“There’s no place like home”.

So goes the rather sentimental song which has brought a tear to many an eye. But we do like to feel ‘at home’, don’t we? What exactly we mean by ‘home’ is a very individual matter. One thing ‘home’ isn’t is a house. There’s something much more subjective about ‘home’. It may, of course, we where we live, be that the building we live, eat and sleep in, or it may be our ‘home town’. And ‘home town’ could be either we live now, or maybe the place we were born in. I know when Margaret and I were first married she would speak about ‘going home’, meaning to the town of Chatteris in Cambridgeshire where she was born and where her mother still lived. By this she was in no way disparaging her marriage to me, her new ‘home’, which only became true ‘home’ after the children were born and where life was truly centred.

The big thing is all this is that ‘home’ is two main things:

-it is the place where we feel secure, and

-it is the place where we feel we ‘belong’

When Abraham was seventy-five years old when God told him to leave home! Now I’ve still got a good few years yet until I reach that age. I don’t think I would feel like ‘upping sticks’, even now: certainly not if I weren’t told even where I was to go! But that’s just what Abraham did. Now there was a ‘carrot’ attached: God didn’t ask Abraham just to clear off somewhere else. Rather, God told him to go to a country that he show him and where he would then make him the father of a great nation, and to his offspring (that nation) God would give the land. (How does this influence our view of current affairs in Israel, I wonder?) I know some would beg to differ: but didn’t God promise the land as a permanent inheritance?

This actually was the very initial act in God’s plan of redemption, and like all along, it hinged on someone making the decision to obey. So Abraham goes, along with all his family, all his very extended family that is until he reached Bethel (that’s verse 8) and then to Ai. In both places he builds an altar to God. Verse 9 actually tells us Abraham went on to the Negev.

It’s on Abraham’s obedience that I wish to focus this evening and more especially on his faith- and the two are indissolubly linked, which really takes us on to the reading from Hebrews: the chapter in the Bible about faith. Verse 6 (which we didn’t have in our reading tonight) says that without faith it is impossible to please God. Faith is something very fundamental, something which spurs to action. Just last Sunday i was preaching in St Mary’s on a passage from Romans 10 where Paul says it is with your heart that you believe (same word in the Greek) (v10). Faith or belief is based in our hearts, which in the biblical sense is not the organ which pumps blood around our bodies but with the very root and essence of our being. The two things, heart-belief or faith and obedience hang together. To quote from Romans again where Paul says that apostleship was

But what is ‘faith’; how would we define it? Well the author of Hebrews gives it to us in verse 1 of chapter 11 where he says that faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Let’s repeat that: faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Here of course our writer is just defining a word, but it has a very special meaning in relation to Christian belief, and it’s that which is developed further not just in our reading tonight but throughout chapter 11. It’s very heart warming stuff, but it should be more than that. It should stir up faith within us; it should move us to action, and at the end of the chapter the writer comes out in verses 1 to 3 of chapter 12 with one of Scriptures greatest ‘therefore’s.

After defining faith for us the writer goes on to ground his definition of faith and he begins with Abraham. And, Paul tells us that those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham the man of faith. (Gal 3:9). There are three main statements which the writer makes about Abraham in connection with his faith.

1. He left home on the basis of God’s promise

That we have already glanced at as we looked at Genesis chapter 12. Although Abraham’s call was linked with a promise, the promise might have seemed a little nebulous. He was called to go to a land God would show him! What land? Where? How do I know this is all true? Don’t you think all these questions wouldn’t have gone through Abraham’s mind “O.K. I’m going to become father to a great nation (nothing I’ll ever live to see in this land! Come on, God. be real!” Might Abraham not have thought all this in the middle of the night unable to go to sleep? “And what’s Sarah going to think?” Yet what do we read? Abraham obeyed and went and surely all because he trusted God for what he couldn’t see and for a future prospect held out to him. If we had read on a little further tonight of Abraham offering Isaac as a sacrifice because God told him to- what did he think about that? But he did it!

2. He looked to God for the impossible.

Yes. God has promised a great nation from his descendants, yet he was 75 and Sarah well past the ‘change’. What hope! By faith (we are told) Abraham even though he was past age- and Sarah herself was barren- was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. He trusted in God’s promise, and because of that he was able to do that which, physically, defied all reason. Faith not only obeys but also trusts God to do what he promised. Indeed it was this simple, unquestioning trust which enabled Abraham to believe.

3. He looked to God for the impossible

Speaking more generally about people of faith we read in verse 16 they were looking for a better country- a heavenly one. Again faith in what is not seen. But there’s much, much more in that.

Where is our focus? Where, in fact, is ‘home’, as we come full-circle. All the people of faith we are told in verse 13 admitted they were aliens and strangers on earth. Faith, Christian faith, should find its true security not in being ‘at home’. Do we not focus first and foremost on worldly security? That will stop us taking risks. It may stop us doing what God is telling us. It may well take our eye ‘off the ball’. Thank God we do have great examples of faith. I think of Stuart and Ruth Fitch who in a few months will be taking little Daniel with them and go to where they believe God is calling them to serve him, in Kenya. Kenya is hardly the country you would choose to go and live in, where because of security issues, the New Zealand cricket team recently refused to go.

And Hebrews tells us that because of their focus on their heavenly home the people of faith continued to live by faith right to their life’s end.

So as we think of Abraham let us remember:

It is because of all this that the Hebrews’ writer can then says in verse 1 of chapter 12: