Acts 7:1-7

EXPATRIATION

1-7. Despite the awful doom of the antediluvians, the people after the flood soon became terribly wicked. While they constantly ploughed up the bones of their antediluvian predecessors, fear and trembling appalled them so they were constantly resolving to be good. Ah! the road to hell is strewn with good resolutions. The postdiluvians had inherited evil hearts from their predecessors. Hence a wicked life inevitably followed, as it always will unless we go to God and receive a new heart. Despite the grand boom given to holiness in the flood, when all of the wicked were taken out of the world and righteousness ruled the only surviving home, yet wickedness so increased that God found it necessary in the third postdiluvian century to begin de novo, calling Abraham to leave the world and identify himself with God alone. In the home of his childhood, in the beautiful alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, that delightful rich, level country between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the cradle of the postdiluvian world, first settled by the sons of Noah after the deluge, where at a later date Nimrod gave himself imperishable notoriety by attempting to found a human government independently of the Almighty (though nowadays all the governments on the globe are Nimrodic without a blush). Such was the wickedness of his native land that God required Abraham to leave his kindred and country and follow whither He led. This is now and has ever been the first step in a true heavenly pilgrimage. A prophet is without honor in his own country. Expatriation as a rule is a sine qua non in a really fruitful ministry for God and souls.

“Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of Ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

As a rule, you must leave your native land if you would be eminently useful.