Abraham is viewed as the "father of faith" in the Lord's church because of the strength of his faith, but also because of the nature of his relationship to God. We can examine the covenants and promises made between God and Abraham, knowing that we share in that covenant relationship if we walk in the faith of Abraham, trusting God and believing the message of the gospel through Jesus Christ.

We learn a lot about what a covenant is and what is required of anyone who enters into a covenant with God. 

Why is Abraham the father of our faith, and how does understanding his life help us to understand our own covenant relationship with Christ? Often we try and interpret New Testament passages that describe Abraham as a model for our faith without truly understanding what made Abraham's faith special. 

In the first of this series, we'll talk about the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, where God calls out to Abraham while was still living as an idolater in an idolatrous nation, promising him a great blessing if he would leave his home and his family and come into a new land far away. To do this, Abraham had to learn to trust a God he did not know and believe in a blessing he would never see with his own eyes.

How important is it for us to have a deeper understanding of the basic truths of the Bible? When Paul prays for the Ephesian church in Ephesians 3, he prays that they might "have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."

Of all the things Paul could have wished for the Ephesians - and for us - why this? Would we consider things like "understanding God's love more deeply" or "being filled with God's fullness" our top priorities in serving God? Is that really the "solid food" that the Hebrew writer discusses in Hebrews 5-6? So we're left with the question: why is fully appreciating God's love so important for us in our spiritual walk, and why does lacking that understanding put our souls at risk?

In Matthew 18:18-20, Jesus says:

“Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

We often read arguments from this passage where people will claim that Jesus is saying that as long as I have a couple of other Christians with me, I can worship wherever, whenever, and however I want. I don’t actually have to go worship with other Christians!

But is that the point Jesus is trying to make?

Jesus lays out two parables in the first part of Luke 15: the parable of the lost sheep, and the parable of the lost coin. In each of these, we see two defining issues: Something is not where it is supposed to be, and God diligently seeks to restore it to its rightful place.

In the case of the lost sheep, we see a representative of someone who has wandered away from God, who is no longer in fellowship and is not receiving the benefits of God’s grace and care. We see God’s urgency in restoring that soul – an urgency that leads the shepherd in the parable to leave the other 99 sheep in the open field, and go bring back the lost sheep. The shepherd does this because he cares about the well-being of the sheep.

In the case of the lost coin, we see a woman searching for what represented approximately one day’s wages. The emphasis in this parable is on the value of that coin – the owner of the house doesn’t see a valueless object that can be easily replaced, and understands that even though the object is safely in the house, it still has no real value until it is found and available for use. So too, God sees his people as individuals with worth, valuable assets in the kingdom.

These parables set up the third story in the chapter: the Prodigal Son. Here the focus is on the father’s love, showing God as desiring His creation’s return just as a father seeks his child. But Jesus uses this story to highlight the issue with the religious leaders of the day, who would have seen the younger son as getting his just desserts, behaving in a way that we will would all term selfish, ungrateful, and sinful in nature. But when the brother turns and comes home, the father’s admonition to the older brother is: “It was fitting for us to celebrate!” And in the same way, God wants His children to love each other, and seek each other’s salvation with just as much urgency and zeal as He seeks it.

Luke 11 opens with the disciples observing Jesus in prayer and asking him "Teach us to pray." Something about Jesus' prayers must have seemed beyond them, and that may seem odd. Prayer seems simple to do from a mechanical standpoint, and simply by observing Jesus, surely they would have known how to pray.

It seems as if their question had more to do with wanting to learn how they could emulate Jesus' attitude about prayer. His boldness in coming before God, his absolute faith that God heard him and answered. His comfort in approaching God not through rote recitations, but as a son talks to his father.

The Lord's Prayer

Jesus provides them a model prayer that outlines the basic tenants of a good prayer:

• Glorifying God (Always remembering to praise God, indicating his greatness, wisdom, justice, and grace)
• Expressing submission to God's will above all things (Your kingdom come, i.e. all that you have planned and intended come to pass)
• Dependence on God for physical needs (our "daily bread", or as translated "the bread that is needed for today" - in other words, for what I need today, and not for abundance, and not for enough to get me through the year in case things get hard!)
• Dependence on God for spiritual needs (Our forgiveness - but with a mind toward forgiving others in the same way!)
• Lead us not into temptation: Not that God tempts us, but He does at time test us, as he tested Jesus (Matthew 4:1). God also promises that he will be faithful, will not leave us, and will provide a way of escape for us in all temptation. (1 Corinthians 10:13) The prayer seems to be a request for God to keep us out of situations that are beyond our ability to bear.

He gives two examples intended to help the apostles (and us) understand the need for persistence and trust in our prayers.

As we move into the speeches by Elihu and God Himself, we start to see the message of the book of Job taking shape. Where Job and his friends argued about God's justice, using their own wisdom and personal observations to draw conclusions, Elihu interjected to correct Job:

• Job accused God of counting him as an enemy, where Elihu shows that God uses suffering to correct, to warn, to turn men back from their own sin and error.
• Job claimed that it didn't matter if you were good or evil, God treated you the same, where Elihu stated that God is not unjust, but patient in trying to bring the evil back to righteousness.
• Job claimed that his sins are not worthy of his suffering, and that he could convince God if given the chance, where Elihu pointed out that God does actually see Job, and knows exactly who Job is. And that many of the ones suffering at that time were doing so because they cried out in anger, not in appealing to God for help - which Elihu pointed out is what Job has done!

God's speech is recorded, with the key passage in chapter 40, when God espoused his justice and challenged Job to show how he would do things better, how he understood the way God has ordered all of nature. "Then," God said, "I would confess to you that your own right hand can save you."

The message of Job is that despite being a righteous man, Job could not save himself. He could not stand before God and explain why he should be accepted, why he was not worthy of punishment for sin. Ultimately all of us have sinned, and all of us must come before God as Job finally does at the end, repenting in sackcloth and ashes.

God restores Job at the end of the book, just as He redeems Job through his grace and the intercessory work of his angel, which appears to be a type - if not an actual reference to - the Christ.

In the context of Luke 10, the parable of the Good Samaritan helps to contrast the joy and eagerness of the "simple" disciples to accept and teach God's word alongside the reaction of the "wise" lawyer, who wanted to parse God's commands and determine exactly who he was required to love.

The implication of the man's question is that there are people whom God does not expect us to love, and it reflects the idea that we often want to qualify God's commandments to figure out the lowest level of obedience we are required to meet and still be pleasing to God.

Jesus turns the man's question around and rather than answering "who is my neighbor," he asks the man to think about what it means to be a neighbor, and to "go and do likewise."

The more we read the story of Job, the more we see that there's a lot more for us than simply a story about a man suffering and being rewarded for his patience.

We see Job and his friends reasoning through the question of how God works His will and His justice in the world, without benefit of full information. In many ways, they're in the same situation as we are, although we certainly have more to work with through God's revealed word. If we go to the book of Job looking for an easy answer to why I have difficulty in my life when people who I view as "more wicked than I am" are succeeding, I may not find a simple answer.

It's important as we read through the dialog of Job and his friends to remember that they aren't inspired - although Job certainly appears to say some things that bear the fingerprints of prophetic utterance by the Spirit. So we can't take as doctrine the way in which they arrive at their own conclusions, but we do get some insight into how we often form opinions about how God works in the world - and how inadequate those opinions are.

Job and his friends rely on the collective wisdom of people who came before them, they rely on the testimony of people who claim to have had visions and dreams, and they also lean on their own personal anecdotal evidence. As a result, they're all drawing from the same well of knowledge, but they're coming to very different conclusions, and the reason for that is that without revelation from God, we can't truly know why God does anything!

So as we read the conversations leading up to Elihu's statement, we can learn as much from the attitudes being displayed as anything. How does the friends' attempt to comfort Job turn into a series of false and slanderous accusations? How do they manage to make things worse? And how does Job's own attitude toward his friends and toward God deteriorate through the influence of Satan - whose influence can be seen even after he seemingly disappears form the story!