Crossroad of Faith Faith Series

We are in our faith series, friends, and the title of my message today is Crisis of Faith. And I believe God will get us to the point of just that. God will test our faith, try our faith, prove our faith, and bring us to a crisis of faith.

We will be brought by God to a crossroad with God to the point of testing, where we come to the end of ourselves, where the rubber meets the road, and we've got nothing else to stand on but the word of God. This crisis of faith is the final battleground for the believer who seeks a deeper experience of God and who wants to press on to spiritual maturity, for it is here at this crossroad where one either goes on to maturity with God into the promised land, so to speak, or lingers back in the wilderness at a dead end. Caleb and Joshua exercised this crisis of faith and came out victoriously on the other side, while the majority were frozen by their fears, stiff with unbelief, and missed out on that blessing.

Unfortunately, because of a lack of faith, many fail to get to spiritual maturity, and this actually breaks the heart of God. He wants us to continue to press on into a deeper relationship with him, but we hit a wall of unbelief while confronted with a crossroad of faith with God, where the road signs become obscured, and we are too fearful to venture out in faith and capture our mountain. We have our reasons for lingering back.

We have our excuses for not pressing forward, but these are paper excuses which will one day be exposed and burned up by the judgment seat of Almighty God. In Genesis chapter 22, we encounter a man who is confronted with a crisis of faith. The man is Abraham.

The crisis involves his son Isaac. How will it come out? How will this man of God fare in this crisis of faith? Can he trust God to do what is right? Can he believe God is able to do a miracle? I'll never forget the thousand-member Baptist church I visited one Easter to watch a play about Abraham and his son Isaac. This Baptist church was so out of touch with God and so unfamiliar with their Bibles that the church member portraying Abraham entirely rewrote chapter 22 of Genesis, because as he stood on the platform before the congregation, dressed in old clothes like Abraham, he was having a talk with God.

He was mad at God for asking him to sacrifice Isaac. He was arguing with God and telling God he had no intention of going through with it. He couldn't even believe that God would even ask such a thing from him, the nerve of God.

He literally was shaking his fists at the ceiling of that church, striving against God instead of cooperating with God, as the scripture clearly demonstrates. Abraham was obedient to the call to sacrifice his son, and he came to that crisis of faith, and he was victorious because he pressed through, he obeyed God, he exercised faith through the obedience to God's word. But this church portrayed Abraham on the same level with God, arguing with him like two deacons in a hallway having a disagreement.

It made me sick to my stomach to even watch that ridiculous portrayal of a man of faith behaving like a big baby. But sadly, that's where we are today in the modern church. The modern church has done a pretty good job on weakening the faith of its members.

The church has no influence with man or power with God because of its impotence regarding faith. We preachers have done a pretty good job at shrinking God down to man's size while we've successfully elevated man in the process. That's why our watered-down gospel has no power to save.

That's why our brand of Christianity is a laughingstock to the world. We come off as mere religious frauds and phonies who can't be trusted, sanctimonious and legalistic with form, but without life and certainly without power. Few in our church today are experiencing God as they could and should.

It's a shallow brand of Christianity that has no flavor nor appeal. Few are challenged to go all out for God in our day by faith. But here in the Word of God, we find a vivid, colorful, living, glorious example of a man of faith who has a crisis of faith and comes through on the other side with a deeper understanding of God and a more pungent reality of God as he enters into the promises of God.

The man is Abraham and his story is found in Genesis chapter 22. And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham and said unto him, Abraham, and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thine son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains, which I will tell thee of.

Well, Abraham doesn't do like that Baptist church did by arguing with God and saying he won't go for the very next verse says what he does. And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son and claimed the wood for the burnt offering and rose up and went into the place of which God had told him. So we see Abraham's obedience to God as he gets things ready, gets the wooden order, brings his son Isaac to the appointed place.

Here we see a man at a crossroad, the crossroad of faith. God is waiting on the other side, watching his servant to see how he will respond to the test. Abraham decides to obey God implicitly, and he obeys God by exercising his faith.

When Isaac asks his father, Where is the lamb for a burnt offering? He is looking into the eyes of that lamb as he answers him. My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. We see the obedient faith of this man, Abraham in verses nine and 10.

And they came to the place which God had told him of. And Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

I will stop here friends to say that all of heaven fell silent at the sight of that human raised hand holding that glistening knife as it was suspended over that boy Isaac. God and his angels looked on in wonder in great interest at that incredible scene of a man of faith obeying God no matter the cost to him personally. And in that moment was a freeze frame of another man, a figure on a cross who also was obedient to the father.

And the raised knife symbolized the stab in the heart of both those fathers as they gave their only son. This was a crisis of faith that Abraham had passed through for the reality of God's promises to come true. There was a meeting of heaven and earth, God's purpose and man's obedience.

It was a demonstration of how we are to respond to God when we are placed in our own crossroad of faith. I've been in a crisis of faith lately. God has had me hemmed up, shut up entirely to him to test me to see how I will come out.

I've never been so shut up to God in my life than I am right now. I just found out I'm being evicted from my apartment and I've got nowhere to go, no money to get me there. I feel abandoned by men, forgotten by friends.

It seems like I'm a stranger in a strange land. How will it turn out? I really don't know, but I know my God and I know the promises he has made to me. I trust him implicitly to do the right thing for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep what I've committed to him until that day.