Genesis 15:7 And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.
My wife and I recently came back from Florida where we bought some fish at a fish market. A lot of people don’t like fish. They are used to having their meat poured out of a box and they are not used to their meat on the bone. So, if I were suggesting for someone to try fish, I would say, “Eat the fish. Do not eat the bones.” Eat what you want to consume; leave the rest.
Sometimes it is the same in life. We get choked up on the details of life. We don’t have a big picture. Sometimes God may have given you some sort of big picture of what you should be doing in life or maybe you do not have that. In any event, all of us need details, and a lot of times we don’t know what those details are. We don’t know what decisions we should make in the little areas that connect the big dots in our life. That was true with Abram.
Abram had a big picture. God had said that He would make of Abram a great nation, yet years went by without a son. Abram was tempted to foist his way onto God’s will. He said, “God, take my servant Eliezer. He can be my heir.” He said, “Here is Sarai’s servant, Hagar. She can be the mother of a great nation.” In both cases God said, “No. I am going to make a great nation from you and from Sarai.” I think Abram believed that God would give him a son and make of him a great nation, but I think he had a difficult time with some of the details.
Genesis 15:7 says, “And he [God] said unto him [Abram], I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.” God is saying, “I’ve given you a big picture, and I’ve given you a big task. I want you to leave your homeland to go to a land that I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation.” In short, God is saying, “I have taken care of you in the past, and I will take care of you in the future.”
Verse 18 says, “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land.” So, God is also showing him a purpose in the big decisions Abram has made. God is saying, “You have left your land. I’m giving you a new land. I’m giving you a son because I am making of you a great nation. All these things are connected.” So, between “I’m going to make of you a great nation” and “you arrive in a new land” there are a lot of details that connect the large points.
Those details can sometimes drive us crazy because we think, “What decision should I make in the small areas of life?” Well, let me encourage to you today by saying, “Don’t choke on the details.” Trust God for what you should do in the future, and obey God as to what you should do right now. If you will do the one, you can certainly do the other.
There are three things to remember. First, a God that is big enough to take care of the grand scheme is certainly “knowing” enough to take care of the details. So, you may or may not have the big picture, but God is big enough to help you with those small details of everyday life.
Second, if the details matter to God, He can and will make them known to you. He will let you know what to do in the small decisions. If they don’t matter to God, then they don’t matter. I would say even when we don’t know what to do in the small decisions, we do know right from wrong and we usually know okay from best. So, why not go with what God would have you to do by doing what is right and what is best. When Abram took Hagar as essentially a second wife, he may not have known the details of how God was going to keep His promise, but if he was honest he knew that God was not going to keep His promise by violating His own character. If the details matter, God will show you.
Finally, make sure that you do God’s will God’s way. Abram was confident that God was going to make of him a great nation, but he tried to force his own way onto God’s will. He took Hagar and offered Eliezer to fulfill God’s promise. God didn’t need Abram’s help. He needed Abram’s obedience.
So, obey in everything today and trust God in everything tomorrow because faith is living without scheming. Don’t choke on the details. Follow God’s leading one step at a time one day at a time.