April 10: Faith That Gives Back the Gift

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.” — Hebrews 11:17 (NKJV)

The hardest thing God can ask you to surrender is the gift He gave you, received through an elaborate labour of faith.

Isaac was not just Abraham’s son. Isaac was the miracle. He was the child born to a hundred-year-old man and a barren woman. He was the living proof that God had kept His word. He was the vessel through whom all of God’s promises to Abraham were meant to flow. And God asked Abraham to put him on an altar.

Read that slowly. God asked Abraham to sacrifice the very thing through which God’s own promises were supposed to be fulfilled. From a human perspective, this makes no sense at all. If Isaac dies, the promises die with him. If the promises die, what was any of it for? But Hebrews gives us the key to how Abraham resolved that tension. Verse 19 tells us he concluded that God was able to raise Isaac from the dead. Abraham did not understand the outcome, but he understood the character of God well enough to know that God does not contradict Himself. If God promised, and God asked for this, then God had a plan for the other side of the altar.

That is one of the most mature expressions of faith in the entire Bible. It is not just trusting God when the path is clear. It is trusting God precisely at the point where His instruction seems to work against His own promise. It is the faith that says: You gave me this, and if You are asking for it back, I trust that You are not cancelling the promise. You are simply taking it through a place I cannot yet understand.

Is there something God has asked you to release that feels like it would cancel the very thing He promised you? A relationship, an opportunity, a plan that felt God-given? Bring it to the altar today. Not with clenched teeth, but with open hands, trusting that the God who gave it is the same God who can resurrect it, or replace it with something greater than you imagined.

Prayer

Father, this is the hardest kind of faith. You are asking me to trust you even when your instruction seems to work against your promise. I choose to lay it down today. Whatever Isaac I have been holding onto, whatever gift I have made into a guarantee, I open my hands. You are the Giver, and you are the Promise. If you take the gift, you remain. That is enough. Do what only you can do on the other side of this altar. In Jesus’ name, amen.