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CONNIE: How do you know when you’ve “arrived?” When you’re at just the place God wants you to be? Join us today as we continue our look at Abraham’s life and the lessons he learned about following God

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko, welcome to our program today, as we continue our journey with the patriarch Abraham.

CONNIE: We’re calling today’s program “Learning to Follow,” and we’ll be looking at a story from Abraham’s life that illustrates his own struggle to know God’s will—to be sure he was in the right place at the right time.

LONNIE: Abraham was a courageous man, as well as a man of faith. Setting out and leaving your family hundreds of miles behind was not an easy thing to do 4,000 years ago. But people are still doing similar things in answer to God’s call.

CONNIE: We’ve invited one of those people to join us on the program today. Pastor Bruce Bauer has served as a cross-cultural missionary in a number of settings—that means he’s left his home country and culture to go and share the gospel in other lands. Now he’s chairman of the department of world mission at Andrews University—teaching others who are planning to give their lives in mission service. Ken Wade spoke with him about some of the challenges of recognizing God’s leading, and knowing you’re in the place God wants you to be.

KEN: I want to welcome Dr. Bruce Bauer to our program today.

BRUCE: It’s a pleasure to be here.

KEN: Dr. Bauer, you’ve had many experiences answering God’s call. I know that you’ve gone from America to Japan to Guam and back, and then from the US to a place where we almost crossed paths in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. What’s it like to be a cross-cultural person on that level? How do you sense, how do you know that God is leading on those kind of moves?

BRUCE: I think that in every situation Linda and I spent a lot of time praying, and I think that you pray to God and ask for a sense of peace or a purpose or direction. I’ve always enjoyed cross-cultural work, but there are calls that come in that sometimes feel a little awkward or a little uncomfortable.

KEN: Particularly going from a teaching position. You had a professorship at a prestigious collage, and you went from a place like that to place like Cambodia, what was that like for you and your wife?

BRUCE: Well we got the call at and some of our colleagues thought that we were crazy for even considering it. I had a very close friend and I asked him what he thought, and he told me that I should stay here at the seminary where I could impact ministry around the world, don’t go to a little backwater country like Cambodia. I respect him a lot, so I asked him if he would commit to pray about it every day for a week, and then for him to tell me what God was saying to him. He came back at the end of the week and said that he had been praying and he felt that if I was getting a call that God must want him in Cambodia.

KEN: I can kind of picture Abraham doing something like that.

BRUCE: I imagine that he was criticized for moving out of his home country and leaving everything behind. It’s an easy reaction by friends to tell you, don’t go where it’s dangerous, or far away, but that doesn’t take into consideration anything that God has said to the individual who is trying to do God’s will.

KEN; I know that when I was working in Cambodia, it was the tail end of the civil war there and my wife often would say, “Do you have to go back to Cambodia again?”, and would worry because there were no cell phones, e-mail or anything, and sometimes two or three weeks would pass before hearing from me again…

BRUCE: …Pretty dangerous!

KEN: Yeah, and yet somehow I sensed that I had a great deal of peace in my own heart, that if this is where God wants me to be that this is where I’m going to be.

BRUCE: That was very similar to what we felt. We prayed a lot and we decided to go and when we got to Cambodia, it was just after the coup in 1997, and every night there was gunfire and it was a dangerous place to be, and yet Linda and I had a lot of peace in our hearts because we felt that we were there because God wanted us to be there. We were careful, but we didn’t really worry about safety, and we felt that it’s much better to be where God wants you to be as opposed to going like Jonah.

KEN: Now you just finished classes with a group of people who are heading out from their home countries, what do you say to those people who are about to embark on a journey like this?

BRUCE: Well, I believe strongly that if God calls and I don’t think that He plays hide and go seek with us, that if we pray and ask Him that we may get a very clear indication to what His will is for us in this type of situation. I don’t think that there is any better place to be except inside the circle of God’s will for our lives. So I encourage people to spend a lot of time praying and listening to what God has planned for them and their lives.

KEN: You mentioned some people going to Colombia that would scare me out of my wits to spend time in a place like that from just reading about Colombia. Were they dealing with fear?

BRUCE: They were very concerned about it because of the kidnappings and the holding of people for ransom, and it’s a scary place, but I talked to them about my experiences and how God has promised us to be with us until the end of the age. He has also promised to protect us and care for us, now that doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen, but I think that it is important that we go with a sense of purpose and call. It’s dangerous to live in the States too.

KEN: Yeah! What would you say to Abraham as he prepared to move?

BRUCE: I would say that there is no one that you can trust more than God.

KEN: Thanks for being here today!

“I Will Follow Thee My Savior”, Merrilou Luthas, from The Midnight Cry CD

CONNIE: Amen—that was Merrilou Luthas with the song “I Will Follow Thee My Savior,” and as always, if you’d like to know more about the CD the music was taken from, and how you can get a copy for yourself, please stop by our web page at VOP.COM and click on the link to “Music Heard on the Broadcast.”

LONNIE: And of course that’s just one of the many features you can find when you visit us at VOP.COM. You can read transcripts of our programs, listen to past broadcasts, find out what’s coming up on our schedule, and a lot more.

CONNIE: In our series about Abraham, we’re talking quite a bit about knowing God’s will. Lonnie, you wrote a book about that recently, didn’t you?

LONNIE: Well, in fact Pacific Press recently published my book What the Bible Says About… and what’s neat about this book is that it actually gives you a plan for marking texts on various topics in your Bible in such a way that you can easily go through and do a study—for yourself, or with someone else—that reveals what the Bible says about that topic—topics like the Second Coming, heaven, and healthful living.

CONNIE: It’s a great resource to have—and the thing I like about it is that you can mark the texts right in the Bible, in a way that you don’t need to have anything but the Bible to go through the study. We’d like each of our listeners to have a copy of What the Bible Says About…, and you can request a free copy by calling our toll free number 1-800-872-0055 and asking for it today.

LONNIE: I know you’ll enjoy studying your Bible in this refreshing way.

CONNIE: But now it’s time for your message today Lonnie, share with us, “Learning to Follow.”

Learning to Follow
When you set out to follow God—to go wherever He leads—how do you know if you’re on the right path? Do you suppose that’s a question that troubled Abraham after he left home, left most of his family behind, and set out to go to a land that God had promised to show him?

When you read the call of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, you notice quickly that it’s more a call from a place than a call to a place. Here’s what God said:

“‘Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father's house,
To a land that I will show you.’ ” (NKJV).

There’s much more instruction about leaving than about arriving. That’s what makes it such a journey of faith. It’s a trip in which Abraham has to stay tuned in with God in order to arrive at the right place.

Maybe you’re on a journey like that right now. You’ve sensed God calling you to make some changes in your life. And you’re walking by faith. But sometimes you wonder whether you’ve missed a curve somewhere along the way. You wonder how you’ll know for sure that you’ve arrived where God wants you to be.

If you find yourself at all in that condition, take heart. You’re not the first. In fact, it just may be that Abraham felt the same way from time to time.

I think it’s pretty clear that he had some moments of questioning—maybe a little insecurity. Consider, for example, what happened when he arrived at Shechem.

The Bible doesn’t tell us a thing about the 500 mile trip from Haran to Shechem. It simply tells us that in answer to God’s call Abraham left Haran, taking his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot, and whatever possessions they could lay claim to, and headed out on the journey. Next thing we know, they’re arriving in Shechem, a city in the central mountains of Palestine. Genesis 12:6 tells us “Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh.”

Shechem is an interesting place that’s mentioned many times in the Bible. It’s one of the first places where Joshua gathered the children of Israel together after their conquest of the Promised Land a few centuries later. It’s near the place where Jesus met the Woman at the Well. It’s at the intersections of two main routes through Canaan. And there was a special tree there called the “Oak of Moreh.” In a later story about Shechem a tree called “The Diviner’s Terebinth Tree” is mentioned (Judges 9:37, NKJV).

In other words, even in Abraham’s day, there must have been some sort of shrine set up at Shechem, where people were accustomed to go to inquire of God.

Now, notice what happened when Abraham arrived there: “Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’ ” (Gen. 12:7a NKJV)

Put yourself in Abraham’s sandals for a moment. You’ve set out to follow the Lord to the land He’s promised to show you. You’ve already walked about 500 miles. You and your family are camped out near a tree where people come to inquire of God, and the Lord Himself appears to you and says, “This is the land I’m going to give to your children.”

What are you going to do?

Maybe start laying the foundation for a house? Maybe start surveying the land and staking out property lines so each of your sons can have a nice plot of land to call his own?

Well, interestingly, that’s not what Abraham did. In fact, he did something even better, I think. Here it is, in Genesis 12:7: “And there he built an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him” (Genesis 12:7b, NKJV).

Ah, you think, when you read this. Isn’t that wonderful! What a fantastic ending to the story. Man sets out to follow God. Wanders for 500 miles. First place he stops, God appears and says “This is the place!” And so the man settles down and lives happily ever after.

Not!

That’s not what happens. The story’s far from over when Abraham stops at Shechem and God appears to him there. Because it wasn’t only God who appeared to him there. We skipped over part of Genesis 12:6. Let’s read the whole verse now: “Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh. And the Canaanites were then in the land.”

This sets up a bit of a dilemma.

On the one hand you have God saying “This is the place your children are going to possess.” On the other you have the Canaanites saying “Sorry, we’re already here, and we’ve already written our wills. The land is going to our kids!”

So what does Abraham do? Verse 8 tells us: “he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.”

Abraham gets a lot of well-deserved credit in most tellings of his story, because wherever he went, he set up an altar to worship God.

But I want you to notice something in particular about this altar near Bethel.

Abraham sets up the altar as a place to worship and call on the name of the Lord. You can see him, can’t you, picking out the stones himself. Laying them in place, piling them up until he has a proper altar—a proper place to worship God. Then he selects an appropriate animal from the flocks that have traveled with him, and he sacrifices the animal on the altar. And he calls out to God.

And what happens?

According to the Bible, nothing.

Back in Shechem, God appeared even before Abraham built an altar. But here in Bethel, nothing.

So, what does Abraham do next? He continues his journey to the south. Bethel is south of Shechem, and when he doesn’t receive any reassurance from God that he’s in the right place there in Bethel, he pulls up his tent stakes again, and just keeps on going. Traveling farther south. Farther away from the place where God had appeared to him! Soon he finds himself in an arid region known as “The Negev.” And things are going from bad to worse. Next thing we hear, there’s a famine in the land, and Abraham just keeps on trucking! Keeps on moving farther and farther south, even though anyone who’s been to Israel knows that the climate gets drier and drier the farther south you go.

In fact he keeps going so long that he finally ends up out in the middle of the desert. But he never looks back. Never turns back to the place where God had appeared to him. He just keeps on going, until he gets all the way to Egypt!

Now, that’s most certainly not the land that God is promising to give to him!

But that’s where he ends up. This friend of God. This great man of faith who set out to follow the Lord wherever He would lead.

Do you see what I’m hinting at here?

If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be missing something in your walk with God. If you’ve hit a dry patch in your relationship with the Lord. It just might be that you’re in very good company. You’re not the first one to miss a curve somewhere in your spiritual journey.
But if you’re feeling a bit lost or disoriented right now, take heart. Take courage. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Keep on reading in Genesis 12. Keep on traveling with Abraham. Keep on with your relationship with God, and see what happens!

The amazing thing to me is how patient God was with the man He was trying to lead. In Egypt Abraham failed to trust God as he should have—he even gave away his wife to Pharaoh to save his own neck. But in spite of that God continued to bless him—and to protect his wife Sarah. God sent plagues on the Egyptians until Pharaoh had had enough and sent Sarah back to her husband. And when Abraham left Egypt, he was richer than when he went down. God had not quit blessing him just because he failed to live by faith. Because God wanted him to learn to trust.

And that’s the great thing about this story. Because the next thing we read about in Genesis is what happened when Abraham and Lot had to separate.

They had been so blessed by God that they couldn’t be neighbors anymore—the land just wouldn’t support all their flocks and herds. So notice what Abraham did: “Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me. . . . Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left’ ” (Genesis 13:8-9, NRSV).

Before Abraham could say that, he had to learn a very important lesson about God, and about following God’s leading.

It’s a lesson that can be expressed in one word: Surrender.

You see, it’s one thing to set out to follow the leading of the Lord. It’s another to keep on following when you think you have a better idea.

Who’s really in the driver’s seat in your life? If you’ve begun to wonder whether God is really still there for you—could it be that part of the problem is that you’ve bumped Him out of the driver’s seat? It happened to Abraham, and it can happen to the best of us.

By the time Abraham arrived back at Bethel, after his long detour down to Egypt, he had learned that none of his scheming and planning could ever bring as rich of blessings into his life as the blessings God wanted to bestow on him. He had learned that the way to be in the center of God’s will and the center of God’s blessing is to let the Lord do the leading.

And when he surrendered his will to God’s will, God spoke to him again: “The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, ‘Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever’ ” (Genesis 13:14-15, NRSV).

This is even better than the promise Abraham received at Shechem. Now God says Look around you—ALL this land belongs to you and your descendants! Because you trust in me. Because you walk with me.

Because you’ve learned to follow.

Oh, Christian friend, I’m glad Abraham learned that lesson. And you know what—I ask God every day to help me learn it as well—to learn to trust Him and follow Him instead of trying to work everything out on my own.

How about you? Your life’s a journey, you know—just like Abraham’s—why not turn it over to the Lord?