Thankfulness Is a Proper Response

I find it sad when people, not just politicians, when people say that they are thinking of other people or that they are remembering other people. And I think that just shows a lack of an outlet. A lack of an outlet. If we say Australia's lucky, there's a lack of outlet for thankfulness, for being truly thankful for anything because we can't direct it to someone to be thankful for. Thankfulness comes from an overflowing heart, doesn't it?

It comes from an overflowing bubbling heart and if you don't have that overflowing to go anywhere, I find that as truly being something that we miss out on. This morning, we're going to be looking at the story of a man who was very lucky in earthly terms. But this man knew where to direct his thankfulness to. He knew he was blessed. His name is Abraham.

You may have heard of him. And this morning, we're going to turn to chapter 12, the very beginning of this man's story or at least the story that we have recorded in scripture. So we're going to look at Genesis chapter 12, and we're going to read along from Genesis 12 verse one through to verse nine. Genesis 12 verses one to nine. The story begins very abruptly.

The Lord said to Abram, leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse. And all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

So Abram left as the Lord had told him and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all the possessions they had accumulated, and the people that they had acquired in Haran. And they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. Abram travelled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem.

At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your offspring I will give this land. So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.

Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. So far, so far our reading. The story we read begins very abruptly. This is the beginning of the story of Abram. It begins with the words, the Lord said to Abram, go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you.

Imagine that. All of a sudden, God tells you to pack up and leave. It comes out of the blue, this command. It's a command to leave and to go. To leave and to go to a land that God will show him.

Doesn't make any mention of the identity of the land. Doesn't give a picture or a postcard view of the greenness or the lushness, no explanation is given to Abraham at all in the first place. God's divine command says, go, leave. And Abraham is called to an abrupt, shocking shift in his life. One day, he's sitting on a back veranda with a cold beer in his hand, checking out his beautiful plot of land, the many cattle and sheep that he had.

Then God says, you need to get up and get moving. There's no easing into it. There's no cooling off period. It was pack your stuff and go. Wouldn't it be an easy thing for Abraham to do?

The writer of Genesis, in fact, never really goes into the emotional side, and you kind of wish that it would just give a glimpse of the turmoil of Abraham because then we'd feel a little bit better reading the story. Because I don't know if I would have gone that quietly. We never talk about the internal struggle in Abraham's mind, but we can be fairly sure that this wasn't an easy command to follow. Abraham had a lot of things going for him in this place called Ur. The Ur of the Chaldeans would later become Babylon, the one of the great early empires of human history.

There would have been a lot of economical financial reasons for him to have stayed in this place. Canaan, on the other hand, was a place filled with barbarians. It was dusty. It was uncultured. It was uncultivated.

So moving from, I don't know, Brisbane to Miles, Chinchilla. No. I won't say that about Chinchilla. Abraham is also a member of an intimate family structure. He's got a big family there.

And family means a lot in those times. Family was your security. Family was your pension. Family was security and your power. And so Abraham doesn't migrate to Canaan or isn't called to migrate to Canaan in search of a nice, comfortable home.

But he's called to leave his safe home, his safe family, his pension, his security in exchange for a very unsettled life in a very uncultivated land of Canaan. Abraham, Abram, leave your country, says God. But it's not just your country, but your people that you are to leave. Your family, your rugby, and your barbecue culture, you have to leave. The boxing day test culture of your people, you have to leave.

Leave them. But not only that, leave your father's household. Leave your family behind. Your favourite uncle. Your favourite niece.

Say your goodbyes and go to the land I will show you. You get an impression of just the amazing courage that this would have taken. When a man or a woman, a person places their trust in God wholly and solely, God is able to do amazing things with that. You see Abram's response to God's call in verse two and three.

It sets the tone for the rest of Israel's history. Because Israel would now have a special connection with God that no other nation would have. It sets the tone for Israel's history, but also for the rest of scripture because we will see God make these commands of famous men and women of God, the Daniels in the lion's dens, the Jeremiahs in the time of the exile, and so on. And there's no mention of any objection. There's no mention of any hesitation by Abraham.

As the story stands, Abraham completely obeys the word of God. So in verses four and five, the Bible says that Abraham, at the age of 75, packs up all his stuff, takes his nephew Lot who wants to come along, and his wife Sarai, and all the possessions they have and they move to a place called Canaan. A place I've never been to. No internet existed. You couldn't Google Earth this.

And here we see the scope of Abraham's obedience. It's a radical relocation. It's a huge move. I'm doing a move this week and I hate it and it's just across the road from us, potentially, God willing. This is a move of thousands of kilometres.

And it's not just borrowing your mate's for the weekend either. All of Abraham's possessions, including all the people they had acquired in Haran, meaning his slaves, his servants, and all the hired workers, all the shepherds, all the cattle, all the donkeys, all the sheep, they have to move. Everything. There's nothing left for Abraham as a contingency plan. If they move and everything fails, if they move and there's a famine, and all his cattle and all his sheep die out, there's nothing left.

He can't move back. Verses six and nine, we see the result of Abraham's trust in God. We trace his journey from the land of Shechem through to Bethel and then eventually to Negev Desert. Now there's two very interesting things that we need to realise about these places, and they're not just written for, you know, for a little bit of detail or anything like this. This is important stuff for us to know.

And the people that, the Israelites that would have read this would have known exactly what it was. Firstly, we have to notice the order in which these are mentioned because it shows a journey that he travelled. It's from the north to the south. Shechem, Bethel, and then the Negev. And so it corresponds with this journey that he would have made.

If you're looking at the map, Ur of the Chaldeans would have been where modern day Iraq would have been, and they would have travelled down the Mediterranean Sea into what is modern day Israel. And so we see them travel down Shechem, Bethel, and then the Negev right down the south. So it shows us the journey, but it also shows us something even more interesting. That he goes right down to the bottom of the land of Canaan. He doesn't just come to the border and then steps over and then says, okay, I've arrived.

I'll settle down here. It's close enough back home. It's kind of like Perth for the South Africans. He goes and he checks out the entire countryside. God says this is going to be your land, and he says, I'm going to check out my piece of property.

He goes right down to the Negev, to the desert that's kind of separating Canaan and Egypt to the west. And if you read on a little bit later, he pops over the fence to the Egyptians as well and just says, good day. I'm Abraham. I'll be your neighbour. This is a man who believes and who has confidence in the promises of God.

You see Abraham just after Abraham received God's promise, Abraham could have simply moved to Shechem, put up his tent and said mission accomplished, I've arrived. A more timid person would have felt that this is sufficient, this is a place, and it's big enough for me. A man of lesser faith would have thought surely, surely God can't give me the whole of Canaan. But not Abraham. Like a man who's bought a fine piece of land, Abraham inspects his new property from tip to toe, from the north to the south.

And he thinks it's not a bad piece of land. He wasn't shy, was he? Abraham lays claim to the promises of God to make him into a great nation, to give him this bit of land. You see, sometimes we can think, I know. God can't promise me this.

Surely, He can't pull this off. Surely, God can't call me to this position, to this place, in the workforce. Surely, I can't receive all these good things from Him. If God has revealed His will to us and He offers these good things to us, why do we doubt? If He's a God who can do all things, it's only a lack of faith that says, surely not all of this.

Surely, I'll just take a little bit. Abraham lays claim to everything God has promised him. But our passage doesn't end there. While Abraham was travelling the countryside, his countryside, God says to him, to your descendants, I will give this land. To your descendants.

Again, God made that promise and made the call, leave and I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed by you. And now He says, God reaffirms that and says, but I will give this to your descendants. What is Abraham's response? How does he react?

The Bible says that Abraham built an altar for the Lord. He built an altar for the Lord. Throughout the story, the focus is on the activities of Abraham, and we don't really get an insider's view of what's going on inside Abraham's heart until now. Until now. If we read between the lines, we see the heart of Abraham.

Here is a man whose motivation for migrating to Canaan came from a dedication to the Lord. Simply that. God said, go, leave, and Abraham went and left. Abraham didn't lay claim to the land because he was a mighty warlord. He was just a shepherd.

He just had a bit of, he was a farmer. He wasn't a mighty warlord. He didn't inspect the land because he had a large family who would support him in it. Abraham entered the land because of his belief that God would remain faithful to him and the promise God had made. How do we know this?

Abraham builds this altar. Abraham builds two altars in fact. The first one he builds in Shechem as Abraham steps over that line and says, I've arrived. God then said to him, I'm gonna give you all of this. Your descendant is gonna have all of this.

And Abraham said, wow. I am going to remember this. I'm going to remember this. And he builds an altar, a permanent reminder of God's promise. Then he goes to the place called Bethel, where he would live for a while, and after setting up his tent, he went out and built another altar to the Lord.

But this one was different. This one wasn't in response to what God had said. This one came from a heart overflowing with thankfulness. Overflowing with thankfulness. It says, Abraham called upon the name of the Lord.

He built the altar and called upon the name of the Lord. It means that Abraham worshipped God. Abraham was so overcome by the amazing grace that God had shown him, this man from the Chaldeans. He didn't deserve it. He didn't earn it.

We don't have any idea whether Abraham really knew God, Yahweh, at all. He would have been a pagan, in fact, in Babylon. Out of nowhere, God appears to this pagan in His sovereignty and says, I'm going to make a nation out of you. But you have to believe and you have to go. That is grace.

That is sovereign grace. Abraham realised that it was purely because of God's unconditional, unrestrained love that he was sitting in this tent, beautiful spot in Bethel, and he was overcome with thankfulness. He goes out, finds a nice place and builds an altar out of rocks, piles them together, a big one. It's not gonna get blown over by a wind or something like that. There's a message in here for us to remember.

Sometimes we fail to make those, to set those reminders. Sometimes we fail to pause and stop and to say, I am going to thank God for this. I'm going to make a point of remembering this. You see, sometimes we can chalk it up to our own cleverness that we got where we are. Good investments, good planning, good ingenuity, or even luck.

But Abraham didn't. His reaction is to build an altar. His reaction is to say, I'm going to stop and I'm going to thank God for this. And then he calls upon the name of the Lord. He bowed his head.

He got onto his knees and he raised his hands and his head to the sky and worshipped the Lord because of His goodness. Friends, it's a time like this, when we are faced with the overwhelming goodness of God, that we have to stop. It's so easy to come before God in troubled times, but we have to stop and say thank you. It's times like these where we are humbled by a love that can never fully be comprehended. It can never be fully comprehended and all we can say is, wow.

Thank you. As we move through another week, another month full of ups and downs, let's make the time to stop and reflect. To stop and reflect. Make time to think about the good things that the Lord has led you to this year. The new job you started.

The new baby that was born. The profit that you made in your business. Remember not to forget where all these good things came from because there was a promise attached to it. There was a God who was behind it. It wasn't just luck.

As Abraham travelled through the country, he built memorials to remember God's actions. And those memorials remained there for his descendants to see later as well. These things aren't silly old superstitions. They're very important things that humans need to have. We need to be reminded.

Why do we buy souvenirs when we go to Paris or Egypt? Because we need to be reminded. In the same way, we should create reminders of what God has done in our lives. I encourage us to write them down in diaries, if you do that, in journals. To put them in your iPhones.

Put a reminder for next year about what has happened today. Put them in your Outlook calendars. October 27, on this day in 2008, God brought me and my family safely into Australia. 07/16/2002, on this day, God convinced me of His love for me and I gave my heart to Him. Create these reminders.

Build these imaginary stone altars to remember what God has done for you. Thankfulness is a mark of Christianity, and thankfulness is what brings you through the toughest, hardest parts in your life. I guarantee you, I promise you. Being reminded of what God has done will carry you through those times. Even as we speak, you can write a note to yourself.

Sunday, 08/18/2013 on this day, I will remember to remember and I will thank God for it. My family, we have some really great memories in it. What I mean when I say that, I mean, in my family, there are people that have great memories. My brother in particular that I'm living with has got an incredible memory. He can remember the most obscure things and facts.

And my mum, well, she just seems to remember all the bad things I did. But one of the greatest strengths about my family is the fact that we spend time remembering what has happened to us. And we often share that around a dinner table. Every time we come to celebrate Christmas, we think back on some of the Christmases we've had, and we've had some great, very blessed times. You know, away overseas or on Stradbroke Island and just fantastic times.

But we especially and often remember our first Christmas in Australia. It was pretty rough, to say the least. It wasn't fancy, it wasn't glamorous. But that year, we were in a bit of financial strife. And in fact, we had it so tough that year that our presents, our presents for that year was a lunchbox for going to school and a single mango.

A lunchbox, you know, that every kid needs anyway. Thanks, mum. And a mango. And that was it. And needless to say, as a 13 year old boy, I wasn't too enthusiastic about those gifts.

But almost every year since then, in one way or another, the story comes out. It serves to remind us every year about the amazing blessings that God has given us. That how many years, fifteen years later, we can be here and we can thank God for what we are able to have now and to celebrate. It serves to remind us about the amazing blessings God has given us since then. Similarly, for all of us, let's remember what God has done for us.

Remember the promises He has made to you directly, to us as His people, and then give thanks when He fulfils it. Let your heart be overjoyed. Let your thankfulness bubble over in your heart. Allow yourself that. Be faithful.

Be faithful when God directs you into a new territory. Write down those amazing promises. Create those reminders so that you don't miss out on the opportunities to thank God for them. Because He deserves our praise. We are more than lucky. We are blessed.