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On July 1st, Rob Mickelson preached a sermon on the will of God. He did an excellent job explaining the all-important topic of God's will. What he showed was that everything happens according to the Lord's counsel, as Ephesians 1 .11 says.
This is known as God's will of decree. The other aspect of God's will is His will of command or desire. This is the will that He has made known to us in scripture. We know the life that God has called us to live because He has made it clearly known to us.
In addition to knowing God's will in the scriptures, at times we face perplexing circumstances or a big decision in our life. And we should pray to God for wisdom to guide us through. Rob covered all those things in his sermon on July 1st.
This was a topical sermon that he preached on. Today, because we will see God's will in this narrative in Genesis 24, we will be confronting this topic again. This is the beauty of expository preaching, where we go verse by verse through a book of the Bible.
I've argued that doing exclusively topical preaching falls short, since in the end you actually cover less topics. It's difficult to navigate the entire gold mine that is there in scripture. So the best thing to do is let's dig everywhere.
Let's go, let's look at every place in Genesis and find what is there. And as you think about it, we've seen a lot of different topics come up as we've gone through Genesis and how relevant it is to each of our lives.
So today, we will see God's will play out in the story of Abraham's search for Isaac's future wife. We will see lessons to learn about how to discern the will of God for our own lives. So I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me to Genesis 24.
This sermon is on verses 1 through 28. And if you're using a red Bible in the pews, it's on pages 20 and 21. This sermon is titled, God's Guidance in the Life of His People. And before we jump in to the main portion of the sermon, as I already mentioned, we know most of the decisions that we should make as Christians in our lives.
God's word has told us how to live. And so when you come up in a given circumstance, you know what to do because God has already told you. But what this sermon chiefly has in mind is the big decisions in life.
The life-altering ones that the Bible may not speak clearly on. So this is what we're going to look at. And we'll see this in the narrative of Abraham's servant going to find Isaac's future wife. And we're going to hopefully answer the question, what do we do when we don't know what to do?
When you're in that circumstance in your life and you just don't know what to do. And so our big idea, our proposition is to seek to discern the will of God in your life. Seek to discern the will of God in your life.
And we'll see three lessons for discerning his will. And what we're going to do, this is kind of a long sermon, so we're going to take two Sundays to do this. You probably have a big sigh of relief there.
We'll be doing point number one today. So the first lesson, and we'll be looking at verses one through nine. And the first lesson for discerning his will is to learn as much information necessary to make the right decision.
Learn as much information necessary to make the right decision. Before we jump into the text, let's give a little recap of last week's sermon. We looked at Abraham's pursuit of the burial location for his wife, Sarah, as she had just died.
When she died, Abraham desired to bury his wife in the land of Canaan, which of course was the land the Lord promised to him long ago. We saw two points of application for us as Abraham pushed hard to get a small piece of this land that would be the promised land, and it would eventually belong to his entire offspring.
The application for us fits in with the promised land being heaven. That's how the author of Hebrews uses it in the New Testament. We saw that we are to look ahead wisely, knowing that our time here is short.
We saw two ways how. The first way how was to set our minds on our future residence, the future residence being heaven. The second way how was to confidently plan on this home based on our sincere faith.
If our faith is real, by observing noticeable fruit in our lives, we should plan on heaven as Abraham planned on living in this promised land by making this transaction. And we should plan by looking ahead and living as heavenly citizens.
We don't want to be people who just always think about earthly things. That's all too common in the church today, where people are just so earthly minded. And we saw Abraham. He was thinking ahead to his future home last week, and so that was the big idea last Sunday.
Today, the story switches from Abraham to his son Isaac. We have spent many months with Abraham. The narrative on his life has been the focus since Genesis 12, so I haven't gone back to look when we started Genesis 12, but it's probably been four, five months where we just have been talking about the life of Abraham.
So this is big that we are graduating to a new person. We will only return to Abraham again when he dies and his descendants are listed in detail in chapter 25. Now, the promised child Isaac is the focus for a while.
As I mentioned, the search begins to find his wife. What we are going to see today is that Isaac does not have to search for his own wife. Abraham's top servant is given that task. I'm pretty sure that probably wasn't any of our experiences when the Lord led us to our spouses, right?
We had to find it for ourselves. In this case, Isaac doesn't have to do it. The servant goes out, as we will see. So this is what Abraham says to the servant in verses 1 through 4. Now Abraham was old, well advanced in years, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things.
And Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had, put your hand under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell, but will go to my country and to my kindred and take a wife for my son Isaac.
Abraham is old, and he knows what the Lord has promised him. The Lord promised that his offspring would inherit the land of Canaan. The Lord said that his offspring would be as many as the stars in the heavens and as many as the sand on the seashore.
So Abraham knows that in order for his offspring to multiply, his son Isaac needs to meet a wife and they need to bear children. So Abraham tells his servant that he needs to go to the land that he came from to find a wife for his son.
He specifically gives him instructions to not take a wife from the Canaanites. The people of Canaan had a bad reputation right from the start. Remember Noah had three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Ham was the son who mocked Noah while he was drunk and naked on the floor of the tent.
Ham's descendants would be cursed because of his actions. The son that would be the most wicked from Ham was Canaan. His line specifically received this curse from the Lord. Genesis 9 .25 said, Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants, shall he be to his brothers.
People in subsequent generations from Canaan would be wicked just like their father Ham.
Was.
And you see this play out in our own day. Sometimes you see a bad line happen from one generation to the next. And that's what happened with the Canaanites. Later on, once Israel possessed the land of Canaan, they were commanded by God in Deuteronomy 7 .3 not to intermarry with the Canaanites.
Then in the following verse, the Lord told them the reason why. He said, For they would turn away your sons from following me to serve other gods. So in an effort to keep his people holy, he said, These people are off limits.
These Canaanite people who had a reputation for being wicked were also off limits to Abraham's son Isaac long before that command was even given to Moses later on. As we just read, these Canaanites were not to be pursued.
And Abraham tells the servant where he should find a wife for his son. I'll read verse four again. He says, Go to my country and to my kindred and take a wife for my son Isaac. This is where we have to remember where Abraham came from.
It's been a long time since we saw Abraham's first journey from his first home to his many years in the land of Canaan. At the end of Genesis 11, Abraham's father, Terah, took Abraham and his two brothers from Ur, which was their original home that was located in Babylon or present-day Iraq, that part of the world.
And they went to Haran. And Haran, to give you an idea of where that is, that would be present-day Turkey. So they went west, and that's where they settled for a while. And while they were in Haran, that was when the Lord called Abraham to go south to the land of Canaan.
And he was told to leave his country, his kindred, and his father's house to go to a foreign land. So Abraham left with Sarah, and his brothers and his dad stayed behind in Haran. Now in chapter 24, Abraham is telling his servant to go to this place, to go home to where his family's from.
And it is from this place that Isaac's wife will be found. And this is such a serious mission that Abraham makes an oath with this servant in verses two and three. The oath is formalized by the servant placing his hand under Abraham's thigh.
Now this sounds obviously very awkward to us, but in these times it meant that he was submitting to the vow that Abraham was having him swear by. So that's important to point out right there. And he has him swear to God that he will do what he is told.
So this is very important. And he's not only swearing to Abraham, but he's swearing to God. So you see the importance of this. I just did a wedding on Friday, and if you think about a wedding, you're swearing not only to your spouse and the witnesses there, but you're also swearing to God.
And that's what he's doing here. This is an oath that he's making between Abraham and the Lord. And so, as this oath is made, Abraham tells him how important it is by saying that the one you're swearing to here, he's the creator of heaven and earth.
He's the greatest one there is. And so you need to keep this vow. And so he sends his most trusted servant to carry out this important mission of finding this woman for Isaac. And as the servant is about to make this vow, he wants a clarification from Abraham as to the instructions.
This is what he says in verse five. The servant said to him, perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land. Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came? So the servant says, what if I find a woman to be Isaac's wife, but she doesn't want to come back with me?
Shall I take Isaac to Haran to marry this woman? So to leave the land of Canaan, to go to her. And Abraham answers this question in verses six through eight. This is what he says. See to it that you do not take my son back there.
The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from the land of my kindred and you spoke and you spoke to me and swore to me to your offspring, I will give this land. He will send his angel before you and you shall take a wife for my son from there.
But if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath.
Of mine.
Only you must not take my son back there. Abraham makes it clear in verse six that if she is not willing to come with the servant to the land of Canaan, then he is not to take Isaac to her in Haran. In verse seven, he explains why he tells him that the land of Canaan is the land that the Lord has promised to him and his offspring, that they would have this land forever.
So it only makes sense that if she's the one, she's going to come back. You can see here, these are some hints as to how this fits in with the will of God.
All right.
So the right one, right, is going to come back. In verse eight, Abraham explains that if she does not agree to come with you to the land of Canaan to be Isaac, then you are free from the oath. He could then return home.
The servant was not supposed to search and search till one woman agreed to come. So he's supposed to zero in on one, and if she didn't come, he's free from the oath and he can return home. But Abraham's instructions here are very wise.
That's what we need to point out here. His instructions are right on the money. Abraham knew that the people in the land of Canaan were mostly wicked, and the Lord already told him that his people would overtake the Canaanites in the land to take it as their own possession.
As Abraham thinks about this, he thought that Isaac's wife is not going to come from these mostly evil people that we're going to overtake. But he believed Isaac's wife would come from his kindred. That's why he is sending his servant to Haran.
So even though Abraham says, you are free from the vow, if the woman you choose does not come, Abraham believes this will work. He's not 100 positive it'll work, but he thinks it'll work. He trusts that the Lord will provide, and that is why he sends his servant on a mission to find a wife for his son.
This isn't a wild goose chase. This is calculated. He's thought this through. So we see Abraham using wisdom here. And we need wisdom in our own lives as well. We need to think things through carefully, and then make the proper decision.
And as I mentioned in the beginning, I'm talking specifically about the circumstances where the Bible might not tell us what to do. Remember when Rob preached, he gave the example of a woman, I think it was someone in your family who had been married for 10 years and wanted to leave their spouse to marry another.
And she approached Rob, and Rob said, we know the answer to this. It's not the Lord's will. So that's not what this is talking about here. 95 of the things, you know what to do, because the Bible tells you what to do.
But this is talking about those times where we need more wisdom from the Lord. We don't know what to do, and so he leads us. We need to think things carefully through. And this text is timely, given that I have been thinking much about the will of God recently.
And actually, one of my professors, Kevin Bowder from Central Seminary, just wrote several articles on how we can discern the will of God in our lives. So one of the ways, he said, is that we need to gather all the information before we act.
It is fairly popular in our day for people to say that thinking things through when confronted by a big decision is not to exercise faith. But that's not true. People who make a quick decision saying they are trusting the Lord without thinking things through end up more times than not in a place they should not be.
They end up doing something foolishly. And this is so because there is no wisdom involved. We need to exercise wisdom and let the Lord work out the circumstances for us so that we can make the best decision.
Scripture says we should think things through before we act. And as we gain information, we trust the Lord to guide us in the right direction. And we know it is the right path if it works, if he blesses it, and if we have peace about it after the fact.
So let me give you some scriptural support about gaining information before acting. The Bible has lots of wisdom literature that gives us insight into how we should approach situations like this. Proverbs 18 .13 says, if one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.
So, this tells us that when we're listening to someone, we need to get all the information. And then once we've digested all the information, then we respond. How often does that happen? Not very often, right?
So that's wisdom right there. Proverbs 19 .2 says, desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. When you are confronted with a big decision in your life and you desire something without thinking it through, you could be in trouble.
Your desire to act and go in a certain direction might be foolish. The Lord Jesus, when he explains the decision to become a follower of Christ, says this, for which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it.
This is why it's so important. When you share the gospel with someone, we need to share the whole gospel to them. That includes the punishment that comes if you don't believe, because people need to count the cost and realize that Jesus, if you're going to come to save in faith in Christ, he needs to be the Lord of your life.
He owns you.
And if you don't count that cost, then you might be believing in something you didn't even know you were believing in. So you see why it's so important for us to share the whole gospel when we're calling people to believe in Christ.
And he uses the illustration here of building a tower.
Right?
Sean's a carpenter. You have to have enough money before you build. That's common sense, and we should do that in our own lives when we're facing decisions. Almost two years ago, Brianne and I faced the important decision of where we were going to take our next journey in life.
And I'll be honest, it was a little perplexing at times. The Lord sent three churches to us at once, and I mean, there was crickets for like four.
Months.
I mean, nobody wanted me. And then four months went by and all of a sudden three churches popped up and we prayed. And we talked to wise people, we got all the information we needed, and we were pretty confident that the Lord wanted us to head to this church.
And so we had enough confidence and enough information to say this is the right decision to go in this direction. And as we think about Abraham here, he needed to think through why he was sending this servant specifically to Haran to find a wife for Isaac.
He could have sent his servant to the land of Canaan or even somewhere else, but he did not do that because he knew the right choice was to send his servant to his people. It would have been a lot easier, right?
The land of Canaan. I mean, these were their neighbors. They lived among the Canaanites. Just find a woman there. And he's like, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to go to my family, to my kindred north of here in Haran and find a wife.
And he's not 100 certain that this is going to work, but he has confidence that it very well may. And he acts accordingly and decides to send his servant to this place. And that's how our decisions work too.
When you face a big decision, you're not 100 sure. What we'll look at next Sunday is that the Lord doesn't give you a vision. He doesn't come to you in a dream. He doesn't write. He doesn't send a plane to write something on the sky that says, do this.
It doesn't work that way. What he does is he wants us to gather all the information, to pray about it, and then to act accordingly. And we see that Abraham has done that in our text this morning. And I mentioned in the introduction that Rob gave a sermon on this very topic a while back.
And one stress that he made was that every decision we make needs to be in conformity with what God desires for us to do as revealed in Scripture. That's the foundation of our decision making. But there will be times when the answer is not crystal clear in Scripture.
And so as we gather all the information, the right decision will never contradict God's.
Word.
And that's a very important point to make. It will never go against what God has said. And this question of what to do comes up when our desire is holy. When we want to do what is God's will for our lives.
When we want the best plan. Because God knows how He wants your life to go, exactly. Your story has already been written. Psalm 139 says that every one of our days was written even before there was one of them.
So sometimes you're going to face a circumstance in your life where every decision might seem bad or every decision might seem good. So how do you weigh those decisions? If you have a holy desire in any one of these paths you could take.
That's where you need to go to the Lord and say, Lord, what should I do? And talk to the right people. Because what He's going to do in those situations is He's going to lean you in one direction more than another.
And as you pray for wisdom, as you trust Him, it will be the right outcome. Now in verse 9, the vow to send Abraham's servant becomes official. So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham, his master, and swore to him concerning this matter.
So the journey to find Isaac's wife begins. Abraham has the right mission planned because he thought through it rightly. And we will see that Abraham made the right decision that God wanted him to make and the Lord is going to bless it.
So we'll see that next week. And so what we're going to do, this is point one of this sermon today. There's two more points left. And so this sermon is asking the question, how do we discern the will of God for our.
Lives?
So we just saw the first lesson for discerning His will and that's you must learn as much information necessary to make the right decision. In points two and three, what we'll see next week is the importance of prayer.
And then thirdly, we'll see the Lord's confirmation to us as well, which are both very important as we seek to discern the will of God in our lives. So next week we'll look at that. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we do thank you for this time that we've had to dig into your word to see the treasures that are here.
And Lord, we can learn so much from looking at how you act in the lives of your people and what we should do as well. And as it says in the New Testament, that these things were written down for our instruction.
And so may we pay attention closely to what it is that you want us to see. And may we get as much information as possible when we do have those decisions that come up in our lives. And as we look at points two and three next week, Lord, may we have a better understanding of more of what we need to do as we discern your will for our lives.
And we pray for this in Jesus' name, amen.