I found out Amazon books won’t yield much if you type “Spiritual Maturity” into the search bar. I guess it’s not a winning category in the minds of mainstream readers.
Anyway, the suggestions that the search engine did return (once you purged New Age titles and bald-faced mysticism) were practice-oriented or how-to—none of it bad stuff, just, well…unsatisfying. Yes, spiritual maturity needs healthy disciplines. But it also thrives on lessons of various sorts taught by no less than God Himself.
There’s probably not a better example of this work than in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God associated His very name with them, referring to Himself as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6).
Why did He do this? Why intertwine His identity with these three small earthly men? Because each of their lives contains a vital revelation of how God works in His people. All three form a composite picture of divine work in total. They present a summation that will essentially become the story of your life.
With Abraham, God mightily operated to teach the lessons of faith. In Isaac’s life, He demonstrated grace. In Jacob’s life, He displayed His divine work of transformation. Therefore, when we refer to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” we are virtually saying, “the God who calls people into a life of faith, establishes them in grace, and works to change them from within.” This threefold operation is the work of God in every typical Christian believer.
Abraham as an Object Lesson
First of all, take Abraham. Paul says in Romans 4:12, we “walk in the same steps of the faith which our father Abraham had.” His individual experience contains, at least in principle, the template for us all.
Primal Steps–Getting Out, Getting In
As an initial experience, God told Abraham to “Get out of your country and from your family and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). So, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out…” (Heb. 11:8a). Just getting out of something can feel like an epic all its own. Where Christians are concerned, this has a lot to do with departing, even escaping, the entrapment of godless past lives. The testimonies Christians share at church events often surround this phase. Such stories are popular because they represent a colorful and dramatic dimension of faith.
But God not only moves us out of old things, He brings us into new, higher reality. We can’t forget this side of faith. Otherwise, our journey will be nothing more than leaving situations and giving up sundry items. It will sound like you sacrificed a great deal with not much to show for it. Remember, faith grants us an exit and an entrance. Abraham went “to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance” (Heb. 11:8b).
The people of God always assign higher value to His future plans for them than the things they left behind. In fact, fixation with their past might even erode their resolve to follow Him: “If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:15-16).
Well before this “city” is manifested, we are already experiencing divine realities incomparably better than anything of this world. As Paul wrote, “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9).
Faith in Christ gets us out, while faith in Christ gets us in. That’s the witness of the Abrahamic template.
The Biggest Part of the Pie–Living According to What You Can’t See
After God told Abraham to come into the land of Canaan, He told him, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7). But for a long time, every bit of visible evidence was to the contrary. “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise” (Heb. 11:9). The humble estate of Abraham and his family reminds us that while promises provide hope, they may not materialize quickly. Faith receives the promise, but then faith must hold that promise against all discrepant appearances. This is a tension we often refer to as the “Now-but-not-yet.” God’s promise is as good as gold right now, and in some sense, even exists now. At the same time, our surroundings remind us it is not yet.
For instance, my mirror tells me to keep it real; I am not in a bodily state of glory at this time but rather melting into a jellied old man. On another level, the ongoing barrage of bad news about fallen church leaders and bickering saints says the New Jerusalem has not arrived. And globally speaking, the tiresome political news cycle continually notifies us that the kingdoms of this world have not become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Though the hope of a glorified body and the Holy City and Kingdom are all true, and their foretaste is invisible now, they are visibly not yet.
In the meantime, what is a person of faith to do? During this massive chunk of our lives, we drill down into the power of God’s Word and learn to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).
A Clarification Process and Learning to Get Out of Your Own Way
In the thick of promises made, God also promised Abraham a child: “And he believed the Lord, and he [the Lord] counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). Believe and righteousness are coupled here, the great centerpiece of the Apostle Paul’s argument in the New Testament that God justifies (declares a person righteous) on the basis of faith, not works.
However, Abraham and Sarah eventually fell under the triple influences of misunderstanding, impatience, and presumption. First, they understood the meaning of the promise to be a child only through Abraham and not involving Sarah. This, plus the passing of years during which time the child did not come, led to a plan to make something happen. Enter the debacle with Hagar, a work to “help” God. Without getting into the many thorny issues here (this is a post, not a book), people of God typically wander into this zone for a season, though it does not follow the desired footsteps of faith.
God repeated His promise to Abraham and clarified that the child would be both his and Sarah’s. By the time he spoke this word, the poor man and his wife were so old they were practically mummies. But Abraham “did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (Rom. 4:19).
If Abraham had scanned the horizon, considering natural and logical reasons to believe, and taking stock of personal potency, it would have extinguished his faith. Instead, he overlooked all impossibilities and paid attention to God.
This is especially challenging for those of us with overly active minds, plans, gifting, and a need to control outcomes. Our immediate response to God’s Word ought always to be faith. However, He may indeed ordain a waiting period for us, during which time He removes certain natural elements and ensures it is only our faith that grows.
Thus, the secret to a faith preserved, growing, and obtaining promises is to entirely rest it upon the One who made the promise to begin with.
The Pinnacle of the Faith Walk–Not Fearing Loss, but Giving All for God
Eventually, the pinnacle of Abrahamic faith arrived–the final exam, so to speak. God told him to offer his son as a sacrifice. In this case, Abraham wasn’t being asked to renounce worldly items, things from a previous sinful living. Those would never have risen to the dignified rank of an offering to God. Besides, such old lifestyle patterns had already been dealt with from the very beginning, when he had been called out. No, Abraham was now commanded to place a good, God-given blessing on the altar.
And he did it:
“By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son…He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back” (Heb. 11:17, 19).
The knife was falling on Isaac when God halted the entire thing: “He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me’” (Gen. 22:12). Thus Abraham’s willingness to give all became the seal on a lifetime of learning.
These are the steps of the faith Abraham took. Rest assured that whatever is going on in our lives will look precisely similar. Of course, the details will be different, but not the underlying principles.
As the first of the three patriarchs, Abraham showcases something none of us can skip. Though Isaac and Jacob will present more for our inspection, the blueprint of spiritual maturity always gives faith a primary place.
Purchase John’s new book here!
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Beáta Komorníková from Pixabay
Comments are closed.