The Call Out of Comfort

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Genesis 12:1 ESV)

Abraham leaves the world he knows and steps out into the unknown. Genesis tells us that God tells Abraham to “Go!” Later, when Joshua recounts this journey we hear that God took Abraham out of the land.

And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac.
(Joshua 24:2-3 ESV)

God calls Abraham. God takes Abraham. Both happen at the same time. This suggests the call of Abraham may have been more dramatic than a simple invitation. The call of God is often cloaked in crisis, dissolution, and collapse of all our comfort places.
Sometimes our Lord stands at the door and knocks. Sometimes he comes like a thief in the night. When you hear someone say that the Holy Spirit is a gentleman never forget that this gentleman is a wind and a fire that may blow your house down and immerse you in His living flames.

We may sometimes speaks of spiritual formation as a series of disciplines like prayer, Bible study, fasting and the like. These are helpful and certainly patterns that we see in Scripture. But let us never assume spirituality is trapped within our scope or definitions. All of life bleeds into one.

Our spiritual life is our family life is our business life is our personal journey of “self discovery.” God is no respecter of the categories we create and use to control our lives. He breaks in anywhere and everywhere with His burning fury.

Consider Father Abraham.

Abraham comes from Ur, the wealthiest city-state in the world. The residents of this world seem safer than those who live at the edge of existence. These civilized people have structures of support that assure their daily bread, their security, their self image.

Abraham is called to leave this behind.

He is taken out of this land, this culture, this world. He is called to live in the land of the people who live at the edge of existence. He leaves behind the world that guards his identity, his control over life, his survival. He is sent to a land that his offspring will inherit.

Much of his life is spent waiting and waiting and waiting for the promised offspring. He never owns the promised land and dies with only a burial cave to him name.

Abraham’s journey into nowhere is way of rescue for a world that is collapsing. Ur is dying. Unlike Sodom, it’s not being bombarded by fire from heaven, but it’s dying nonetheless. Before we even learn that the Lord calls Abraham out of the land of his fathers, we find out that his wife Sarah is barren. In some ways her, barrenness represents the end of the culture. Ur still appears to be thriving, but it is fading and eventually fades away completely.

Ur is trapped by cyclical thinking. As a past-oriented culture, they believe they are re-enacting some type of drama in the heavens. Ever person simply plays the role in culture they are supposed to play just like their father and his father before him. Abraham breaks the cycle. He leaves.

The businesses, cultures, and systems that seem so secure and successful have no enduring quality. Our spiritual journey is often the story of stripping away of supports that seem firm but ultimate have no enduring quality.

We really are on journey, traveling across a wilderness. Look around. What seems permanent is temporary and fleeting. Whether you’re surrounded by the comforts of life or struggling to survive, remember that you are on journey. You are moving.

The struggles and the successes are temporary signposts.

God is calling you. God is taking you.

He is leading us from faith to faith. He is leading us from love to love. Though the way seems clouded and unclear at times know that He is leading, He is guiding, He is sustaining.

to be continued.

(My friend David Legg ends his writings with the subscript “to be continued.” There is always more to say but it may not be the time to say and we may not even be the persons to say it. )