June 15, 2008 Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Series: Standing on God’s Promises
Sermon Title: “Belief and Unbelief”
Text: Genesis 18:1-15
Elder Vicki Eitel
Delivered on June 15, 2008
Belief and Unbelief
We are in the third week of our series on the promises of God. Today our scripture comes from Gen 18:1-15.
We are studying about God’s promises, but do you believe His promises? Do His promises apply to your life? Do you know how to appropriate the promises of God and allow them to work powerfully in your life?
I think that was what this passage is all about. Learning how to receive the promises of God and how to respond once we have received them.
Let’s take a look at Abraham’s relationship with God and how he positions himself to receive God’s promise and how he and Sarah respond. We can learn a great deal about the right way and the wrong way to approach His promises.
The first thing we note about Abraham is that he is watching. He’s not taking a nap in the heat of the day but sitting at the door of his tent where he can watch. There is an air of expectancy. Are you watching for God? Are you looking with the expectation of seeing God? This is the first ingredient for receiving a promise. If you don’t look for them, you most certainly won’t find them.
The next thing we notice is Abraham’s eagerness to be in His presence. Abraham hurried to the Lord as soon as he saw Him. Do you hurry to your quiet time with eagerness? Did you wake up this morning and hurry in your eagerness to get here? Eagerness is the second ingredient.
Next, we see Abraham bow low to the ground acknowledging his place in relationship to the Lord. God is his superior and he is the Lord’s servant. Do you daily acknowledge that He is God and you are but His servant, totally dependent on Him for all things? Or have you brought God down to your level and see Him as a kind wise old man? When we fail to keep God in His proper place and bring Him down to our human level, it becomes very difficult to believe He can fulfill His promises. But when we see God as He really is: all-powerful, all-mighty, all-knowing, infinite, then we can believe that nothing is impossible for Him. That’s the third ingredient.
After bowing down to God, Abraham asks the Lord not to pass Him by but to stay and linger with Him. Do you find yourself wanting to linger in your quiet time, or wishing that worship would go on a little bit longer. It is when we linger in His presence that we most often hear His voice. Lingering is the fourth ingredient.
Abraham then focuses on serving the Lord. Of bringing God the best that he has to offer. He hurries to serve them with great excitement and gives them the best that he has to offer.
Abraham goes above and beyond the customary hospitality. Normally he would have invited them to stay and rest and then join in the evening meal which would have been a pot of stew. Instead, he has Sarah bake bread in the heat of the day. He tells her to get 3 seahs of flour. That is about 20 quarts of flour and to knead and bake bread. Now I make my own bread and can tell you that it takes 4 ½ cups of flour to make a loaf of bread. That’s about 18 loaves of bread the size you buy at the grocery store. There is only three of them. He butchers a calf which was only done on very special occasions and will feed a lot of people. He butchers it in the heat of the day and roasts the meat over the fire. He brings water for their feet. He is going all out, way over the top. Do we give to God like that and serve Him with that kind of zeal?
Are you giving God your best or the minimum that is required? Serving Him with excitement and giving Him your best is the fifth ingredient.
Now Abraham positions himself to listen to what the Lord will say. Listening is the sixth ingredient.
Now God gives Abraham and Sarah the promise. ““I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”
The next ingredient is critical. Our response. How we respond determines whether or not the promise will have any value in our lives. We can respond with belief and trust and see the power of God at work in us, or we can respond with unbelief and loose the promise.
Let’s take a look at Abraham and Sarah’s responses. When Sarah hears that the she will have a child by this time next year, she laughs in her mind. The Hebrew word used for laugh in this passage means a mocking laugh. “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?” She’s basically saying, “Yeah right.” Why do you think she responds this way? I think there are at least three reasons.
o She heard this promise 25 years ago and nothing has happened
o She is looking at her and Abram’s abilities and resources and it is impossible
o Perhaps she doesn’t have the intimacy and depth of relationship with God that Abraham has. We read in Genesis that the Lord appeared to Abraham three times but we don’t read that He appeared to Sarah.
And aren’t these some of the same reasons we don’t believe God? We’ve prayed for something and it hasn’t happened, we look at what it would take to accomplish it and can’t see anyway that it can be done. We lack a deep intimacy with God.
More often than not, I respond like Sarah instead of like Abraham. I have been praying for God to help me with my unbelief. My cry has been the say of the demon possessed child, “I believe, help me with my unbelief.”
I have been struggling with a lot of health issues over the last several years and I have been to every kind of doctor mainstream and alternative, trying to get to the bottom of the problems. I used every resource “I” had to try and get well. I finally acknowledged that the root cause of my illnesses could not be healed by doctors. I got to the end of MY resources and fell at the feet of the only one who has the resources to heal me. I said,” God, you are the only one who can heal me. I give myself into your hands. Either heal me or give me the strength I need each day to do the things that I need to do.
Several weeks later while I was worshipping with my Bible Study group, and I felt that God said, “It’s complete. It’s done. You’re healed.” I was excited but guarded. I’ll wait and see if He really said that.
The next day, all my symptoms were still there, and the next and the next and the next. I battled back and forth over whether God had spoken to me or whether I had made it up. Finally, one morning in my quiet time, I asked God to confirm for me whether He was the one that had spoken or whether I can made it up. He immediately brought to mind two events.
The first event
happened many years ago. I was
strolling Katherine up at the Outlet Mall on a Thursday morning around
10:00am. Now if you have ever been at
the outlet mall on a Thursday at 10:00am, you know that there is virtually no
one there. I was walking along and I
looked up and there was a man walking toward me. I immediately said to myself, “That’s George
Skarulios from my high school in
The second event
happened several months ago while I was waiting in the car during my children’s
piano lesson. The home where they take
lessons is right on Hwy 9 and there is a pasture behind the house. I was looking out over the pasture when I say a large animal
start walking through the pasture. I
thought, “Wow, look at that big dog.”
Then I noticed that it was walking like a cat. I thought, “That’s a mountain lion. It can’t be.
We don’t have mountain lions in
So as I said, God brought these two events to mind back to back. Then God said to me, “Vicki, if you can’t believe what you actually see with your own eyes, then how will you ever believe what you can’t see?” “I am not going to take away your symptoms. You will have to stand on what you know and trust Me to bring about your healing.”
So I said, “OK, God. Is there anything that I need to do on my part to participate in the process?” And God began to show me different things that I need to change or let go of.
One morning, God gave me a dream. I believe that God still speaks to us through dreams, and although I often don’t know what they mean, I usually try and write them down. As I flipped through my notebook to find the next empty page, I ran across an old dream. I had the dream about a year ago, and at the time didn’t know what it meant. But as I re-read it that morning, I instantly knew what it meant.
I dreamed that I was here in Worship and someone in the congregation went into labor. Everyone was rushing around helping her to deliver the baby. After the baby had been delivered, everyone was oohing and aahing over the baby. I went over to see the baby and there in the blanket, was just the head of the baby. The head was smiling and looking around like any normal baby.
I was horrified. I went over to another women in the congregation and asked her, “Where is the rest of the baby?” She replied, “Oh the body will be delivered later,” as if this was perfectly normal. I stood there wondering how they were going to reconnect the head to the body. I woke up very confused.
God was showing me through the dream that my head would have to be delivered before my body could be healed. You see, through my thoughts, I am putting an incredible amount of stress on myself through the perfectionism, the accusations, and the self-hate and that is causing all of the auto-immune diseases I am suffering from. Words have the power of life and death. The words don’t have to be spoken. They can be thought and they will slowly kill you.
I asked God to make me aware through the power of the Holy Spirit of my thoughts. He has slowly been healing my mind and my body if following.
But I believe this dream also pertains to the church at large. On one level, our minds have to be set free to believe God before we will ever see the body of Christ walking in power and health. We have got to take our thoughts captive and bring them into the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ. The problem lies in our minds.
Sarah’s problem was in her mind. She and Abraham received the same promise. But listen to her thoughts compared with Abrahams
“So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?”
Sarah is focused on what she can see. There’s been no baby and my body is no longer able to have children.
Now listen to what Abraham was thinking. It tells us his thoughts in Romans 4:18-21.
Romans 4:18-21-Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.
Abraham’s confidence was in God as a Person who is both able and committed to do what He promises. Abraham’s kind of faith puts reliance on the object of faith: God Himself. It is God’s trustworthiness and not our trusting that is critical.
Sarah cried out, “I can’t!” but Abraham cried, “God can!”
Finally, the last ingredient to receiving God’s promises is to wait on His timing.
“At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”
I think this is the hardest part. When we pray we want God to answer immediately like a genii in a bottle. We don’t like to be kept waiting. But it is most often in the waiting that our faith is strengthened and intimacy with the Lord grow.
We often want to run ahead of God. We must free ourselves from the burden of trying to make things happen. We must stand firm and trust in the knowledge of the one who made the promise.
God desires to show Himself mighty. To display His power in our lives and do the impossible. We need only to believe He is able and He will do it. Nothing is too hard for the Lord.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.