This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series called, “When Life Gets in the Way.” Sometimes when we have gotten in a good groove in our lives, something comes along to completely upset the apple cart. Our plans, our preparations, our entire lives get interrupted, and then we have to figure out what to do next. Over the next six weeks, we are going to be talking about how to handle these times, especially when God seems to be the one behind them. We’ll start today with a glimpse into Abraham’s story and trusting God when that doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Let’s dig in.

Seeing Through the Fog

Don’t you just hate interruptions? Getting and staying focused is hard. When we finally get there and something comes along to break our concentration, that’s so frustrating. We teach our children not to interrupt, that interrupting is rude. But we live in a world where distractions and interruptions seem to be multiplying all the time. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I am so easily distracted by…well…just about anything that interruptions are really bad for me. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I can’t focus at all. I’m just really good at focusing really intently for really short amounts of time. And by “really short amounts of time,” I mean that I can focus until something comes along to distract me…squirrel! (And for a quick peak behind the curtain, I think over the course of writing just that one paragraph, I got up about six times to do something else…)

Interruptions take all sorts of different forms. There are digital distractions. I’ll be honest: if my phone is close at hand, I’m less productive than I am when it’s not. Of course, if my phone isn’t close at hand, I’m probably wondering where it is, so it manages to distract me whether it’s close or far. We have to guard carefully against that particular idol taking over our lives, but that’ll have to be a sermon for another time. There are the interruptions of stray thoughts. For me, sometimes those stray thoughts lead me to actually interrupt myself when I’m talking. Maybe you’ve had that experience with me personally. I’ll start telling someone about one thing, think of something else, and then head off down a new path. I might eventually come back around to the first path, but I might also jump to yet a third track. By the time we get where we’re going…or at least where we end up…there’s really no telling how we got there. It’s really bad when I’m trying to tell a story. 

Sometimes other people are the source of our interruptions. And kids. That one word is probably enough to cover it. It seems like there’s always something urgent trying to get in the way of something important. But sometimes interruptions take a different form even than that. Sometimes they come in the form of life itself. We actually manage to get ourselves in a pretty good groove, and then life swoops in to mess everything up. 

Life interruptions are hard on a whole other level than these other, simpler, kinds of interruptions because we don’t have any power over them. To a certain extent, we are able to exert some control over the first few kinds of interruptions I mentioned. You can turn off your phone (but take a big digital breath first to make sure you don’t suffocate without your digital air hose attached). You can train yourself to stay engaged with one task longer than you once could. Turning off the TV and reading actual books…especially challenging books…is a good way to do that. You can work where people don’t have easy access to you physically. You can duct tape your kids to the wall and work with noise cancelling headphones in another part of the house…or the city. (I didn’t say these things were all practical…or ethical…I just said they were possible.) But for all our efforts to control these kinds of relatively small interruptions, sometimes life itself comes crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man. That’s hard to ignore. 

And here’s the thing: When these more significant interruptions come knocking…or just crashing through the walls…God’s usually not far behind. God has a remarkable way of butting into our lives when we least expect it. Sometimes that’s because He wants to move us somewhere. Sometimes it’s because He wants to teach us something. Sometimes it’s because He wants to shake us out of a sin slumber so we don’t get caught too deeply in the consequences of our sin. Whatever the precise reason, ignoring God is a lot harder to do. 

Well, when life comes along and makes a mess of our nice, neat plans, what are we supposed to do about that? How are we supposed to handle it? More than that, what are we supposed to do when God is the ultimate reason for the interruption? For the next six weeks, in a new teaching series that is going to piggyback off of our Sunday school series (which means it is a great time to get into a Sunday school group if you aren’t yet), we are going to be taking a look at this very question. We are going to be talking about what to do When Life Gets in the Way. To help us see this from several different angles that just may speak directly to situations we have faced in our own lives, we are going to look at the stories of six different individuals in the Scriptures who found themselves having to deal with unexpected interruptions. 

Sometimes when God interrupts our lives, He doesn’t just do it once. He does it again and again and again. We’re going to start this morning with a fellow who experienced something like this. When Abraham (who was still named Abrahm at the time, but for the sake of clarity and consistency, we are just going to call him Abraham) was living a happy, comfortable life, God came to visit and invited him into a grand interruption that would completely alter the course of not only the rest of his life, but the rest of human history. I don’t know that our interruptions are going to result in something quite so dramatic as that, but Abraham’s story nonetheless gives us some pretty good insights on how to handle these times. 

Abraham’s story unfolds over the course of the large middle section of the Hebrew origin story that is our book of Genesis. But I don’t want to look at it there. Instead I want to jump way to the back where another author writing hundreds and hundreds of years later gave us a nice summary of Abraham’s story along with an observation that is pretty worthwhile to have. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way to Hebrews 11, and let’s dive right in. 

We don’t know who wrote the letter we call Hebrews. We have several guesses, but no hard evidence to support anyone in particular. The letter was written to a group of Jewish background believers in order to make the case for them (and what a compelling case it is!) that Jesus and the new covenant of grace through faith He inaugurated with His death and resurrection are better than Moses and the old covenant of law God made with the people of Israel at Sinai. 

In Hebrews 10, the author wraps up his argument with a call to persist in faith no matter what. He ends by saying, “But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are saved.” This prompts a rather obvious question: What is faith? In chapter 11, the author goes on to explore what faith is and how faith was always the primary motivating factor for the people of God. He does this by basically doing a review of the Old Testament, pointing out how all the major figures lived by faith. Abraham occupies the biggest part of this historical review. 

Check this out starting in v. 8: “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed and set out for a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out, even though he did not know where he was going.” And indeed, when God called Abraham (as recorded in Genesis 12) to go to the place He would show him, Abraham really didn’t have any reason to do that. He was exceedingly wealthy. He was living in a great city. He was married to a beautiful woman. No, they hadn’t had kids, which was a pretty significant issue, but everything else about his life was about as good as it could get. Traveling—which wasn’t safe—to a new place whose location he didn’t even know yet beyond that God would tell him when he got there, where he had no family or other support system, and where he didn’t know if there would be sufficient land to graze and water his massive flocks and herds, didn’t make the first bit of sense. This was about as profound of a life interruption as we can imagine. His family would have considered him certifiably insane. I doubt Sarah was thrilled at the prospect of leaving her entire support network to go wander around the desert, living in tents indefinitely. Nothing about this said, “This is a good idea that you should agree to do.” 

And yet, because of his willingness to trust in this God his ancestors had worshiped, but who wasn’t all that terribly familiar to him, Abraham packed up his stuff and his household, and set off. And when things got tough, Abraham persisted. Verse 9: “By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents as did Isaac and Jacob, coheirs of the same promise.” And what promise was that? The promise to create a great nation from his descendants. God promised Abraham that he was going to be the father of a great nation whose number would be beyond the number of stars in the sky. That promise was made in a day when a total lack of any kind of light pollution meant you could see a whole lot of stars. 

Here’s the problem: Abraham and Sarah didn’t have any kids. And they were both over 70. So, God completely interrupted his life by calling him on this grand adventure that no one thought was a good idea, and the thing motivating all of it was a promise that was absolutely ridiculous. How was God going to create a great nation from a couple who didn’t have any children and were in their 70s? This was the kind of interruption that leaves you wondering what was wrong with God. 

Yet like her husband, Sarah bought into the same vision. She was willing to trust that God knew what He was doing and live accordingly just like Abraham did. And as a result, they experienced God’s fulfilling His promise to them together. From v. 11 now: “By faith even Sarah herself, when she was unable to have children, received power to conceive offspring, even though she was past the age, since she considered that the one who had promised was faithful. Therefore, from one man—in fact, from one as good as dead—came offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and as innumerable as the grains of sand along the seashore.” 

If that was all God was going to do in and through the lives of Abraham and Sarah, that would have been enough. It was a lot. He had completely interrupted everything about their life with the single exception of their being married still. Nothing was the same for them after this interruption. It wasn’t like when I’m writing a sermon, stop mid-sentence to do something else, and then pick up where I left off (unless I’ve forgotten my train of thought, in which case I have to delete the whole paragraph and start over). Once they accepted God’s invitation into this life interruption, there was no going back to what was. Forward was the only way to go. 

But God wasn’t done. After Abarham and Sarah had settled in a pretty permanent home for them, and after they had conceived and given birth to their son, Isaac, God came to interrupt Abraham’s life yet again. For reasons we are not going to explore this morning, God interrupted Abraham’s life by asking him to give up his precious son to God as an offering. Except this giving up wasn’t like Hannah’s giving up Samuel by sending him to live in the tabernacle with the priest, Eli. This was a total giving up. Isaac was to be offered to God as a sacrifice. What an absolutely insane thought, yes? Any parent who would even consider such a thing is someone we probably aren’t going to be friends with any longer. How could you be? Can you imagine how that conversation would go? “Hey Philip, how are you doing? How are the kids?” “We’re doing fine. The kids are good too. I mean, I offered up Junior as a burnt offering to God, but other than that, the others are doing just fine.” What?!? 

By this time in Abraham’s journey, though, he had learned to trust God in a deeper way than most of us even understand. Verse 17: “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He received the promises [namely, that God was going to make a great nation from this boy] and yet he was offering his one and only son, the one to whom it had been said, ‘Your offspring will be called through Isaac.’” And why would Abraham even process such a thought? Because “He considered God to be able even to raise someone from the dead; therefore, he received him back, figuratively speaking.” 

Those are some pretty profound interruptions. I mean, I don’t like when someone interrupts me when I’m talking. God interrupted Abraham’s life with His plans over and over and over again. When I am going somewhere and get pulled somewhere else that I wasn’t expecting, I don’t always handle it very well. Abraham wasn’t just pulled in a slightly different direction, the entire trajectory of his life was upended. Nothing was the same after God kicked through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man. The old was gone and the new was here whether Abraham wanted it or not. 

And let’s be clear: although the author of Hebrews emphasizes the faith of both Abraham and Sarah (that’s the whole point of this chapter), the things God interrupted their lives to call them to do were not by any means easy. They ranged from impossibly difficult to excruciatingly difficult. And Abraham and Sarah didn’t always handle things well along the way. They both made some major blunders, and had their faith fail in extraordinarily significant ways. Almost nothing about their journey was smooth. Yet they persisted in following God’s lead no matter how disruptive a particular interruption happened to be. 

Why? What is it that kept them moving forward with God rather than calling a halt to the whole thing and trying to put themselves back on the track they were riding in the beginning? Simple: they made the decision to trust God even when things didn’t make a lot of sense. And the reason they did this is because they were able with God’s help to see through the fog of their circumstances to the hope that was waiting for them on the other side of it all. 

The author of Hebrews points this out a couple of times in this passage. The first is in v. 10 when he has just noted Abraham’s willingness to keep living into God’s interruption even though it took him to a foreign land and less than comfortable accommodations while he was there. “For [Abraham] was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” And then again more generally in v. 13, speaking now of all those like Abraham who pursued God’s kingdom before they even really understood what that meant, and long before Jesus was around to tell them. “These all died in faith, although they had not received the things that were promised. But they saw them from a distance, greeted them, and confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they were thinking about where they came from, they would have had an opportunity to return. But they now desire a better place—a heavenly one.” 

Are you with him here? Abraham and all these other folks like him were able to see something beyond just their immediate circumstances. They received God’s invitation into a life altering interruption, and with His help understood the concept of what He was doing. They never saw it actually come to pass. They never experienced the full wonders of what He had planned. They recognized and understood that they were vessels He was using along the way to better ends for all the world, and that when those plans arrived in full, they themselves would be among the beneficiaries. They were thus living for a heavenly home rather than merely an earthly one. That was enough for them. And so they trusted. 

What Abraham and these others couldn’t see, we can. We can see that God fulfilled His promises to them. The evidence for this is laid out right here for us in the Scriptures. We can see that God created the nation He told Abraham that He would. We can see that this nation was eventually used by God to bring a blessing to the rest of the world. We can see that God did indeed reveal His kingdom. We can see that in Christ He threw open the doors of His kingdom and invited all the world to enter in with Him, to enter into the blessing that Abraham’s descendant made possible…that Abraham’s willingness to trust God even in the face of a major interruption made possible. What all of this means for us is simple: When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. 

That’s not the same thing as saying we will understand what He’s doing. We often won’t. At all. We won’t understand it at first. We won’t understand it later. We may not even understand it after the fact when we are reflecting back over it from the standpoint of hindsight. But we can trust Him all the same. He’s proven Himself too faithful to too many for too long for us to think we are somehow justified in rejecting Him now because this will be the one time He’s not going to come through. When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. 

God’s interrupting your plans doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re off track. It doesn’t necessarily mean you need to change anything. It may simply mean God is trying to get your attention so that you can follow Him into some new adventure. When He does that, you can trust Him. When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. We can trust that He has our best interests at heart along with the best interests of everyone else around us. And if we will keep on following Him, we’ll discover just how good His plans are. When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. 

And here’s the thing: This kind of trust gains God’s approval in a big way. I stopped short of reading all of v. 16 a second ago. Let’s come back to that here right at the end because this is something you don’t want to miss. How did God feel about these folks who were willing to trust Him even when trusting Him seemed like a pretty bleak prospect? The author of Hebrews tells us: “Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” 

Just let that idea soak in for a second. God is not ashamed to be called their God. Would that the same could be said of you and me, yes? These folks were willing to place their trust in God even when He interrupted their lives in profound ways. This made their heavenly Father proud in ways not much else does. Have you ever been around a new grandparent? Do you still remember being a new grandparent? Those folks will drive you crazy. They’ll pull out their phone at the drop of a hat and show you all of their pictures of their grandkids. All. Of. Them. You can’t escape it. You just have to smile and nod and share in their pride, because they are really, really proud. God is more proud than that. We put our trust in Him like this, and He walks around pointing at us and declaring, “That one’s mine! That one right there! I’m really proud of that one! She put her trust in me even when it was hard! She’s awesome! I’m proud of her!” 

Friends, when you put your trust in God, that’s how He feels about you. He is not ashamed to be called your God. That’s something to aim for. It is something worth aiming for because God is worthy of that trust. He’s proven it over and over and over again. Even when He interrupts our lives in the most disruptive ways imaginable, we can still trust in Him. When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. He may not lead us where we expect, but He won’t let us down. And, in the end, He’s already secured a place for us in His kingdom. When we are in Christ, we win no matter what. When God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. 

Next time, we are going to take this a step further and reflect on times when God’s interruptions seem to be not just disruptive, but downright destructive. For now, know that when God interrupts our plans, we can trust what He’s doing. I hope you will.