Perhaps you might like to have your Bibles
open in Genesis chapter 20, because we are
going to turn together for a little while
to consider this rather sad incident in the
life of the great patriarch Abraham.
The saints of scripture are never men of
straw.
On the contrary, they are real characters, living
a real life in real situations.
And as we come to consider this great
stalwart of faith this morning, we must remember
that he is a real man, facing real
temptations in the real battles of life.
There were times when this great man of
faith descended to a rather low trough, spiritually.
And this morning we are going to look
at him in one of these very tragic
troughs to which he descended.
Now, there are three pictures that emerge from
this chapter that I would like to bring
before you.
I want to stay particularly with the first,
but in order to preserve the balance of
scripture I think we shall have to see
the three pictures together.
The first picture is that of a saint
at his worst.
The second will be that of a sinner
at his best.
And the third, that of the Saviour in
his consistent excellence and sovereignty and sufficiency.
Now, first of all then, shall we look
at the picture that we have in this
chapter of a saint at his worst.
The episode before us in Genesis 20 shows
Abraham descending to what is perhaps the very
lowest plane of living to which he has
descended since he left his home many a
long year ago, in answer to the call
of the unseen God, the God of glory
that appeared to him in the land of
the Ur of the Chaldeans.
The principles governing his behaviour at this particular
point are totally unworthy of a man of
God, but I think that as we examine
the facts that are brought out here, we
shall find the Holy Spirit of God showing
us that should such principles operate in our
lives, they are doubly reprehensible, for we live
in the light of the full revelation that
God has given to us in Jesus Christ,
and we have at our disposal a whole
Bible and the fullness of the provisions of
the Holy Spirit.
So, don't let us be unwise in our
approach to this picture.
Don't let us be arrogant as we criticize
the saint of old, but may God help
us to see that what was a sin
in him may be doubly grievous in our
own lives.
Now, look at the facts of the case.
Upon his arrival at the presumed pagan city
of Gerar, Abraham introduced Sarah to the inhabitants
as his sister.
Reports came to King Abimelech of the man
and his wife and the little group that
accompanied them, and it would seem from the
story that the king himself had come and
set eyes upon this beautiful woman that had
come into the city.
He decided immediately that he would have her
as his wife.
And having taken first steps to this end,
somehow or other he was restrained from pursuing
that course of action through.
He may not have been able to understand
his own thinking at this stage, but somehow
or other the king was strangely restrained.
And then the whole truth emerges.
Now, the facts show that whereas Abraham was
unquestionably a man of faith, a man of
proven faith, in this chapter we are told,
and told very clearly, that he was living
not a life of faith but a life
that was dominated by fear.
Perhaps it is due to fear that there
is no record of him ever raising an
altar in Gerar.
In any case, he confesses that as he
approached Gerar he rashly concluded, to use his
own words, that there is no fear of
God at all in this place.
He anticipated being confronted by a crude, unprincipled
pagan community who would, to use his own
words again, kill me because of my wife.
And therefore he feared the consequences of telling
the truth.
Now, Abraham's fear was nothing new.
On the contrary, it was a phenomenon of
long-standing.
Well over thirty years ago, just as faith
was emerging in his soul, away back home
in the land of his nativity, away back
there thirty whole years ago, Abraham had manifested
this basic fear of his heart.
You remember that before he set out in
obedience to God's call, he turned to Sarai,
his beautiful wife, and he said this to
her.
When God caused me to wander from my
father's house, I said to her, this is
the kindness that you must do to me.
At every place to which we come, you
say of me, he is my brother.
Why?
Well, for the simple reason that there was
a basic fear at the heart of this
man.
And we find that as Abraham has gone
on and followed the will of God into
the land of promise, there have been times
when this basic fear in his heart has
emerged and has dominated.
One classical example, of course, is that recorded
in chapter 12.
When Abraham went down into Egypt, afraid of
the people of the land, he went down
into Egypt.
Afraid of trusting God for provision in a
day of famine, he resorts to Egypt.
I must say that I am nevertheless encouraged
in one sense to find that Abraham did
have this fear.
I don't want to overdo this because it
can be misused and misapplied, but I am
encouraged that at the point when God called
Abraham, he was afraid.
There are passages of scriptures from which we
might conclude that Abraham had no fear at
all.
When God called him, he just went out,
fearless.
Abraham was afraid.
And because of his fear, he made this
compact with his wife.
But he overcame that fear.
And he trudged a thousand miles, living by
faith, trusting in his God, overcoming his fear.
Now and again, however, it came to the
surface.
To have come so far and dared so
much with such a dread lurking in his
soul is nothing short of a miraculous.
But that it should emerge again at this
stage in his spiritual pilgrimage is a great
tragedy.
Now there briefly are the facts of the
case, but let us look now particularly at
the folly, at the foolishness of it all.
Looking back retrospectively upon the sad event, Abraham
would doubtless feel grieved at heart.
I am quite sure that he would give
anything if only he could erase and obliterate
this incident again from his life.
It brought to light, for one thing, the
hideous fact, hideous to a man of faith,
that here was one whole area of his
life that had never been sanctified.
Here was one whole territory of his experience
in which he had never found victory by
faith in his God.
He had never been able to conquer fully
and completely this basic fear.
Had faith mastered that basic fear of his,
then the pact that he made with Sarai
many years ago would have been undone and
torn and thrown with the winds a long
time ago.
But it wasn't.
It wasn't.
And so here he has the same pact
in being, offering to a stricken faith an
alternative means of existing, when he is found
with his back against the wall.
To use other language, Abraham has not burnt
his bridges behind him.
Abraham still has an alternative to faith.
There is a whole area of his life
that has not been mastered by God.
Moreover, to resort to such carnal methods now,
at this stage, seems to call in question
the penitence of twenty-four years ago.
As we have already indicated, Abraham did something
quite similar a way back in Egypt.
So very similar indeed.
But then Abraham emerged from Egypt, and it
would seem that he was really a penitent
man.
It would seem that he was a heartbroken
man, a man that had learnt his lesson
the hard way, and when he came back
to the land to which God had brought
him, he reared the altar again and he
worshipped God, and he went on, sacrificially living
in dependence upon God.
For example, he was willing to let Lot
choose the cities of the plain and the
pastures of the plain, and himself to go
up to the bleak mountains to live.
He had faith in God now.
But this fact brings into question the reality
and the depth of that penitence.
Again, it was a signally sad and foolish
lapse, when we consider how greatly privileged Abraham
had been in the meantime.
It's a wonderful story of how God comes
into the life of this man and gives
him untold privileges.
You start reading when you have a moment
of leisure, if you have any here in
Keswick.
Read from chapter 15 on again.
Take chapter 17, where God comes so close
to Abraham to reassure him that he is
indeed the object of his covenant promises.
It is as if the God of Abraham
would rub it in so that Abraham shall
have no doubt about it.
He is the object of covenant care and
covenant promises.
Look at him in chapter 18, entertaining unawares
for a while, not only angels of God
but the very God himself, talking to Jehovah
under the oaks of Mamre.
Think of him again being assured that Sarah
indeed was to be the mother of the
promised seed.
And see God speaking to him as a
friend, telling him what he's going to do
in terms of judgment down there in Sodom.
You see, God is coming so near to
him.
Fellowship is so sweet.
The reality of it is so precious.
And yet, my good friend, despite all this,
Abraham lapses.
And he descends from the mountain of faith
and obedience and comes down to the trough
of unbelief and of fear.
And listen to this.
The man that cannot now trust God puts
his confidence in a lie.
Well, now, it's all very well for us
to look at this picture, and it's a
very challenging one, but now, just for a
moment, are we being honest with God this
morning?
Are we really being honest with God this
morning?
Could this picture be a mirror in which
you would see yourself, my dear Christian friend,
if you were honest?
Am I speaking to someone this morning who
has come to Keswick and who is really
living on a lie?
And if the truth were told, you are
pretending to be what you are not, and
you have more confidence in a lie than
you have in God.
Could it be that there are some of
us who have set out upon this convention
and who are here on this Monday morning,
and as God looks upon us, there are
whole areas of our lives that are unmastered
by the grace of God?
There are still basic fears and tendencies emerging
from our old unregenerate life, and though we
have gone on for twenty, thirty years, we've
still not got the real victory.
Could that be true?
In fact, certain things have happened quite recently,
maybe in our experiences, that have called in
question the penitence that we apparently exhibited ten,
fifteen, twenty years ago.
We pretended to deal rigorously with an issue
that brought us to the place of shame
and dishonoured our Lord.
We presumed and we assumed that we were
going to sway the hideous thing at the
heart when we emerged from our Egypt.
But something has happened even recently in the
days before we've come to Keswick, which has
brought to light the fact that we were
not really as penitent as we appeared.
We never came to that place where we
loathe our own sin and anything that dishonours
our Lord, and we are still wallowing in
the mire of a secret sin.
Could it not be true of some of
us?
I'm quite confident it is.
Though we have known glorious privileges freely given
us by the grace of God, we are
despising them in order to court a darling
sin that is more dear to us than
life itself.
We have known those precious moments, and God
has been so near that we have been
afraid to breathe.
Just like Abraham, if, beneath the oaks of
Mamre, we've heard him speak to us by
name, and we've fellowshiped with him in all
the sweetness of it, words cannot tell the
wonder of the fellowship we once enjoyed.
And yet, despite that, some of us this
morning have more confidence in a lie than
in the living God we have known so
well in the past.
My friend, listen.
Do you know that Abraham was willing to
sell his wife's purity for his own safety?
Are you pandering with the purity and moral
and spiritual well-being of your partner or
your children because you're living in sin?
Abraham would esteem the promise to posterity a
light thing for his own comforts.
Oh, God has said so much to him.
The blessing is not only to you, Abraham.
Children unborn, nations untold will profit if you
walk in the pathway of obedience.
Abraham would sell it all for his own
comfort.
He would permit the glory of God to
be eclipsed and tarnished by his selfishness and
his fear.
My good friend, now, let us be honest.
Could not this be true of some of
us in this very tent in this morning
service in Kesi?
In other words, could it not be that
God in his providence has brought some of
us here simply because we are living at
our very worst?
A saint at his worst.
Now, that brings me very briefly to the
second point here, the second picture, namely that
of a sinner at his best.
The heinousness of Abraham's sin looks even worse
alongside the high standard of the pagan king
of Gerar Abimelech and his servants.
The remarkable thing here is this, that their
behavior seems altogether exemplary.
It is strange how pagans sometimes seem to
reach a higher plane of living than some
of God's people in their moments of delirious
rebellion against his will.
This man's high moral standard appears in his
attitude to Sarah, for example.
Have you noticed it?
This king does not permit himself to be
ruled by unbridled passion.
Now, I have no doubt that the man's
lust was aroused, but something restrained him.
And when he saw this beautiful woman, he
had decided to make her his wife, but
something held him in check.
And like a gentleman, first of all, he
questioned Sarah, who are you?
Oh, she said, I'm Abraham's sister.
And notice this, he's not content with questioning
the one, he questions the other.
He asked Abraham, who's the woman?
She's my sister, he said.
And it was only when this pagan man
had received the same answer from both of
them that he proceeded to make plans to
make Sarah his own wife.
Here is a man who is living on
a higher plane for the moment, at any
rate, than the man of God.
This man not only recognized the voice of
God in a dream, as verse three tells
us, there's something more than that here.
He knows himself to be at the mercy
of the God who speaks to him.
You read the record, I'm not going into
the details, but it's quite obvious.
This pagan man, this man who didn't know
Jehovah, the God of Abraham, the real God,
the living God, the God of the covenant,
but he recognized his voice in a dream
as the voice of the living God.
And he knew instinctively that his life was
at the mercy of this living God that
was speaking to him.
He knew that he was a sovereign God.
His high principles again emerge in the urgency
and the sincerity with which he restores Sarah
to her rightful husband the moment he knows
what's gone wrong.
You notice how he gets up early the
next morning after God has spoken to him,
and he calls his servants together, and he
says, we've got to put this thing right
immediately.
God has spoken.
One of the things that makes the moral
and the spiritual lapses of godly folks so
tragic is the fact that often there are
men at hand who are totally ignorant of
the grace of God, and yet whose standards
in some respects are incomparably higher.
Their good behavior seems to call in question
the very validity of the Christian faith, as
represented in the servant of God there at
hand.
God is dishonored by the standard manifested by
his representative, and his glory is beclouded.
I wonder whether there isn't someone here this
morning who has been a Christian for years.
You've made great professions.
Oh, you know your scriptures.
You come from an assembly or from a
church or from a congregation where there is
great Bible teaching, and you are so glad
and sometimes so proud to be able to
say that you've sat at the feet of
so-and-so.
You know the doctrines of the word of
God, and you've had this blessing and that
blessing, and you know the place and the
time.
But listen, friend, there's someone in the office
who's far more conscientious than you are, and
he's not a Christian.
He's there to time, and he does a
good day's work for a day's wage, and
he finishes the job, and your testimony is
under a cloud, not only because of your
sin, but because of the standard of the
man who is not a Christian by your
side.
Alongside of a saint at his worst, you
get the picture of a sinner at his
best.
Let's apply it a little, and bring it
a little nearer home, in the place where
you stay, where you're lodging.
If you're not at home, is it not
true to say that there are some others
who are unconverted and who know nothing about
the privileges that you have experienced?
They're far more considerate than you.
They think of others.
They're kind.
They're generous.
Somehow there is love coming from their hearts,
and you, child of God, with all your
vaunted experience of the grace of God, you're
as hard as flint.
Could that be so?
Will you be honest with God this morning?
Indeed, is it not possible that some of
us in the homes where we are have
unconverted parents and sisters and brothers whose standards
in living are far higher than ours?
I don't believe as a pastor in parading
the sins of folk under my care, and
I would not do it.
But I will tell you this much.
I've known in principle this kind of thing
happen over and over again.
When a burdened father or a burdened mother
comes and says, look here, so-and-so
has professed conversion, and he comes to the
Bible class, and he does this, he goes
to the open air service, and if there's
anything to do, he'll do it in church,
but at home he's a misery, and his
unconverted brother is living an exemplary life.
What's wrong?
Brethren and sisters in Christ, these things ought
not to be.
A saint at his worst, a sinner at
his best, and it makes the tragedy doubly,
doubly disastrous.
That brings me to the last picture.
The Savior in his consistent excellence.
Hallelujah.
He never wavers.
His strength is never spent.
His might and his grace and his excellence
is always consistently the same.
The same yesterday and today and forever.
In the presence of a sinning saint, he
is here in all his glory and in
all his consistent grace.
I want to bring just two very brief
pictures out here.
He is excellent in his sovereign power, for
one thing.
I see that sovereign power overruling and restraining
the pagan king, lest he should hinder the
fulfillment of the divine purpose.
God in his sovereign power puts a limit
to the sins of men, and in case
of Bimelech, the pagan king should become a
little bit proud of his standard of living,
God says to him, look here, he says,
it was I who kept you from sinning
against me.
It was I who restrained you from taking
Sarai to be your wife.
It was I who restrained you, the sovereign
God.
Not only overruling and restraining a pagan king,
but teaching his erring child by showing him
that his fears were unfounded.
Had Abraham only trusted God, he would have
gone into the city of Gerar and he
would have found the most friendly king and
the most friendly people and the most understanding
folk.
There was no need for him to be
afraid.
It was all so groundless, all so very
unnecessary.
And then we see the sovereignty of God
supervising the whole of life so that his
purpose is fulfilled and not frustrated.
The excellency of his sovereign power and the
excellency of his saving sufficiency.
Oh, I find great comfort here, and I
want God helping me to be his instrument
for bringing the same comfort to someone else
this morning.
Having chosen Abraham and called him and given
to him some of the first fruits of
the blessings that he held in store for
him, God does not give up his sinning
saint, and in grace he comes after him
and disciplines him, brings him down to despair
a while perhaps.
But in order to save him and to
bring him back again to the plane of
faith, I wonder whether I'm speaking to someone
this morning who, because of your sin, you
are almost tempted to believe that God must
give you up.
Oh, the God of all grace and compassion
that called you when you were dead in
trespasses and sins, I believe is here this
morning to minister saving and sanctifying grace to
your heart, if you will hear his voice.
When Abraham had learned his lesson, God will
yet heed even the prayer of Abraham, for
Abimelech the king and his household.
But the sovereign power and the saving grace
of God must not be made a cloak
for your continuance in sin.
Now, I find that all the doctrines of
Scripture can be misapplied and misused.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God can
be misapplied and misused.
It is a doctrine in which I believe
unblushingly and repose my confidence in it.
But there are men and women who believe
in the sovereignty of God in such a
way that they excuse their own responsibility in
certain issues.
So is it possible to misapply and to
misuse the great doctrine of God's grace, that
we should continue in sin and rebel against
our gracious God?
Shall we continue in sin that grace may
abound?
Perish the thought.
These are blessed facts to be held and
applied to our situations, but not in such
a way as to preclude the necessity of
our straightening things out this morning, things that
have gone wrong.
Now, it may not be a basic fear
with you or with me that is unmastered.
It could be a carnal arrogance, a boldness,
a self-sufficiency.
Or it could be something quite different from
this.
But the fact is, it has involved you
or it has involved me in dishonouring our
Lord.
Will you not face up to it, my
friend, in this first known meeting of our
convention?
I plead with you to do it.
So much of the ministry of this week
will be like water on a duck's back
as far as you are concerned, if you
are not prepared honestly and realistically in a
convention such as this to face up to
what God says about your condition.
Abraham did.
Oh, I marvel when I come on to
a chapter like chapter 22, just two chapters
ahead, and I see this man that was
lapsed away in chapter 20, and I see
him prepared even to offer his only son
Isaac.
And don't forget, he could not offer Isaac
without first offering his own heart.
Everything now hinged upon Isaac, but he was
prepared to do it now.
Why?
Oh, this man has come back to live
by faith, believing that God was even able
to raise Isaac from the dead.
He is living by faith again.
But wait a moment.
Before he got back to the plane of
faith, he had to face his own sin
and folly.
Now, this is the challenge of the early
hour of this convention.
You, my good friend, have been called of
God perhaps to do a work for him,
a work that in some measure involves others,
even now, a work that could very well
determine the plight of posterity, in a limited
sense at least.
Are you going to perpetuate a lie?
Are you going to live on a fib
rather than by faith?
Are you going to live on a plane
that is beneath your dignity as a child
of God, leaving the whole vast possibilities precariously
poised?
Your own children may suffer.
Your own wife, your own partner may suffer.
Posterity in general will suffer, if you do.
Therefore, for your own soul's sake, for your
family's sake, for posterity's sake, for the Church's
sake, but supremely for the glory of the
God of Abraham and your God and mine,
my dear brother, come with me this morning
in penitence.
Open your heart.
Tell him all about it.
Ask him for the grace realistically to deal
with yourself.
Plead the grace that he has promised.
And I believe, I sincerely believe, not because
I happen to be the one speaking here
this morning, I really believe he will heal
your backslidings and he will have mercy yet.
And you may yet ascend and walk the
life of victorious faith in a triumphant God.
Oh, may he grant it for his name's
sake.
Let us pray.
Our God and our Father, we bow humbly
in thy presence.
Having again been under the disciplines of thy
word and spirit, and quite unable to avoid
the conclusion that in some measure this picture
applies to us all, we pray thee now
to save us from thinking of the need
of others in this respect, and avoiding to
face issues for ourselves.
As we have sought of thee already in
prayer, we do again humbly beg of thee
to give us an honesty of heart and
of mind toward thee.
So direct us, and so lead us, that
during this coming week we shall be brought
out into the large place of the wholesome
deliverance that thou hast in Jesus Christ for
all thy people.
And we ask it now in his holy
name.
Amen.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
love of God, and the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit be with us all.
Amen.