Hebrews, and look at our text for today. We're in Hebrews 11. And Hebrews 11, of course, is the faith chapter, sometimes it's called. It presents to us the lives of those who had faith. And it shows us the benefits that come from faith, through faith, by faith, they have this and this and this and this and this. It keeps listing off various things and giving people as kind of model examples where those particular benefits especially stand out. So it gives us real life examples, in other words, from the Old Testament about what it is to have saving faith. The first one that we saw was Abel. And with him, we saw that by faith, we are made righteous in God's sight. We're not righteous in ourselves, and yet he was approved of God, Cain wasn't, because he had faith, because he looked to God to make him righteous, is what that means. You look to God for the forgiveness of sins, to take care of that, to justify you, to make you right in his sight. You trust God, and you're made righteous. Abel's an example. Next there is Enoch. With him we saw how faith gave us hope of eternal glory. Enoch walked with God and then he was taken, he was not, and he was exalted to glory. All who believe will be raised to immortality. It's not happened to us yet, but when Jesus comes back the last day, even the people who have already died, they don't have yet their resurrected bodies. Those bodies they had are still in a grave, rotting away, but they're going to be raised up, and they're going to be made immortal, and we'll all be made immortal. And Enoch is a testimony all the way back from the ancient world that that's what God is going to do. Then there was Noah. And with him, we saw how faith responds to God's warnings and escapes condemnation that would come if those warnings were ignored. OK, so faith believes what God says when he says, I'm going to send a flood. Then it says, oh, God's going to send a flood, it believes, and then it goes and acts. God says, build an ark and you'll be saved. It builds an ark. So that's what faith does. It does what God calls for. Today we come to Abraham where we'll see how faith obeys God's call. This is actually the first of three parts that we're going to look at, divided into three parts, could have been four, kind of we're doing two today really, but three sermons that we'll look at about the faith of Abraham. He has a large place in the book of Hebrews because he is the preeminent example of what it is to believe God and to trust God and be made righteous and go forth in serving him. And here we have the initial call when God comes to him and says, Abraham, be mine. Basically, come and receive my blessing and my salvation. Be mine forever. And Abraham, by faith, obeys the call. We're told that it was by faith. So the passage is Hebrews chapter 11, verse 8 through 10. So listen attentively as I read it to you, remembering that when we hear God's word. It is not the word of man, it is God's word. So we can trust what is said here. Hebrews 11.8, By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country. dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise, for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Thanks be to God for his precious word. Oh, Lord, add your blessing. to your word. We thank you that you have given it to us and we pray that you would help us to receive it with faith and love, to lay it up in our hearts and to practice it in our lives for it is your word. In Jesus name. Amen. Now, as I mentioned, there's three different aspects of the benefits of faith that are mentioned to Abraham regarding Abraham, as I've divided it. So Abraham was a man of great faith. That's a shining example to all of us. But don't miss the main point. about all of these men that are examples of faith. The reason that they are great men of faith is because of faith. Faith trusts God to do what we cannot do. And none of them could have been anything apart from the grace and working of God. It was by faith, by trusting in God to enable that they were able to do these things. So we need to remember that always as we look at these, we can start looking at people as heroes and say, oh, look at that. We need to say, look at what God did in these people. Look at how he worked in their lives. That's one of the things that you see with Abraham. If you read his life, you see that, you know, his faith isn't nearly as strong when he first starts out. It's marvelous faith. What we're looking at today, the beginning of his faith. It's marvelous. It gets stronger and stronger because he is trusting God and God is at work in him. Abraham would not have been able, if he'd had a son right away and God said, OK, go offer him up. He would have said no. What are you talking about? But at the end of his life. He was able to do that and see God working in him as he grows. He's no different than anyone else. He had to have the grace of God. So it's far better to have God to make your name great than to try to make your own name great. This is what's promised to Abraham here is sort of a reflection of what had happened at Babel. Because at Babel, it said the people came together and they tried to make a great name for themselves. Not a good idea. The world does that all the time. And then God comes to Abraham and he says, Abram, I will make your name great. I will bless you. I will make you secure. And that security, that's where we need to go. Something we need to remember with all of these men, again, the whole point. is that it's depending on God instead of on ourselves, on our own resources. So much pride in the world. The three examples about Abraham's faith pertain to different times in his life. And as I say, this begins with his calling, the beginning, when God first appeared to him. So that's what we're looking at today, the initial call and how faith obeyed that call. And we're going to look at how that obedience prevailed as well. That's kind of a second thing that we could I said it could be divided into two. So the initial call in our lives is a call to turn from our sin, leaving our old life behind and entrust our lives to God that we might henceforth live under his promise, salvation and blessing to come to God, to live under his blessing. That's what Abraham did. That's the first thing. By faith, Abraham obeyed God's call. You can see that in verse 8. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. Some versions say afterward receive, stressing that. He went out not knowing where he was going. It's a tremendous thing for the living and holy God to come and call a sinner to himself. This is what happened here to Abram, or his name was later changed, of course, to Abraham. God called him when he was a sinner, living in the beautiful city of Ur. Ur was a city that excelled in culture and prosperity in the ancient world. We are told that they even had running water and possibly flush toilets. Kind of amazing in the ancient world. But we're told, like many of the people in that place, that Abraham worshiped idols. The Jews say that his father was actually a manufacturer of idols. We don't know for sure that that's true, but it could well be true. Yet it was while living there, you see, in that place that God called him to come out from that. When Stephen mentions Abram's call, it's recorded in Acts 7, he says, the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia. The Jews say that when Abram was converted, he destroyed all the idols in his father's shop. Now some of you have heard this before, but he left one idol standing. And then his father came with anger and said, who destroyed all of my idols? Abram pointed at the idol that was standing, and his father said, that idol can do nothing. Abram said, that's the point. These idols can do nothing. Gotcha. Whether that story is true or not, when God called him, as Stephen says, he appeared to him as the God of glory. In other words, God revealed himself to Abram as He is, as God is, in His glorious majesty. He saw something of the majesty of God, not like the idols. He saw something of the holiness and power of God, or the grace of God, the wisdom of God, the kindness of God. He saw also the wrath and judgment of God, that he did not tolerate sin. He saw his mercy and his justice, that he was one who forgave sin, but also dealt justly. We could go on. Part of the way of that revelation of Himself was through His promise that He made to Abraham. One of the principal ways that God reveals Himself to us is through the promise of salvation that He makes to us, that He's going to save sinners and carrying out that promise. We learn of God so much about Him. His grace, His holiness, His justice, His mercy, all of these things. We read about in Genesis chapter 12, one through three. We read about it earlier. Now, the Lord has said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you. and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. He's going to bless a sinner. That's what God does when he blesses us. And that is a remarkable thing that our God, who is holy and righteous, blesses sinners. How could he even bless us? Because he's wise, because he's powerful. I will bless those also, he says, who who bless you and I will curse him who curses you and you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. This salvation is going to spread to all the nations, the families that were now scattered about in the earth after Babel. Nothing reveals God's glory so wonderfully as the gospel that promises to bless sinners who are unworthy. This is where faith comes into the picture. When a sinner learns about God, when God is revealed to him and he sees who he is, and the gospel that this God saves sinners by his grace is revealed, then God, that God calls people to come to receive that blessing. Abraham believed what God revealed to him. He believed what God had said. He could never be the same. From then on, he had communion with God. He had the forgiveness of sins and a new life by the Holy Spirit. With the everlasting God, he now lived. He saw that the God of glory had promised to bless him. For this great God to bless him meant everything to him. It's everything. What do you have if you don't have that? Nothing worthwhile. A blessing from the true eternal God meant to mean nothing less than eternal life. The people that God blesses, they're not dead. Now, they might be dead now in the grave, but he's promised that he's going to bless them. They won't be dead. They're going to be raised up. And even now, their spirit is alive with God. But at the last day, their bodies are going to be complete. The blessing is going to be complete. God doesn't do the God we're talking about that Abraham saw and heard of when he called him. He's not a God that uses half measures. He doesn't do things halfway. If that God says, I'll bless you, then it means everything. Look at the rest of what it says then here about this, he says. First of all, I want to say that it is this way with you who believe. Once you saw God graciously revealed as one promising to bless you, you had to have him as your God. You had to have his salvation. You must have his blessing. Nothing else mattered. If you believe that message, that this God was going to bless you a sinner instead of condemning you, then you have to have that blessing. You have to have him. Nothing else is acceptable to set your heart upon. By his grace and saving power, you know that you come back to that even in times when you drift away. You know, you drift away sometimes and lose sight of God, but you come back to it because it's so important. It's dominant in your life. This is where faith then brings about obedience to the call. Our text says, how did Abraham obey? By faith, Abraham obeyed. It was because he believed that he obeyed. He wouldn't have obeyed if he hadn't believed. He wouldn't have left everything and gone out to serve God. He could not do otherwise, you see, because he had seen who God is, as we said. He had seen the promise of salvation through faith. By God's grace, this faith is now in him. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot utterly fail, even when it's weakened and assaulted in all sorts of different ways. It always revives and says, I will go to my God. I will go on with God. Faith always brings about obedience to the call. We're told plainly in God's Word that if it does not, then it's not true faith. James says that faith without works is dead. It's not that works save us. Faith is what saves us. We trust in God. But when there is faith, it's gonna bring about always obedience to God's call. It's gonna bring about faithfulness. Paul asked how we who died to sin through Jesus Christ can live any longer in it. We cannot. We cannot go on that way. We are a new creation in Christ Jesus. In the life that we now live, we live by faith in the Son of God. who loved us and gave Himself for us. God's call then is to do what? Is to leave all and to follow Him. To leave the old idolatrous ways and to go and follow Him. This is what Abraham did. He was called, verse 8, to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. He had to leave that celebrated, advanced, idolatrous city of Ur, where he had a comfortable life, where he had a family. He had to leave the security and familiarity of his homeland and of his kindred. He had to leave all the pleasantries that were there. Wouldn't have done that if he had not believed. What's more, he did not quite know what God was going to give him. He knew that God was going to bless him. That was all he needed to know. But God did not describe the place that he was going or even tell him at that time exactly where it was. Look at the rest of verse eight. He went out not knowing where he was going. And there was no dissenting here, no questioning. There was no need for weighing out whether this was a good idea or not. Because the God who said, I will bless you, said, go and do this. He is God. He knows what he's doing. He is not one to be questioned when you recognize who he is. He is to be obeyed. When the great God he knew by faith commanded, Abraham obeyed. Furthermore, that great God promised to bless and faith believes that. So he was not insecure about going out with God. He said he's going to bless me if he said it is going to happen. So I'm going to go wherever he calls me to go. If he says to leave this, I'm going to leave this. I'm going to obey whatever he's whatever God says in his word to you. You have commands and things like that come from God. And you don't say, oh, I don't know about. No, God said it. If you have faith, you go ahead and do what He calls you to do in every aspect. You do this when you have faith. You leave father and mother. You leave your property. You leave your own life, your own dreams, all of those things that you had. is an unbeliever. You give yourself entirely to Him and there are no competitors. Did Jesus not say in Luke 9, 23, if anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me? We see this in a very tangible way with Abraham where he was expressly told, we're not all told exactly to do what he did, to go to the land of Canaan, but we're told to do that in a way of leaving all the things that we had our hearts set on, our affections on, that were in place of God, and to go and have God in the place that he belongs as God. So if anyone desires to come after me, Jesus says, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Lose your life for his sake to save it. That's how you find it. He says, for what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world and is himself destroyed or lost? He is God. He appears to you, you must forsake all and follow him. The point is that nothing else trumps God's authority. That's the idea here. Not that we're consistent about this, but I say again, this is what we come back to as our foundation when we have faith. We go back to, I need to follow God, I need to serve God. He calls us back. Faith has obedience in its roots. From henceforth then, you are here for God. Your business is to please God. Your mother wants you to do something that's contrary to what God wants. You do what God wants. That's the idea here. He is the one you give yourself to. God tells you to love your mother. It's not indicating that you should hate her in the sense of despising her and being bitter and rejecting her. It's a sense of hating her in the sense that when she wants you to do something that's contrary to God, You say, no, she says, you hate me. And in a sense, you do. You've chosen God instead of her over her. That's the idea. There's no there's no idols. There's no person. There's no thing that is an idol in your life. You say, I am not my own. I have been bought with a price. You are my Lord and my God. I belong to you now. That's how we are. Like Abraham, you do not know where he will bring you next. You do not know what following him is going to entail. I mean, you know something of it, but you don't know the particulars. The word that's used here is of an experiential knowledge. You don't you don't have a sense of, OK, what is this actually what's going to actually happen? What's going to God going to bring me into? You don't know what it will tell. There may be sickness. There may be poverty. There may be failure in your life, there may be persecution in your life, but you do not know what form it will take that persecution. It might be just someone kind of ostracizing you. It might be someone giving you to the lions. You don't know. You are the bride of Christ and you will have him as your Lord from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, you will have Him until glory. You don't look and say, like Pliable did in Pilgrim's Progress, this isn't going like I thought it would. I'm out of here now. I'm done with this. No, faith goes on with God. And then we eventually will get to glory where there will be no more sorrow, no more death, no more sorrow, nor crying, There shall be no more pain, for the former things will have passed away." Just as the Lord told Abraham to go to the land, so He called you to go where? Where does He call all Christians to go? To go into His church. You don't know what life in the church will look like either. You don't know what life as a whole, you don't know what it's going to look like in the church. There may be sweet fellowship, as there ought to be. There may be brotherly concord. There may be peace and support, encouragement, sound preaching. There may be unity in the brotherhoods, but there may also be division. painful division. There may be slander, there may be abuse and hypocrisy and discouragement. You don't know any more than Abraham knew what it was going to be like with his family and the earth. What about Jacob and his sons? They were all quarreling with each other. They tried to get rid of Joseph. There were all kinds of things that went on. You didn't know all those things were going to happen. That can happen. in the assembly, the people that are called out to God. But whatever that may be, you know that the Lord has called you to live as a vital part of the congregation of His people, to love them and to serve them and to pray for them and to work with them, to submit to the elders and to learn from them, to support the church and to seek its peace, purity and prosperity. Going to a faithful church may also mean rejection by the world. Even by people you love. Jesus told you so. That's what the Hebrew Christians that Hebrews is written to were facing. That was the thing that was really in their life. They were ostracized because they were following Jesus. And the Jews kicked them out of the synagogue. They did all kinds of things. They wouldn't let them work sometimes for them. They were outcasts. So Jesus told them it would be like that. God has spoken, though. So this is what they did. They came out and they associated with the people of God. They left their people and they came out at God's call. And that's what you do there. You will worship there. You will associate there. You will serve those who call upon his name with them. You will rejoice and with them you will weep until Jesus Christ comes and brings us to glory. God must be served before the promised blessing has been received. You hear that? He must be served before the promised blessing is received. It is not yet in this life that we receive the full blessing of God. If it was, God would be ashamed. of giving us nothing more than what we have here. That may sound almost blasphemous, but this is what the scriptures teach us. We're going to see that later on in Hebrew. So he must be served before the promised blessing is received. Yes, now we have all kinds of things. We have justification with the forgiveness of sin, acceptance in Christ. We have communion with God, fellowship with him. We have The new birth by His Spirit. We have communion with the saints. We have new life and hope. We have adoption. We have sanctification. We have assurance of God's love. We have peace of conscience and with our sins forgiven. We have all kinds of blessings. But we do not yet have the full blessing that God has promised, and you need to know that. I was talking to someone when we were traveling, and they said, you know, when I became a Christian, I wish someone had told me that there were going to be troubles and difficulties, because I didn't know that. I was just told about how wonderful it would be. And that's not the reality. That's not what we're called to. With Abraham, we see how faith enabled him to dwell in the land before he received the blessed inheritance that God has promised. It says that he lived there as a foreigner. Look at verse nine. By faith, he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country. So he wasn't owning it. He was like a foreigner, dwelling in tents. He was a nomad. With Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him are the same promise. He faced all kinds of troubles, too. When he first got there, I mean, he just got there, and there was a famine, you know, right away. We read that in Genesis 12. And so he went down to Egypt to escape. He might have said, Where's the blessing I was promised? This is the land you've given me? A place of famine? I don't even have any possessions here? What is this? But he didn't. Now, I'm not sure that he should have gone down to Egypt. I don't think, it was probably necessarily he didn't consult with God about that. But he continued to believe what God had promised, and he came back to the land, you see. After that, he had a quarrel with his nephew Lot. Why? because it was actually his servants and lots of servants that were looking after the animals and everything, because they didn't have room. They didn't have room to live in the land, because there were so many people in the land, and they were just kind of there as nomads, like they didn't have their own property, and they're going around and trying to find a place to graze their flocks and things like that, and they didn't have room. And so they had to divide. Abraham said, I thought this was the land that you're giving me. I don't even have enough room here to live with my nephew. I used to live with all of my family when I was back in Ur. He was a wealthy man. So he and Lot had to divide. And as for this ownership, Abraham was there with his son and his grandson, even, for three generations. He lived a long time. And he didn't gain any property there, except that whole time, except for a burial ground that he bought to bury his dead. Stephen summarizes this in Acts 7, 5-7. He says, and God gave him no inheritance in it. He gave him no inheritance in it, not even to set his foot on. But even when Abraham had no child, he promised to give it to him for a possession and to his descendants after him. So before he had a child, he said, I'm going to give all this to you. And he didn't even have any of it yet. But God spoke in this way that his descendants would dwell in a foreign land. Later, God told him this and that they would bring them into bondage, the foreigners and oppress them 400 years and the nation to whom they will be in bondage. I will judge, said God. And after that, they shall come out and serve me in this place. Now, I ask you a question. What kind of inheritance is that for Abraham? How would you like to be told that you had a rich uncle that died or whatever, and he's given you this huge inheritance? But you can't have any of it. Now, you've got a title to it that's going to be good after your son, your grandson, 400 years. And then the people that your children, children, children, children, children are going to be able to have that. Yeah, okay. What is that to me? You see, this is basically what Abraham was given. What kind of an inheritance? A stranger and foreigner for the rest of his life. And here he was having left her with all of the blessings and and privileges that were there in the culture that was there. He was out wandering around like a nomad. What kind of inheritance? Where's the blessing? Where is the glory that God promised? Now, you see, this is where false teachers go so wrong with what we call the prosperity gospel. They say you have everything now, Christian. No, you do not have everything now. You have all those blessings I talked about. You have justification, sanctification, adoption, assurance of God's love, all of those things. But you do not yet have the inheritance that God has promised. So what about us? We have come to Jesus Christ. He has promised glory to us and we have continued in his church. But what do we have? What do you have? Just this week, our dear brother, who is able to be among us for a while today, he had to go to the emergency room multiple times, even by ambulance. He has ongoing debilitating illness that he has had for years. Many others among us are dealing with chronic illnesses that plague us day after day, year after year. Some couples have been unable to bring forth children. Some of you have had ongoing problems in your family. Relatives that you pray for that don't come to Christ and that are very difficult to deal with and that you maybe have to disassociate with. Some of you have lost loved ones, either to the devil or to death. Some are struggling financially with setbacks, loss of job, difficulties with work. Maybe you are a new believer who is being persecuted by your old friends and your family, people that you love. Perhaps you are lonely and you don't see that ever ending. You don't see an end in sight. Maybe you lack social skills or talents or things like that. And you say, God, what's wrong with me? Maybe you lack skills. Perhaps you are physically unattractive or maybe people just don't seem to like you and you're not really sure why. And it's hard and it's difficult. You came to God because he said, I'll bless you. And you believed him. And this is what you have now. And then there are the spiritual struggles. We all struggle with ongoing sin. You set out to lay down your life for your spouse, but then you fail again. Anger breaks out. Bitterness nests in you. Selfishness, impatience when you were saying, I'm not going to be selfish like that. And then again, you pray and then still you struggle. You want to be more diligent in serving others. You start out and then you get sick and it slows you down and then you try to go back and then something else happens. And you're like, God, why don't you help me? Maybe you're struggling with lust, maybe addiction. But then but and you pray and you fight. And it keeps coming back. Maybe God has exposed some sin in your life that was there for years and years. Why didn't He show me? I didn't even see it. And now it's so ugly to you. And you're ashamed and embarrassed for all these years. Perhaps you find that you don't love the Lord very much, and you have little zeal for Him. You try to pray, and you just kind of get distracted. And you try to read His Word, and you can't even think about what you're reading. And it goes on and on and on. And you pray, and you cry out, but then a lot of the time you just fall asleep when you try to pray. Maybe you lack assurance of faith. Or you continually struggle with doubts about God's promises. Maybe your efforts at ministry and at evangelism have not been fruitful. You've prayed for people, you've reached out to them, and no one really wants to hear the gospel. No one really responds. Where is the blessing that God promised? Brothers and sisters, We need to pray for God to bless us. It's not like we should be indifferent about those things, especially the spiritual struggles. We need to pray and cry out to God for Him to bless us now. God's people always did that in the church. The prophets would cry out to God and say, Lord, send forth Your Spirit, come down among us with power, and show Your mighty hand, revive us, bring us back. We need to be concerned and pray about it, but we also need to realize that God has not defaulted on his promise because he didn't say he said, I will bless you, but he didn't say, I'll bless you immediately in this life. And Abraham found that to be the case. The blessed inheritance is yet to come. It is yet to be fully given. Abraham believed this. Verse 10 explains why he was content to live as a sojourner in the land of promise without so much as a place to put his foot. It was because he, or any ownership. He waited for the city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God. He waited because he knew that God was not a God who made empty promises. He believed that God would establish a glorious city for him and his people. He was able to keep on obeying because he believed God and the promise of God. He believed that it would be a city with foundations that could never be destroyed. He believed that it would be built and made by God himself, a city like no other. Now that sounds like what has been described in Hebrews, doesn't it? What we've been studying in Hebrews all this time. A temple that Jesus entered as priest and king. What was significant about that temple? It was a temple that was not made by human hands. but one that was eternally established by God in heaven. And Jesus is there at God's right hand as our priest, ever living to make intercession for us. He has already come as a part of that eternal glory, and he is already there. And he's going to bring us from here to there, to the presence of God. This is a house of God that Jesus entered. and that he has secured as an inheritance for himself and the bride that he has called and redeemed in the world, all of his people who are called by his name. Whatever God provided now for the gathering and maintaining of his people in the world, was fine for Abraham as far as whatever he had provided now went. But he knew that it was nothing in comparison with the eternal city that God had prepared and had promised to his people. The secret of Abraham's patience was his certainty that what God had promised would be fully fulfilled. If there had been no resurrection like the Apostle Paul, Abraham would have been of all men most miserable because of what he left and what he had in this world when he left what he had in this world was far less than what he had before in the world since. Abraham knew now that he was with God and that glory waited. Christian take heart. This glorious city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God, has been more fully revealed to you now than it ever was revealed to Abraham. It was just the beginnings of seeing a glorious God saying, I'll bless you. That's about all he had when he first went out. And he knew, OK, this God I met and revealed himself to, he said he was going to bless me. I don't see what I'm expecting, but there's it's going to come. It's going to come. It's going to come. I know that there's more here. He knew that what God had given him was not all that God had promised. You have even more reason to know of the glory to come because God had told you specifically that the glory is yet to come. He's revealed that all over the place. We have it all through the New Testament. We don't look at the things that are seen, but the things are not seen. The things that are seen are temporal, but the things are not seen eternal. Jesus told us that we would suffer much tribulation in this world, but to be of good cheer because he had overcome the world and that he was going to come for us and bring us to glory at the end. He has gone there himself and he's going to take us there. Not only that, but now Jesus himself has been revealed. And him, we see that glorious son, that glorious prince of that city, our husband, the one that we're going to live with there forever and ever. We've already had a taste of who he is and what he's like and what he does, what he did for us on the cross as is our husband, in order that he might have us as his bride going to the cross to pay the penalty of our sins that we might have an inheritance with him that we might have forgiveness. We have seen him, though clothed with humility, radiating the glory of God, the glory of God manifested in the face of Jesus Christ when he was among us. When you know him as your savior, you yearn for the city of which he is Lord and master. You want to be there because of him. Abraham longed to see What you have already seen, he longed to see the prince of glory who came into the world 2000 years ago. We have seen him and we have more to look forward to. Do not grow weary then with your present situation in life. Do you have great sorrows? Do you have great losses here? They are all to prepare you for the glory that's to come. Are you disappointed with what you have now? Lift up your heart to the Lord. I mean that. Lift up your heart to the Lord. I mean that. Whatever you're struggling with. Lift up your heart to the Lord, look to him, see what kind of God he is, who said so simply. I will bless you. That's what he said, I will give you an inheritance and you shall be a blessing. When he says that, it means a God-proportioned eternal blessing. It doesn't mean something like we have now. It means far more than that. This is what he has prepared for all of his people who trust in him. Will you have a place in that glorious city? You have two options. If you rely on yourself to attain glory like the people at Babel did, you will be disappointed. You will be frustrated. You will never have this glory. If you rely on God who says, come to me and I will bless you. Trust in me for the forgiveness of your sins. My son that I sent to you, if you trust in him, then you will have this blessing. All you have to do, you have to depend on him. You don't depend on yourself. That's the whole point. You can't. You depend on him. You give yourself into his hands and he is the one who brings the blessing. That's all. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved by faith. You will then be able to obey God's call because you believe and he will keep you and guide you and you will receive his promised blessing at last. You will immediately be reconciled with God. and afterward you will be brought to glory. Please stand and let's call on the name of our God. Our most merciful and gracious Father in heaven. how we praise you for what you have revealed to us, even through your servant Abraham, whom you called. We thank you that you've told us all about his calling. You've told us how that he left the city where he lived in order to obey your call, in order to go out with God. That was the point. He was going to a city whose builder and maker was God, eternal in the heavens. He did not want the cities of this world. They were not important to him. He wanted the city that you are preparing for your people. And he waited patiently for that city. He did not get it right away. He did not get it in his whole life. He did not even get the even the typical ceremonies, the typical city, the city that was just a picture and a type that was in the Old Testament. He didn't even get that in his whole life. But we thank you that he trusted you and that he continued to follow you with greater and greater confidence and zeal. And we see how you worked in his life. We're going to see more about that in the days to come. We know, Lord, that you will do the same in the lives of each of your people. Oh, Father, we give ourselves then to you. We trust you, O Lord. Bless. Bless your people here, Lord, bless those who are suffering, who are having difficulties and struggles in this world. Oh, Father, bless them and help them to lift up their heart to you, O Lord. to look to you and to see that that you are faithful who promised. Oh, Father, it stretches our faith to have these difficulties. And so often we're we're beat down by them and we we we go into despair and disheartened. We're disheartened. But we thank you that the seed of faith remains in us, that it is preserved and it comes back again and it revives and it rekindles that you do not quench the smoking flax. O Lord, You do not break the bruised reed. We praise You that You are a God of compassion and mercies, that Jesus Christ knows what it is to be pummeled in this world. He knows what it is even to be forsaken by You, as He was when He bore our sins on the cross. He knows all about these things. He knows what it is to be hungry. He knows what it is to struggle with rejection, and even His disciples forsaking Him. We see that He is the one who is able to come to us with compassion and to understand whatever we suffer, whatever we struggle, and that He meets us here with His promise. I will bless you. I will make your name great. I will make you a blessing. We pray, O Lord, that it will be so. We know it will be so. And we thank you and we praise you in the name of our risen Savior, Jesus. Amen. Please be seated. Let's prepare to come to the Lord's table. So the benediction, the blessing today is a longer one. And there's always the risk that you lose focus when there's a long one like that. But the reason I have chosen it is because it talks about that right now, at this time, that God would bless us so that we would know the inheritance that's laid out for us. So we wouldn't confuse it and think that we have it now. that we would realize that, yeah, we have the beginnings, glorious beginnings of it, but we're looking for the glory that Christ has prepared for us that is far beyond what we can ask or think. So receive this blessing. May God give to you this blessing. Now may the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling. What are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints? And what is the everlasting greatness of his power toward us who believe? According to the working of his mighty power, which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. His grace be with you all, amen.