Genesis chapter 15, and I'm going to read to you from verses 7 to 21. Then God said to Abram, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, how shall I know that I will inherit it? So he said to him, bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. Then he brought all these to him, and cut them in two down the middle, and placed each piece opposite the other. But he did not cut the birds in two. And when the vultures came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Then he said to Abram, Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. And also the nation whom they serve I will judge. Afterward they shall come out with great possessions. Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried at a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And it came to pass, when the sun went down and it was dark, that, behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. On the same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river of the Euphrates, the Canaites, the Canazites, the Cabanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, and the Rephaim, the Amorites, and the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. Well, if we were to go back and look at the chapters before us, we would see in chapter 12 that God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees, gave him great promises of what he would do for him personally, and also for his descendants, both physically and spiritually. We would see that Abram was a man of faith. to leave his country and his father's house and journey to Canaan, I think it was something like four or five hundred miles, journey over to the promised land. And we would see already how his faith was being tried and tested and how he was weak in faith at certain times and how he was strong in faith at other times. He would almost lose his wife Sarai to Pharaoh's embrace in Egypt because he would have her call him her brother, and yet later he would be a peacemaker with Lot over the issue of where they would pasture their flocks. He was also a man of war and going out to rescue Lot when he was taken captive. These were strong actings of faith in him. But we never hear of his faith being mentioned in the Scriptures until chapter 15, verse 6. when God took him outside and had him look up at the sky and say, count the stars, Abram, if you can, so shall your descendants be. And it says that Abram believed him, believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness. So we can see here that he was called by God from Ur the Chaldees. And that was what was meant in chapters 12 to 14, because there's nothing mentioned really about his faith other than he went in chapter 12 to 14. And we see him justified then in Genesis 15, And it's not that he wasn't justified before, but this was a declaration of God to Abram, of what God would do for him. And so in these verses, we see Abram seeking God for the assurance that he would inherit the land that was promised to him. Since Abram is the father of all the faithful, the father of all who believe in both Old and New Testaments, I think that we can very safely use him as a type of the believer in every sense of that word. This is the order of salvation as we find it in the scriptures, which is spoken of in Romans 8, verse 30. Moreover, whom he predestined, these he also called, and whom he called, these he also justified, and whom he justified, these he also glorified. So assurance of your having eternal life is one of the greatest blessings that you can ever have. Abram came to have assurance because of the things that happened to him here in this chapter. The inheritance that Abram was promised is to the New Testament believer is a type and a picture of the eternal inheritance of heaven and the believers being glorified through the work of Jesus Christ. Assurance of salvation does not always come at the moment of your being justified. At the moment you first believe, you may have very strong assurance. And at the moment you first believe, you may not have very strong assurance. So I'm saying assurance of salvation does not always come at the moment that you are justified. It may, but it is not always the case. Abram had faith, But as I said last week, he was also afraid that God would not give him the child of promise before he grew too old to have any children. Abram needed his faith to be strengthened. He needed to have his doubts and fears removed. And so too, you and I will need to be strengthened as we walk through this Christian walk of life. We are going to need to have our fears and our doubts taken away in regard to our salvation and all that God has promised that he will do for us. We need to know that we will inherit all that God has promised to us and that God will do for us in regard to salvation. Those things which would be impossible for us to perform without Christ's help. and without Christ's grace. So what I believe that this text is saying to us this morning is this, you can know that you will be an inheritor of salvation and eternal life if you find the same kind of assurance that Abram found on the night in which he was justified. So the question that we want to answer this morning is this, how can I find assurance of my salvation and eternal life even as Abram did on that night so long ago. How can I find assurance of my salvation? And the answer that comes to us from these verses is that you will find assurance if you will look to see if you have by grace the same kind of responses as Abram had to the gospel sacrifice. Abram responded in three ways to the gospel sacrifice. First of all, he responded by bringing to God in worship what God commanded him to bring, verses 7 to 10. I'm calling this a gospel sacrifice that Abram responded to because at the end of the chapter we see God making a covenant with Abram. And this covenant does not at all require Abram to do anything to fulfill it. It's all one-sided. This covenant is the outworking of what God sovereignly decided to do for Abram and for his descendants. It has to do with what he would do for the physical descendants of Abram as a nation. That is certain. And this is the Hebrew people to whom He would reveal Himself, He would give them His Holy Word, and through them He would bring forth the promised seed of Genesis 3.15, that is, our Lord Jesus Christ. He would give them a land, He would give them commandments through Moses, and the law and he would show them how he wanted to be worshipped. In this passage also we are given a prophetic history of what happened to the Jewish people and what God would do for them. They would be strangers in a land, it says, in another land, that is Egypt, where they would be under bondage, in bondage and affliction for 400 years and then they would return to the land of Canaan. And Abram wants to know whether he will inherit the land of Canaan. Acts chapter 7 verse 5 says that he would not personally inherit a foot of it. But the book of Hebrews says very plainly that he was waiting for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Hebrews 11, 10. And in verse 16, it says that he desired a better, that is, a heavenly country. And that God had prepared a city for him. That is the New Jerusalem. where the church shall dwell forever, even heaven itself. And that is the New Testament church, by the way, being built by our Lord Jesus Christ and composed of believers in every age, a heavenly city begun here even upon the earth and extending all the way into heaven today. But this sacrificial covenant that God and Abram were entering into did require a response of obedience to what God would ask him to bring. And so I believe that when it talks about Abram bringing the three-year-old heifer, and the three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram, and of his cutting them in two, and also a turtle dove and a young pigeon, that this is a response to the gospel. It's a picture of a response to the gospel and the grace purchased by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And all the promises given to Abram and all true believers in both Old Testament and New depend for their fulfillment in God and what God would do through Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus is the sacrifice, through which God the Father would pass through a smoking oven and as a burning torch, as it talks about in this passage, in His justice. And He would show His mercy to Abram in making an everlasting covenant with him. And then all sinful men who would trust in Jesus would also be able to become partakers of this covenant. It would mean His afflicting His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in the place of us, the afflicted, those afflicted with sin and afflicted with distress of soul and heart at many points in our life because of our sinfulness and because of the afflictions we go through as a result of our sinfulness. and which we pass through in order to be taught by God and to become righteous persons in his sight, we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ that we might be saved and sanctified and eventually glorified. In other words, the blessings of the covenant that would be made with Abraham would descend on down through the Jews and then be fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ and all of these spiritual blessings of salvation we would inherit. That's the picture of the land. The land is a picture of our inheritance. It's an eternal inheritance laid up for us in heaven, but which is begun here upon the earth. You see, Christ had to suffer for sin in the smoking oven of God's wrath and justice, instead of the sinner suffering there forever in hell. It would mean God's ordaining the burning torch of the dying love of our Lord Jesus Christ that would satisfy His justice and His judgment, His righteous judgment against sin. This would allow believers to come into covenant with Him, the Holy God. And Abram was the only sacrificing person at that time, what God had commanded him to bring that day in accordance with his will. There were others who believed. At that time we believe, but yet this is what God commanded of Abraham entering into covenant with him. He's saying, this is how I'm to be known. This is how I am to be worshipped. And through this sacrifice and death of my son in the future, Abram, which is coming, pictured by my passing between the pieces of the sacrifice and the burning torch which represents the love of God in Christ Jesus. This is how I'm to be known. This is how I am to be worshipped through his sacrifice. But the kind of animals that Abram brought show us what you and I must bring at God's command when we come to worship him, not physical animals. But the three-year-old heifer, the three-year-old female goat, and the three-year-old ram are a picture to us of our response as believers in the Church of Jesus Christ. The three-year-old heifer, the three-year-old female goat, and the three-year-old ram were at the height of their strength, their physical strength and beauty. And whether you and I are male or female, or a leader in Christ's church, we are to bring to God all of our strength and whatever is good and lovely in us, and we are to offer it to God. That's our worship. We are to lay it before Him as slain. That is all of our glory. We are to divide it in two in relation to what we can do without Christ. We can do nothing. without Christ. And we need to see this this morning. Christ died at the height of His strength at 33 years of age. He died at the height of His righteous beauty and power as a sinless man. He was wise, and He was holy, and He was true, and He was good, and all of His mind, and all of His soul, and all of His strength were devoted to God. So our response, I'm saying, must be the same in whatever sacrifice and offering we make of ourselves to God. We sacrifice our glory in order to have His grace. at work in our heart. In other words, it's not what we think that we can do for Him, but it's what He has already done for us and is doing for us now. that allows us to serve Him and worship Him in truth and spirit and to serve Him in the way that He desires. Romans 6, 10, and 11 says, For the death that Jesus died, He died to sin once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. So Christ died for men, women, leaders, yes, and also for children in their pictured For us here, even the children are pictured for us here. The sacrifices that weren't divided in two, those who weren't old enough to understand what they should do to serve the Lord Jesus Christ, to serve God through Him. They're too young to think of making any sacrifice or of offering their strength to God, yet Christ died for them as well. They're not cut in two, as the sacrifice of mature adults is. We divide it in two, but they do not. And we bring these offerings before God and show Him. We don't do it like they did in the Old Testament, Old Covenant times, but we bring our hearts. And we pray that the Lord will save our children at a young age and use them mightily in his service as they grow up. And so we need to ask ourselves this morning, if we know that we are true Christians and inheritors of eternal life, whether we bring the sacrifices to God in worship which he has commanded, are we coming through the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus Christ, that sacrifice which alone God is pleased with? Do we lay our own strength in the beauty that we have as a young person or as an adult and the merits of what we do as dead in the dust before Him? Are we fully intending to be His servants in righteousness? Do we bring our strength and our beauty and whatever level of intelligence that He has given to us into this place of worship? To be given to Him to be taught? That is, that we would be taught? That He would come and we would pray that He would teach us how to use our gifts and abilities for Him? Let us ask ourselves those questions because this is what God did for Abram that day. He gave Abram assurance. He brought him this assurance that he would inherit the land and he will bring you, dear believer, trusting only in Jesus Christ, that sweet and simple assurance that you bring him all your life, all your gifts, all your abilities, and all your resources, and you give him your time. and He will give you sweet assurance. You give Him yourself and He will prove Himself to you based on what Christ has done for you and based upon that alone.