According to the Scriptures

Damian Kyle: God is not like us. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle to elaborate. God does not bring to his relationship with you and I what so often we demand of ourselves and others, and that is perfection. And it isn't to minimize the seriousness of sin and the different things that happen, but just to stop and to realize that we are not free to take ourselves out of God's calling upon our lives. Only he is free to do that. And if he does not do that, then we're to remain because of his grace.

Announcer: Where would we be without the amazing grace of God? While it's never an excuse for sin, it is the remedy. We'll see a picture of that here today on According to the Scriptures with Pastor Damian Kyle. That picture, it may surprise you to learn, comes from the Old Testament. As we continue our series Gleanings from Genesis, we've been looking at an episode in Abram's life where he blundered greatly. And there's something we can learn from it. To begin with, a cautionary word about strengths, here's Pastor Damian.

Damian Kyle: Oswald Chambers famously in his devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, he has one of the days in the 365 days where the devotion warns us always to be on guard concerning our strengths. So, as Christians, for the most part, we're pretty well aware of what our weaknesses are. And we keep a guard up there. Okay, can't go there, can't go there. I've got to be careful. I've got to always pray when this thing surfaces. But in our areas of strength, we tend to look at them, we can become more casual in those areas and less on guard concerning them. And that's why he wrote in that devotional, he declared, "An un-guarded strength, our strengths even our strengths need to be guarded, an un-guarded strength is a double weakness." And it's true. Abram is going to fail here massively in an area of strength in his life.

The Apostle Paul put it this way, 1 Corinthians chapter 10, he said, "Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall." A fourth thing that we want to learn from Abram's blunder here is that if we ever find ourselves needing to lie or to deceive to advance something, it's a dead giveaway that we are not in God's will. Just a sure sign, as soon as I have to say a lie or engage in deception for some plan to move forward, I know that plan is not from God. Or I'm trying to advance it in a wrong way because God never lies, he never deceives, and he never uses lies and deceptions to advance his plans.

And so Abram, he calls on his wife to lie in order to advance his plan. As some of you are familiar with the passage, somebody says, well, it was a half-lie. And we'll find out in chapter 20 that Abram and Sarai were half-brothers and sisters. They shared the same father but they had different mothers in marrying one another. And so maybe they could try and justify that. Abram giving a wink and a nod and everything, we are just leave out the husband and wife thing and we are actually brothers and sisters. But his action's absolutely indefensible on this. It was a deliberate attempt to deceive others.

Now, we're told here how Abram's plan worked out in verses 14 through 20. Sure enough, they go into Egypt and she is a knockout evidently and she gets noticed right away by all the her beauty does in Egypt. And if Abram thought he could be able to manage and control where this was going to go, he lost control of it immediately because the princes of Pharaoh caught sight of her and then went to Pharaoh and recommended that Pharaoh would make her a part of his harem. Now, if things could not get any worse, they do. And here Sarai not only gets noticed but then she gets noticed by the most powerful man in the entire nation of Egypt.

And you put yourself in Abram's shoes. We'll ignore Sarai's shoes for just a moment, which are equally miserable in their own way. But think about being a man, a husband, a man of God, and your plan has just delivered your wife into another man's harem. How that would break your mind. That would break you emotionally. I mean, his entire world, both of them, just has to be spinning. This can't be happening, we can't be here, this is all just an awful dream, there's just no what and yet that's the reality.

And you just put a little pause right there in this entire progression and then you ask yourself, wouldn't he give his right arm and everything he owns to be back in Canaan in the midst of that famine in comparison to what he has produced by departing from the will of God for his life? There is something harder than God's will in our lives and God's will can be hard, and that is to depart from his will and what unfolds there. And Abram watches all of this and he doesn't just watch what happens to his wife, he allows it to happen to Sarai.

What a nightmare. And what a nightmare for her. And I think that this speaks in a way to what a person can become if we depart from God's plan for our lives. I know that what God has called me to as a pastor, it's like a public calling, it's a prominent calling in that way. But you don't have to worry about me getting a big head. I mean, pray for me if you please in all ways. I think he put me in this calling because he knows I'm such a numbskull that he had to put me in a calling where there is never enough time to get to everything you need to get to because he knows what trouble I would get myself into otherwise.

The calling is of course for some good that he wants to do out of it, but what it protects us from to be in the call of God. And I've seen it through the years. I've seen people walk away from their calling under the same influences or just self-will like Abram does and then you see them further down the line and they've become a person they never believed that they could ever become. Making decisions they never thought themselves capable of, doing what they never imagined that they could ever do. And the potential is there for all of us and the calling is a safeguard for all of us all the way around in our lives.

And then in all of this with Abram, I mean he's not just putting his wife in horrible jeopardy, but he's also taken the plans of God and just thrown them to the wind, put them all in jeopardy as well. And it's totally indefensible and it's important to recognize that where he is in this snapshot, it's indefensible in every way. And then Pharaoh does what Pharaoh's going to do because he's just gotten not the wife of a husband, but the sister of a brother, he's going to make sure Abram gets taken care of.

So here come the camels, here come the donkeys, here come the men servants and the women servants and he's and the silver and the gold and the wealth and all of it is being lavished upon him in verse 16 as it's described. And yet do you think he enjoyed even one penny or one animal of those things knowing where his wife was on the basis of the decisions that he had made? There is no capacity to enjoy even the greatest things in life apart from the will of God for a child of God, it's impossible. And I mean he's just got to be all tied up in knots and tormented for her and tormented at what he's thrown away. Looks like his marriage is destroyed and wondering how I can get out of this and wondering how he's going to live with himself for the rest of his life after doing this and after all, you do have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. And that's a big thing to struggle with.

And then in verse 17, this entire nightmare is unfolding, he can't believe what he's in the middle of, everything looks lost, it looks like there's no hope of a rescue and then God steps in to protect not only Abram and Sarai but his plan through them for human history and for you and I. To protect his plan to make a great nation of them, the Jews, and to bless the whole world with a savior and a Messiah. And God proceeded to smite Pharaoh and his entire household with some kind of a plague. We're not told what that plague was, but it certainly would have assured that there was no sexual intimacy between Pharaoh, it incapacitated Pharaoh and Sarai. And the fact that that didn't take place is made clear in verse 19 anyway.

And then Pharaoh's household, they begin to get sick and one after another after another after another. And it's a superstitious age and they begin to look and say, okay, what changed? What happened? What great dynamic occurred? We were all well at one moment and then what happened immediately before all of us getting sick? And they realized it was Sarai coming into the harem. And it probably didn't help that she was not sick at all. Stuck out like a sore thumb in the midst of all of it. And Pharaoh then it becomes clear what's happening here, he called her in, he confronted her and she confessed the truth in all of it.

And God then after protecting them you notice he allows Abram to suffer a little bit of humiliation at Pharaoh's hands. Pharaoh calls for Sarai to be brought before him, Abram to be brought before him and he rebukes this great father of faith, gets rebuked by a Gentile pagan. And when you look at the language of it in verses 18 through 20, it's just like Pharaoh is talking to Abram, this man of God, and he's saying, I don't even know how a person does what you did. As a man, as a husband, I don't know how another man gets where you got in this whole thing. Have you ever been in that's a difficult place to be and he had and God wanted him to experience a little bit of that.

You ever been in a place where pagans, and I use the term affectionately, have conducted themselves far better than you and I have as a Christian in a given situation? And I mean it's very chastening kind of thing to realize it even if they don't if it doesn't get verbalized, we see it by the Holy Spirit and that shaming that goes on here, just a miserable, miserable place to be. And to Abram's credit, he offers no defense. One thing we should know about that, if you ever find yourself in that scene, don't witness to Pharaoh. It's not a good time to talk about how great your God is and how important it is to obey him. And as the old saying goes, he sat there, he took it and when you've been put down, sit down. And he absorbed it and he took it like a man.

And then I think Pharaoh here looking and not trusting Abram as far as he could throw him, not only dismissed him and told him to leave the land of Egypt, but you notice he sends an escort, an Egyptian escort, to make sure these people leave Egypt and go back to wherever they came from. And it might have just been disgust over Abram or it might have been a fear that Pharaoh had related to their God because as disgusted as he was with Abram, he did know that whoever this Abram, the God of this Abram is, he brought a plague right into my living room. And so you don't mess with whoever that that is.

And then we're told that Abram returned to Canaan there in chapter 13 and this represents repentance on his part. He repented, he turned back to God's will upon his life. And so this "let's go to Egypt out of fear" episode was over in his life. Verse 3 we're told that he returned to the altar that he had erected to God between Bethel and Ai. And then in verse 14 beautifully that he called on the name of the Lord and no doubt to commune with God, to confess his sin and to renew his commitment to God and to ask for a fresh start and to be restored back into his calling.

Someone might think, well, what else would Abram do? Well, Abram could do what a lot of people do when we blunder big time in God's call upon our life. And that is under our own self-will, pack up our bags and go back to Ur of the Chaldees and determine that I have blown it, I have blown it too big, this is such a mess that I have made, I am so ashamed of myself, my name is mud in the entire nation of Egypt and I'm going to be in marriage counseling for the rest of my life over what I did with Sarai. And humanly speaking the temptation would be to look at it and go, I'm done, I'm through, God will not want anything else to do with me and so I will just pack up my stuff, I will go back to Ur of the Chaldees and I will just live out my threescore and ten anonymously. And that had to be a temptation for him.

And yet he doesn't do it because God didn't tell him to do that. And if God hasn't removed us from our calling, we're never free to remove ourselves from our calling. One of the things that as we look at this entire situation as it's before us, we see Abram here and it's important to look at what Abram teaches us here in the situation. But we have never ever absolutely and adequately mined a passage until we see what it reveals to us about God. And the entire passage is intended among other things to take this incredible blunder of Abram and put it on one side of the scale and then wonder what could ever tip that scale in the other direction.

And what tips the scale in the other direction is the grace of God. God is not through with Abram because God does not bring to his relationship with you and I what so often we demand of ourselves and others and that is perfection. And it isn't to minimize the seriousness of sin and the different things that happen here, but just to stop and to realize that we are not free to take ourselves out of God's calling upon our lives. Only he is free to do that. And if he does not do that, then we remain in there because of his grace.

And people look at it and say, that's too sloppy. You do that it's going to you're just going to do a sloppy agape thing and sloppy grace with Christians and you're just going to you're going to produce a whole bunch of Christians and servants that just become very casual in how they treat the grace of God. I beg to differ because if you have ever been in Abram's place on any level and God rescues you out of his grace the way that he did Abram, you aren't thinking of ever returning to that place. And the grace of God makes us love him more, appreciate him more and more committed to fulfill his call upon our lives than was ever present before. The grace of God is powerful, powerful stuff. And that's why Paul talks about the phrase that he uses in Ephesians chapter 1, and the truth of the matter about every single one of us, not just Abram. If we don't know it about ourselves, we're going to know it about ourselves.