If we look into the account of Abraham’s righteousness we can begin to see a picture of what real faith is. Abraham can teach us 7 things about real faith.
1. Real faith comes with risk and loss. Abraham was told to leave the people and place he knew for the unknown.
2. Real faith is not perfect faith, but faith in a perfect God. Once Abraham gave away the promised land, and twice he gave away his wife Sarah, but God was faithful to return both.
3. Real faith struggles to trust both God’s will and timing. Abraham struggled to trust God’s promise as he waited from age 75 to 99 for Isaac to be born.
4. Real faith has always been in Jesus. Abraham looked forward to Jesus’s first coming, and we look backward at His first coming, and forward to His second coming.
5. Real faith results in obedience. Abraham’s trust in God resulted in him doing what God told him – like leaving his father and family to find a new national.
6. Real faith grows as God proves faithful. After waiting more than two decades for Isaac to be born, his faith grew so strong that he even trusted that God could bring Isaac back from the dead if needed (Hebrews 11:17-20).
7. Real faith sees beyond life. Hebrews 11:10 says Abraham, “was looking forward to the city whose designer and builder is God.
Like the rest of us, Abraham started as just another lost pagan from a messy family. He came from Ur of the Chaldeans, which probably means he was a Babylonian bad guy (Nehemiah 9:7; Acts 7:2-3). He was a Gentiles who was saved God’s grace at the age of 75 and he circumcised himself 24 years later at the age of 99 along with his household, thereby the Jewish national (Genesis17:24-26).
From Pity to Praise 