'Let God build it!'

“Calling one of us to, ‘Move to Chicago!’ well, God wouldn’t do that to anybody,” says Jordan in an old study from Hebrews. “But He did to Abram. He took Abraham and said, ‘Get out of thy kindred from thy house to a land that I’ll show you,’ but didn’t tell him where it was going to be.

“Abraham’s over in that land some time before God shows him the perimeters of it. Now, God took him and walked him around in the land that later on He’s going to give him and his seed forever. But when Abraham first started out he didn’t know what was what and where was what and what was where or anything else.

“Abraham just took God at His Word in spite the lack of details involved. Isaiah 51 says, 1] Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.
[2] Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.
[3] For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.

“That hole and that rock . . . it was a pit of idolatry that God reached down in there and saw a man and called him out of.

“God called him, underline the next word—ALONE. God took Abraham and set him apart from all the other families of the earth and all the other kindred of the earth and set him alone.

“He sends him off, saying, ‘I’m going to separate you from everybody else and I’m going to put you over in that land over there and you’re going to be MINE!’ You know, you think about loneliness—whew! That’s something.

“He doesn’t say, ‘C’mon, let’s go down here and I’m going to make you a part of a great big influential movement of people that’s going out here.’ He said, ‘C’mon, Abraham, I’m going to sit you out here where there isn’t anybody else but just you and me.’

Hebrews 11:9 says, ‘By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:’

“By faith, he didn’t only obey in going out, but he sojourned in the land of promise. By the way, that’s what that land ought to be called. The land over there in Palestine is not the Holy Land. Ezekiel says it will be holy one day but it will be holy because God is going to dwell in it and sanctify it and He’s going to put His presence in it.

“Abraham sojourned in the land and they lived in tents and tabernacles. He was by faith saying, ‘This is MY country! This is MY land! God gave me this!’

“God said, ‘Don’t worry about the details. Forget all the details. Just trust me. Go out here and enjoy it!’ So he does. Well, how can he do that?

“Hebrews 11:10 says, ‘For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.’ He says, ‘I’m not going to be satisfied until I get the city God’s going to build. I’m not going to build me a city. I’m going to let God build it! He said He would. I’m going to trust Him.’

“Abraham took God at His Word in spite of any lack of explanation and detailed accounting of how it’s going to be accomplished. He just trusted God.

“Verse 11 says, ‘Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.’

"She conceived seed by a fellow who, by all natural rights, shouldn't have been able to have been the father of anybody. Sarah and Abraham just took God as His word despite the natural laws of life that would have seemed to have limited them.

“Look at Gen. 17:15 and notice how this thing worked out in history. Then Abraham fell on his face and said, ‘Thank God, I knew you would do it!’ That what it said?! No, it said Abraham fell on his face and said, ‘Ah, yeah, get real, Lord! Haha! Just get real, wouldya! You pullin’ my leg or not?! Ha!’

“Abraham obeyed but he didn’t obey fully. But Hebrews looks back and says, ‘You know the issue isn’t your performance; the issue’s your faith.’

“Verse 12 is a great verse: 'Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.'

“Now that’s what God did. The stars of the heaven and the grains of sand--those are figures of speech to describe the innumerable seed of Abraham.

“I don’t know if you ever thought of what it must have been like for Abraham. I love that in verse 11 where it says Sara received strength.

“I know the other versions and commentators try to make that not be Sara’s faith but Abraham’s faith, but I’ll tell you what, there’s an old saying out in the world: ‘It takes two to tango.’ And if Abraham had of come home and said, ‘God said we’re going to have a child,’ he couldn’t have a child without his wife.

“She had to be a willing participant in that which seemed to go against all of nature, and all of her understanding, but there came a place where Sara was willing by faith to do what God said and God supernaturally gave to that couple the physical capacity to bear the seed and that’s wonderful and it came by faith.

“And even though they started out doubters and not fully doing what they ought to do, it wasn’t what they were doing that was the issue anyway, It was always going to be what God did that was the issue and they took God at His Word in spite of not having everything written down ahead and all the details figured out. And in spite of what their natural inclinations would have told them, in spite of all that, they just took God at His Word.

“You know how Israel’s going to get through that tribulation? Just that way. You know how they’re going to ‘lay aide every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset us and run with patience the race set before them, looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of their faith’? You know how they’re going to do that? It’s going be the motivation of faith resting in the provisions God has made for them and in Christ, and in the promise He’s given them about what He’s going to do for them and with them.”