People often get confused by Abram’s blessing, believing it was about ethnicity or real estate, but we know the blessing of Abram was the promise that would be fulfilled in Christ for you.
Lent is a journey away from the familiar world which surrounds us. It is a walk with God that leads to the blessings of Jesus’ cross and empty tomb. Is it any wonder our Old Testament text is also about the travels of Abram and his family? Abram’s family is called away from the familiarity of their home to a land where God would bless them and all people through them. The blessing is not real estate though. It is the blessing of the promise to be fulfilled in Christ for you.
The structure of our text is simple. It is an address (verse 1a), a command (verse 1b), a promise (verses 2–3), and Abram following the call to go where God commands (verse 4a). The main take-away is the blessing God gave to Abram because textually it takes up much of the reading’s concern. Also, this blessing is critical to our development of the Gospel. The language of the first four verses in Genesis 12 is artful and rhythmic. Certain words are repeated for emphasis, terms are linked in grammatical chains, and clauses balance one another out in the Hebrew language present in our text. These poetic devices serve to further highlight the significance of these words as they point to the importance of God’s future work in Christ as the fulfillment of this blessing and promise. When preaching from the Old Testament, escalation is the key to preaching Christ faithfully. This means, although we have a text about Abram, it must escalate to being a sermon centered in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The trick here is we must find a way to do this without minimizing the real, literal, and historic significance of Abram.
To start the sermon, we need to ground our preaching in the actual events of Abram’s journey. This piece is critical as it helps us to connect to the stories of faith for God’s people and also to Christ. Choosing which parts of Abram’s journey you develop will set up how you plan to connect to your listeners, but more importantly how you will connect to Christ. Not every detail of the story of Abram will need to be developed, only those features which help us for escalation in the sermon will be necessary to build a full Gospel proclamation.
To do this, I suggest a thematic structure for your sermon. Specifically, you can use the structure known as “Compare and Contrast” which is a thematic structure that can help us preach Christ in a typological way. Lent is a blessed journey for us. In these verses we see Abram going on a journey to be blessed. Christ went on a journey to bless us all with salvation. By using a “Compare and Contrast” structure we can illustrate how Abram started a journey only Christ could finish. Possibly bringing in Nicodemus from our appointed Gospel lesson in John 3 might give us another familiar person on a journey, away from what is familiar in their life, as an illustration in the sermon for our people who are likewise on a Lenten journey of hope for the resurrection from the dead.
The Compare and Contrast “structure systematically explores relevant similarities and/or differences between two topics in order to accomplish a purpose for the hearer. In this sermon, the purpose of comparing/contrasting is crucial. While proverbial wisdom says you cannot compare apples and oranges (like Abram and Jesus), the preacher responds that you most certainly can, depending upon what your purpose is. The sermon does more than simply inform hearers of similarities and/or differences. It uses the information for a purpose, and that purpose often makes a difference in their lives.”[1]
When preaching from the Old Testament, escalation is the key to preaching Christ faithfully.
Typically, when you use this structure there are two ways you can go. You can either go part-to-part or whole-to-whole. I suggest we do the latter. Working whole-to-whole means you unpack all of the individual items of one topic before proceeding to a listing of the individual items of another topic. An example of this is comparing and contrasting Abram, Jesus, and Nicodemus (us). How you decide which approach (whole or part) to use “is often based upon the balance of information you have and what you desire your hearers to remember. Whole-to-whole encourages them to remember the topics (like Abram and Jesus); part-to-part encourages them to remember the items which compose the topics (for example, the stages of temptation found in both the fall of Eve and the fall of David into sin).”[2] An example of an outline might look something like this:
Intro: Lent is a journey away from the familiar world which surrounds us. It is a journey with God that leads to the blessings of Jesus’ cross and empty tomb.
Topic A: The journey of Abram and his family. Abram’s family is called away from the familiarity of their home to a land where God would bless them and all people through them.
- A1: Abram was called to leave his home.
- A2: Abram obeyed the call of God though it would be difficult.
- A3: He came and “pitched his tent” (verse 8).
- A4: The Canaanites were in the land (verse 6).
- A5: He hung around a great tree (verse 6) near a hill (verse 8).
- A6: Abram was blessed (verse 3) by faith and his name became great (verse 2) as it is connected with the example of those who believe God and it would be counted to them as righteousness (Genesis 15:6).
Transition: People often get confused by Abram’s blessing, believing it was about ethnicity or real estate, but we know the blessing of Abram was the promise that would be fulfilled in Christ for you. Have you ever noticed the similarity between the call of Abram and the work of Christ?
Topic B: The Journey of Christ to save all humanity. Christ in obedience to His Father was sent to fulfill the promises of God to His people and finish the work Abram could not.
- B1: Christ was sent from His home in Heaven to the land where Abram roamed.
- B2: Christ obeyed His Father’s will for you (John 6:38)
- B3: Christ tabernacled/tented among us (John 1:14)
- B4: He lived amongst a strange people (Matthew 9:10-17, Mark 2:15-22, Luke 5:29-39) and even a Canaanite in Matthew 15:21-28.
- B5: Jesus climbed the hill of Calvary and hung upon the tree of the Cross for all.
- B6: Even though we do not see the glory of the promised land of Heaven now because we are on this journey of Lent together, we too are blessed by faith in the great name of Jesus (Acts 3:16). By faith in Jesus’ finished work on the cross and empty tomb we are saved by His work which we could never do ourselves. Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness,” “so then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith” (Galatians 3:6-9).
- Jesus actually calls you blessed on this journey of faith. Listen to what He said to Thomas after His resurrection: “Have you believed because you have seen Me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
Conclusion/Illustration: In our Gospel lesson we meet a familiar face who is on a Lenten journey as a child of Abraham, much like we are on a Lenten journey as well. He too experienced the difficulty of leaving the familiar places of his life in order to try and follow Jesus through difficulty. His was a journey of faith that starts at the beginning of John’s Gospel and goes all the way (like us in Lent) to the cross and empty tomb.
The illustration comes in the character of Nicodemus. Three distinct times in John’s Gospel Nicodemus shows up because he too is a fellow traveler in this season of Lent. We are invited by the Gospel lesson to journey together with him and learn about Jesus.
When Nicodemus first visits Jesus at night, it was to learn about His teaching. In John 3:1-21, Christ teaches Nicodemus about the new life we received in the waters of Baptism. In your baptism, God has called you, like Abram, to follow Jesus into every place in life He will have you go. In your baptism the Holy Spirit promises to be with you every step of your life’s journey until you reach the promised land of Heaven forever.
The second time Nicodemus is mentioned in John’s Gospel is when the religious leaders try to arrest Jesus and he defends Jesus. He tells the Sanhedrin: “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” They replied, “Are you from Galilee too?” (John 7:50-52). In this part of Nicodemus’ journey, we are reminded that, like Abraham (Genesis 20:1-16; 21:22-34; 12:8-13:2), we will be in conflict with the world around us because of our faith.
Finally, Nicodemus arrives at the culmination of Lent and the promised fulfilled to Abram when we see him at the crucifixion of Jesus and his assisting Joseph of Arimathea in burying Jesus in John 19:39-42.
Therefore, it is fitting we begin our Lenten journey with Abram and Nicodemus. They are good traveling companions during this season of the church year and this season of our lives. It is better still, though, that we take this Lenten journey with Jesus because He is our hope in the darkness (John 3:2) and the blessed salvation we all could never live without (Genesis 12:1-4).
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Additional Resources:
Craft of Preaching-Check out our previous articles on Genesis 12:1-9.
Concordia Theology-Various helps from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, MO to assist you in preaching Genesis 12:1-9.
Text Week-A treasury of resources from various traditions to help you preach Genesis 12:1-9.
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[1] https://concordiatheology.org/sermon-structs/thematic/comparisoncontrast/
[2] Ibid.
