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As you turn there, I want to remind everyone, all of our men, all of our guys, that upcoming on this Friday night, February the 9th, we will have our men's shrimp and oyster dinner.
All right.
Tim is leading that toast.
Tim, that you just all baptized.
He's one of the leaders in our men's ministry.
He's going to be leading this night.
Tim corrected me this past week, and so I stand, and I need to give some clarity to something that I said.
Okay, on here we have.
This is a men's dinner, but here's who's invited.
Men and boys of all ages are invited to be a part of this evening together.
We're excited as Daryl Cheeks, one of our missionaries who's here with us from the Philippines, is going to be sharing that night, sharing about all that God has done and been a part of.
And if you've never heard Darryl's testimony, you need to be here to hear all that he's going to share about the work that God is doing.
If you've heard it, trust me.
I've had the privilege of almost weekly being able to have lunch with Darryl and the discipleship group that we're in in every single week.
There's something new of wisdom that he can impart and speak truth into my life.
And so I want to challenge you guys to be here, to be a part of that.
The cost is $20, and so we need to know by the end of the day tomorrow if you could let.
Us know so they know how many.
They need to go out and buy.
With that said, I want to challenge you men as well, all right?
To not just get a ticket for yourself, but be willing to get a ticket for you and someone else.
There's a friend, there's a brother, there's a neighbor, there's someone that you know that needs to be here that night.
And as a part of missional discipleship, we want to challenge you to invite them and encourage them to be with.
Us on that evening as Daryl shares with us.
I promise you will get plenty to eat.
I know some of you are, like, challenged, accepted.
I cannot wait.
You can register on these cards as a little QR code.
You can scan that, and you can.
Be registered to be a part of that evening.
So we are back in Genesis, chapter 23.
We're back in Genesis this morning.
Going to be in chapter 23.
So last March we started this series working through Genesis.
And I committed that when we started this journey, that while we would take a few breaks and we have, we broke for Christmas time around November, so we can move into our Christmas series.
And then we went into our proverbs series to kind of get us started for the new year, but that we would definitely dive back into and we would work through, all the way through Genesis, that we would stick it out all the way through the end.
And if you've read Genesis, if you've studied Genesis, you know, man, there are some really just wonderful passages that we're all aware of and that we've read, and we dive into understanding creation in the fall and Noah and Abraham and all those.
But sandwiched in there, there's some difficult passages, there's some genealogies to kind of work through.
There's some encounters that we don't, relational encounters that we don't fully understand, but that we understand that all of God's word is powerful and is useful and is beneficial and good for us.
So in this commitment, we're like, you know what?
We're going to journey through it all.
We're going to journey through every genealogy.
We're going to push through, push through, push through.
All right.
And so last year when we made our break, we were really into our time with Abraham and Sarah.
That was the bulk of that kind of end piece that we were in.
And today we're going to kind of look at the end of our time with them.
And these are two pretty important people, not just in the story of Genesis, but in the story of the entire bible.
In the entire narrative that we see Abraham and Sarah, they're a pretty big deal.
The book Genesis encompasses about 2000 years of history.
That's a big chunk of time.
When you think about 2000 years, that's basically from the time Jesus was born until today.
And Genesis is a historical narrative that covers that large of amount of time.
And that these two individuals, the events of their life, are so impactful for the ongoing narrative in the story of scripture that about 20% of the content of Genesis is covered in them.
In fact, in the entirety of scripture, Abraham is mentioned a few hundred times and Sarah, his wife, is mentioned a dozens of times as we go through scripture.
We met them in Genesis chapter twelve, and they were Abram and Sarah prior to Genesis chapter twelve.
We don't know a lot about them, but we know that they were pagan.
People from a pagan land.
But there's this interaction with God, where God calls them, uses them, and they respond.
And in their life, they have their highs and their lows, their ups and their downs, both in their relationship and their relationship with the Lord.
The fact that we call it highs and lows might be an understatement.
In their highs, they're called and chosen by God to have his people come through their lineage.
It's a pretty big deal.
They're brought into this covenant relationship with God, and they're continually reminded of their covenantial relationship with God.
We see something different with them than what we've seen before.
Beginning in Genesis twelve.
They experience high levels of financial success.
We see them politically.
They're influential, they're widely respected amongst people that surround them.
They are known.
They are powerful.
They are people of means.
God promises them a son.
He promises them a son in a miraculous way.
And as God always does, God fulfills his promises, and he gives them a son.
Of all of the things that we've seen happen and move in their life, we see the faithfulness of God here in a very, very powerful way.
And at times, they display high levels.
Of obedience from the very beginning.
In Genesis twelve, God calls them think all the way back to the summer.
When we started reading about them.
And God calls them that.
They left their home, they left their family, they left their country, they left all that they knew to follow a God that had called him into a depth of obedience.
We see high levels of obedience that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, the son of the promise Isaac, that God had given him because of God had called him to in his full commitment, until in the character and the nature of God, he stops him and he provides a sacrifice in his place.
We see these high levels of commitment, this power couple of scripture, right?
But we also see the lows of their life.
They continually question God who called them.
They question his fulfillment of the covenant and the promises that he made for them.
They show great levels of character weaknesses in scripture.
Twice, two times, Abraham offers his own wife to others out of fear that he'll lose his own life.
They doubt God's plan for them to have a son, to the point where Sarah gives up her servant to Abraham so that he can have a son with her.
You see, they take the truth of what God's promised them, and then they try to manipulate it so they can take it over themselves.
And instead of listening to God, he listens to her, he listens to Sarah, he impregnates the servant woman, and a huge cycle of dysfunction begins to continue in their life.
But when you read all of that, what you see is the steadiness of the hand of the sovereign God over them.
I remind us this journey that we've been on with Abraham and Sarah, because.
If you're new in joining with us.
As we're reading through Genesis, our tendency from time, as we read these historical accounts and we say this, that we.
Believe that the Bible is both spiritually.
Accurate and true, and historically accurate and true.
So we don't believe that these are.
Myths and fables that are taught to us so that we can learn great lessons.
We believe that these are real people in real time and a real God working in a real way in their life.
And it can be our tendency, though.
From time to time, to look at.
The individuals and look at the people of the story and to make the story all about them and all about who they are.
And they become these heroes of the faith, and they are, they do miraculous things as the Lord works in and moves in their life.
But they're just people like you and I falling in dependence for the Lord, having their highs, having their lows.
And as we read through this in Genesis, what I just want to remind us of before we even get into Genesis, chapter 23 today, is this, that God has a plan for your life and God has a plan for your life.
So many times we talk to people and they think they're too insignificant.
We talk to people and they think they're too old.
We talk to people and they think they're too young.
We talk to people and they think they've been too disobedient.
We talk to people and they think they've got too much of a past.
We talk to people and they think they don't have enough finances.
We talk to people and they think that they're weak in their gifting.
We talk to people and they feel like they don't have the right personality.
And what I want to tell you is, regardless of whatever excuse that Satan is speaking into your ear about your past or who you believe to be, that God has a plan for you, to use you for his name, to use you for his kingdom, he's got a plan for those two girls and that boy.
He's got a plan for their granddad.
He's got a plan for me and he's got a plan for you.
And the Bible is filled with men and women just like you and I, who get it wrong, but who trust in a God who always gets it.
Right, who continually get it wrong, but trust in a God who gets it right?
No, no, but there's exceptions to the rules.
I mean, there's Jesus.
We know Jesus fully, man fully.
God always gets it right.
But then there's others, and they're just better than me.
They're just better than me.
I thought that.
You think that we'll get Paul, right?
Here's how Paul describes himself in one Timothy, chapter one.
The verse will be on the screen.
I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus, our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent.
But I received mercy because I'd acted ignorantly in unbelief.
And the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of which.
I am the foremost.
It's Paul.
Paul who was Saul persecuted mass murderer.
Paul said, look, he's using me to save the world.
God's got a plan for you.
But what if Paul was just talking.
About his past, right?
But now we think about all the.
Things that Paul's done.
Look what Paul says in romans seven, starting verse 15.
For I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what.
I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good.
So now it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me.
For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh.
For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me.
And so Paul writes in this battle that he faces of the sin that wars within him, in the pieces, what's right.
And it's exciting for us that God's got a plan to use you, God's got a plan to use me.
And that over the course of every.
Day that God gives you the grace to walk the face of this earth, there's a purpose, and there's a plan for every single moment that's here.
In just a moment, we're going to read Genesis, chapter 23.
We're going to read all of chapter 23.
And I was telling some people that were here earlier.
Maybe I should do.
A better job of strategically planning out week to week exactly where we'll be.
But I do, and we talk about.
That, but we just kind of go though also as the spirit leads.
Berger and I were talking.
I was like, how do we get back into Genesis coming up here in February?
And so we went and looked, and I was like, all right, Genesis, chapter 23.
And open up my bible.
And we're right here.
And we see Sarah's death and burial.
Like, welcome back to Genesis.
And so I started thinking like, all right, God, as I kind of wanted to do this recap and remind.
And then here we find ourselves right here.
Why, God?
Why of all the breaks, why do you have here?
And it came to, as we talk about this plan, this purpose that God has for our life, here's this piece that we know that we uncomfortably choose not to talk about.
Enough.
Your life will come to an end.
Your life and my life will come to an end.
One of the unique challenges of my.
Job is officiating funerals.
Do way more of those than I would like, but it's an honor every time I do one.
It's a weird conflict within us as pastors.
It's a conflict because we're not looking forward to the next death and the tragedy and the heartache that it would bring.
But we know that it's going to happen.
And the ability to walk alongside and.
Comfort a family is there.
I think we have this mentality sometimes with us that every day is an expected event and not every day is a privilege.
We think that this won't happen to us, or it's so far away that it not even needs to be thought about.
But look about James 413 through 14.
Come now, you who say today or.
Tomorrow, we can go into such and such a town and spend a year there and make a profit, yet you.
Who do not know what tomorrow will bring, what is your life?
And look how James describes it.
For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
Kind of like warmth in South Carolina in January or February, right?
It's warm as cold.
As quick as it comes, it leaves.
And this is what we find within our life.
Is all that God has.
Chosen within Sarah and Abraham.
Yet this is what we find.
In Genesis chapter three, we see the first funeral in the Bible.
In Genesis chapter three, we find out the age.
The only woman in the bible that.
We know her age when she died.
It's also very interesting.
The first time we see anyone in the Bible weep.
First time we see anyone in the Bible weep.
So let's read.
We're going to read all the way.
Through Genesis, chapter 23.
And then draw some pieces for us this morning.
Says Sarah lived 127 years.
And these were the years of the life of Sarah.
When Sarah died at Kirathriba, that is Hebron, in the land of Canaan.
And Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
Let's just pause there.
Just a beautiful picture that we see husband and wife.
In the ups or downs.
She dies, he weeps.
Verse three.
And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, I'm a sojourner and a foreigner among you.
Give me property among you for a burying place.
That I may bury my dead out of my sight.
And the Hittites answered, Abraham, hear us, my lord.
You are a prince of God among us.
Bury your dead in the choices of our tombs.
None of us will withhold from you his tomb to hinder you from burying your dead.
And Abraham rose and bowed to the Hittites, the people of the land.
And he said to them, if you are willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me and entreat from me Ephron, the son of Zohar.
That he may give me the cave of Mechpevlah, which he owns.
It is at the end of his field.
For the full price.
Let him give it to me in your presence, as a property for a bearing place.
Now, Ephraim was sitting amongst the Hittites.
And Ephraim the Hittite answered Abraham, in the hearing of the Hittites, of all who went in at the gate of the city, know, my lord, hear me.
I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it.
In the sight of the sons of my people, I give it to you.
Bury your dead.
And then Abraham bowed down before the people of the land.
And he said to Ephraim, in the hearing of the people of the land, but if you will hear me, I give the prince of the field, except the price of the field.
I'm sorry, the price of the field.
Accept it from me that I may bury my dead there.
And Ephraim answered, Abraham, my lord, listen to me.
A piece of my land worth 400 shekels of silver.
What is it?
That between you and me, bury your dead.
Abraham listened to Ephraim.
And Abraham lifted out of Ephraim the silver that he had named in his hearing of the Hittites.
400 shekels of silver, according to the weights current among the merchants.
So the field of Ephraim and Mexla, which was the east of Mamre, the field of which the cave was in, and all the trees that were in the field throughout its whole area, was made over to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites before all who went at the gate of his city.
After this, Abraham buried his wife Sarah, in the cave of the field of the Melikfah, east of Mamre, that is, Hebron, in the land of Canaan.
The field and the cave that is in it were made over to Abraham as a property for a burying place by the Hittites.
All right, so we see this story of a man who loses his wife and the process that he goes through as he plans to bury her.
I think part of what makes life.
So precious is that it does come to an end.
I shared as a pastor.
I've watched death impact families.
I've watched death come when it was expected, and I've watched death come when it was unexpected.
I've seen death come to those lost and those saved.
I've seen death come to men and women.
Death come to the healthy and to.
The unhealthy, and death come to the.
Young and the old.
In the 22 years that I've experienced in ministry, I didn't realize how much death that I would deal with, face.
Minister in and process through.
I can tell you, it wears on you.
It's hard.
It's a hard battle.
It's a difficult tension.
But I don't just know death as a pastor.
I know it as a man as well.
From the age of 15 to 19 each year, during that span of my life, I had a personal friend that I knew and love die.
Throughout my entire life, I've watched my.
Mother continually grieve the loss of her mother that passed away when my mom was just 15 years old.
I watched my grandmother love and serve my grandfather as he fought Parkinson's for years and then pass.
I sat in an unfriendly, cold, dark hospital room with my wife and listened to a doctor tell us that our newborn baby son had a condition that would kill him if measures were not taken.
And we praise the Lord that he's alive today.
I've lost people close to me from murder, cancer, suicide, car accidents, dementia, Parkinson's.
And the list goes on and on and on.
So when I open up Genesis 23.
And I read this this week, it's like, lord, what do you have for us from this.
And here is.
I've heard this from time and time again from families.
When you walk into that hospital room, you show up at that nursing home, you come into their living room, and.
They'Ve just lost someone close to them.
And here's what they want to know.
How do we respond as believers who have our hope, our faith and trust in Jesus?
How do we respond?
And sitting in my office this week.
That question came to me, and I read this encounter over and over and over again.
And I thought, what God gives us in the life of Abraham is a beautiful response to how we respond when someone close to us, whom we love, whom we cherish, passes.
So I want to give these to.
You this morning, quickly, as a comfort.
Number one, we grieve.
Genesis, chapter two.
And Sarah died.
And Sarah died just as bluntly as it could be.
And Sarah died at Kirtharakaba, at the land of Canaan.
And Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
He mourned.
He wasn't too spiritual not to.
He wasn't too focused on the things.
Of God, that he could not be consumed with tears.
But what we see here is the reminder of what Paul tells us in first Thessalonians chapter four, that we are a people who grieve.
The next verse says that he had to get himself up.
I don't know if you've ever hit that type of grieving, but literally what that means is that man fell out on the floor.
Snot bubble, tears, ugly cry.
He literally had to will himself up off of the floor.
We grieve, we mourn, but we do it with hope.
Jesus wept with Lazarus.
There can be a lie that Satan.
Gives us that when we face death.
To weep is a sign of spiritual immaturity, but we see the opposite from scripture.
We grieve.
Now, here's what's hard sometimes is our grieving can look different in 2020.
My dad's here.
2020 or 2021 is when my dad, my grandmother that I just spoke about love, my grandfather passed away.
Before she passed away, she asked me to do her funeral.
Great honor, great privilege, most difficult day.
And I remember that morning, Eric's at the house, and we were getting ready, and I said, hey, I just need to go into the office for a little bit.
And she's like, do you need to work on the message?
And I said, no, I just need to mourn for a little while.
I just need to grieve for a minute.
And so I did.
We grieved.
And so don't let the emotion of your heart in these moments.
Don't let Satan grasp that.
And no, you're of little.
No, no.
When these things happen, we grieve, we grieve, but we also, number two, we seek to honor.
We seek to honor verses three and four.
And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, I'm a sojourner and foreigner among you.
Give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.
He sought to honor his wife, to do what was right and what was good and what was honorable.
You know what I've never buried?
I've buried kids.
I've buried adults.
I've buried mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, friends and family.
Death does not choose, favorites or exclude.
But in the 22 years, I've never buried the perfect person.
Never.
Because it doesn't exist.
And in these processes, when these times come, we're not brought back to all of the failures that we saw.
We're not brought back to all of the shortcomings.
What Abraham does, is he.
No, no, I need to honor, and I think there's that part of us, of what God gives us in his grace and his kindness and mercy when we face death is the wonderful beauty of life and experience and memory.
And that we can honor the individual who was not perfect, by no means, but we can honor them with what we do.
Here's the challenge for us.
I've sat with families before and I.
Want to tell you, walk through the difficulty that they face of thinking how to honor an individual who has lived a life so reckless and so careless and so abusive and so sinful.
And that's a hard journey to walk a family down.
So here's the challenge that I would give us as we take the truth and the hope that we have in God's word.
Live a life.
You can't live a life worthy of the grace that God gives you.
But you can choose to live a life that's worthy for the next generation to honor you in your passing, be the person that your kids, that your grandkids, that your friends and that your family would look to emulate in Christ, to seek to be the person that they know with the character and the integrity.
So when that difficult day comes, it's the joy that they can speak to of the memories of the life of the individual that's there.
So we grieve and we honor, but we treasure.
Now I'm not going to go back and read all of those verses here of what's happening for Abraham.
But let me kind of explain what the majority of this that just happened.
Abraham needs to bury his wife.
He still, in this journey, is a foreigner in a foreign land, so he does not own land to bury her.
Now, in negotiations, what he does in.
The attempt to purchase this land.
They'Re resistant to charge him, so they want.
To give it to him.
And he says, no, that's not how I'm going to treasure her.
I'm going to treasure her, and I'm willing to pay the price that honors her.
So the Bible tells us that he pays 400 shekels of silver for the land.
Now, here's where this kind of gets significant.
Here in this moment, the price he paid for for the land was eight times the value of the cost of what it would take to build the temple.
Did he overpay?
Yes.
It was a bad deal.
But here's the thing.
His heart was saying it was worth.
It because she was worth it.
In that moment, his choice of treasuring his wife was made clear and was made evident.
Here's what I want to say as we walk through the passing of an individual, of what's there.
I'm not saying go to the funeral home today and say, what's your price?
Times that by eight.
But I'm saying this.
Make sure in the schedule of your life that there's the inconvenience that's there to show that you treasure and that you long them not only in their passing, but in their life.
Go visit, pick up the phone, make a call, spend time.
Don't look back after the passing and say, what if?
But look at the point of where you are and say, what can we do?
But Abraham doesn't just treasure Sarah here.
He treasures God here, because here's what he could have done.
He could have taken her back.
He could have taken her to their home, back where he was from, and left where God had called him to be.
But here, he valued his faithfulness to his lord over everything.
Over everything.
And lastly, what we see here is we remember, we remember as we grieve, as we mourn, as we treasure, as we honor.
We remember.
And don't just remember the person who passed.
Remember our savior.
Two Corinthians five, six through eight says so.
We are always of good courage.
We know that while we are at.
Home in the body, we are away from the Lord.
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
Yes, we are of good courage.
And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
The day Sarah died, that was a bad day for Abraham.
Aaron and I say Aaron and I joke.
It's not a joke.
I mean this, right?
I've got to pass away before her.
All right, I'm just saying that.
Right?
Right.
Like, I need that prayer to be happened.
Like, I can't walk through this.
I can't do this.
You're stronger, you're better, you're smarter, you're all of those things.
Yep.
I can't take it.
All right.
It's a bad day for Abraham when Sarah dies.
You've walked through that.
You've experienced that.
You know that.
You've buried a parent, a child, a grandparent, a friend.
You know what that day feels like.
It was a bad day for Abraham.
It was a good day for Sarah.
Why?
Because she stepped out of this home into eternity.
She stepped out of the brokenness of this world into the arms of her savior.
That's the conflict that we see that day my granddad died.
It was a bad day for my grandmother.
It was a good day for my granddad.
And it's made possible through Christ in Christ alone.
It's made possible through Christ in Christ alone.
That's what makes that day the conflict within us.
We grieve the life that's lost, but we celebrate, because eternity has been realized.
We celebrate the pain.
We struggle through the pain that we're.
Experiencing, but we celebrate the healing that has taken place, but not through their works, not through who they are, not through what they've done, but through Christ in Christ alone.
In just a moment, the worship team is going to come on stage, and.
We'Re going to take part in the Lord's supper.
The reason why on a day like that day, that hope can be found.
Because Christ has made a way through who he is.
These remembers should remind us to be the people that share our faith, to declare our hope, to make much of Jesus.
Because there is the reality that for some who were apart from him, one bad day just got worse.
Would you pray with me.
God, we.
Come to you this morning.
I've seen the picture, Lord, of a man who loved his wife.
And Lord, as she passed, Lord, he sought to glorify and honor you, to treasure her, to grieve her in obedience, in submission to you.
God, I pray that we would not.
Give this disillusion.
That we're promised more than we are, that I'll take care of that later.
I'll treasure this at a different point in time.
Lord, we're not promised tomorrow, but we.
Have in this moment right now, and we're promised hope through Christ in Christ alone.
Lord, as we prepare to take the Lord's supper.
Lord, we thank you for.
The work that was done on the.
Cross and that was done on our behalf, that we may have life and.
Hope that while there, on that day, there will be tears shed.
On that day, we will rejoice in eternity.
God, I pray if there's anyone in here who does not know Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior, that today would be the day that they come.
To him in surrender, in confession, in belief, in repentance, Jesus Christ as Lord and savior of their life.
And it's in Jesus'name I pray.
Amen.
Thanks again for listening, and be sure to check back next week for another episode.
In the meantime, you can visit us@willowridgechurch.org or by searching for Willowridge Church on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.