Renew Your Mind

Why should we be interested in what happened to Abraham thousands of years ago? It might not even have actually happened, of course- does that make it even more irrelevant?  If we do believe it matters, it is still so hard to make the leap from the life of a middle eastern nomad to our own comfortable, settled lives today. Just because God called Abraham to a life as a traveller doesn't mean He still calls His people to travel today, does it? In Deuteronomy, we read an early creed. God's people came before God in worship with these words: " A wandering Aramean was my ancestor..." Deuteronomy 26:5 Their story begins with   the travels of Abraham, and somehow the fact that he was a traveller is significant. Maybe it mattered because the people who heard this were still on a journey, out of Egypt. And maybe that's why it continues to matter. Even if we are not on a physical journey from one place to another, we often use the metaphor of travel to make sense of...

Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar.  He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. T hen she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there, she   began to sob. God heard the boy crying,  and the angel of God  called to Hagar from heaven  and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid;  God has heard the boy crying as he lies there.   Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation. ”  Then God opened her eyes  and she saw a well of water.  So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.  God was with the boy  as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer.   While ...

The whole life of faith involves tension- between now and not yet, between promise and reality, between travelling and arriving. The writer of Hebrews explores this tension through Abraham's experience: 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.   By faith he made his home in the promised land  like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents,  as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.   For he was looking forward to the city  with foundations,  whose builder and architect is God  Hebrews 11:8-10 Abraham was called to be a traveller, and we have asked whether this is significant- does God require that as His followers, we have a nomadic mindset, not requiring physical, geographical or social roots but rather finding our security in Him? But here in these verses we see that Abraham travelled w...