Hebrews 11:8-9 “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. 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.” (CSB)

I hate moving. I hate the packaging and boxing, the lifting and stacking. I hate deciding what to throw and what to keep. I hate the way your stuff seems to multiply while you are packing it up, and a room never seems to get empty. I hate the idea of starting from scratch, and relearning everything in a new place.

I think that part of the reason I don’t like moving is because I like to be comfortable…too much so. I let myself become attached to things and places in a way that is not spiritually healthy. Like Lot’s wife, I want to look back and long for things that God says need to be left behind. “Do not love the world, neither the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” John writes. Moving makes me let it go, at least some part of it, and my sinful nature objects.

By faith, Abraham moved, and what a move it was. He moved his ranching operation five hundred miles across a desert without roads and without trucks. He packed up and moved even though he didn’t know where he would end up. God gave him no address to enter into his GPS. He didn’t tell him why the move was necessary. “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you,” he says in Genesis 12.

When Abraham finally arrived, what did he find? Have you seen pictures of the Holy Land? The man was leaving the area known today as the Fertile Crescent, some of the best farmland in the ancient world. He was leaving the area we call the Cradle of Civilization, a place with culture, technology, and refinement. He settled in a land of rocks and scrub and just enough grass to keep your sheep alive.

Abraham lived there on a camping trip that lasted the rest of his life, one hundred years of it, and then continued for two generations to follow. “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.” I like camping, but a week or two is usually enough. And Abraham wasn’t living in some thirty-foot RV with water and electrical hookups. He lived in tents, with hundreds and thousands of sheep and goats around him.

Abraham made all these changes, and he lived this life, without demanding God explain why he chose this place and life for him. There were no clear advantages in living here. It’s not as though this new life represented an obvious upgrade by earthly standards. Still, by faith he accepted and lived the life God chose for him.

Take a moment to look at your own life. I’ll bet that much of it seems hard to explain. The people you have buried, the injuries or sickness you have endured, the jobs you have had to work, the mistreatment you have suffered, the opportunities on which you had to pass, the sacrifices you have been forced to make, the battles you have had to fight–why? Why this life? Why trust God when so much seems wrong or out of place? Why accept the life he gives me, the life and place to which we have been called?

Why? “For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Abraham had God’s promise. Abraham trusted God’s promise. And faith changed everything. The Lord promised him a future with foundations, a life with permanence. No one has that now. You can’t stop the clock and stand in the way of change. It will run you over.

God promised him a place, a city, the Lord had designed and built himself. It’s not like the place the Lord designed and built here, a world now spoiled and ruined by sin. It all works right all the time. It’s a life with God the way life was always meant to be. It’s a life God gives as a gift of his grace. By faith Abraham accepted…no, Abraham embraced the life God chose for him now because Abraham believed God’s promise that a perfect life would follow. Faith changed his life now because faith would change his life to come.