Have you ever been invited to an attorney’s office for the reading of a will?
I haven’t. Where I come from, there was never enough money left for the relatives to fight over when someone died. Most of the people I knew didn’t leave wills…they left bills.
But, glory to God, that’s not the case anymore. I became heir to a fortune more than 40 years ago in Little Rock, Ark., when I gave my life to Jesus. At that moment I was born again into the richest family ever known. I was born into the royal family that owns and operates the universe. I received an inheritance so vast it will take me all of eternity to fully comprehend it.
Some people get excited about tracing their natural family history. They like to know if they have great people in their family tree because it makes them feel they’ve come from good stock.
You and I ought to be that way about our heritage as believers. Our ancestors are the greatest men and women who ever walked the face of the earth. We can trace our lineage back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, King David…all the way to Jesus. Think about that! Those are our forefathers.
“Now wait a minute,” you may say. “Those are Jewish men. They lived in Canaan and Israel. You’re an American from Arkansas! You’re not part of that family.”
Well, not physically. But spiritually, according to the Bible, yes I am. And if you’ve made Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, you are too, because Galatians 3 says:
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise (verses 13-14, 29).
Let’s Read the Will
As a Christian, you are the seed of Abraham! What does that mean? It means everything God promised him belongs to you. It has been passed down to you through Jesus.
Abraham’s blessing is your inheritance! It has been willed to you by the Word of God. So let’s read the will today. Let’s look in the Bible and find out how God treated Abraham, because that’s how God has promised to treat us.
Genesis 12:2-3 is a good place to start. There we see the first promise God made to Abraham: “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
To fully grasp what God was saying here, you must realize when He blesses someone, He is not just telling them to have a good day. He is conferring upon them the power to increase and prosper in every area of life. In fact, according to W.E. Vine and Webster’s dictionary, the true definition of bless is “to cause to prosper, to make happy, to bestow favor upon, to consecrate to holy purposes, to make successful, to make prosperous in temporal concerns pertaining to this life, to guard and preserve.”
It was actually THE BLESSING of God that made Abraham rich! It caused him to prosper wherever he went.
In fact, he became so “very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold” (Genesis 13:2) that he and his nephew, Lot, who was traveling with him, eventually had to go separate ways “for their possessions were too great for them to live together” (verse 6, The Amplified Bible).
Do you know what Abraham did when that happened? He gave Lot first choice of the available land. He said: “Is not the whole land before you?… If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you choose the right hand, then I will go to the left. And Lot looked and saw that everywhere the Jordan Valley was well watered…. Then Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley…” (verses 9-11, The Amplified Bible).
Notice that Abraham wasn’t greedy or concerned about his own welfare. He didn’t have to be. He had a covenant of blessing with God and he knew God would bring him success no matter where he lived.
Put Your Name in the Promise
Financial prosperity wasn’t the only benefit God’s blessing brought Abraham either. It also made him an overcomer. Because God had declared that those who cursed Abraham would themselves be cursed, Abraham could conquer any enemy that came against him or his family.
You can see that fact borne out in Genesis 14. It tells of the time when Lot and his family were taken captive by wicked kings who made war on Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham received the news about his nephew, he didn’t sit around wringing his hands wishing there was something he could do. “He armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued…and smote them…. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people” (verses 14-16).
Imagine that. Abraham and his servants single-handedly whipped four kings and their armies, then recovered everything and everyone they had taken captive!
What gave Abraham the boldness to go after those kings? He knew he had a covenant with God. He knew God had promised to be an enemy to his enemies, and he dared to act on that promise.
Abraham understood that God was God! Abraham took God at His Word when He said, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward” (Genesis 15:1).
We need to do the same thing. We need to take that promise and put our name in it. After all, it’s ours! We’re the seed of Abraham.
Years ago, when Ken and I first started to walk with the Lord, we were facing debts and problems that seemed overwhelming. So I took that promise from God to Abraham and put my name in it. I read it like this: Fear not, Gloria. God is your shield, your abundant compensation, and your reward shall be exceedingly great!
I decided that since I was an heir of Abraham, those words were just as true for me as they were for him. And sure enough, they have been. In the years since, God has protected me and rewarded me beyond anything I could ask or think. He has been as faithful to me as He was to Abraham!
God keeps His promises, and He promised Abraham that He would bless his seed. He said: “I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee” (Genesis 17:6-7).
Circumstances Can’t Stop THE BLESSING
When I look at the life of Abraham, I’m convinced there is no limit to what THE BLESSING of God can do for those who dare to believe. It makes the impossible possible!
For example, when God told Abraham and Sarah they would have a son, naturally speaking there was no way. They were both more than 90 years old, and Sarah had been barren all her life. But that didn’t matter. Their covenant of blessing with Almighty God overcame those obstacles.
It not only enabled Sarah to give birth to Isaac, it kept her alive until he was 37 years old. It’s amazing enough for an old, barren woman to have a baby. But for her to live long enough to raise him to manhood, that’s really something!
The power of God’s blessing didn’t stop there, either. God so renewed Abraham’s youth that after Sarah died, he was able to remarry and have six more children. At 175 years old, the Bible says, “Abraham’s spirit was released, and he died at a good (ample, full) old age, an old man, satisfied and satiated, and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:8, The Amplified Bible).
What happened then? Did the covenant of blessing die too? No! Verse 11 tells us that “After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac.”
If you’ll read about the life of Isaac, you’ll see THE BLESSING of God caused him to prosper just like it did his father. It didn’t matter what happened around him, he just kept increasing.
Once, when there was a famine in the land, Isaac considered moving to Egypt to escape it. But the Lord appeared to him and said, “Do not go down to Egypt…. Dwell temporarily in this land, and I will be with you and will favor you with blessings…and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father” (Genesis 26:2-3, The Amplified Bible).
Keep in mind, famines back then were just as terrible as they are today. I’m sure it was just like the pictures we see where the babies’ bellies are swollen from starvation and their arms and legs are little more than skin and bone. Yet right in the midst of it all, “Isaac sowed seed in that land and received in the same year a hundred times as much as he had planted, and the Lord favored him with blessings” (verse 12, The Amplified Bible).
I want you to know, that’s what THE BLESSING of Abraham will do. It will enable you to prosper no matter what’s happening around you. It will cause you to increase in the midst of recessions, depressions and every other kind of economic calamity the devil can dream up.
If you’re the seed of Abraham, you shouldn’t even worry about such things. They don’t have to affect you. You’re not dependent on the economic cycles of this natural realm. You’re not dependent on what the Federal Reserve does. You are dependent on your covenant with Almighty God—and that never changes! He never alters the Word that comes out of His mouth, and He has said you are BLESSED!
What’s more, He’s said you’re a BLESSING. That means the company or corporation you work for will be blessed just because you’re there.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” you may say. “I’m just a janitor and the company I work for is full of heathens!”
So what! Genesis 41 tells us Abraham’s great-grandson, Joseph, started out as a slave in the ungodly nation of Egypt. But because he was the seed of Abraham, he ended up saving that nation from being destroyed by famine. Not only that, he became the most powerful man in the nation next to Pharaoh himself. The entire country was blessed because of Joseph and his covenant with God!
Use the Anchor
Joseph had quite a success story, but you should have an even better one. You are an heir, not only of the covenant Joseph had, but of a better one with even better promises (Hebrews 8:6). Available to you are all the natural blessings that Abraham, Isaac and Joseph enjoyed, plus the spiritual blessings Jesus won for you when He died on the cross and rose again.
Jesus obtained those blessings as an heir of the Abrahamic covenant. That’s right! God promised Abraham that “thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies” (Genesis 22:17), and on the strength of that promise, Jesus invaded the devil’s domain, defeated him and came out with the keys of death and hell (Revelation 1:18).
Glory to God! Because Jesus possessed the gates of His enemies, you have everything He had under the Old Covenant and, in addition, you have the fulfillment of the promise of the Spirit. You’ve been born again. You have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you.
You’ve Inherited It All!
God wanted you to be so sure of that, He gave you a double guarantee. He not only gave His promise, He backed it with an oath:
For when God made [His] promise to Abraham, He swore by Himself, since He had no one greater by whom to swear, saying, Blessing I certainly will bless you and multiplying I will multiply you. Accordingly God also, in His desire to show more convincingly and beyond doubt to those who were to inherit the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose and plan, intervened with an oath. This was so that, by two unchangeable things [His promise and His oath], in which it is impossible for God ever to prove false or deceive us, we who have fled [to Him] for refuge might have mighty indwelling strength and strong encouragement to grasp and hold fast the hope appointed for us…. [Now] we have this [hope] as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul… (Hebrews 6:13-14, 17-19, The Amplified Bible).
The fact that God has sworn to give you the blessing of Abraham should be an anchor to your soul! You should hold fast to it. When Satan comes to you and says, You won’t make it. You’ll never prosper. You’ll never have a good job. You’ll never have that home you need…, God’s promise and oath ought to rise up within you. You ought to say, “I am an heir. I have inherited a promise that in blessing, God will bless me. And in multiplying, He will multiply me. I rebuke you, unbelief! Now get out of here devil, you’re not going to get my inheritance!”
Faith Opens the Door
That’s what the devil does, you know. He tries to talk you out of your inheritance. He doesn’t have any inheritance of his own. He has to steal everything he gets from the seed of Abraham, because the whole world belongs to us.
It’s true! Romans 4:13 says plainly that God promised us, the seed of Abraham, that we would be “heir of the world!”
You should never entertain another thought of poverty again. Don’t ever let the devil discourage you and push you around. Instead, you should wake up every morning shouting and singing about how blessed you are.
You may not feel very blessed right now. You may not look very blessed. When you check the balance in your bank account, it may not appear that you are heir to anything. Naturally speaking, your situation may seem absolutely hopeless.
If so, remember you’re in good company. Abraham once faced similar hopelessness. When God first promised him he’d have a son, he and Sarah both were old and wrinkled. They’d tried for years, without success, to have a baby.
But Abraham, “[human reason for] hope being gone, hoped in faith that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been promised” (Romans 4:18, The Amplified Bible).
Abraham believed God when there was no hope. He believed even when the world said, “It’s impossible.” “And being not weak in faith…He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:19-21).
THE BLESSING of Abraham comes to us when we do what he did. It comes to us when we believe God’s Word. As Romans 5:2 says, “We have access by faith into this grace.”
Faith gives us access to the favor and grace of God…and it gives God access to our lives. It opens the door to our inheritance. And since faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, I suggest you get out your Bible.
Start reading it with a new perspective, not like a book of stories, but as the record of your forefathers. Read and believe it like you would a will that detailed your inheritance, and you will begin to enjoy the riches that are yours by virtue of the new birth.
You’ll discover for yourself that you are truly an heir to the limitless resources of the family of God!
Author: Gloria Copeland
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