything he had.
In verse 13, it says:
"So Abraham went up from Egypt to Negev with his wife and everything he had. And Lot went with him. And Abraham had become very wealthy in livestock and silver and gold."
Notice: Abraham leaves Egypt extremely wealthy—but this is not the blessing of God.
There is a difference between good success and terrible success. This wealth is terrible success—it's pagan wealth, gained through scheming, lying, and pimping his wife. When you poke a fruit in the supermarket, sometimes it looks good on the outside but is rotten inside. That's Abraham's wealth.
When you gain something through wheeling and dealing and manipulation, you must continue wheeling and dealing to keep it. You can never rest. You lie awake at night. But when something has been given to you by God, you can sleep peacefully, knowing you didn't have to earn it through your own schemes.
Abraham engineered his blessing instead of letting it come. In cricket, they say: don't chase the ball; let the game come to you. If you chase it, you'll be bowled out. The same is true in our lives. Feel the rhythms of God's Spirit. Don't chase. Don't engineer.
The manner in which you receive things from God is important. If you've bought your license behind a shop instead of earning it honestly, don't post it on Facebook and give God credit. There's a difference between genuine blessing and engineered success.
I've been thinking about this season in our church, and here's what I know: we're not going to engineer things. We won't change who we are to attract donors with deep pockets. We won't tell our team members to be less colorful or authentic. We're not going to calculate every move for growth.
It doesn't mean we won't be creative or improve our facilities or extend our reach. But we will not engineer God's blessing. We will move with the rhythms of the Spirit.
One specific commitment: we will not abandon student and campus ministry because after four years, students leave. "They don't stay to pay tithes," someone might argue. "Let's focus on families with stable income." No. Campus ministry is part of our DNA. God has called us to reach the university. We are seeding where we will not reap—we'll reap in heaven. That's faithfulness.
Now, here's a deeper truth about Abraham's failure in this chapter. This is a test, not a temptation. Temptation comes from the pit of hell. Testing comes from God.
I always tell students: be excited when you have exams. Exams show you're ready for the next level. Don't run from tests. Anyone who ran from school regrets it. The same is true spiritually. Every time you're tested, you've hit a ceiling. The test is there to help you cross that ceiling as a foundation. If you run away, you'll keep hitting that same ceiling, going backward, hitting it again.
Abraham fails this first test dismally. He doesn't endure in the famine. And I believe because he failed here, God had to continue testing him throughout his life. The weight Abraham carried—becoming the father of our faith—was too significant to not be thoroughly tested.
Let me close with something powerful. Someone recently said: "Don't let the seasons of life leave a mark on your body. Don't let the hard seasons leave a mark on your soul. Don't let them turn you bitter because you haven't healed from the past."
This made me think differently about Hagar, the maidservant that Abraham receives from Pharaoh—the very gift of his scheming.
Later, when Abraham and Sarai struggle to conceive the son of promise, Sarai says to Abraham: "Sleep with the maidservant so she can bear me a son." Now Abraham agrees. But I wonder—and I'm reaching here—I wonder if Sarai had never forgiven Abraham for what he did to her in Egypt. The trauma of being placed in Pharaoh's house, of being given away by her own husband—perhaps those scars never healed. And now she asks Abraham to do something similar, and he can't refuse because of what he did to her.
Sarai fails her own test. The test of barrenness and waiting wasn't just Abraham's test to endure. It was also Sarai's test to trust God's timing. Instead of waiting, they engineer a solution. Ishmael is born.
And here's the generational consequence: while Abraham becomes blessed and through him all peoples are blessed through Jesus, there's also a parallel blessing that has created centuries of conflict. The descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac—some trace the ongoing wars in the Middle East to these two lines.
One is a promise of the spirit. One is an engineered blessing. And we must be careful: don't put too many of your fingerprints on things God has given you. Don't take steps back and try to engineer outcomes, because those outcomes have generational consequences.
But through all of this, one consistent truth emerges: God is a redeemer.
It doesn't matter how much you've messed up your life. Through repentance, God can redeem any situation. No one is beyond repair in God's eyes. The enemy will tempt you to crucify yourself mentally, but know this: the great Abraham messed up mightily. Yet today we still sing about Abraham. Every day we see both his disobedience and his obedience. But in Jesus Christ, God comes to redeem everything.
That is the blessing of God.
