6 March 2026

You have got to admire Abraham’s obedience.  God says, ‘Go!’ And Abraham goes and the writer to the Hebrews adds  that Abraham went ‘not knowing where he was going’. (Hebrews 11;8)

And if he was going to a place of plenty, a life of ease, a paradise garden, a land flowing with milk and honey we could see the point of his obedience. But there is no such consolation for Abraham.

Read on in Genesis 12 – and what do you see? There is famine in the land. What an inhospitable welcome! There is fighting in the camp! What next? I’ll tell you! There’s warfare and Abraham gets caught up in it!

Famine, family conflict, warfare! Who would journey on into that kind of world? But it’s the real world as we can see all too clearly today. It is the most authentic context for God’s call to be heard and obeyed.

Living with uncertainty  is our human lot. But how we resist it! Because God calls, it doesn’t mean to say we will not experience famine, warfare, family strife!

But we can still obey the call. We can still go. We can still live faithfully despite the challenges to our faith consequent on the human context in which we live!

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