January 4 – Genesis 12-15 : Living in the Desert

“Leave your country...for a land that I will show you.

I’ll make you a great nation and bless you...make you famous...

those who curse you I’ll curse...”  (12:1)

Can you imagine your small group’s prayer time and when it’s your turn to share, throwing out a prayer request like this?  I want to be great, be blessed, be famous and just for good measure, I want those cursed who curse me!  We would be thought the most prideful, arrogant, selfish, vengeful people.   Yet, this is what God promised Abram.  And Abram hadn’t even done anything for God yet.  He hadn’t left his country, he hadn’t believed God, he hadn’t sacrificed or built any altars and still, God spoke this blessing over him. 

“Our badness is no longer the obstacle to blessing.  Nor is our goodness the condition for blessing… There’s never a moment in all our lives, from the day we trusted Christ till the day we see Him, when God is not longing to bless us.  At every moment, in every circumstance, God is doing us good.  He never stops.  It gives Him too much pleasure.  God is not waiting to bless us after our troubles end.  He is blessing us right now, in and through those troubles.  At this exact moment, He is giving us what He thinks is good.”  (Crabb, Shattered Dreams)

Really?   It’s not about not being too bad or doing enough good?  Apparently, it wasn’t in Abram’s life either, because he quickly obeyed and then quickly lied about Sarai being his wife to get out of a hard situation and God’s blessing stood firm.  Not that Abraham was experiencing what we could call “blessing” – from appearances, he got the short end of the stick in dividing up the land with Lot.  And then Lot was attacked by several kings and Abram was pulled into a battle to save Lot and his family.  Abram won the battle and then God came back with another promise of grand reward (15:1):

“You’re going to have a big family, Abram!

And he believed!  Believed God!  God declared him ‘Set-Right-with-God’.”

Romans 4:17-18 (Msg), puts it like this:

“We call Abraham ‘father’ not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody…. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.”

There’s the tension for me.  It’s not based on what I see as a solution or how ‘blessed’ I feel in the situation or how much I am or am not “living like a saint.”  It is based solely on God and what He says is good and is a blessing, which often looks vastly different from my definition of blessing.  This leaves me with a gap, a desert, between my hope for God’s blessing and the reality of my circumstances. 

“People of faith live in the desert.  Like Abraham, they are aware of their circumstances but are fixed on hope.”  (Miller, A Praying Life)

What is your desert right now?