Recently, my Monday mornings have been spent pouring over my notes from Sunday sermons. When you are given such rich truths, you want to make sure they take root!

Sunday morning, Pastor Joe opens the Word and brings a word. He then challenges us with that word to obediently live the Word so we can give the Word to a world desperate for a word. We know that the only word that can bring a word worth hearing and heeding is God‘s Word, so we’ll start there again today (and every day), as we learn what it truly means to trust and obey...

Genesis 22. I’m sure you’re familiar with this passage. I thought I was, too, until I found out Isaac was much older than I had imagined him when he made the multiple day journey with his father to Mount Moriah to carry out an act of obedience that would be hard at any age or life stage.

I’ve always thought Isaac was this young boy (likely a toddler), walking alongside his dad, maybe even carried by him at times because of the long trek they had up that mountain. But as Pastor Joe recapped this story as he read and reread details from the text, emphasizing timelines and connecting the series of events with the previous and following chapters, he concluded Isaac was likely 37 years old at the time of this journey.

I know. Shocking, right? For those of you to whom this is new news, I’ll give you a minute. Believe me, I’ve taken quite a few myself yesterday and today, dissecting the text, looking for myself, seeking to truly understand that which I cannot fully comprehend.

And that, dear friend, is what Bible study is all about — reading the Word in a way that It can read us, teach us, and beseech us to live according to It. God’s Word is alive and active. (Hebrews 4:12) It changes us, from the inside out, so It’s not just something we talk about, it’s our deepest desire to live it out.

So, when I recovered from the shock of discovering how old Isaac was at the time of this event, I was able to glean these three lessons about OBEDIENCE…