“And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” Genesis 22:2 (Kjv)

Loved ones,

In a sermon he preached in 2014, Ray Pritchard declared this: “If your God always does what you want, he’s probably not the God of the Bible (…) God is much bigger than our puny ideas”. Sounds weird to you? Yet, nothing is truer than that. Indeed, God’s ways and instructions do not always make any sense to our human reasoning and logic; at times, they may even appear as foolishness. But those who follow and abide by them diligently without questioning and doubting, always end up with signs and wonders. God does not make sense, He makes signs!

Otherwise, how can one make a sense of God’s request that the miraculous Isaac, born to a ninety-years-old-Sarah and a one-hundred-years-old-Abraham be sacrificed? That can but be confusing! But Abraham’s prompt obedience earned him God’s confession in Genesis 22:12: “for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.” When reading verses 17 and 18, I could only conclude, “the more challenging God’s test, the bigger and brighter the reward”.

In fact, that was not the first time Abraham received instruction from the Almighty God that challenged his faith. In Genesis 12:1, we read: “God said unto Abram: Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee”. In obedience, Abram followed God’s instructions, uprooted his family for the unknown, leaping in the dark (sort of) even when it made no sense to him.

Abraham’s obedience, as shown in Genesis 12 and 22, are actually Hebrew 11:1 in motion, in action! Faith is following God’s instructions even when they don’t make sense, even when they don’t seem logical or rational. Faith means being obedient.

Child of God, maybe you are very faithful to God; you have prayed and fasted but got no answer; you are worried and God’s silence does not make any sense to you. Don’t give up because anytime life or God don’t make sense to you, the potter is silently doing a greater work in you, stretching your quality capacity; He is refining you from inside or testing you for promotion! Persevere and the crown will soon be yours.