Genesis 12:1-9 is the pivotal story in the Bible, of a man named Abram and his call to leave everything he knew and go to a land that wasn’t his home in order to be a blessing to all people. Abraham is mentioned over 300 times in Scripture in 27 books of the Old and New Testament, almost every time highlighting his faith. He is revered by three major world religions, and written about extensively by both religious and secular scholars and philosophers. Who was this man of faith, Abraham? As we begin to look at the life of Abraham this morning we don’t find a cleaned up missionary biography, but a man whose faith was just like ours. A man whose overall trajectory of his life was one of unwavering faith, but whose day to day faith was sometimes solid and sometimes shaky. A man like us who passes some of life’s most grueling tests of faith, ones that I don’t know if I would pass, but also fails miserably on others. But through it all, a man who trusted God with everything he had and who drank deeply of the grace of a faithful, covenant keeping God. We first meet Abraham when his name was Abram in Genesis 11.
