Giàu Trong Chúa

Abraham is a model of what it means to be a Christian because he lives on the basis of a call. We’re looking at the life of Abraham in the book of Genesis. Last week we saw Abram was called by God to go to Canaan and wait there for God to bless him. Everybody wants to stick a church or an organization … Everybody wants to put people somewhere in the liberal to conservative spectrum. We have a liberal on this end. You have the left here and the right here and everything in the middle.

Everybody wants so very much to put everything somewhere on there. We want to know where you really stand on things and where you fit. We need to categorize people. At the one end, you might say, of the human culture spectrum, the most traditional societies, the most conservative societies, your identity is fixed by your duty in your social and family role. Many of you are either from those kinds of cultures or your parents were, and you know what I’m talking about.

What makes you a good person is if you fulfill your duty as a father or as a mother or as a husband, as a wife, as a son or a daughter. You’re a good person if you take up your duty and you fulfill it well. So in a sense, duty defines you. Your social role defines you. That’s who you are. At the other end of the spectrum, at the most liberal, at the most secular, at the most individualistic end of the spectrum (in other words, New York City), you define yourself.

You decide who you are. You look at your own desires, and you say, “This is who I am, and this is what I need to do to be happy.” So, you see, at the sort of conservative end, it’s duty that defines you, and your role in the family and the society defines you. At the liberal end of the spectrum, it’s you who defines yourself. You construct your own identity, and you determine who you are.

Where is Christianity in there? Where is the Christian in there? Of course, by the way, the liberals think at the traditional end of the spectrum Christians are these people who have to do all these right things, and they have all these duties. Actually if you want to know the truth, when traditional people really run into Christianity in their society, they think Christians are incredibly liberal.

I mean, you have to realize when the church is itself in a capitalistic, individualistic society it’s prophetically calling people not to live for themselves. But when the church is itself in a totalitarian or a communist or just a dictatorship it’s always calling the government to stop trampling on the individual freedom.

Where is Christianity? People on one end think it’s over there, and people on this end think it’s over there, but it’s not on the spectrum because the Bible says, Christianity says, what defines you is the call of God. God has called you. He has gifted you. He is speaking to you. There’s a call that comes to you.

On the one hand, as we’re going to see, that means you don’t really fit into traditional society. The call of God makes you leave your family, makes you think outside the box of your culture. On the other hand, the call of God means you are not your own. You do not construct your own identity. Where is the call of God as the main factor in your identity, the main thing that shapes your life? Where is that on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum? It’s not there. It’s not on the spectrum. It’s somewhere else.

That’s the reason why the church and Christianity are always seen as dangerous in every culture they’re in. It’s weird. It’s odd. It doesn’t fit. It’s not predictable. That’s why we’re looking at Abraham, because of all the people in the Bible who we know much about … I mean, you have David and Moses and so on. Abraham is the one who the call keeps showing up. Did you see it at the end of this passage?

If you were here last week, you saw the call at the beginning of chapter 12. It’s what brings Abram away from his family, away from his culture, away from his tribe, into Canaan. Now you saw at the very end, that’s the call again that comes in verses 14–17. In fact, in chapters 12 to 25, in the life of Abraham, this call from God comes back to him 12 times.

It’s, in a way, the same call, but it always has something new to it. It always has more detail or more insight, or certain aspects are emphasized. Sometimes the challenge part of the call is emphasized (what he has to do). Sometimes the promise part of the call is emphasized, like here (what God is going to do).

It keeps coming. It’s the thing that distinctively shapes you. Who are you called to be? What are you called to do? It’s multi-faceted, but we’re going to be looking at this each week actually. We can’t get to the bottom of this subject in one sermon or two sermons. That’s why we’re spending several weeks looking at the life of Abraham.

This particular chapter in the life of Abraham tells us about three ambitious men. When we come to understand the ambitions of these three men, we’ll understand the call of God, what it means to live according to the call of God, better. We have the ambition of Lot. We then have the ambition of Abram. Then we have the ambition of somebody else.

1. The ambition of Lot

Verse 5: “Now Lot, who was moving about with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents. But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. And quarreling arose between Abram’s herdsmen and the herdsmen of Lot.”

Lot was Abram’s nephew, and Lot was with Abram. We notice something here, which is when nomadic people get wealthy, their bank accounts don’t get bigger. What happens, of course, is they get more and more livestock. By the way, this is a much less convenient way to get rich, but your livestock, your herds, and your tents grew. You had to hire more people to watch them and so on.

As Abram and Lot began to grow, they came to the place, it says in verse 6, where they came to realize their financial growth had maxed out at the land God called Abram to live on (the arid land of Canaan). The two of them could not both get richer by staying together in the place where God had called Abram to go.

Now Abram gives Lot a choice, and we’re going to get back to the fact that this is a rather remarkable thing Abram does. For the moment, we’re just looking at Lot and what he does. Abram puts a choice before Lot, and he says, “Lot, you can go to the left or the right.” This morning, I was talking to somebody. I was also reading in the commentaries about this. If you actually go to the place where Abram was (to Bethel and Ai), if you go to that part of Canaan, you can see it’s a very arid part of Canaan, but you can actually look right down …

By the way, in about 20 miles, the land drops 3,000 feet down to the plain where the Jordan River comes down into what we now call the Dead Sea. It’s green, and it’s fertile. It’s watered. In fact, it was also irrigated back then. So Lot, we’re told in verse 10, looked up. He lifted up his eyes, the text says literally. “… and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered …” He said, “That’s where I’m going to go,” because it was the only place where he could continue to get richer.

It was the one place where there was really significant possibility of growing his portfolio … significant possibility. When he moved to just outside of Sodom, he stayed barely in the land of Canaan God called Abram to. When he eventually moved into Sodom (which we see in chapters 14 and 15 he did), he has actually technically moved outside of Canaan. What Lot does is he looks, and he says, “Here’s the one place I can go to get wealthy.” That’s what he chooses.

He is an ambitious man. We can see why he is ambitious. Money and financial prosperity are more important to him than two things. First of all, it’s more important to him than sticking with the promise of God. Admittedly, God’s promise looks silly. God says to Abram, “I want you to leave civilization. I want you to leave the possibility of living in really fertile places. I want you to go to this middle-of-nowhere, primitive place called Canaan. I want you to sit there and wait, and I’ll bless you eventually.”

Lot is the last member of his family to go with Abram on this crazy mission. Now he has finally bailed out, because he says, “Look. You know, I was with Abram. I love Uncle Abe. He is a great guy and all this. You know, when it comes right … Listen. Business is business.” He puts financial growth ahead of his relationship to the promise of God. Of course, you see by the quarreling … Ambition has also turned him irritable and his people irritable. He goes, and he says, “No, I’m going to opt for financial growth.”

In itself, is it wrong to want to make money? Is it wrong to want to just grow financially? The answer is it’s not, but verse 10 tells us there’s more going on here. Robert Alter teaches at Berkley, and he is a leading expert (he is maybe the expert) in ancient Hebrew narrative. He is a Jewish scholar. He teaches Hebrew and comparative literature at Berkley. He has written the classic book in the last 30 years on this subject. It’s called The Art of Biblical Narrative. It’s a terrific book. He has written a commentary on Genesis.

What Robert Alter says about verse 10 is very interesting. He says what you have to realize is verse 10 is not a description of the Jordan plain in the voice of the narrator. He says grammatically speaking, when it says Lot lifted up his eyes and he looked, what we’re getting is the way Lot’s heart is interpreting what he sees. It says, “Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered [and here’s the key text], like the garden of the Lord …”

Robert Alter says that is not just a little flourish. That is not just a kind of little rhetorical flourish. The garden of the Lord is the garden of Eden. What the narrator is saying is, when Lot looked, he didn’t just see a way to get rich, a way to make more money. There was something spiritual going on, and he was saying, “Now, finally … It’s like the garden of the Lord.” What’s going on here? Well, let me give you some quick examples.

Remember Chariots of Fire? In Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams becomes a gold medalist eventually. He is a runner, an Olympic runner. He wants to win the 100-yard dash. Somebody is talking to him about it, and he says the reason he is working so hard to win the 100-yard dash is not just to get the gold medal. He says he feels when the gun goes off, “[I have] 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.”

That’s interesting. Let me give you another little example of what we’re talking about here. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times is very grumpy about Bridget Jones’ Diary. She is grumpy about Ally McBeal. She is grumpy about some of the female icons in popular culture in the late 90s.

This is what she says: “After the women’s movement exhausted all of us with the idea that women should be mini-me’s of men … it was refreshing when the pendulum swung back to ruffles.” I think she is talking about Bridget Jones and so on. She says, “The trick now is to lose the desperation but not the femininity.”

What she means is this. She says something like, “We were told we didn’t need men, but then we started to say, ‘Well, maybe we do need men.’ Why is it that Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal, the women who are so popularly depicted in movies and TV and the novels, are so desperate for men? That’s what I can’t stand: being desperate for men.” Then, of course, the implication is, “I’m not desperate for men. I am a mature, modern woman. I don’t really need men. I like men. I don’t really need men.”

If she is not desperate for men, what is she desperate for? Here’s the point. When we say, “The main thing I want is to break the record. The main thing I want is to be married and have a happy family. The main thing I want is to do well financially and be successful in my career,” that’s not true. We’re always after something deeper in all those things. What is it? Well, human beings don’t know who they are. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we’re worth. We don’t know what we’re made for. We have deep spiritual insecurity.

In these pursuits, we’re trying to find those things. That’s the reason why Harold Abrahams says, “I don’t just need the gold medal. I need to know I’m significant, I’m important, my life means something.” When a person says, “My heart’s greatest desire is that a person of the opposite sex will love me and want to marry me,” you’re not just after love. You’re after an assurance that you’re lovable.

All of this, according to Robert Alter, is actually implied in a fascinating way in this text in this verse 10, because the Bible tells us the reason why there’s a desperation. In spite of what Maureen Dowd says, we’re desperate for certain things, maybe not for this. If we say, “I don’t need men. I have a great career,” then you’re desperate for that. You’re desperate for something. Why are we desperate for something?

In the garden of Eden, in the garden of the Lord, we knew who we were. We knew we had value. We knew what we were worth, because in the garden of the Lord, we were walking with God. But we’ve lost that. The human condition is we do not know who we are, we do not know what we’re worth, and we’re trying to get back into the garden.

We’re trying to say, “If I had that … If I was married to him or to her … If I had this kind of career … If I made this kind of money, then my life would be a garden again. Then things would be all right. Then that inner emptiness and that inner desert would be gone.” There’s more going on than money. There’s more going on than our career. There’s more going on than having a child. There’s more going on than being in love. There’s more going on!

Lot, therefore, is actually just doing what we’re all doing. He doesn’t just want to get rich. He set his heart on riches and his hope on riches in such a way that shows us he spiritually turned this into the thing he believed was going to finally complete him, but it won’t. If we could trace out the rest of Lot’s life, we would see why. If you go on (and I’m not going to go on) … In our series, we’re not going to trace Lot out. You can learn about him in chapter 14 and in chapters 18 and 19 of Genesis.

We’re not going to go there, but suffice it to say it’s not that hard to understand that when you get married, saying, “Finally! The garden of the Lord. Now my life will be a garden. Now I’ll know who I am. Now I know I’m lovable …” If you go into marriage that way, if you go into parenting that way, if you go into your career that way, it’s like taking a three-ton truck and putting it onto a one-ton bridge. It’s going to break!

It’s putting three tons of spiritual expectation on a finite thing. It’s going to crack. It does crack. You can even see it here. The quarreling, see? The anger. The grumpiness. The irritation. He is an ambitious man. He has set his heart on riches. He is driven now. He’ll trample on even Uncle Abram and his beings. There will be this irritation. There will be this anger and so forth. Lot has looked spiritually at success and money. He has looked at it, and he says, “Ah. It’s like the garden of the Lord.”

That’s an exaggeration! That’s hyperbolic language, Robert Alter says, but it is spiritually significant, because it not only tells us what we all do with something, but it shows us why we do it: because we’re alienated from the garden. We’re trying to get back into the garden. We’re trying to find a way.

But don’t you see how ridiculous it is? He wants the garden of the Lord without the Lord! How can you have the garden of the Lord without the Lord? How can you have that kind of satisfaction, how can you have that kind of contentment, and how can you have that kind of sense of success without him? You can’t.

2. The ambition of Abram

The ambition of Abram is utterly different. I told you I was going to say something about this. What Abram does here sounds more reasonable to you and more … I mean, it sounds like common sense, but it’s not. Abram lived in an absolutely patriarchal society in which seniority and age were everything. He was the head of the clan. He was the uncle. Lot was just a nephew.

For Abram to sit down in front of Lot and give Lot the choice and give Lot the call is amazing. Here’s why. Abram had three things, and he couldn’t keep them all. He had a relationship to Lot, he had a relationship to God, and he had a relationship to his money. He had financial growth. He realized he couldn’t keep all three. He actually had three choices.

The first choice is Lot and Abram could have gone somewhere together. They could have left Canaan and gone some place where there was sufficient fertility and grazing land that they could have both grown financially. Got that? See, option one was, “Let’s move out of Canaan together. That way we have our relationship with each other intact, our relationship with our money intact … Oh, but of course now we’re not trusting in the promise of God. He told me to stay here.” So that’s one option.

The second option is Abram says, “I am the big guy. I am the honcho. You are the kid. I’m taking the one place in this whole area where you can still grow rich. You take the leftover,” in which case he would have kept his relationship with God technically because he would not have left the land. He would have kept his relationship with his money. Oh, but Lot, of course, would have been deeply alienated. Obviously, he is an ambitious man. He would have been embittered, and the relationship with Lot would have left.

Or he could do what he did, which was to say, “Lot, where do you want to go? If you go there, I’ll go there. If you go there, I’ll go there.” What we have in this case is Abram, knowing what Lot is going to say, of course, knowing his heart … So now Abram has kept his relationship with God and kept a good relationship with Lot, but he has put himself in financial jeopardy. So here’s money, God, family. Money comes third.

The ambition of Abram is to love God with all his heart, soul, and strength, to love his neighbor as himself (in this case, it’s Lot). God, family, money. One, two, three. By the way, this is an amazing decision. First of all, it’s a wise decision. You notice this little reference to Canaanites and Perizzites? Abram is smart enough to realize if he and Lot become alienated from each other, they’re going to die.

Lot, of course, is so ambitious that he is actually doing things (the quarreling and all that) that are really jeopardizing their relationship. They’re surrounded by hostile tribes. If they don’t keep together … We can see this in Genesis 14. It happens in the very next chapter. In the next chapter, Lot and Abram together have to have a military alliance so they survive. Abram realized it was wise to keep a good relationship with Lot and not get alienated.

Secondly, Abram’s decision was not just wise, but it was outside the box. It was culturally subversive. The idea of the older man giving the younger man this kind of choice was just so creative and so unusual and shows such freedom from cultural convention. Most of all, Abram isn’t worried. He is not worried about his money. He is not worried about his financial and his physical support. He is just living a completely unanxious life. He is not scared. He is not afraid.

He is doing the right thing by God, doing the right thing by his family, and leaving it all up to God. Where did he get this kind of poise? Where did he get this kind of wisdom? From the call. Let me tell you two things we learn in Abram’s life here that tell us all about this call. Two more things about the call. The call of God is what? What’s the essence of what it means to be called?

To answer the call of God, does that mean, “Before I was called, I had sex with everybody, and now I’m being sexually controlled”? Does it mean, “Before I heard the call, I just spent all my money on myself, and now I give a lot of money away to the poor and to charity”? Well, I do want you to know that if you become a Christian, you know, things will kind of move along those lines. You ought to know that.

However, that’s by no means the essence of what it means to hear the call of God, not to pick up another book of rules. Hebrews 11, had these little summaries of the lives of a lot of these Old Testament figures. Hebrews 11, says this about what Abram is doing here. This is 11:8–10.

“By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went … By faith he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country … For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Let me tell you what the essence of the call of God is. Here’s what it means to become a Christian, to answer the call of God.

It’s to change your foundations. It’s to change your foundation! “What do you mean? What’s your spiritual foundation?” Well, do you remember the one good Rocky movie? There are only two or three good places in the one good Rocky movie. In one place I liked a lot that has meant a lot to me, Rocky was explaining to his girlfriend why he doesn’t really even want to win. He just wants to go the distance. He just wants to stay on his feet during the boxing match.

He just wants to go the distance. The question is … Why? He said, “Then I’ll know I’m not a bum.” I suggest something to you. Let’s not look down our noses at Rocky. Everybody in this room has something you’re doing that you’re desperate to do or desperate to have so then you’ll know you’re not a bum. Because we’re alienated from the garden, we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we’re worth. We’re not sure our lives mean anything. We’re not sure we’re lovable.

Everybody has something. Whatever it is, there is something you could not face losing. There is some relationship or some event or some activity, something that if you lost it, if it went away, you would say, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know that I have any reason for life. I have no meaning.” That’s your foundation. It could be family. It could be the career. It could be money, like in the case of Lot.

Here’s what the call of God is. The call of God is not just, “Well, you were living like this. Live like this.” The call of God is change your foundations. God is saying to Abram, “Leave. Stop finding your security in all these things. Make my righteousness your wealth. Make my love your identity. Make my approval your joy. Make my will your mission and purpose in life. Make my salvation your story.

Then you’ll be liberated! Then you’re utterly liberated! You won’t need to have this. You won’t need to have this approval. You won’t need to have this status. These things that used to drive you and used to jerk you around, now you can live a big life. Make me your foundation. Change your foundation!”

It’s because his foundation had changed that he has the wisdom to give this choice to Lot, that he has the creativity, the freedom from cultural convention, that his priorities are all straight. It’s all because he has changed his foundation. You say, “Okay. Foundation into God. Right.” But Abram also shows how subtle it is to think you’ve changed your foundation into God, and you haven’t.

Look at the first part of this passage. It’s easy to miss. “From the Negev [Abram] went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar.” There Abram went back, settled in, went back to his altar, and called on the name of the Lord. Do you know what the significance of that is? That is a pilgrimage of repentance.

The last half of chapter 12 we didn’t read for you tells us about a huge failure. If you were here last week, you remember the last time we saw Abram, he had just come to Canaan because of the call of God. God said, “Stay here. I’ll give you this land, and I’ll give you a son.” That was 12:7.

In 12:10, we’re told there was a famine in the land, and Abram immediately … Instead of trusting God to provide for him on the land, Abram immediately rushed down to Egypt. When he got to Egypt (some of you may remember this, but I’ll just be really quick about this to summarize this), he noticed Pharaoh was attracted to Sarai. He said, “Well, she is not really my wife; she is my sister,” and let Sarai go to the Pharaoh’s harem.

Actually in the last part of chapter 12, we see a complete collapse. We see Abram completely failing the call, completely failing to trust the promise of the land, completely failing to trust the promise of the son, giving his wife up to save his own skin. It’s a disaster! What is happening in verses 2–4? The answer is Abram is going right back where he went wrong. He is going back to ground zero. He is going to the very spot where he went astray.

He is going back and starting over, getting back on line. He is repenting. He is retracing his steps place to place, deliberately heading for the spot where he last was obeying. He is going back to it, and he is picking up the path where he lost it, where he left it off. He is repenting. Let me tell you why that’s so incredibly important.

The way you know you have really changed your foundation and now you’re resting in the grace of God … The call is all about the grace of God! The call comes to you, wakes you up. When you become a Christian, because the call has come and awakened you, you realize it was all of grace. The call of God is to change foundations and rest it in the grace of God. The only way you know you’ve really gotten there is by how you handle your own personal failures. That’s the acid test.

By the way, last week we had a Q&A after the service. I told a story to those of you who stayed that is so relevant. I think I even said last week I had never used this story it’s so (I think) traumatic, but I’m going to use it because it so perfectly illustrates what’s going on here. There was a man who was a professing Christian, went to a conservative church, who I knew of. I knew a lot about him, though I didn’t know him personally. He was in the same city I was in.

Years ago, a terrible tragedy happened to him and to his wife. They had three little children, and they were all killed at once in a car accident. All three, just like that. What amazed everyone was how this man responded with such strength and faith. He said, “I believe in God. I know God has a reason for this. My faith in God is not flagging.” The funeral was a remarkable funeral in which he got up and testified how God was supporting him, and he was able to face this with God and so on. Everybody said, “Wow! What a strong Christian faith!”

Some years later, he went to his pastor, white as a sheet, and said, “I have a terrible problem.” The problem he confessed was he was feeling attracted to a woman in the congregation who was not his wife. He hadn’t spoken to her. He hadn’t reached out to her. He never acted upon it. The pastor simply said, “Well, that’s good you haven’t acted on it. You need to repent of it, of course. You need to confess it to God and receive his forgiveness.” But he couldn’t. He couldn’t!

He continued to feel condemned. He continued to feel guilty. He continued to feel like a failure. He got other counseling. He got other counseling. Eventually, they put him into a hospital where he got the best counseling possible. Everybody did everything they could do for him, but he was disconsolate. He was inconsolable. Eventually, he committed suicide.

Here’s a question. How could this man have a faith so strong it could take the death of his three children but it could not take just a lustful feeling he couldn’t shake? What’s going on here? The answer is what was he resting in? What was his foundation? What was the thing that made him know he wasn’t a bum? What was the thing that made him feel like, “This is what makes me significant”? What was the basis?

Here’s what he would have probably said. Do you know what? This is really hard to do. Let’s move away from the man for a minute, because I don’t want to completely say I know everything about his heart. It is possible to say, “My foundation is no longer career. It’s no longer fame. It’s no longer this. It’s Jesus. I’m going to church. I’m sharing my faith. I’m studying the Bible. I am so completely committed to him. My foundation is no longer these other things. My foundation is Christ. My foundation is God.”

It’s possible, if you look carefully, that your foundation is not really in the grace of God. It’s in the purity and the quality and the intensity of your commitment to him. It’s still resting in your performance. It’s still resting on something besides him. It’s possible to think you’ve heard the call and you haven’t, because the call is not a call to become a better person or a more committed person or a more faithful person. It’s a call to rest in the grace of God.

The way you know you’ve really heard the call is not … The acid test is not how you handle suffering, because he was so happy to prove to himself and other people what a strong Christian he was through the suffering. The real acid test that you’ve heard the call of God (as you can see here in Abram) is how you handle your own failure. Can you be forgiven? Can you experience God’s forgiveness? Can you move on, or do you just beat yourself up?

Do you know why? If there is anybody here who you just cannot get past your own failure, you haven’t made the change yet. You haven’t heard the call. You might be a good person. You might be a moral person. You might be a very religious person. You might think you’re a Christian, and maybe you are a Christian, because at this point I’m talking about areas I cannot read. I can’t read a person’s heart, but I can tell you this. You haven’t made the foundational shift God wants you to make.

The call is to give up resting yourself, your foundation, in anything but the utter grace of God, the utter acceptance of God. Because Abram had done that, because of his failure in chapter 12, he makes repentance. As a result, he has deeper liberation than he did before, a greater liberation than he did before!

Do you hear that? Do you see it? That’s why he was able to give this choice to Lot. That’s why he was able to think outside the box. That’s why he was able to make this decision without being anxious. Why? He has given it up. His foundation is something else. That’s why he is living this big life.

We have to ask this one last question. How can God do this? How can he just keep accepting Abram? Look at verse 14. “The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, ‘Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever.’ ”

Now Robert Alter says at the place where Abram was living (between Bethel and Ai), there is an enormously spectacular lookout. It’s high up. From this lookout, you can see everything. Therefore, God has taken Abram up to this high mountain and said, “All that you can see, I will give you. Because you gave it up, I will give it all to you.”

How can he do this? Abram is a failure, and Abram is going to fail again. God certainly knows that. God is never surprised. I mean, the Abram who has failed in chapter 12 is going to fail later on. Yet God is putting him up on a tall mountain, saying, “I will give you all these things.” What’s the matter with God? Does he have no standards? How can he do this? I’ll tell you why. Because there’s a third man whose ambition is pointed to by this text.

3. The ambition of Jesus

Centuries later, the real Son of Abram was also taken up to the top of a high mountain. Somebody said, “All that you can see I’ll give you if you’ll just worship me.” Sounds parallel, isn’t it? Yet when Satan took Jesus to the top of a mountain and said, “All these things I will give you,” here was the great irony.

The things he was offering Jesus were already Jesus’ by rights. Here’s what the temptation was. He says, “I can give you these things without renunciation, without suffering, without going to the cross, without following God’s way. I can give them to you.” Jesus said, “No. I came to lose everything. I came to lose my Father’s face. I came to lose my authority. I came to lose my glory. I came to lose everything.”

Here’s what’s so intriguing about this. God takes Abram up and says, “These things are not yours by right, but I’m going to give them to you.” Satan takes Jesus up and says, “These things are yours by right,” but Jesus refuses them! That’s why. The reason you and I can be taken to the mountaintop along with Abram and God can say, “I will give you all this,” is that Jesus Christ lost it. You can have it because he lost it.

I’ll put it another way. Abram points to Jesus, because Abram let go of his wealth so he could keep his relationship with Lot. Jesus Christ gave up the ultimate wealth so he could have a relationship with us. Second Corinthians 8 is where it says, “… though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

What does that mean? Abram points to a greater one than himself. You’ll never be like Abram only by trying. You’ll only be like Abram if you believe in the one to whom Abram points. He left his ultimate wealth so you could have the ultimate wealth, and only when you know, “Because Jesus died, therefore I have everything I need by the grace of God, the ultimate wealth,” then the way you treat money will be different.

You’re not going to be anxious about it. You can be generous with it! You won’t let it destroy your relationships or your family. You can’t live like Abraham just by trying to live like Abraham. You have to believe in the work of the one to whom Abraham points, the one who went to a high mountain and lost everything he could see so you can be taken up to a high mountain and take everything and gain everything you can see. That’s how you do it. Lift up your eyes.

Are you having trouble dealing with failure? Change your foundations into the grace of God. Are you quarreling with people around you, irritated because people are not respecting you or not letting you …? Change your foundation into the grace of God. Are you having trouble just keeping on going and just enduring? Are you just wearing out? Lift up your eyes and see what you have in Christ. Let’s pray.

Father, we will only have the relationship with you that comes from the call if we remember Jesus Christ heard the ultimate call. He came out of his Father’s house. He came out of his security. He lost his money. He lost his wealth so he could keep us. As Abraham lost his wealth for the love of Lot, though Lot was stupid, your Son lost even greater wealth for the love of us.

We’re all like Lot, trying to find the garden of the Lord without the Lord, but we thank you that you come to us, and you call us, and you save us by your grace. Teach us how to base our lives on your grace. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.