“The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’” Genesis 12:1-3
What a moment! God promises to multiply Abram–land, descendants, a great name, a mighty nation. This will all come to him if he follows and obeys the Lord. Though probably not as world-defining, I believe we all have moments like these. God gives us a new vision for making new disciples in a new moment in time. And all this beautiful fruit of multiplication will emerge as we step out with Him as our Lord.
However, for me at least, it hasn’t been as seamless as it sounds. I’ve found that on the other side of my yes was a different sort of math than I was prepared for. Much like Abram, multiplication as a promise sounds amazing. Multiplication as a practice is anything but.
Rather, what Abram’s story teaches me is that God’s multiplying work feels much more like subtraction, division, and addition before it ever produces any generative fruit.
Multiplication as Subtraction.
Go from your country…your people…and your father’s household.
You must leave behind the old to make room for the new. It’s not that the old was rotten or idolatrous. Rather, it may just have been taking up too much room in Abram’s heart. In the course of the Abraham material, God asks for more and more from Abram, culminating in God even asking him to give Isaac back, the son of the promise, until God (and Abram) were absolutely sure that Abram loved God most of all.
I think of Peter’s journey as Jesus’s disciple. It started with Jesus asking him for his career (leave your nets and I’ll make you a fisher of men) and ended with Jesus asking for his heart (‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’). This journey to see God multiply His kingdom in us starts with God subtracting lesser loves from our hearts.
And as Jesus is taking things away, the question He’s asking is–do you love me most of all?
Multiplication as Division.
I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse.
Herein lies a tragic and unavoidable reality to God’s promises. He will multiply His Kingdom through us. But our yes will be met by others no’s. And for every person who responds to God positively, there will be moments of chaos, as the old world is broken apart and a new one re-fashioned with Jesus as King.
It’s noteworthy that God sends Abram out on this divisive mission with no weapon to defend himself or collateral in which to trust. Abram is given nothing to hold onto to prove that God can or will make good on His word or that God can or will protect him when others don’t respond well to what he represents. When Abram obeys and leaves, he has no land, no son nor pregnancy to trust in, no great name, and no reputation as cause for blessing. It’s as if God is sending Abram out a sheep among wolves with nothing to hold onto but God’s promises alone. And amazingly, that is enough.
If you are to experience the fruit of multiplication, as Jesus subtracts things from your heart asking if you love him most of all, He’ll also take things out of your hands and put His promises there instead, asking–do you trust me most of all?
Multiplication as Addition.
“So Abram went, as the Lord told him.” Genesis 12:4
The fulfillment of these promises to multiply Abram start with a single step. And then another. And then another. And then another. We cannot control God keeping His promises. But we can decide to take the next step. The story of Gospel multiplication is a story of a million little moments of obedience. It’s as if God multiplied Abram’s descendants from the tiny little ‘yes’s’ that, I’m sure, to Abram felt like nothing but laborious addition.
The question of Jesus in these moments is–will you obey me most of all?
- Do you love me most of all?
- Do you trust me most of all?
- Will you obey me most of all?
I recently wrote a book entitled His Face like Mine: Finding God’s Love in our Wounds. It emerged out of a very personal and tragic story in my life where I was met by love in the place of my deepest brokenness and shame. And that love set me free in a way I hadn’t realized I wasn’t. All the promises of Jesus to multiply Heaven’s power in my life were unleashed when I finally met God’s love in the driest, barest, most painful parts of my being. In the depths of those painful wounds the questions God asked Abraham were posed to me.
Why is this the divine pattern? Why did God have to strip everything away from Abram before He could multiply it all back–and more? Why was it that my most powerful experience of God came through my most painful inner wound? Why do the promises of multiplication have to first feel like subtraction, division, and addition before any fruit can emerge?
I think it has everything to do with Jesus.
Because who else left His country, His people, and His Father’s house to come to a new land, that through Him God might multiply descendants more numerous than stars and sand, give Him a name that would be higher than every other name, and cause Him to be a blessing to the world such that through Him any who blessed Him would be blessed and any who cursed Him would be cursed?
Who else lived a life that progressively let go of more and more from His heart to reveal He loved God most of all?
Who else caused great division in the world and continually offered up His life with no security or collateral that God would make good on His promises but simply as a sign that He trusted God most of all?
And who else went to the cross and experienced excruciating physical and social pain because He resolved He would obey God most of all?
It was precisely at Golgotha–the place of Jesus’s greatest pain, suffering, and death–that God’s promise was made good and multiplying fruit began to be borne through Him unto the ends of the earth.
God invited Abraham to be multiplied, and He invites you into the same story, because this invitation is ultimately found in Jesus. By our yes to God’s promise to multiply us, we say yes to God forming the heart of Christ within us.
And though this yes will lead to our own Golgotha moment where we will have to answer those same three questions, it will be precisely through Golgotha that the blessing will pour forth.
So today, if your yes feels like subtraction, division, or slow addition, take heart. You are on the right path. You are not alone. Far from it. Just like Abraham, you may be closer to conforming to the heart of Jesus now than you ever could have imagined.
