What am I doing here?
The crucial clarion-call to Abram had come. God's plan was now unfolding - the plan that includes you and me living and working here in the 21st century. Abram was going to be a great nation - the source of blessing to all the peoples on earth.
He had moved away, as God had told him to, left his home and kin and shipped his belongings and his household. But as he moved west he must have begun to wonder where he should stop. The instructions were not that clear-cut. One more time the Lord spoke, telling him that Canaan was the land where he would found a nation. It just happened to be full of other people. So he wandered on down to Egypt, stayed there and then wandered back.
How do we know that we are where we should be, doing what we should be doing? Abram may have looked at his steadily increasing wealth and figured that there was plenty of blessing in that. What more should he do? What more should be happening?
He went to church (built an altar). He prayed (called on the name of the Lord). But the Lord seemed to have told him all he needed to know for the time being. Even Abram, carrying the weight of the enormous promises of God, had to go on living an ordinary life, making ordinary decisions, managing a small business, working at good relations with his neighbours, working out what ordinary obedience meant, but always on the lookout for a new word from the Lord, clarion-call or whisper. Meanwhile he also had to live with on-going disappointment - becoming a great nation in the land of Canaan did depend on his producing children, and yet the barren years went by....
Well, what more is there? We too have to go on living an 'ordinary' life, working out what 'ordinary' obedience means. And we too have to listen for the Lord's clarion-call or whisper as we go.
'By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going' (Hebrews 11:8).
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