Sermon 01-08-12 :: Connect the Dots

Family Tree – The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

If God wanted to, he could have communicated his character and will to us by inspiring a set of doctrinal textbooks that explain our relationship to him in a logical, coherent fashion. At the risk of being boring and academic, at least we would have clear answers. But instead, God did something far more complex, dramatic, and at times, downright crazy. At a specific time in history God called a specific man named Abraham to go to a specific land where he would become the father of a specific family. This family of God to which we belong has continued throughout the ages, through joy and struggle, faithfulness and failure, growth and decline, all the way up to this present day in which we gather as family to worship. In the following weeks we focus our attention on the stories in Genesis that narrate the formation of this family of God – our family. For many of us, these stories may be somewhat familiar, but we struggle to understand how our lives fit within them, perhaps wondering how the episodes about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob intersect the chaotic episodes of our lives. And so we go back to our “family tree,” knowing that the same family God created long ago through Abraham is the same family we belong to today.

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