Sorry for the delayed post today.
The main thing that stood out to me in today’s reading was Abraham and how he handled God’s command to sacrifice his son. God usually asks me to do much simpler commands and somehow I complain and fight Him on it all the way. Abraham was willing to follow through completely and without complaint. If it weren’t for the angle stepping in, Abraham would have followed through and I have to believe there would be no angle present if God knew Abraham didn’t have it in him. That type of obedience is the kind I want to have. The kind that doesn’t hesitate to just jump right in; knowing God will take care of the details. The other thing to keep in mind is that God did not ask Abraham to do something He wouldn’t be willing to do Himself. God sent His son and sacrificed Him for us. Shouldn’t we trust God to know His plan is perfect? If nothing else, we should trust that there is purpose in His plans through us and we should count it a blessing to be included in those plans.
Daily Devotion 
Few thoughts on the sacrificing of Isaac. I think I already mentioned this in another post recently, but I’ll mention it again. At this time, all the religions practiced human sacrifice, and more specifically, child sacrifice. This was the norm. So the fact that God stopped the human sacrifice and delivered an animal instead was highly out of the norm for that culture. It was another step in the direction of God ultimately creating the ultimate sacrifice so he could have what he was after all along: our hearts.
The other thought I suppose isn’t so novel. Everyone talks about it. But I was just reminded of some stuff. In this culture, a son was the most prized goal a family could have. As we see in other biblical and secular stories of the time, women pined for a boy. If they didn’t deliver a boy, they were useless. Their identity was nothing. So people were obsessed with having boys. Here they have pined for a boy for so long and God asks them to give him up. So often we pine so long after something because we feel like it will give us our identity. And when it finally shows up, it can so easily become an idol. It can so easily take our eyes of the Lord, who was the one who actually brought it to fruition. It’s when this happens, at least in my own life, that God asks us to lay it aside. It has to die, so that we let go of it as an identity – so that we reestablish our identity in our creator, which is the only way to live a healthy life. He doesn’t do it to be mean. He does it because he knows it is better for our hearts to find our identity in him, not whatever we were seeking. Only at that point can our greatest desire become a reality. Whether it will or not will remain to be seen. Sometimes when we get our identity straight, our goals change. But either way, at that point, our identity it rooted in what is truth. When that happens we can withstand anything.