Session 2 ### *The Gospel According to Tennessee* # The Promise That Must Be Protected by Hope Wooten | about 13 minutes to read > "For the toils of the road will seem nothing when I get to the end of the way." — Lessie Agnes Ham Henderson ## An Interrupted Race At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, the United States 4 × 100-meter relay team entered the qualifying round as the defending Olympic champions. Four runners. One baton. One hundred meters each. Their assignment was simple: receive the baton, carry it through their portion of the race, and place it safely into the hand waiting ahead. But during the second exchange, the race was interrupted. As Allyson Felix approached her teammate English Gardner, contact from a runner in the neighboring lane disrupted the exchange, and the baton fell to the track. For Team USA, everything stopped. The other teams kept running. The distance between them grew. Their race appeared to be over. Gardner picked up the baton, and the women kept running. If this were a Hollywood movie, the music would swell. Team USA would dig deep, summon one final burst of strength, pass every competitor down the homestretch, and win the race by the narrowest of margins. But that’s not what happened. By the time they recovered they were hopelessly behind. There was no possibility of winning the heat. Still, they carried the baton through every remaining exchange and across the finish line. They finished a race that already appeared lost. The baton had fallen. The race had been interrupted. And in that moment, it looked as though everything had been lost. That image reaches far beyond an Olympic track. Scripture tells the story of a race interrupted almost as soon as it began. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1 ESV). God created a world filled with life, goodness, order, and His presence. Humanity was made in His image and invited to live with Him, represent Him, and cultivate what He had made. Then an adversary, the serpent, crossed into humanity’s lane. He questioned God’s word. He distorted God’s character. He enticed humanity to grasp what God has forbidden. The runners stumbled and the race appeared to be over. ## The Promise Moves Forward But God did not leave the promise lying in the dust. And before Adam and Eve ever left the garden, He spoke a promise. One day the offspring of the woman would crush the serpent's head. A Deliverer would come. But this promise had a long way to travel. The Deliverer would not arrive the next day. Or in the next generation. It would spend centuries moving from one faithful hand to another. It would pass through families and nations. Through famine and slavery. Through wilderness and exile. Through seasons of waiting. And more than a few moments when someone must have wondered whether what God had spoken would ever come to pass. ## The First Runner The promise that would one day reach every nation first rested in the hands of one ordinary man. Not a king. Not a warrior. Not a ruler. Just an ordinary man living an ordinary life. When we first meet him, he is not the father of a nation. He is not a landowner. He is not even called Abraham. He is simply Abram. A man from Ur. Then God spoke. "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you." (Genesis 12:1) The command is strikingly abrupt. In Hebrew, the opening words are lekh lekha. The Complete Jewish Bible captures their force well: "Get yourself out of your country, away from your kinsmen and away from your father's house..." God wasn't asking Abram to make a slight adjustment to his life. He was calling him to leave behind everything that defined it. His homeland. His family. His security. His future as he understood it. Abram's first act of faith wasn't mastering a doctrine. It was taking the next step. He simply went. And as Abram walked, God began to reveal how the promise first spoken in Eden would move forward. It would pass through Abram and his descendants. God said, "And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Genesis 12:2–3) God could have accomplished His plan without Abram. He didn't need a human partner. Yet from the very beginning, He chose to accomplish His purposes through ordinary people. He invited Abram into the story. Not because the promise depended on Abram. But because God delights in shaping people as they learn to trust Him. Every runner knows something the spectators often miss. The race is about more than reaching the finish line. It is also about what the miles produce in the runner. The same would be true for Abram. The baton would pass from Abraham to his family. Generation after generation. As God moved the promise through history, He was also shaping the man entrusted to carry it. The miles ahead would change his home, his name, his understanding of God, and even the way the world remembered him. The promise was not only moving toward its fulfillment. God was transforming the people through whom He carried it. There was only one problem. ## Looking Up The promise of a nation rested in the hands of a man with no son. So Abraham waited. And waited. And waited some more. The miles passed. The years passed. Abraham grew older. Sarah grew older. Every birthday seemed to move them farther from the promise instead of closer to it. The seconds became days. The days became months. The months became years. And the years became decades. Until the relentless ticking of time bumped into Abraham's lane and knocked the baton from his aging hands. There it lay. In the dust between what God had said and what Abraham could see. And from that dust came an old and familiar question. The same question that had echoed through Eden: Did God really say? Had God really said Abraham would become a great nation? Had God really promised descendants when there was still no son? Because the clock was still ticking. Abraham was getting older. Sarah was getting older. And there was still no next runner reaching for the baton. Finally, Abraham gave voice to the question that had followed him through every mile of the journey: “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” (Genesis 15:2) In other words, “Lord...this is a beautiful promise. But there is still no child.” God didn't answer with an explanation. He led Abraham outside. "Look toward heaven..." Imagine standing beneath a sky untouched by city lights and seeing the stars scattered across the heavens beyond counting. All the way back in Genesis, God had placed those lights in the heavens ". . .for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." (Genesis 1:14) They marked the seasons. The days. The years. They measured the passing of time for everyone who lived beneath them. Yet the God who hung them in the sky was never measured by them. Time belonged to creation. The Creator did not. And now the very things that reminded Abraham *how much* time had passed became God's answer to his fear that *too much* time had passed. The stars were more than an illustration. They were a testimony. The One who had spoken them into existence... The One who had faithfully sustained them since the beginning... The One who had never failed to uphold the work of His own hands... That was the One making the promise. Then God said, "Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them... So shall your offspring be." (Genesis 15:5) This wasn't merely about estimating population growth. It was about lifting Abraham's eyes from his aging body to the Creator of the heavens. The serpent's first strategy in Eden had been to distort God's character. Now, beneath a sky that had been quietly proclaiming God's faithfulness since the fourth day of creation, God was restoring Abraham's confidence in who He is. The stars hadn't changed. They had been there every night of Abraham's life. What changed was Abraham's vision. God didn't create something new to reassure him. He invited Abraham to see what had been there all along. The promise had never rested on the passing of time. It had always rested on the character of the God who created it. And Abraham believed the Lord. The Hebrew verb for believe is he'emin, from the root ʾāman. It means far more than agreeing that something is true. It speaks of firmness, reliability, and trustworthiness. It is the picture of placing the full weight of your life upon someone because you have found them trustworthy. Abraham wasn't merely believing that God's promise was possible. He was entrusting himself to the God who had made it. Perhaps that is why our word Amen comes from the same Hebrew root. When we say Amen, we are saying more than, "The prayer is over." We are saying, "This is sure." "This is trustworthy." "I stake my life on this." Abraham's faith became an Amen to the character of God. ## The Next Exchange Centuries later, Paul would look back on that moment and say that Abraham believed in the God "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." (Romans 4:17) That faith would echo through generations. In a race, where you fix your eyes matters. Your feet have a way of following your focus. Abraham’s eyes had become fixed on the passing years. On an aging body. On an empty tent. On everything he could count except the faithfulness of God. So God lifted his eyes. And then one day... After decades of waiting... Abraham heard a sound he had almost stopped expecting. The cry of a newborn son. Isaac. The promise no longer rested in Abraham's hands alone. There was another runner reaching for the baton. For the next seventy-five years, Abraham and Isaac carried the promise together. By the time Abraham died at one hundred seventy-five years of age, he had carried the baton for a full century. He never saw the finish line. He never saw a nation. He never saw a kingdom. He never saw the promised Deliverer. But he had seen enough. He had looked up into a sky filled with stars. He had looked down into the face of a promised son. And he had come to know the God who keeps His word. Then Isaac ran his stretch of the race. Then Jacob. Then Joseph. What looked like the end of the race became another exchange. A jealous act of violence sent Joseph to Egypt as a slave. Yet the very place that appeared to end the promise became the place where God preserved it. Through famine, the family was reunited. Seventy descendants of Abraham entered Egypt carrying nothing more than the promise of God. One generation faithfully placing the baton into the hands of the next. Sometimes what looks like the end of the race is only an interrupted exchange. A fallen baton does not mean a finished race. It looked that way in Joseph’s day. It looked over in Rio too. ## The Race Continues Later that evening, officials reviewed the Olympic race. They determined the American team had been obstructed. The runners were called back. They would run again. This time there would be no crowd to chase. No competitors in the surrounding lanes. Only an empty track, a clock, and four women entrusted with a baton. One by one they took their places. One by one they ran the portion assigned to them. One by one they made the exchange. The baton reached the finish line. The following night they won Olympic gold. Looking back, English Gardner said, "The bumpy road made the victory sweet." That Olympic team learned something most of us never stop to consider. The race is only lost if you quit running it. Because a dropped baton doesn't necessarily end the race. It reveals the heart of the runner. What do you do when the course changes without warning? When the exchange you expected suddenly seems impossible? When everything in front of you says the race is over? ## She Picked it Up Nearly four thousand years after Abraham first began to run, another ordinary runner found herself in one of those moments. Lessie believed God had called her forward—to, in her own words, “plant my feet on higher ground.” Then cancer entered her lane. At thirty-six years old, a brain tumor changed the course in front of her. Whatever miles Lessie had imagined still lay ahead suddenly became very few. Her race was coming to an end. And there, in the dust and debris of a life cut short—scarred by tragedy, loss, and heartbreak—the baton fell. It hit the ground with the echo of that ancient question still ringing through the ages: Did God really say? You're done. It's over. Whatever you thought God was going to do with your life, there isn't enough life left to do it. The same lie that had echoed through Eden now whispered from the wreckage of an unfinished life: The race is over. But Lessie had spent a lifetime learning something Abraham had learned beneath a sky filled with stars. The promise had never rested on the length of the course. It rested on the character of the God who made it. So Lessie reached down. She picked it up. And she wrote. Word after word. Page after page. She wrote so that her words would be “remembered long after I have departed this life.” Her race would end. But the Word would keep running. She wrote so that her words would be, as she said, “remembered long after I have departed this life.” She carried what God had entrusted to her as far as she could. Lessie faithfully wrote it. Margaret faithfully carried it. Vivian faithfully protected it. Teresa faithfully passed it on. Rebecca faithfully proclaimed it. Different runners. Different portions of the course. Different ways of carrying the baton. No one runner could see the whole course. Abraham couldn't. Lessie couldn't. Neither can we. We can only see the stretch of track beneath our own feet and the baton God has placed in our hands. Our responsibility is not to know where every turn will lead or how every exchange will happen. It is to faithfully carry what has been entrusted to us for the portion we have been given. And then, at the appointed time, we may look back and discover that what seemed like an ending was only an exchange. Scripture is full of ordinary people who refused to let a bump in the lane and a dropped baton end the race. They picked it up. They kept running. Through famine and slavery. Through wilderness and exile. Through corrupt kings and burning scrolls. Through moments when everything seemed to say, It's over. Did God really say? Again and again, the answer came—not merely in what they said, but in what they did. He picked it up. She picked it up. And the Word kept running. The baton may pass through human hands. But the promise has always rested in the hands of God. And God always has the last word.