“Cage of Assumptions”

from the book “Wild Goose Chase” by Mark Batterson

Sunday, October 31, 2010: Genesis 15:1-6

Introduction: In this series, we are talking about six cages. So far we have talked about the “cage of responsibility” and the “cage of routine.” We have talked about how our responsibilities can cause us to make excuses of how we cannot do the work of God, and how our routine can lead us to boredom and forget the exciting adventure that God wants us to live. Today we are going to talk about Abraham and the cage of assumptions.

There is great wonder in kids. One of the best parts of their wonder is how they don’t make assumptions about what can and cannot be done. They believe their parents are invincible and that anything is possible. The only limitation to them is their God-given imagination. Of course, as they grow up and see that there are limitations, this wonder starts to dim, and they, like us adults start to make assumptions about the world around them.

As adults, we stop make-believing and we start making assumptions. We have trouble believing that “all things are possible for God.” We start getting in the rut of thinking the same way, and doing things the same way. In living like this, we lose some of the spiritual adventure that God wants us to experience. We lose the edge on our faith, and we end up in the “cage of assumptions.” I think Abraham gives us a good example of how to get out of the cage.

I. Getting in the cage- (Genesis 15:1-6; Isaiah 55:8)

a. Abraham and Sarah- Here is the scene: Abraham and Sarah are

childless. Their deepest desire is to have children, but Sarah is barren. For decades they have lived with the pain of being childless. In their culture there was great shame in this. Your children were your legacy. Your children were what kept your family line in tact. We can only imagine how every time one of Sarah’s friends got pregnant, every time she heard a child laughing, she felt that familiar pain in the pit of her soul of her wanting children, but not able to have one. Abraham and Sarah felt the ache of emptiness and the confusion of helplessness, because what they wanted most, they could not have. But one day, God makes a promise. He says, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.”

But it is not just what God says. It is what God does. If you look at this passage very carefully, it says that He took Abraham outside. Now, I think it is easy to read a passage like this, and read right past it, but let me preach between the lines, if you will. Abraham was holed up in his tent, maybe even isolating himself from others. When God decides to take him outside for a little faith lesson. God took Abraham away from his manufactured environment so that he might look up into the night sky and to count the stars. Who knows how long it took, but when God was done, God had taught Abraham an object lesson that he would never forget.

See, Abraham would never look into the night sky the same way again, because those stars in the sky were a nightly reminder of the promise that God had given to him; a promise that included children!

Illustration- Last August my family and I went to visit my mom and sister in Prescott, Arizona. We stayed with my sister and her husband, who live outside of the main city. Because of where they live, there are no street lights, which makes it very dark outside at night, and allows you to see how many stars there really are. It is amazing how many more stars you can see when it is dark around you! In fact, one night, Tami, Tyler, Tiffany, my sister, her husband, and I were all outside looking at the stars together. As we looked into the sky that literally stretched billions of light years in every direction, it was a reminder of how big God is. There is something about looking into the night sky that helps you to put the majesty of God in perspective. It reminds us of how small we are and how big God is. This is a very healthy and a holy experience.

b. The object lesson- So why did God take Abraham outside? Why did He

tell him to look into the night sky? Why did He tell him to count the stars? I think the answer is so obvious, it eludes us. As long as Abraham was inside his tent, his vision was obscured by an 8-foot ceiling. This ceiling kept the promises of God out of sight, and as the old adage says, “out of sight, out of mind.” I think God wanted to remind Abraham of how big He was, so He told Abraham to go outside and do a little stargazing. I think it was God’s way of saying, Abraham, don’t put on 8-foot ceiling on what I can do.

A.W. Tozer once said, “A low view of God is the cause of a hundred-lesser evils. But a high view of God is the solution to 10,000 temporal problems.” I think this is what happens in many of our lives and how many of us end up in this cage of assumptions, and how many of us forfeit the spiritual adventure. What happens is this. We tend to reduce God to the size of our biggest problem. Or reduce Him to the size of our greatest fear or our worst sin. And what we end up with is a god, small g, that looks an awful lot like us and seems to be about our size. This is one of the greatest mistakes we can make. You know what? What we think is our biggest problem isn’t our biggest problem. OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM IS THAT WE THINK GOD ISN’T BIGGER THAN OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM!

God says to us, in Isaiah 55:8—“‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.’” Try to get your mind around this: Our sun is about 93 million miles away. If you were to drive a car 65 miles an hour, 24 hours a days, 365 days a year, (no rest stops, no gas stops) it would take you more than 163 years to get there. But the light that warms our face on a sunny day is only 8 minutes old because light travels that fast. Now here’s the thing, our sun is the nearest star in our tiny little galaxy called the Milky Way. But astrophysicists have discovered galaxies very, very far away: I heard that the farthest one from us is 13.7 billion light years away. God deals in great distances!! And God says that His thoughts are that much greater than our thoughts. Quite humbling, isn’t it?

Yet, we live in this tiny little cage of assumptions. What I’m trying to say is that when you enter into a relationship with Christ, when you begin to chase the Wild Goose, all assumptions are out the window. Why? Because God exists outside of our space-time dimensions. He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent (or another way to say it is that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-present).

II. God can do all things- (Philippians 4:13; Ephesians 3:20; Romans 4: 18-

21, 8:31; Mark 9:31)

a. Faith- It takes faith to believe what we read in scripture, because much of scripture goes against what we can logically understand; scripture goes against what we can put into perspective. Let me read you a few wonderful verses from the Bible that reminds us of how we need to open our minds to what life is like with God:

Philippians 4:13—“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Ephesians 3:20: “He is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine according to His power that is at work within us.”

Romans 8:31—“If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Mark 9:31—“All things are possible for those who believe.”

By virtue of being in relationship with God, God takes the ceiling off of our lives, and I think that is the heart of the story here with Abraham. I think God tells Abraham to look up in the sky at these stars, and reminds Abraham that He is the One who made them. God is telling Abraham, AND US, to quit assuming, and start believing. From this point on in his life, that’s exactly what Abraham does. Now Abraham has his moments of doubts, he has his fears, he got frustrated. But listen to the way that Romans 4 captures his faith. Starting in verse 18 and reading to verse 21: “Against all hope, Abraham, in hope, believes and so became the father of many nations just as it had been said to him, so shall your offspring be. Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead, since he was about 100 years old, and Sarah’s womb was also dead, yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God has the power to do what God had promised.”

Faith is not logical, but faith isn’t illogical either. Faith is theological. Meaning that we are adding God into the equation so that what we’re able to imagine isn’t just determined by our human ability, but about what God can do in and through us. What I love about Romans 4 is that is says that Abraham faced the facts; he wasn’t out of touch with reality. But it also says that he was fully persuaded that God had the power to deliver on His promises. F.B. Myer once said this, “Unbelief puts our circumstances between us and God. Faith puts God between us and our circumstances.” Listen to that again: “Unbelief puts our circumstances between us and God. Faith puts God between us and our circumstances.” Faith is not mindless ignorance, it simply refuses to limit God to the logical constraints of the left-brain; it puts God between us, and our circumstances.

b. Assumptions that keep us caged- It is important for us to understand that these words to Abraham aren’t just for Abraham; scripture is written for all of God’s people of all ages! So think about this: What 8-foot ceiling have you put on God? What assumptions have kept you caged? What promises have you given up on? Let’s talk about a couple of assumptions that I think keep us from chasing the Wild Goose and keep us from living the spiritual adventure that God ordained for our lives.

The first assumption that we often make, that I think keeps us from really living the spiritual adventure that God wants us to live— is…..I’m too old. Ninety-year-old women don’t have babies. Is that a fair assumption? It’s biologically impossible for a barren, post-menopausal woman to get pregnant. Or is it? This is the possibility Abraham had to wrestle with, in the end, because Sarah was 90 years old when she finally got pregnant! Remember how last week I talked about how God is using Bruce Kunkel at the age of 94! God is the God of second chances, and it may feel like time has passed you by (even if you’re 30 or 40 or 50 or older). It is less about our actual age, and more about our frame of mind.

On the flip side, there is the assumption that you’re too young. Many kids and youth and young adults believe that you have to be a certain age, and have certain experiences before you can be used by God; before you can live the spiritual adventure. Having done youth ministry for 20 years, I can tell you that youth are very capable of living the spiritual adventure, and making an impact for the Kingdom of God.

Don’t forget that Mary (the mother of Jesus) was probably a teen-ager, maybe 16 years old. What a huge responsibility! And the disciples, many of them 20-something probably. And David, was but a child when he took on Goliath. You are never too young. It is wonderful to see how Jared Ropati and Haley Fike are stepping up and serving as Deacons, and trying to let God use them for His glory.

You see, once we start down this road, our assumptions continue: we aren’t ready; we aren’t experienced enough; we aren’t educated or trained enough; we aren’t spiritual enough. Too often we allow what we cannot do to keep us from doing what we can do, and we allow who we are not/ to keep us from being who we are. I think we allow the fear of failure to keep us from even trying, or we allow the fear of looking foolish to keep us from daring to be different. And because we fail to step out in fail, assuming that we can’t do it, we never accomplish those “good works” that God prepared for us to do.

Steven Kisling, is the 49-year-old editor of Spirituality and Health, and he is a rower. He rowed at Yale in 1980, and 28 years later, he decided to train for the Olympic team; he decided to make his comeback 28 years later. Unfortunately for him he did not make the team. He didn’t even come close to making the team. You might be sitting there right now wondering why I would share this story. If you are wondering that, right there you are making the assumption that the only real value of a story is if there is success attached to the end of it. What I want to point out about this story is the fact that he tried out. He said, “Had I stopped to squarely face all the numbers from the beginning, I would have concluded that winning was impossible because rowers have gotten faster over the last 28 years. But that seems to me like choosing to never live because you know that you are going to die. We were careful not to lie to anyone, especially ourselves. Instead we chose to suspend belief.”

The point of the comeback was not that he thought he could win, but rather to not be afraid to try. “We showed up,” Kisling said, “with a lot of talent out there, but there was a lot of real, raw talent that didn’t show up. They didn’t want to take a crack at it because they were afraid of losing. He who gets embarrassed loses first. You’ve just got to show up.” There are many other assumptions we make that hold us back: church has to look a certain way; sharing our faith needs to be done by a specific method; I have to have ENOUGH money first before I can start giving to God…. I could go on and on, but I hope you get the point. Our assumptions keep us from even being open to listening to God and hearing what God would have us to do in and through our lives.

Conclusion: The truth is, progress in every area depends upon those who challenge the assumptions. Doesn’t it? We see this very profoundly now with the internet. Amazon assumed that to sell books you don’t have to have a bookstore. They do it by their displays online. In fact, Tyler just got his I Touch from Amazon, and they shipped it to him without any tax or shipping cost! Wikipedia assumed you don’t need door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, in fact you don’t even need books. You can buy most anything online now. The internet has changed the sales world breaking the assumptions that were held.

Have you ever wondered why the Pharisees, the religious leaders were so threatened by Jesus? Because Jesus challenged every assumption in the book! I think spiritually, we have to be careful that we don’t just live in this cage of assumption but we find ways to break out of that. As I look at my own Wild Goose chase, I think the defining moments are the moments when my assumptions were challenged and I had a choice to make, and I had to let God lead me past what I would normally do. I had to take a step of faith beyond my assumptions, and follow God’s lead. We did that last week when we had the band play all the music without an accompanist, and I thought they did a great job! We did it when we did our “Return to Bethlehem” production, which required about 50 people and $1000 to make it happen. I have always been open to letting God lead, even when it takes me away from what I’ve always done.

You really have to choose: hold on to my assumptions, or hang on to God. You really can’t do both. I want to challenge you to do that in your own individual life. Quit assuming and start believing. Don’t assume that you can’t start the business or write the book or get the job or save the marriage or overcome the addiction or experience the miracle. Quit assuming and start believing. Quit putting an 8-foot ceiling on what God can do.

Last thought: when Abraham believed, how long did it take for God’s promise to come true? It took 25 years!! When we trust God, and step out in faith away from our assumptions, it doesn’t always happen in a day, or a week, or even a year. After 25 years Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age. At just the right time, she became pregnant. Waiting 25 years for God to fulfill His promise must have seemed like an eternity to Abraham and Sarah, and it had to be spiritually confusing and emotionally exhausting.

By doing this God broke through the 8-foot ceiling and proved once again that nothing is too hard for him. Let God break you of your assumptions, so that He might do great and wonderful works in and through your life. Amen.