Abraham or Esau?
“And he believed in the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness. And He said unto him, 1 am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (Gen. 15:6-8).
God’s people often are impetuous, and through want of understanding His dealings do not bear the fruit of patience; they would, in their haste, have things at once, for which their heavenly Father, in His wisdom, sees fit to keep them waiting. The spirit of such is too much that of the world, whose saying is, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” But the Christian, in communion with God, knows that it is better to lack in the present time the portion that the world covets, so that in the eternal future he may possess that which shall never pass away. The Spirit of God calls Esau a “profane person” (Heb. 12:16), because, by selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, he showed that he esteemed a meal in the present worth more than God’s inheritance with its promised blessing in the future. There are many who follow Esau’s example now-a-days; and we do well to ask ourselves, Have the glorious realities of eternity so laid hold of my soul that, compared with them, all beside is insignificant? If God gave me the choice today of an earthly inheritance, or a heavenly one, which would I choose?
If some of us had been in Abraham's place, we should not have liked to wait four hundred years before the promise was fulfilled; nor to hear that for all those centuries the promised land should be possessed by the enemy, and our children meanwhile be afflicted in a land that was not theirs. But Abraham's faith is not perturbed. He knows that He who gave him the land will secure it to him; and as he trusted God to give him the children to possess it, he can also trust Him to take care of those children.
Herbert Wilbraham Taylor (1847-1899) possessed a heart for the Gospel and a love for perishing souls. He visited many of the large towns of England preaching the Gospel with great power. He was a great open-air preacher it was his great joy to preach in the market places. He wrote a large number of tracts and many small Gospel booklets.
