God: 'Forget the details; just trust me'

God took Abraham and walked him around the land He later would give him and his seed forever. Abraham just took God at His Word in spite of any details.

“By faith Abraham sojourned in the land of promise,” says Jordan. “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 there and enjoy it!’

“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 a lack of explanation and any real accounting of how it was going to be accomplished. He just trusted God.

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“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 Genesis 17:15 and notice how this thing worked out in history. Abraham fell on his face and said, ‘Uh, yeah, get real, Lord! Ha, ha! 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.’

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“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 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 aside 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’?

"It’s going be the motivation of faith resting in the provisions God has made for them and in Christ, and in the promise that’s He’s given them about what He’s going to do for them and with them.”