If you would, take your Bibles with me for the next few minutes and go to Genesis chapter 12. Genesis chapter 12. Abraham was called exalted father, but later on his name was changed for Abram, of course, but changed to Abraham. In Genesis chapter 12, look with me if you would at verse 1. I want to take a few moments and just look at a couple of things tonight about the call upon Abraham's life and how that call is really a call to us and the principle of how God used and called Abraham. In verse 1 it says, Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house into a land that I will show thee. Sounds like missions, doesn't it? And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curseth thee, and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken unto him. Lot went with him. Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son, and all their substance, that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran. And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan. And into the land of Canaan they came. And Abram passed through the land, and to the place of Sychum, and to the plain of Moriah. And the Canaanite was in the land. And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land. And there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him. And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west, Hai on the east. And there he built an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord. But if you would, go back to the first part of chapter 12. As we look at Abraham, we know Abraham's story. We know what he did. We know his life. We read Scripture a lot, don't we? But friends, how often do we just really stop and meditate on what we read? Do we read just to read? Or do we read to gain the understanding? Do we read to meditate and see what God has there for us in our own lives? The meat to chew on and to assimilate into our spiritual lives. And I see this that we must see in Abraham. Because I see in verse 1 the importance of the call. God came and said to Abraham, he said, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, and to a land, that I will show thee. I see the importance of the call is, number one, is that it's God who is calling. And when God calls, we must listen. As I told you, as God began to work in my life regarding missions, I told this representative, I had had him for a missions conference at our church, and he approached me about becoming a representative for West Virginia and Ohio at that time, and I said, as a good, and I was pastoring, but I'm just as human as everybody, I know nobody else has probably ever done this. I said, I'll pray about it. But I didn't. And probably because I didn't, at that time, want to do it. Two years later, I have the same guy back for a missions conference. Why would I do that? I liked him. But you know what he did? He hit me with the exact same question over another cup of coffee. I like coffee. And he approached me and we began to pray about it. And God began to move in our lives and show us that we needed to move and we needed to step out by faith. Brother Bowen asked me, the guy you saw in the African dress up gear, he was my supervisor for years until I stepped into his position. He's now our international rep. And as I met with him after we decided to go with IPM, one statement he made to me, he said, Brent, let me ask you this. He said, are you ready to live by faith? I thought, I'm already living by faith. Small rural church in West Virginia. I was having to work by vocationally and different things like that. But I said, Bill, I am. He said, no, that's not what I mean. And he just smiled at me. He said, are you really ready to live by faith? Today I know what He means. And that never, I've never forgotten that to this day. So I kick myself for wasting two years of not doing what I should have been doing. And I look back and I think, think of the joys that I could have had and what I've had in serving the Lord in missions. I could have had two more years of it at this point. But the importance of the call. God calls Abraham, and we have to understand that God's call is always important, and when God calls, we've got to stop and we've got to listen to His call right then. Don't just hear it, listen to it. And for Abraham, it was a call for great sacrifice. Is it not a call for great sacrifice even for us as missionaries? Those that go to the foreign field, it definitely means the same thing in the idea of leaving friends and family. Possibly even leaving our homeland. It meant leaving all that he knew and held dear. It meant no looking back. It meant no turning back. It meant no going back. By the way, I don't see him looking back here. I see him continuing on. leaving the old desires behind, not allowing any distractions to draw him aside. Do we see God's call to us as important as God sees His call to us? I have to ask myself that, and we must all. Is that as important to me as it is important to God? When I stop and I think of our Lord, who was the greatest missionary, who came to the greatest mission field, planet Earth, for you and me, was willing to go to the old rugged cross and die there and shed his blood and stay there because he loved us so much and have victory over death and hell and sin for me. And then he would even think to use me as simply a servant As the psalmist said, hey, you know, I would be just as happy to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord. What service that would be for Him. It meant moving forward. If the call of God, folks, wasn't very important, God would not have asked Him to leave everything and follow Him. By the way, I believe He did that to other men in the New Testament, did He not? I believe there were like 12 guys, 12 disciples that, you know, He brought unto Himself. called the New Testament disciples. It was a call here we see for total commitment. I'm sure that Abram thought everything through and decided it would be in his best interest to serve the Lord. Hey, why wouldn't it be? We don't see rebellion in service. We don't see any rejection from serving the Lord or anything like that. It was a call for a new course in his life and he was ready to make the change. Wow, that's a word that we don't like sometimes. Change. It's like rubbing the cat the wrong way. The screeching on the chalkboard. But there is good change. I never knew anything about national missions until Brother Bond came to our church. And my eyes were wide opened to what God is doing all around the world with these men and their ministries. It's the same God who has the same power doing the same work. And we see that when we go to the fields. He has the same power. And he's still in the saving business all around the world. It was a course of complete change for him. It was a course into the unknown. God said, I'll show you where to go. He pointed, Abraham followed. Hebrews 11, 8 tells us it was unknown. But verse 4 there says that he departed as the Lord had spoken to him. Look at verses 2 and 3, and let me give you the second quick point here, and that's simply this. We have the importance of the call, but then we have the imperative of the call. God's covenant was expressed. We must heed the call. It was a binding covenant to a life of service in the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is a binding covenant between the believer and his Lord, and yet so often we break that covenant that we've made with Christ. Not that we've lost our salvation, but saying no to serve because it interferes with my schedule. I can't serve right now. I'll serve when I get older, or I'll serve when I get through my studies, or I'll serve, you know, when I have a day off. No, when a day off comes and you're going to be doing something else because a friend's going to ask you to go somewhere or do something, and you're like, well, yeah, I can do that. I don't have anything planned. The imperative of the call. How important is God's call? You see, God's promise was given. Verse 3, God said, I'll bless them that bless thee. Verse 4, he says, So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken unto him. God's promise was given. It was a promise of blessing. It was a promise of prosperity in Christ. You know, the interesting thing is that sometimes as believers we expect God to keep His promises that He has made to us. But do we keep our promises that we have made to Him? Like we should. Remember the missionary, Brother Bond, that I told him I'd pray about it? Yeah. And many times, the resounding answer has to be no. How many times has somebody broken a promise they made to you, and we get bent out of shape because a promise was broken? You know, they should have kept their promise. And I just have to tell people, slow down a little bit. Let's reverse that. Have you broken any promises that you made to people? I am sure glad God didn't break His promise He made to us. None of them have been broken. And what comfort we can have in the very fact of the promises that He has made for us, that He is going to return to take us to be with Him. the blessings of salvation, the blessings of being with Christ, the blessings of service, what blessings even Abraham had and was promised. Listen, what if Abraham had not obeyed the voice of God? I'm glad I don't have to answer that, because he obeyed. Was Abraham perfect? No, if you study his life, you know he was just as human as you and me. But God still used him. What about David? Was David perfect? No. We know of the many frailties of David's life too, don't we? What about us? We are just as frail. We are just as human. And if God could use Abraham, and God could use Moses, and God could use Noah, and God could use David, and God could use Peter, and Paul, and James, and John, and all of these men, He can certainly use us. But we have to allow Him to. See how one man's obedience changes the course of history. So let me just leave you with this question, if I might. How do you see God's calling to you in whatever calling He is giving to you, maybe right now? I don't know what that calling is. I don't know what that calling might be. It may not be one yet, but it may be a future call. Are you willing to listen? Are you willing to go forward? Are you willing, as Isaiah said, to say, Here am I, Lord, send me. I'm volunteering. It's like the little kid in the back of the classroom who doesn't know the answer but thinks he knows the answer. When I taught in Christian school, the lowest grades I taught was third and fourth. I loved those kids. You need a lot of energy to teach them, but I loved those kids because you'd have kids raising their hands, you know. In the back of the room, you'd ask a question, and I'm sure we've all done this as we were kids, maybe even as young adults, I don't know. But they raise their hands, and you don't call on them immediately, and it's this stretch, and then they start waving at you. Isaiah said, here am I, Lord, send me. I'm volunteering, I am ready to go. Wherever you send me, whatever you call me to do, I will do. You know, my biggest fear, when I first got saved, well, later on, I got saved at seven, so I really didn't have a whole lot of fears at that point in time. But later on in my life, my biggest fear was that God would call me to California. I wasn't worried about Africa. It was California. Why? I don't know. I have no idea to this day why. But that was my fear. But, see God's call, hear God's call, and listen to God's call. Let's pray together. Father, what a blessing to know you. What a blessing to know that you care. What a blessing to know that you are there for us. That you call us to come unto yourself. And Jeremiah, you, 33 in verse three, call unto me and I will answer thee, and I will show thee great and mighty things that thou knowest not. You want us to be in your presence. You want us to be near you. You desire to be near us and to bless us. And Father, I pray this evening that you might just take this short message, Lord, and just use it to encourage our hearts, to send us on our way, to gird us up, Father, to make us bolder in the faith, that we may not fear in Joshua, that we may be strong and courageous and go forward for you. May we heed the call of God upon our lives and may we follow it. We thank you for your word. We thank you for what you've done and what you are doing. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.