William A Ward said, “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” If that is true – and I believe it is – how much more force is behind those words when it is God Himself who feeds the imagination with the dream that you can “become something”. There are many Jewish “Midrash” stories of things that happened to Abraham before he left Ur. I find them utterly fascinating, but also totally pointless. In the Canon of scripture we are told absolutely “zilch” about who Abraham was, what he did and what he wanted out of life while he lived in Ur. We are not aware if he had been a man of faith in Yahweh for years, or whether God first appeared to him when he was an idolater. We simply do not know. All the stories of his “exploits” in faith before he left Ur, I receive as legend, myth, or wishful thinking on the part of writers. We let the Bible alone be our standard.
Piecing scripture together, it seems God appeared and spoke to Abraham, while he was still living in Ur, speaking the lines of Genesis 12 :1-3 as we know it. After that, Terah, Lot, Sarah (then Sarai) and Abraham (then Abram) moved to Haran. The word was pregnant in Abram’s heart. He neither acted on it further, nor did God speak to him any further until the father of the faithful turned up in a place known as Canaan.
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| Always remember that what you are is not what you always will be. |
The fact that God did not appear or speak to Abram again whilst he was living in Haran, together with the truth that we are not told how long Abram was living at Haran suggests a principle of life that needs highlighting. Having quoted the late, great William A Ward, allow me to quote another writer of a completely different ethos. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was”. It sounds like more “childish” than “childlike”, but it applies especially to Abram. Abram was slow off the mark. Does that ring a bell with any of my readers? Later in life when God told Abram to expel Hagar and Ishmael, he acted immediately. When God instructed him to take Isaac to Moriah, Abram was on his way early the following morning. Immediate responses show his faith and sense of urgency to obey God’s word – that was developed in him much later. However, here at the end of Genesis 11, the beginning of Genesis 12, the word had been gestating in Abraham’s spirit for an unknown length of time before he acted in the manner God had asked of him.
Abraham had God’s promises swimming around in his consciousness, his sub-consciousness and his unconsciousness for years, before, as a man of great faith, he received the son of promise. Joseph had the two dreams of his family bowing down to him and the stars bowing to him for years in the face of circumstances that suggested rather than being bowed down to, he would for the rest of his life be bowing down to Egyptian prison officers. The dream was planted and needed gestating before its fulfilment could jump out of the future into the present, out of the dream into reality, out of the invisible and into the visible. Moses also knew he was the “deliverer” of his people for at least 40 years before he led them out of Goshen. However, because he misread the times, he had to become a shepherd for four decades, whilst he marinated in the vision, soaked in the dream, and allowed the sperm of the word to gestate into mature fulfilment. The Bible is full of such accounts of dreams being given, followed by the limbo period of waiting, whilst the subject emerges as a mighty man or woman of God who then appears in time to do something that changes the world.
Forget the 25 years for Abraham for his dream’s fulfilment, the 13 years for Joseph’s exaltation, or the 40 years for Moses anointing. We need to measure by God’s workings in our hearts not by man’s calendar or the stipulated amount of years of a course set by men. We need to gain points with God in deeds of obedience, not years of frustration: We need to note our thoughts not our breaths; we need assessments in our faithfulness, not in the figures on a university certificate. We should count time by heartthrobs. He most lives who thinks most, believes the noblest,and acts the best. Abraham was given a mind boggling vision, dream, aspiration – or whatever you wish to refer to it as. Abraham had an egg to sit on, a child in his spiritual womb to develop and give birth to (and I am not referring to Isaac). Abraham had tests and exam’s to sit – tests of the heart and exams of his faith set by God Himself. Abraham had a dream to follow and a vision to catch.
The Apostle Paul referred to this principle as “apprehending that for which he had been apprehended” by Christ Himself. Readers, this principle is not only for biblical heroes of the faith, but also for every person who has ever named the name of Christ. Whatever promise has been spoken over you, prayed over you, prophesied over you – or whatever you have received in prayer, or through the scriptures – do not hurry. Let the pregnancy of the word go the full period of gestation. Remember that what you are now is not what you will be in future years. Men that I knew in their teens and twenties seemed hardly suited to ministry when considered by the external eye. However, to see those same men now in their fifties and sixties one realises the reality of the gestated vision and all the promises that were spoken over them. God always knows what He is doing.
Never despise the youth of your pastor, or church worker or anybody in church government who, to your eye, seems ill fitted, non-charactered, and utterly unqualified for what they are doing. In years to come, they may be the pastor of thousands, the leaders of movements, and a Godly voice across the nations, or an Apostle of the faith. Abraham started slowly. Abraham started with stutters. Abraham started with partial obedience. Abraham started as Abram. What Abram was in Genesis 11 and turning into Genesis 12 was nothing like the man that we see in Genesis 22 and on to chapter 25. Peter (the Rock) started out as Simon ( the Reed). The Apostles all started out as disciples. The mighty Apostle Paul started out as the bigotted small minded Pharisee Saul of Tarsus. You are not now what you shall be later.
WHAT’S THE POINT? Let the word inside you do its thing. Don’t abort -or press for early delivery.
Trekking with Abraham 