Abram’s unquestioning obedience to God’s command in the first part of this chapter really is remarkable. The Lord was asking Abram to leave the land he knew, his family and everything that was familiar, and set out into a new land, totally reliant on God alone.

Genesis 12:4 makes it sound like a very simple act of obedience on Abram’s part: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him”. Yet we can perhaps imagine that this sudden decision of Abram’s was greeted by his people with as much wonder and doubt as Noah faced when he suddenly started building a huge boat in the middle of the desert. Yet Abram did obey and, more than that, honoured God in his obedience, building altars as he went.

This makes it all the more surprising that just a few verses later we find Abram lying to Pharaoh, and handing over his wife, Sarai, to Pharaoh’s harem in order to save his own skin.

We are often tempted to imagine that God worked special wonders through certain individuals because those individuals were special people. And yet we see again and again that, like Abram, like David and like Peter, those whom God chose to work through were complex human beings, just like the rest of us, inclined to sin, rebellion and disobedience from time to time.

What these people all had in common was their faith. It was faith and willingness to be obedient that made them available to God, not their own perfection. Abram undoubtedly sinned when he passed his wife off as his sister, but God’s blessing on him remained, because God had chosen him and Abram had responded in obedience to God’s call.

None of us can achieve perfection – not us, and not even the Patriarchs. Perfection is not what God requires. He is looking for obedience and faith. He will take care of the rest. Let us be ready for God’s call, and obedient to respond to it.

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NEWBOLD COMMUNITY CHURCH