Genesis 23:4 I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.
I have been driving vehicles most of my life, and a lot of what I do now includes travel and driving. I learned to drive on a 1983 T-bird in a church parking lot in Manchester, TN. I can remember lurching around that parking lot trying to learn how to shift gears. Whether you know how to drive a stick shift or not, all of us need to know how to shift gears because your challenges and opportunities change with the years and shifting stages of life. Everyone needs to know how to see what is before them, to make adjustments in their mind, and then to act on unchanging principle in order to keep up with the changes of life.
In Genesis 23, we find some major changes happening in Abraham’s life that conspire together to illustrate a changing of gears for Abraham. What you have is Sarah, Abraham’s wife, dying, and Rebekah, Isaac’s wife, coming onto the scene. There is a change of gears.
Genesis 23:2 says, “And Sarah died… in the land of Canaan.” This was huge! The whole story thus far has been about Abraham and Sarah, but that can’t go on indefinitely. Sarah dies. At the end of the chapter “Abraham buried Sarah,” and straightaway the next chapter is about Abraham’s preparation to find a wife for Isaac. He says to his servant who is going to look for a wife, “Make sure that Isaac does not move to her. We are not going back where we came from. God has given us a land of promise. We are moving forward.” This story illustrates the need for every one of us to be able to change gears, but never to lose our sense of direction.
Your age changes, your prospects change, your challenges change. So, change gears, but do not lose your sense of direction. When Abraham was buying a place to bury Sarah, he said to the people from whom he bought the cave, “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you.” He realized that he didn’t belong to this world. At this point, the only possession Abraham had in the land that God had promised him was a place where he and his family would be buried. There is, of course, a sense in which he didn’t have to buy this property because God had given him this land.
The book of Hebrews says, “These [patriarchs] all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Then it says they were seeking a country and that if they had been “mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned to that country.”
When Abraham said he was a stranger, he wasn’t wishing to go back to the old country. God had promised this new land. Hebrews continues, “But now they desire a better country… wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.” In short, there were a lot of changes through the years but there was not a loss of direction. Abraham realized that people are born, people marry, and people die, but Abraham said, “We are not going back to the land we came from.” He was moving forward.
Today, there are a lot of changes in life. We are living in a world that changes more rapidly than it has ever changed before. So, be able to change gears as new opportunities and challenges present themselves, but if you are a child of God, remember that you have a sense of direction. You have a Father in Heaven and this world is not your home. Change gears, but never lose your sense of direction.