Grier Ministries' Thoughts

¹ Now the LORD had said to Abram: “Get out of your country,  From your family  And from your father’s house, To a land that I will show you. ² I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  ⁴ So Abram departed as the LORD had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.  (Genesis 12:1-4 NKJV)

I am not yet as old as Abram was when God asked him to move to an unknown destination, but I know that i would find it difficult (at best) to be as evidently obedient as Abram was. I remember the summer of 1970 clearly since that was the year in which God asked a similar thing of my dad. Dad decided to pick up stakes, and move west. So dad, mom, me, and my brother John all packed up and headed west. Problem was, we had no clue as the destination.

Dad turned 64 in October of 1970, and was moving his family with no financial support, no prospect of a job, no real notion of where to go, and thus there was no destination. We didn’t have a lot of money – we never did! – so the entire trip was on faith. This is a picture of what God asked of Abram. Abram also had to move to an unknown place with only limited resources. He didn’t have an international mission board behind him, or a large well-funded church to support him. In fact, he probably didn’t have the full support of his family. The idolotry of his family and his culture undoubtedly didn’t promote much belief in what Abram was doing. I’m sure that dad faced the same issue.

The fun part of the story is the ending. Dad stopped for gas in central Nebraska at a little town called Maxwell. He asked the attendant there about a preached that dad had met many years ago. It turned out that this preacher had gone on to become the pastor of a large church in the area that also owned a large Bible Camp just 2 miles from Maxwell where we got gas. This man had been praying for a caretaker for the camp for that fall. Short version: we moved to the camp and spent the winter there! Talk about an answer to prayer!

Talk about a step of faith! Do we have that kind of faith today?