What Can We Learn From Abraham? — Spurgeon on the Father of Faith
⏱ 15 min read
You have heard the line so many times that it has gone smooth. And Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. The line is engraved in the foundation of three monotheistic religions. It is the verse Paul anchors the doctrine of justification by faith on. It has been preached so often, in so many registers, that the actual texture of Abraham’s life — the seventy-five-year-old man hearing a voice in Ur, leaving everything he knew, walking into a country he had never been to, and then waiting twenty-five years for the son the voice had promised — has gone quiet under the doctrinal weight the line has been asked to carry.
This article walks the slow version. Not the doctrinal one. The actual life, read at the speed Abraham would have lived it — the leaving, the long wait, and the mountain — with Charles Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary held next to each episode, because the famous line was never meant to travel without the life underneath it. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built for the slow walking of stories like Abraham’s, at the pace the rushed reader has often forgotten how to keep. For now — read slowly. (If the question of what faith actually is has been the long question of your own walk, what is faith according to the Bible is the closest doctrinal companion; how to strengthen your faith when it’s weak walks Spurgeon on the weakening seasons; and Bible study for married women sits beside this article for the reader whose leaving has had to happen inside a household.)
Charles Spurgeon returned to Abraham often in Morning and Evening. What he kept noticing — and what this article reaches for — was not the dramatic obedience on the mountain. It was the quality of waiting between the call and the fulfilment. Abraham was seventy-five when the voice spoke in Haran. Isaac was born when Abraham was one hundred. The twenty-five years in between are the years the doctrinal summaries skip. They are also the years that did the slow work of making Abraham the father of faith the New Testament names him as. The mountain came later. The waiting came first.
The first episode: the leaving, and what was actually left behind
The narrative of Abraham begins with a sentence that the modern reader passes over too quickly. Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. Read it again. The Lord is asking for three departures, in a specific order. Country. Kindred. Father’s house. The order moves inward. The country was the easier thing to leave. The extended family was harder. The father’s house — the immediate household that had raised him, the rooms he knew the smell of — was the hardest. The text gives the three concentric circles deliberately, as if to acknowledge that what God is asking is not a single departure but a layered one, with the hardest layer named last.
And the destination is not given. Unto a land that I will shew thee. No coordinates. No map. No description of the climate or the soil or the people. The destination is whatever I will show you when I show you. The faith Abraham is being asked for is not the faith of agreeing to a known plan. It is the faith of leaving without the destination specified.
This is the part the modern Christian woman tends to slide past too quickly, because the contemporary Christian language about being called to leave has been spoken so often that it has gone abstract. The abstraction is not what Abraham did. Abraham did not leave his country in a metaphorical sense. He packed up his household — his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, his servants, his livestock — and walked out of Ur and into Canaan, with no return ticket, in his mid-seventies, on the strength of a voice that had not yet provided an address. The leaving was physical, financial, social, generational. The cost was visible the day he stepped outside the city gate, and the cost continued to be visible every day of the years that followed.
Spurgeon, writing on the inward posture of a soul that has left the familiar in obedience to God’s voice, recorded in Morning and Evening the kind of stillness that the leaving requires:
“Come, therefore, O Lord, my God, my soul invites thee earnestly, and waits for thee eagerly. Come to me, O Jesus, my well-beloved, and plant fresh flowers in my garden, such as I see blooming in such perfection in thy matchless character! Come, O my Father, who art the Husbandman, and deal with me in thy tenderness and prudence! Come, O Holy Spirit, and bedew my whole nature, as the herbs are now moistened with the evening dews. O that God would speak to me.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Notice the verbs. Invite. Wait. Come. Spurgeon is naming the posture of the soul that has left its country and is in the new ground without a map. The soul invites God to come to the new garden. The soul waits eagerly for the divine speaking. The soul does not pretend it has its bearings. The line O that God would speak to me is the small honest sentence of a person standing in unfamiliar territory and asking for the next instruction.
The first lesson, then, on what can we learn from Abraham in the Bible: the leaving is not the destination. The leaving is the first piece of evidence that the soul has trusted the voice enough to begin. The destination will be shown when it is shown. Your part is the invite and the wait. The destination is His.
For the modern Christian woman whose own leaving has happened in some quieter form — the long resignation from the career path the family had assumed she would walk, the slow departure from a friend group whose assumptions had become incompatible with the life God had been quietly building in her, the season of unknown next-step inside a household that wanted certainty before she could give it — Abraham’s seventy-five-year-old departure is the precedent. The leaving was reasonable. The destination was not specified. The waiting began.
The second episode: the twenty-five years, and the long stretch of nothing happening
After the leaving comes the wait. The text records the wait in fragments — Abraham at Bethel, the trip down to Egypt during the famine, the separation from Lot, the rescue of Lot from the four kings, the encounter with Melchizedek, the covenant in Genesis 15, the misstep with Hagar, the renaming, the visit at Mamre — but the underneath of the fragments is a single long stretch: the son has not come.
The promise had been clear. I will make of thee a great nation. The promise required a son. The son had not arrived. Abraham was seventy-five at the call. He was eighty-six when Ishmael was born to Hagar. He was ninety-nine when the visitors at Mamre announced that Sarah would conceive within the year. He was one hundred when Isaac was finally born. The twenty-five years between the call and the fulfilment are years of nothing happening that the promise had required.
What the modern reader misses, because we know the story ends with Isaac, is the interior weather of those twenty-five years. The first ten years were probably hopeful. The next ten were probably increasingly strained. The Hagar episode in year eleven is the textual evidence that Abraham and Sarah had run out of patience and tried to engineer the promise themselves. The fourteen years between Ishmael’s birth and Isaac’s are years in which Ishmael was the visible answer that turned out not to be the answer, and the actual answer continued to not arrive.
Spurgeon understood the inward landscape of the long wait better than most. He had pastored congregants whose own promises — for healing, for restoration, for the prodigal’s return, for the child — had not arrived in the timeframes they had assumed. And he wrote about the kind of unbroken divine outflow that surrounds the soul whose visible answer is delayed:
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Sit with the image. The sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit. The sun did not stop shining over Canaan during the twenty-five years. The lovingkindness did not pause. The arrow of love did not stall in mid-flight. The fragrance kept perfuming the air through which the arrow was flying, year after year, while the visible answer was still being formed in a place neither Abraham nor Sarah could see.
This is the line worth keeping near the page during your own long stretch of nothing happening. The orbit has not changed. The grace has not paused. The promise has not been withdrawn because the calendar has slipped. The fragrance has been in the air around the long wait the whole time. You have not been forgotten. The arrow is still in flight. Your part is the simple keeping of the camp at Mamre — the small daily life lived under the tent at the place the promise was last spoken — until the visitors arrive and the year of the answer is named.
The misstep with Hagar is not the failure that disqualifies you from the promise. Abraham made that misstep in year eleven, and the promise still came in year twenty-five. The misstep cost. Ishmael’s life would be its own long pain, and the household’s peace would not return easily after it. But the promise itself was not revoked. Spurgeon would say — and the arc of Abraham’s life bears him out — that God’s purposes are larger than your worst attempt to engineer them. The misstep is forgiven. The waiting resumes. The orbit continues.
A pause for the body
The teaching has been long enough that the body has begun to brace again. Pause, here, in the middle of the essay.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by a small amount — not by trying to relax, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw unclench. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale, until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own. Repeat once more. Then continue reading.
The waiting-body is the stiff-body. The held-breath body of the woman who has been carrying a long unfulfilled promise. The somatic of the long wait is the somatic of not exhaling all the way out because something has not yet arrived that would allow the lungs to fully empty. The slow exhale is the body’s first small refusal of that holding. The body learning that it is allowed to release the breath even before the answer comes. The body learning that the rest does not depend on the arrival.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow daily settling. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. No demand to perform. The kind of small daily practice that, year after year of the long wait, becomes the camp at Mamre — the tent at the place the promise was last spoken — where the visitors will, in their own time, arrive.
The third episode: the mountain, and what the asking actually cost
The most piercing episode in Abraham’s life is the mountain. Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. The grammar of the sentence does what only Hebrew narrative can. Each clause names a layer of the cost. Thy son. Thine only son. Isaac. Whom thou lovest. The text refuses to let the reader skip the love. The Lord, in asking, names what He is asking for in a way that does not minimise the weight of the asking.
The mountain takes three days to walk to. Three days of Abraham knowing what he is walking toward, with the boy beside him asking why they have brought fire and wood but no lamb. The three days are recorded almost in silence. The text gives one exchange: My father… Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. The answer is honest in a way that is not theological evasion. Abraham does not know what God is going to do at the top of the mountain. He simply knows that God will provide. The provision is the unknown. The walking is what he can do.
Spurgeon, writing on the Trinitarian flow of grace through the long obedience of the saints, named in Gleanings among the Sheaves the kind of mercy that operates underneath the moments of greatest asking:
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read it twice. The Father as the source. The Son as the channel. The Spirit as the inward receiver. The whole architecture of grace is being held in this single passage, and Spurgeon is naming the architecture for a reason. The asking on Moriah was not the act of a capricious deity testing a man’s resolve. It was the action of the Father asking Abraham to participate, in a foreshadowing he could not yet fully understand, in the same kind of giving the Father would Himself enact at the actual Moriah of Calvary two thousand years later. The mountain Abraham climbed was a rehearsal of the mountain Christ would climb. The provision Abraham named — God will provide himself a lamb — was, in a register Abraham could not have known on the day, the prophetic naming of the actual Lamb who would, in fullness, be provided.
The ram in the thicket is the answer at the top of the mountain. Abraham does not have to give the son. The provision comes from the Father, through the substitution Spurgeon names as the channel, into the heart of the man whose obedience had been ready. The Hebrew name of the place becomes Jehovah-jireh — the LORD will provide — and the line passes into the language of the next four thousand years.
For you, this is the third lesson. The mountain you are climbing right now — the asking that has been put in front of you that you do not understand, the surrender that has been required without the destination being specified — is not being asked by a capricious God. It is being asked by the Father who is, in His own way, making you a participant in something larger than the asking itself. You do not need to know the larger thing to walk the three days. You only need to walk them in the honesty Abraham walked them in: God will provide. The provision is the unknown. The walking is what you can do.
What the father of faith teaches across a life
The famous line — and Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness — was spoken in Genesis 15, years before the mountain. The faith that was counted as righteousness was not the climactic obedience at Moriah. It was the steady belief, sustained across the long wait between the leaving and the fulfilment, that the One who had spoken in Ur would do what He had said. The mountain confirmed the faith. The mountain did not produce it.
What we can actually learn from Abraham in the Bible, for the lives most of us are living, is the architecture of the long stretch in between. The leaving was the first act. The waiting was the second. The mountain was the third. The fulfilment came after each. The doctrine of justification by faith is not a shortcut around the architecture. It is the doctrinal name for the belief that persists across all three episodes — the belief that does not need the destination to be specified before the leaving, that does not need the calendar to be honoured before the trusting, that does not need the asking to be explained before the walking.
That is the slow secret of what can we learn from Abraham in the Bible. Faith is not a single dramatic moment of obedience. Faith is the long steady belief that the voice in Ur was true, sustained through the leaving, sustained through the twenty-five years, sustained up the mountain, sustained when the ram appeared in the thicket. The whole life was one act of faith. The doctrinal summary is the New Testament’s faithful description of the whole life. (For the sibling slow reads in this series, what can we learn from King David walks Spurgeon on the man after God’s heart, and what can we learn from Paul the apostle walks Owen on Paul’s sufferings, both at the same contemplative pace.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor for the woman whose own long wait has been going on long enough that the year feels slow, and who is ready, slowly, to keep the camp at Mamre until the visitors arrive.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the invite and the wait, the sun in its orbit, the Father as the source — into a daily companion built for the woman whose own faith has been asked to hold across a stretch that the calendar did not respect, and who is ready to keep believing the voice in Ur was true.
