Daily Devotional

Abraham is first introduced to us by the name, Abram, which God changed years later. The Spirit of God passes over his early life in Ur of the Chaldees with but the briefest notice and begins the sacred record with his encounter with God.
In this meeting, Abram was commanded to do three things: leave your country, your family, and your father's home. This is exactly the command that comes to every person who hears the call of the Gospel today. We are called to leave our country—the place where we have been living, our residence since birth. We are called to leave the old life with all its ambitions, its loyalties, its worship of money and fame and power, and its imagined independence—which is really slavery—all that we have been by nature since birth. This is clearly a picture of the secularized society with its satanic philosophies and value systems.
Abram was also told to leave his family. In the spiritual sense, these are the moral forces that shape our lives. Just as blood relatives affect us greatly on the physical level, so these moral forces at work today change our lives constantly and color all that we think and do. Others’ opinions, human traditions, pressures from family and friends, the attitudes of our employers and others around us—these are the kindred we must be willing to forsake when we hear the call of God. We are to renounce this concern about what others think and be preeminently concerned about what God thinks.
The third thing Abram was to leave was his father’s house—that is, the ties with the “old man.” In this sense, Adam is the father of us all. What theologians call our “Adamic nature,” is the father's house in which we all live. We are called to leave this, to no longer put any dependence upon our looks, talents, or any of our normal resources, but to begin to walk in dependence upon another to do through us what we cannot do ourselves.
Just as God called out Abram, He says to us, “You must no longer depend upon what you have been depending on—the opinions, the attitudes, the philosophy in which you have been reared. These are wrong. They are based upon the lies of Satan, and you must not live on this basis any longer. You must learn to accept the truth reflected in the Word of God, though it cuts right across the philosophy of this world. You must, above all, leave your father's house, which is dependence upon yourself.”
It’s a simple but vital decision—we can’t stay in Ur and go to the Promised land at the same time.

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