The sermon opens in Genesis 15, "God's Covenant with Abraham," and begins with a probing question: has the listener ever been tempted to doubt God's goodness, to wonder where the promised peace and hope have gone when present circumstances do not match God's word? This is the same temptation Satan planted in Eden — twisting God's command until Eve, and then Adam, questioned whether God truly willed their good. Abraham, the preacher stresses, does not fall into doubt, but he does wrestle. When the LORD appears and says, "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great," Abraham immediately presses back: what good is any reward when he remains childless and his heir is a servant, Eliezer of Damascus? The struggle is not unbelief but honest lament held together with faith.

The sermon locates the root of Abraham's unrest not in worldly lack — by any human measure he is comfortable, prosperous in flocks and servants, secure in land — but precisely in God's own promise. Abraham cannot rest content with worldly sufficiency because God has promised him descendants like the stars and a land of his own; the gap between promise and present reality is what unsettles him. This becomes the sermon's first major application: are believers satisfied merely to reach material comfort and safety, or do they still ache for God's kingdom purposes to be fulfilled through them? The preacher invokes John Piper's image of the telescope versus the microscope — a microscope magnifies what is genuinely small (a virus, a flea) to make it visible; a telescope magnifies what is genuinely vast but appears small only because of distance (a star, a planet). Glorifying God is telescopic work: God is not made great by human praise, he already is infinitely great, but a secular, comfortable world (explicitly likened to secular Melbourne, in contrast to Indonesia where God still feels present everywhere) treats him as small and irrelevant. The congregation's planned church plant in Springvale is framed in exactly these terms — not a project for comfort or growth for its own sake, but a telescope held up in a spiritually needy, rapidly growing area where existing churches, including the one the congregation is purchasing, have shrunk to almost nothing.

Returning to the text, the sermon shows God responding to Abraham's uncertainty not with rebuke but with two confirming signs. First, God reaffirms that Eliezer will not be the heir, brings Abraham outside, and tells him to count the stars — "so shall your offspring be." Abraham believes, and it is counted to him as righteousness (v. 6), a verse the sermon flags as foundational for Paul's later teaching in Romans 4 and Galatians 3: justification by faith, not by works or obedience, since at this point Abraham has done nothing but trust the word he heard. Second, when Abraham asks how he can know he will possess the land, God institutes an ancient covenant-ratification ceremony: animals cut in half, the pieces arranged opposite each other, through which the covenanting parties would walk while invoking a curse of being torn apart themselves if the covenant were broken. Abraham falls into a terrifying sleep, evidently fearing he himself will be forced to walk that path and take on that curse. Instead, after sunset, a smoking fire pot and flaming torch — symbols recalling the pillar of cloud and fire that later leads Israel — pass alone between the pieces. God himself, not Abraham, walks the path and takes the self-curse. The sermon draws this forward typologically to Christ, who literally has his body broken — scourged, crowned with thorns, pierced — not for his own covenant unfaithfulness but for ours, so that those united to him by faith, like Abraham, are reckoned righteous.

The sermon closes with three applications: first, believers are called not merely to survive comfortably but to press on, like Paul in Philippians 3, toward fulfilling God's purposes, relying not on self but wholly on God's grace, illustrated by Paul's thorn in the flesh and the principle that God's strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12). This should shape everyday faithfulness, including prayer — the congregation is urged toward the Wednesday prayer meetings as a concrete expression of "apart from you I can do nothing." Second, echoing Psalm 127, all labor — parenting included — is futile unless the Lord builds and keeps it, so effort must be paired with earnest prayer for the hearts of children, not only provision for their needs. Third, and most directly evangelistic, the sermon insists no one is justified by church attendance, giving, or moral effort — like the tax collector of Luke 18 who simply cries for mercy, sinners are invited to stop trying to "walk between the pieces" themselves and instead trust wholly in Christ's finished work for righteousness before God.

Bible Verses Used

• Genesis 15:1-21: The sermon's central text — God's covenant with Abraham, Abraham's questioning, the promise of offspring and land, and the covenant-cutting ceremony.

• Genesis 15:6: Highlighted as the pivotal verse on justification by faith apart from works, later expounded by Paul.

• Romans 4: Cited as Paul's development of Genesis 15:6 into the doctrine of justification by faith.

• Galatians 3: Cited alongside Romans 4 as Paul's exposition of Abraham's faith-righteousness.

• Philippians 3:13-14: Used for the image of "straining forward" toward the goal, paralleling Abraham's pursuit of God's purpose over comfort.

• 2 Corinthians 12:9-10: Paul's thorn in the flesh and "when I am weak, then I am strong" illustrate reliance on grace amid struggle.

• Psalm 127:1: Applied to parenting and ministry labor being futile unless the Lord builds and keeps.

• Luke 18:13: The tax collector's cry for mercy models coming to God without relying on one's own works.

• John 15:5 (referenced as "apart from you I can do nothing"): Used to press the congregation toward dependence on God through prayer.