Turn with me in your Bibles tonight
to Genesis and the 17th chapter. Genesis chapter 17. Have you ever wondered why? that when the Lord saves His
people, He does not take them immediately
into His presence. He doesn't take them immediately
to heaven. Or maybe wondered why that we
live to old age, maybe in the midst of sickness and weakness
and afflictions. Well, I believe that this is
really just self. It's really our own fleshly thinking
about ourselves, that is, Everything is for us, and everything is
about us. Hold your place here and turn
to Psalm 71. Psalm 71 and verse 18. Look at what it says. The psalmist
says, Now also when I am old and gray-headed, O God, forsake
me not, until I have showed Thy strength unto this generation,
and Thy power to every one that is to come." Here he has some understanding
of what this is all about, the purpose and will and glory of
God In us, he says, until I have showed thy strength and thy power to this generation
and those to come. The man in our text tonight whose
name is Abraham is getting to be quite an old
man. Thirteen years have now passed
since the birth of Ishmael. And Abram, as he was called then,
was 86 then, and he is now 99 years old. And in that time, and over that
time, and over especially these last years, he has proved his
inability to bring the promises of God to fruition. He showed that he could not do
it. And he has also shown the weakness
of human flesh. And I guess you could say that
in a measure, over these last years, he has kind of been under
the silence of God. And he now is becoming an old
man and no heir such as the one God has promised. If he had heard Paul He would
have said amen to the fact that Paul says that God has set the
bounds of our habitation. And that means, we know that
means that we cannot go beyond that point that God has appointed
for our life. We can't go beyond that. He set
the bounds of our habitation. But not only that, it means this,
we can't stop before it either. And Abraham may well have been
wondering, why has God not taken me unto Himself? Why has He let
me get old and why I'm aging? And yet, all these promises that
he's received, Most of them have not come to pass. But it is as true of all promises. Promises are only as good as
the one that makes them. And promises are only delivered
according to the ability of the one who promises to deliver them. He has been promised a son. And now he comes down at this
time, at 99 years old, when he thinks everything is really pretty
much over, and the Lord appears to him again. And the Lord remembers that he
has made a covenant with Abraham. Look down in verse 2. He says,
And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply
thee exceedingly. He has a covenant with Abraham. And God's covenant with Abraham,
as His covenant with all His people, that covenant never depended
on Him, but on the God who made it. It depended on the God who promised,
because He does not change, and He cannot fail, and all His promises
depend on Him." Now, there are a lot of folks who have promised
people a lot of things in the name of God that He has not promised. But the things that He has promised,
they are all good promises because they all depend on God. As a matter of fact, this is
something that we really need to learn. And it is just exactly
as the Apostle says when he writes to the Corinthians, when he says,
for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is preached among you by
us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay."
Somebody says, if you will, God will. Oh, no. Or, if you don't,
God won't. No, no. He says that the Jesus
Christ that we preached unto you was not yea and nay, but
in Him was yea, was yes. For all the promises of God,
for all the promises of God in Him, are yes, and in Him, Amen, unto
the glory of God by us." All the promises of God in Christ. Now, I'm not talking about what
men say. I'm talking about what the Scriptures
say. All the promises of God in Him
are yes and amen to the glory of God. You see, unlike us, God
is not only the promiser, but He is also the provider, and
more than that, the producer. He cannot fail. because it all
depends on Him. And this man Abram in his old
age has been promised things pertaining to his posterity according
to the flesh. The son of promise will be born
and through him will come a physical seed. We find that spoken of
in the plural. and yet a posterity and a spiritual
seed who is one in the singular and a spiritual posterity which
is said to be the children of Abraham by faith. In other words, God had promised
this man and in doing so promised a whole lot of other people also
First of all, that in his flesh there would be a fleshly people,
a fleshly bunch of children, if you will. But more than that,
he had promised that in one of his lineage, who is described
later by Paul as the seed, which is Christ, He has promised that
in this one seed of Abraham there would be a spiritual posterity. There would be many children
who the Apostle calls the children of Abraham by faith. They're like Abraham in this. They believe God. They believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ. And they are in that everlasting
covenant of which Christ is the covenant head, and His death,
or the shedding of His blood, is said to be the blood of the
everlasting covenant. So God will fulfill to this man
Abram everything He said concerning a fleshly people, and He will
fulfill everything He speaks concerning a spiritual people. Why? Because it's all depending
on Him. And God has brought this man
Abram down to this old age and let him do all of these things
just so that he and us would know that it always depended
on God, always depended on Him. You see, Jehovah God reminds
Abram of all these things, these precious promises. Look back
in verse 2. He says, and I will make my covenant
between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.' And
Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying, As for
me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father
of many nations. Neither shall thy name any more
be called Abram, But thy name shall be Abraham, for a father
of many nations have I made thee, and I will make thee exceeding
fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come
out of thee, and I will establish my covenant between me and thee,
and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting
covenant." to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee and
to thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger,
all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I
will be their God. Now, you'd have a natural tendency
in the flesh hearing all this if you were Abram, to say, Lord, isn't it getting
to be just a little bit late for all this? You're talking about many people. You're talking about another
particular child. You're talking about a son in
your covenant and your promises. But all I have is this one child
by the bondservant, Hagar. And you don't even view him as
my son." That's right. You see, when God
told Abraham to take Isaac later up on Mount Moriah, He said,
take Isaac, thine only son. So all of his attempts in the
flesh to fulfill this promise for God had failed. But he gives him a token. He gives Abram on this occasion
a token. If you look at what he does in
verse 5, he changes Abram's name from Abram to Abraham. And here's the reason. "'Neither shall thy name any
more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham, for a
father of many nations have I made thee." You see, he shows us in these
two names that Abraham has. One, here is Abram as he is in
the flesh. And yet now, here is Abraham
which is what he is by the grace and power of God, instead of
Abram, which means a high father. His name was changed and he was
called Abraham, which means a father of a multitude of nations. Now, he's got one son who's not
really considered his son. Even his first name, Abram, high
father, doesn't really seem to fit. And here God is saying,
now your name is Abraham, a father of a multitude of nations. And I'm sure Abraham knew more
than we know that the adding of this last part to his name,
the adding of that last Hebrew suffix, that Abraham, that it meant life. You're calling
me life? You're calling me a father of
a multitude of nations? when I'm like I am. And yet, what is even more amazing
than that is that the Scripture says that God enabled him to
believe. Abraham believed God. Because in grace, now think about
this, in grace, Everything is of God. Paul said, for by grace are ye
saved. Not by works of any kind. Not by the way you dress or you
look or any of these things or what you do or what you don't
do. For by grace are you saved. He says, through faith. But that
is not something that we have. That has to be given us by grace. He says, for by grace are ye
saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it too is
the gift of God. could have written by the Spirit
of God a couple of verses that fitted Abraham's situation here. But the truth is, it not only
fitted Abraham, but it fits every one of the Lord's people. This
is what he says. He says in Romans 4, therefore
it is of faith, what? This promise. A promise made to Abraham, but
a spiritual promise that is made to all his people. He says this promise is of faith. that it might be of grace." Faith is grace. Men make it to be a work, but
it's grace. Not only do we believe in the
grace of God as it is in Christ, but it's grace that enables the
Lord's people to believe. He says, therefore it is of faith
that it might be by grace, to the end the promise might be
sure to all the seed. Why did God make this promise
of salvation, of eternal life, of all spiritual blessings? Why
did He make it to be that which is received by faith? because it is to be by grace. And faith is not something we
do. Faith is a ceasing from our doing
and trusting the doing of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not my decision. It's not,
I did this and I did that. Every lost religious person in
this world, their mouth is full of what they did. I quit this. I quit that. I accepted Jesus. I made my decision. I was baptized. I did all. No. That's not grace. Grace is what God does. And the
truth is, the only thing that you and I have ever done and
can ever do of ourselves is sin. Listen to what he says. Therefore
it is of faith that it might be by grace. To the end, the
promise might be sure to all the seed. If it depended on anything
that we did, At any point, we'd mess it up. He said in order
to make it sure, He made it by grace that this
promise of life and salvation and blessing and eternal life
and glory and every other blessing of God, that it should everyone
be sure to the sea. All right? Not to that only which
is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham,
who is the father of us all, as it is written, I have made
thee a father of many nations before him whom he believeth,
even God, who quickens the dead. The worst possible scenario to
happen to Abraham is here he is 90 years old and God has promised
him he is going to have a child in many seeds. What can you do, Abraham? I have
done it all and every bit failed. Well, you are without hope, aren't
you? Yes, in myself, but not God. He's the one, Paul says,
is the one who quickens or makes alive the dead. And calleth those things which
be not as though they were. This Abraham, who against hope,
against any reason, naturally to hope, believed in hope that
he might become the father of many nations according to that
which was spoken, so shall thy seed be." As we say against all odds, against
all natural abilities, against all human possibilities, It wasn't
possible for a 99-year-old man to father a child. It wasn't
possible for his old wife to bear that child. But he did and
she did because God quickens the dead. And he wasn't doing
this just to give Abraham a family or a posterity or to remove his
shame before the Jews or anything else. God was doing it for Himself. But before He gave Abram his
new name, before He reminded him of all these promises and
such as that, before He told Abraham what his new name would
be, He told him what his name was. You see, everything starts with
God. Everything. But especially salvation. Look back in verse 1. and see if we can find out if
the name of the Promiser means everything. And when Abram was ninety years
old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him, I
am the Almighty God. Walk before me, and be thou perfect. That's a tall order. Walk thou
before me, and be thou perfect. Now, I'll tell you what you're
going to find out if you read more about the life of Abraham.
You're going to find out that, humanly speaking, He didn't even
come close. He lied about his wife and told
a king that she was his sister. You see, the truth is, God never
paints His people who are sinners in themselves in any other light
than what they are by nature. And they are by nature, Paul
says, by nature the children of wrath, even as others. You look at them. David in his
fall with Bathsheba. You look at Lot, you look at
the host of Abraham, you look at Abraham, the father of those
who believe, you're going to find a man with faults and flaws
and falls and failures. And yet God has said, walk thou
before me and be thou perfect. Somebody said, how good do you
have to be to go to heaven? According to what this book says,
perfect. Perfect. And that means, if you and I
have got to be perfect to go to heaven, it's going to have
to be based on somebody's perfection other than ourselves. What is the name of God here? The Almighty God. Now, somebody says, let me tell
you what that means, the Almighty God. That means that God can
do anything He wants to. No. No. That means that God has
said what He's going to do, and He's going to do it. You haven't
bragged on God any when you say that God can do anything He wants
to do. What you're doing is, you're
going to limit Him to doing what you think He wants to do. No. He's going to do what He says
He's going to do. And if He doesn't, He'll cease
to be God. You hear all these people talk
about what God's trying to do. He had never tried to do anything. He had never tried to save anybody. He saved those He'll save. He
had never tried to do anything in this world. It says whatsoever
He desires to do, that's what He does. I wouldn't have a God who could
only do what a man lets Him do. Nebuchadnezzar, he said, when
the Lord got through dealing with me, He told me, He showed
me, He proved to me that He does what He will in the armies of
heaven and among the inhabitants of men, and that nobody can stay
His hand or question Him. He works all things. Did you
hear that? That's what Paul said. He works
all things after the counsel of his own will. We've got a generation of people
who are so blinded by the devil. that they are not able to see
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, who is the sovereign
King of the universe, who does all things as He will, and He
does them well. He said, I'm the Almighty God. In the Hebrew, that's El Shaddai. And you know, when we think of
that, when we think of the Almighty God, we do think of the fact
that God has power to do all these things. But really what
that means is, he said, I'm the all-sufficient God. Boy, I'll tell you, that's the
God to grow old with in me. I'm the all-sufficient God. I talked to a man in England
today, and he's all upset about getting his pensions worked out. And I thought to myself, I wish
I had one to work out. He said, I'm the almighty God,
all-sufficient God. In Exodus it says that he declares
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob."
Didn't he appear to Ishmael? Didn't he appear to Abraham's
brother, uncle? Didn't he appear to Esau? No, not like this. Not in grace. Not in mercy. You see, there's
one thing for certain. You don't get very far in this
book before you find out just what God says about Him, about
Himself. And that is, He says to Moses,
I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I will be gracious
to whom I will be gracious. That's my glory. He said, I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by
the name of God Almighty. God Almighty, the All-Sufficient
One. Jehovah is sufficient in and
of Himself and for Himself. And he stands in no need of any
or of anything from another, but has a sufficiency for others." Somebody said, the Lord needs
you. If He does, He's in bad shape. He needs your time. He needs your talents. How pitiful
He is then. He doesn't need you or me or
anything we have. He's the all-sufficient God. And if He uses us, it's for our
good. It doesn't add anything to Him. If He receives anything of our
service or anything we have, it's only that which He's given
us. Because he's the all-sufficient one. Here's this man, Abram, and he
learns this. Something you and I have got
to learn. We're the Lord's people. And that is that he not only
can, he must do everything. He must do everything. He must be everything. No movements or workings of nature
can avail. Everything that is for God must
be effected and accomplished by God. That's right. You see, God will
only receive that which He gives. The only work that He will honor
is the work that He does and does in the person of the Lord
Jesus Christ. That's why the old hymn writer
wrote, Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy cross I cling. If we walk before Him and are perfect, which is what
He commands, It will have to be in the perfection
of the Lord Jesus Christ. He's the only perfect man that
has ever lived and walked in this world. He is the only one
who in that perfection went to the cross as the sacrifice for
the sins of his people. And God accepted it. And it says
that he rose from the grave and that he'll appear the second
time without sin. That means the sins of his people
that the Lord laid on him, he went to that cross and in his
death he paid the debt of that sin. And they are no more. We shall experience the grace
of His covenant, obtain all spiritual blessings in Him. And this is what the Apostle says. The true Israel. What is the
true Israel? Which he calls the true circumcision. Circumcision of the heart and
not of the flesh. He who is a Jew or an Israelite
inwardly, not in the flesh. What is it? He said we are the true circumcision who worship God in spirit, what
does that mean? It means in the one and through
the means that the Spirit of God uses, which is what Christ
said, when I send him, he'll take the things of mine and show
them to you. He takes the things of the gospel
of Christ, the things of the Word of God, and shows them to
us. We worship Him in spirit and
rejoice in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the
flesh. None. No confidence. This is not a combined effort
here. Either God saves me altogether
by Himself in Christ, or I perish. It's not me and God have got
a good thing going. No. It's God alone. It's grace alone. And it's for His glory alone. Why do you suppose that hanging
there on those crosses with the Lord Jesus Christ, here is a
man who has lived all his life and lived in such wickedness,
such rebellion and such ungodliness and immorality that the law of
the land now takes him and puts him to death. Yet he's hanging there on that
cross. And on the other side of Christ is another man just
like him. One man says, Lord, remember
me when you come into your kingdom. Now you tell me, if you've got
an honest bone in your body, what made that man say that,
cry out that, and the other man not? They're the same man, lived in
the same world, guilty of the same things, dying the same kind
of death? I'll tell you what it is. It's
sovereign grace and mercy. It is God who looked upon him
before the world began and chose him in grace and mercy, and has
now sent his Son to die in his place and for his sins on that
middle cross, and he brings him to cry out to him, I'd say the Spirit of God has
taught him something. And evidently in a short time,
because it isn't long before this, that he's railing on Christ
and everybody else with the same thing as the other thing. What's
the difference? The difference is God. The difference
is God's grace and power. All of a sudden, this man who's
dying there on that middle cross, he's got his hands nailed and
his feet nailed to that cross, he says to that man, Lord, remember me. Like he can do something
for you with his hands nailed to that cross, remember me when
thou comest. You sure he's coming? Look at
him. Into thy kingdom. And the Lord said to him, today, today you'll be with me in paradise. Well, he didn't walk down anybody's
aisle. He wasn't baptized in anybody's
water. Today, you'll be with me in paradise. because I'm God in the flesh. And my purpose has always been
to save you and the people that the Father gave me by grace through
my sacrificial death on this cross. Today, you'll be with
me in paradise. Oh, the whole religious world
is full of the Hagar and Ishmael principle that something can
be secured on the line of flesh and law, but all that has to
be set aside. God can and must do everything
if there is to be a true seed to inherit his promises. Why? Because salvation is of the Lord. And it is by his promise which
is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Because all life, and all faith,
and all truth, and all blessing, and all redemption, and all sanctification,
and all justification, and all wisdom, and all righteousness
must come from Him. in Him, given by Him, and imputed
to us by grace. Somebody says, well, be perfect. He knew that there was no possibility
of Abraham doing perfectly. And he doesn't even say that.
He says, walk before me and be perfect. Is that a command for something
that Abraham is to do? Or is that a command by God by
which He confers that perfection to Abraham? That's what Paul is saying in
2 Corinthians 5. For He, that is God, hath made
Him, the Lord Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin for us,
that we might be made by God the righteousness of God in Him. Grace is never a license to sin, but it is the gift of God, the
almighty, all-sufficient God. And not only to save us, but
to keep us all our days. Paul had a bodily affliction
of some kind. Nobody really knows what it was,
He called it a thorn in the flesh. And it says that he prayed three
times, I believe it was, for God that it would be his will
to remove it. God didn't do it. But he told him something better.
He said, My grace is sufficient for you. If my grace is sufficient to
save your soul, my grace is sufficient for you to live the time I've
appointed you in this life, and you're to do it by my grace and
by my strength for my glory. For my glory. That's what the walk of faith
is. That's the walk he's talking about. Walk by faith. What is
that? Looking to Christ for everything. Faith is not believing that God
is going to do something He's not said He's going to do. Well,
if enough of us get together and believe God, no, no, no. We believe His promises. We believe
that He'll do what He says He'll do. We believe that He will be
faithful. We believe that He will keep
every promise to us in Christ. Turn back over and look at Psalm
73. Psalm 73. And look down. I could just read every one of
these verses, but look down at verse Oh, me. We'll start at verse 22. So foolish was I. Do you think Abraham ever felt
that way? I know I have. So foolish was I and ignorant. I was as a beast before thee. Nevertheless, I am continually
with thee, And thou hast holden me by my right hand." Somebody
says, you've got to hold on to God. Well, I'll tell you this,
safety is not in our holding on to God, it's in His holding
on to us. You take a little child, a toddler,
does their safety rest on them holding on to your hand? No. Their safety lies in you holding
on to their hand. Thou shalt guide me with thy
counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Now listen to this. Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth
that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart fail. But God is the strength of my
heart and my portion forever. He's everything. He's everything
in creation, created this world and everything in it by Himself
for His glory. He's everything in providence.
He works everything, every detail. I'll never forget reading one
time something that Spurgeon said in a sermon. He said, I
believe that even the dust particles that are kicked out by the wagon
wheel of the carriage that rolls, that every one of those dust
particles has been charted in its course by God. And everything in salvation. the Almighty God, the all-sufficient God, who because He is all-sufficient
and gives that great sufficiency to His people in Christ, they will be like Jacob who said,
I have more than enough. I have enough in despair. Go dismiss us if you would, please.