Narrative Lectionary / Old Testament – THE GOD WHO PROMISES
Living between Promise and Fulfilment
The Story of Abram and Sarai
Reading: Genesis 12:1-9. Preacher: Phil Swain
God calls Abram and Sarai to leave what is familiar and travel towards a future they cannot yet see. God promises them a home, a family and a blessing that will reach far beyond their own lives. So they set out … but when they arrive, the land is already inhabited, they still have no child, and there is no timetable for what God has promised. What is it like to trust God when the first faithful step leads into more uncertainty?
Many of us know something of that space between hope and reality. We may be praying for someone we love, facing a change in work or family life, wondering what lies ahead for our church, or simply waiting for things to become clearer. This Sunday, as we continue The God Who Promises, we’ll explore how Abram and Sarai lived within that tension … and what it might mean for us to keep walking with God and be a blessing to others along the way.
Reflection Questions
Exploring the Passage (Genesis 12:1-9)
- What does God ask Abram to leave, and what does God promise him? Which part of the call do you think would have been hardest to trust?
- When Abram reaches Canaan, the narrator notes that “the Canaanites were in the land.” How does that detail affect the way you hear God’s promise of land?
- Abram builds two altars along the way. What happens before each one, and what might the altars tell us about his response to God?
Pondering the Sermon Themes
- The sermon pictured Abram and Sarai living “in the house while the work is going on.” Does that image help you understand the long wait between promise and fulfilment? Why or why not?
- We considered several responses to waiting: giving up hope, looking elsewhere, and trying to take control. Which response do you most recognise in yourself?
- The sermon named the harm done to Hagar when Abram and Sarai tried to secure their future. How might anxiety about a good goal cause us to overlook the needs or dignity of others?
Going Deeper
- Abram later brings his childlessness directly to God (Genesis 15:2–3). What is the difference between honest questioning and giving up on trust?
- How can we hope and pray for a particular outcome without assuming that God has promised it will happen?
- God promises that blessing will reach others through Abram. What is one way you could be a blessing to someone now, while something in your own life remains unresolved?
Sermon Text
Last Sunday we began a short series exploring the promises of God. Promises give us a way of reading the Old Testament, and really the whole Bible. Throughout the Bible we encounter a God who makes promises, and people who are learning what it means to live in the light of those promises. But as we will see today, that is not always easy … especially when what they are experiencing does not yet match what God has promised.
We began last Sunday with Noah and asked, “Can God be trusted?” At the end of the flood story, God places a rainbow in the clouds as a sign of God’s commitment to creation … not there would never be storm clouds again but that God would not give up on the world. And that brought us to the heart of last Sunday’s message: we can trust God’s promises because God is faithful.
This week we turn to Abram and Sarai, and the question changes a little. What does it look like to trust God when a promise has been made, but you cannot yet see how it could come true?
Perhaps you know something of that feeling from renovating a home. You can picture what it will be like when the work is finished. You may even have plans showing exactly where everything will go. But for now, you’re living among dust and noise, the kitchen is somewhere it shouldn’t be, and every time you think you’re nearly there, another delay appears.
The hope of what is coming matters … but you still have to live your life in the middle of the work.
Abram and Sarai know something about living in the middle. God gives them an extraordinary promise, but it will be a long time before they see even part of it come to pass. And unlike the renovator, they have no plans to look at, no completion date, and no way of knowing how it will all come about.
Before we look more closely at Genesis 12, it is worth turning back a few verses for some context. I was talking about this passage with Rev Richard Harris from Terrigal Uniting Church this week, and he pointed out something I had overlooked.
If you had asked me where Abram was when God called him, I would probably have said Ur. That is how I had pictured it: Abram living in his hometown, God suddenly saying “Go,” and Abram setting out into the unknown. But the end of Genesis 11 tells us there was already a journey underway.
In Genesis 11:31, we read that Abram’s father Terah took Abram, Sarai and Lot and set out from Ur towards Canaan. That caught my attention. Canaan is the very land that will become central to God’s promise. Yet the family did not get there. They came to Harran, and they settled there.
We are not told why they stopped. Perhaps Harran became home. Perhaps the journey was harder than expected. We cannot know what Abram and Sarai thought their future would hold. But the story does tell us this much: they had set out for Canaan, and now they were living somewhere along the way.
It is there, in Harran, that Genesis 12 begins. God says to Abram, “Go from this country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
A journey that had come to a stop begins again … this time in response to God’s call. And alongside that call comes an extraordinary promise: God will make a great nation of Abram, bless him, and through him bring blessing to all the families of the earth.
“So Abram went,” the story says. It sounds wonderfully decisive, doesn’t it? God called, Abram went. We could almost end the sermon there and say, “That’s what faith is all about … trusting God and going.”
But this is only the beginning. Abram and Sarai set out carrying a promise, and they will spend much of their lives in the space between hearing it and seeing what becomes of it.
As with that renovation, it is one thing to picture the finished future. It is another to live in the house while the work is going on. For Abram and Sarai, that stretch between promise and fulfilment would last for years.
God has promised Abram a land. But when they arrive in Canaan, what does the story tell us? “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” There are already people living there. Whatever Abram might have imagined when God spoke of this land, he has arrived, and the promise has not simply become his.
God has promised to make a great nation of Abram. But Sarai cannot have children. Genesis told us that before the journey even began. Sarai is carrying this uncertainty too, though she has not heard the promise spoken to her in the way Abram has. And as the years pass, the possibility of a child seems to grow more distant, not less.
That is a difficult place to live. God has spoken of a future, but the present seems to be telling a different story.
And this is not a matter of waiting a few days for things to become clearer. Abram and Sarai will spend years living with this promise before Isaac is born. Years in which they get up in the morning, make decisions, deal with whatever the day brings, and still do not know how God’s words could possibly come true.
I wonder whether you recognise something of that gap.
Perhaps there is a person you have prayed for over many years. You still pray, but you also know how tiring it can be to hope for change that you cannot see. Perhaps your family is in a season you never expected, and you are trying to work out what faithfulness looks like within it. Or perhaps it is the future of our church that comes to mind. We can speak with real hope about what God might do among us, while also seeing the questions and pressures right in front of us.
These situations are not identical to God’s promise to Abram and Sarai. We cannot assume that every outcome we long for is something God has specifically promised. But we may recognise the experience of trying to live with hope when we cannot yet see the way ahead.
And in that space, there are several things we might do.
Sometimes we become tired of hoping. We may not announce, “I’ve given up.” We simply stop expecting anything to change. It can feel safer to lower our hopes than to keep being disappointed.
Sometimes we look elsewhere for the fulfilment we want. We reach for something that will give us a little certainty or relief now, even if, deep down, we know it cannot answer the deeper longing.
And sometimes we try to take control. We think, “If this future is ever going to happen, I had better make it happen.”
Abram and Sarai know something about that last response. Later in their story, when there is still no child, they turn to Hagar, a woman enslaved in their household, as a way of securing the promised family. Hagar is a person, and she bears the cost of their decision. When people with power try to force the future they want, others can be hurt.
That leaves me with a searching question. When I am anxious for something good to happen, am I still seeing the people around me clearly? Am I listening to them? Or have I begun to treat someone else as a way of getting to the outcome I want?
The story does not present Abram and Sarai as people who always knew exactly how to trust God. They question. They struggle. They make decisions they should not have made. That is part of why their story speaks so honestly to us.
In fact, later on Abram asks God quite directly how this promise of descendants can come true while he remains childless. He brings the gap between God’s words and his own experience into the conversation with God. I find that encouraging. Faith does not require him to pretend that the question has gone away. He can ask it.
And yet, Genesis 12 gives us another picture of their life in this unfinished place. It is small enough that we could easily miss it.
Abram keeps travelling. He arrives at Shechem. God appears to him there and renews the promise. And Abram builds an altar to the Lord. Then he moves on towards the hills east of Bethel, pitches his tent, builds another altar and calls on the name of the Lord.
Nothing has been resolved. There are still people living in the land. Abram and Sarai still have no child. Yet in the middle of this unfinished journey, Abram stops and responds to God.
He does not have to wait until the end of the story to worship. He does not have to understand how every part of the promise will unfold before he can recognise that God has met him here.
I wonder what those stopping places might look like for us. Perhaps it is a prayer in which we tell God honestly how things are, including the questions we have been reluctant to say aloud. Perhaps it is remembering a moment when we did sense God’s presence or the care of others, and giving thanks for it. Perhaps it is coming together to worship, while bringing with us lives that are still unfinished and questions that are still unanswered.
Abram keeps moving, and he stops to call on God. I think both these things are important. There is a time to take the next step that is open to us, and there is a time to pause and remember whose company we are travelling in.
Abram and Sarai set out because God had made them a promise. They didn’t know how long the journey would take. They didn’t know how a child could come. And when they reached the land, they discovered they were still only at the beginning.
But they were there. They were living in the gap between promise and fulfilment. Abram could pitch a tent, build an altar, call on God … and then take the next step.
And there was something else he could do. God had said, “I will bless you” … and that blessing was never meant to stop with Abram. It was meant to reach all the families of the earth.
Perhaps that is something we can carry with us this week.
If you are living with a question that has no answer yet, you don’t have to pretend the waiting is easy. You can tell God the truth about it. You can pause and look for signs of God’s presence. And when it is time to move, you can take the next step that is open to you.
Along the way, you can be a blessing. To the person beside you. To someone who needs your kindness, your time, or your courage. You may still be waiting for something in your own life … and still have something precious to give.
Abram’s story doesn’t tell us that faith means seeing the whole road ahead. It shows us a God who meets people along the way.
So wherever you find yourself on the journey today … may you know that God is with you. And may someone else be blessed because you were there. Amen.