The story of Joseph teaches us that God is with us in our struggles. Not only that, but God is able to produce something from that struggle. Joseph had God’s perspective on struggles in his life and remained faithful to God’s promises.

Today’s scripture (Heb. 11:1-20) provides an overview of the last few months’ teachings, reminding us of God’s faithfulness – from creating purpose out of chaos and nothingness to our lives today. We are reminded that, without faith, it is impossible to see God. Instead, we must trust God in our limitations because God is incapable of being unfaithful. If you wait until your life is in order to let God in, you will be waiting forever because (as with creation) only God can bring order to the chaos and nothingness of our lives.

Read Genesis 32:22-32, Colossians 4:12-18

Jacob’s wrestling match, in the middle of the night, comes when he is not expecting it. He realizes that he’s not just wrestling with man, but God himself, and the experience leaves him (and history) changed forever. 

As Christians, we can be surprised by the ways that God engages us too. Things in our lives that start out lacking clarity in darkness and even in isolation often end up being the things we wrestle and struggle with until God brings them to light.

What are some things that you have wrestled with in the past? How has God shown up and given you clarity (even if clarity comes with a limp)?

We also have the ability to engage God in wrestling through prayer. Do you pray through your loved ones, your church, and the communities who need God in your area? Do you organize times of prayer as a faith community? How can you create more opportunities for your church to wrestle with God in prayer?

Jacob secures his father’s blessing in an unconventional way (to put it nicely)! Whatever we may think of how he and Rebekah went after the blessing, we can’t deny that he really wanted to be blessed by his father and by God. This story highlights that blessings come about in unexpected ways if we’re willing to look for them and even work toward them in a sense. (Not that they can be earned.)

We may have ideas about how we want God to work in our churches but they don’t always match up with his. How might God be working unexpectedly in your church? Is the Spirit working in a way that you didn’t see coming? What trends do you see? What ministries are producing fruit?

What types of people have been coming to your services? Could God be leading you in an unexpected direction? Is there fruit already on the tree but we’re just failing to recognize it?

Take some time to ask God and ponder these questions. Think about your flock and your community with an open mind.

The saga of Sarah and Hagar is raw and real. We are not unfamiliar with feelings of emptiness and hopes deferred even with thousands of years separating our lives from the lives of these women. How do we deal with brokenness and loss? How can we trust when the answers to our prayers may not be seen in our lifetimes? Where is God in our deepest struggles? He sees us. He hears us.

As Christians, we have an advantage over Abraham and the faith heroes of the Old Testament. What they looked forward to in hope, we can look back upon with awe and gratitude. However, even though we’ve received such precious promises, we can often forget that God has kept his word. We need to remember the precious promises of God. Even the ones we still wait and hope for.

Part two of our sermons on Abraham. Finding ways to see our invisible God is essential for a faithful life. 

 

“Seeing” is s major theme in Abraham’s life and in the Hebrew scriptures. Even in English seeing has multiple meanings that coincide with some of the nuances we see in Abraham’s life. 

 

For Reference: For more on this check out the Schocken Bible Volume 1 by Everett Fox – this unique translation aims to capture Hebrew idioms and rhythms that most English translations fail to illuminate. Also, his footnotes and scholarly work are very beneficial when reading the Torah.

 

Last week we looked at Abraham and saw that wherever he pitched his tent, he built an altar to worship on the way. We looked at 3 out of the 4 passages where Abraham built an altar. today we’ll zoom in on the fourth and final altar.

 

As Abraham moved about the Promised Land, tending sheep, dealing with life, and calling on the name of the Lord, Abraham received 7 promises, some were fulfilled while he was living, others took centuries to be realized. 

 

 

When we read the Bible, we are reading a translation of Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, depending on what section we’re reading from. Whenever you translate anything from one language to another, it’s easy to miss ideas, rhymes or alliteration, or wordplay that might be going on.

 

We’re not going to get into a full Hebrew lesson here but today we’re going to look at a theme in the Hebrew text that we can actually “see” pretty clearly even in English if we’re paying attention.

 

Like we talked about with books and movies, we’ll look at some of the same texts as last week but with new eyes.

 

“Seeing” is a major word, idea, and theme in Abraham’s life – and in our lives as well, if we’re trying to live lives of faith.

 

Seeing God

 

Scripture Blitz:

These These passages are rephrased to highlight the use of the same Hebrew word over and over:

* Genesis 12:1 Land I will show you → Land I will let you see

* Genesis 12:7 He built an altar to the Lord who appeared to him → the Lord who was seen

* Genesis 13:14-15 Look around, all that you see

* In the passage talking about covenant that mirrors the Suzerain-Vassal treaty

* Genesis 15:5 Took him outside, gaze into the sky and count the stars

* Genesis 15:17 The covenant is cut in the dark (pitch black) where nothing could be seen but the firepot

* In Sarah and Hagar (next week), Hagar calls God the “God who sees me.”

* Genesis 17:1, 18:1 The Lord appeared to Abraham → The Lord was seen by Abraham

* Genesis 18:2 He looked up and saw three men

 

These are just some of the instances of seeing in the life of Abraham

 

If we were to revisit the altars of last week, we’d see that Abraham saw God everywhere he went. 

 

The focus of last week’s message was to worship God in a less compartmentalized way. His presence is with us always. Did you recognize God in your home, at work, at school, even on the road?

 

One of the overarching themes of Thread is decompartmentalization – taking our faith out of the boxes we put it in like worship being restricted to Sunday mornings or kids and adults separating for worship. These practices, though often unintentional, restrict our worship, effectively making God smaller than he is.

One of the remarkable things about Abraham, who God chose to enter into a covenant with, was that his faith was not compartmentalized. He worshiped God wherever he went. Wherever he set up his tent, he also built an altar to the Lord. When he won a war he worshiped a Jesus type in Melchizedek. He involved his family in worship, albeit in one of the wildest texts in the Bible, as Isaac carries the wood for his own sacrifice.

Is your church putting God in boxes that he never intended for us to put him in? Is your faith community separated into silos or is it given opportunities to unite despite differences? Remember, Babel – God loves diversity. But sometimes, in an effort to “meet needs” we put people and groups together in ways that actually keep us from growth because the individuals in the groups are all in the same life stage. Is there another way?

Are you intentionally helping the church to decompartmentalize Sunday morning as the only time of worship? One easy way is to look over the resources in the Thread App each week and mention (or have someone else mention) what they can discover this week as they worship at home using the resources for individuals, families, and groups. You could send out notifications from this portal pointing people to the resources. You can train your leaders to use the small group material and to encourage one another to share what they are learning. You could make a slide for your service and social media that highlights the resources.

It’s one thing to have resources available but it’s another thing to change a compartmentalized culture so people will actually incorporate these lessons into their lives throughout the week.

One important note: as you offer and promote these resources, be careful not to use guilt as a motivation. Worship has to be something each person decides to do in their hearts and lives. Keep it positive.

 

 

While Christmas is a time of quiet reflection over Christ’s impact on our lives, New Year’s Eve often makes look at the year ahead. Those who trust God’s promises have a lot to hope for. And ‘hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

The story of Jesus’s birth shook the world. It calls people to surrender their lives to a baby boy who will eventually grow up to be a man who will die for the sins of the humanity.

Matthew 1:18-23

Nativity is here to remind us what we are doing here. Secularism has invaded our world. Christmas has a double meaning. Most people misinterpret Christmas as time with family or the time to give gifts. Many parents use Christmas as peace offering or guilt offering, to make up for the neglect over the year.

Jesus came to bring us personal connection with God. You don’t have to go through the priest. You don’t have to wait for a certain time of the year. You don’t have to offer an atonement for your sins.

Emmanuel – god with us now means something else. Not fear. Not death.

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21

The Bible’s foundational story set ends with Babel and a new beginning. There are many facets of the Babel story but we’ll focus here on language as it’s the first thing mentioned in the Genesis 11 account. They had a “common language and a common vocabulary” (NET Bible). Even though we are tasked with using language to preach the word of God, we might not consider language enough. Babel teaches us that when humans get together in like-minded groups to accomplish lofty goals, their language is a concern.

 

Groups can use language to unite. This can be healthy for us if we speak to one another in “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” This can also be problematic if our lingo becomes exclusive. 

 

Groups can also suffer disunity when they aren’t speaking the same language. The world is constantly churning up new terms and ways of describing things that can be adopted by some in the church while others stay out of the loop. The way we use language to talk about big issues like gender or race is very important. In our fellowship, many of the divisions that seem to be sparked out of nowhere often begin as deficiencies in language. 

 

In Acts 2, before the “repent and be baptized” part, we see a kind of anti-Babel. God is not building an empire, but rather a family of faith, his Kingdom/Church. Instead of making sure his disciples speak the same language, he makes sure that everyone can hear the gospel in their own language. Luke goes into great detail to drive home the Holy Spirit’s work in this regard. It should be no surprise that a God who created the world with his voice and gave us the gospel as his word would be concerned with the communication of his Christians. 

Take a moment to reflect on the effects of language in your ministry:

 

Are there lingo words in your church services that only people who are “in” would understand? How do such phrases make guests feel? How could you model and encourage the use of more descriptive language instead of church-y words?

 

Think about areas of disunity that may have flared up in the last few years in your church? How much of the issue was a war of words? How could you use the Word to create new ways to talk about divisive issues?