June 22, 2008 Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Series: Standing on God’s Promises
Sermon Title: “God’s Unfailing Promises”
Text: Genesis 21:8-21
Dr.
Delivered on June 22, 2008
“As for the son
of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your
offspring.” Genesis 21:13
God’s Unfailing Promises
This morning I’d
like to begin my message with a little trivia: What do Anne Heche, Morgan
Freeman, Ray Liotta, Brad Pitt, Faith Ford and Kelsey Grammer all have in
common? Give up? They all got their start in the fictional town of
I never was a
huge fan of the soaps, but I do remember back in high school, between our
two-a-day workouts for football in August when we were so whipped we just laid inside
in the air conditioning, I tuned in a few times to “Another World.” This
was back in the mid-seventies and there was a serious love triangle going on
between Steven Frame, Alice and Rachel. Anybody remember that? They ended up
having a baby during the summer of my junior year, and then the summer of my
senior year the kid was grown and had run off to
I bring up soap operas this morning because to me today’s story from Genesis reads just like a soap opera. It’s the story of a love triangle, and jealousy, and children born out of wedlock. Of course, I’m not the first to note that parts of the Bible read like a modern-day soap opera. Infidelity, murder, intrigue, sin, grace, redemption, it’s all there in the Bible in stories about amazing characters like Moses, and King David, and Peter and Paul. Truth is, as I guess I say about every week, there’s nothing new under the sun.
This morning as we continue our series “Standing on God’s Promises” I’m going to give you the main thing I want you to take away from this story right at the beginning. I want you to leave here believing that God is faithful to his promises, even when we complicate what He’s trying to accomplish. And boy can we complicate things for Him. To look at how complicated we can make it, let’s look at how Abraham and Sarah complicated things, and then I want to give you three things this story is about.
Last week, when we left Abraham and Sarah, God had promised them a son and Sarah laughed in disbelief. To be honest with you, neither Abraham nor Sarah apparently had much faith that God could or would do what He promised. So the couple did what so many of us do; they took matters into their own hands. When Sarah remained barren she insisted that Abraham father a child with her slave Hagar. As might be expected, the pregnancy made Sarah jealous, so she banished Hagar to the desert. God found her there, told her to return, and gave her a promise almost identical to the promise made to Abraham, that He would make her descendants “too numerous to count.” The child to be born would bear a special name, too, Ishmael, which in Hebrew means “God hears,” for “the Lord has heard of your misery.” All this part of the story is told in Genesis ch. 16.
For today’s reading we need to fast forward about 14 years. The first seven verses of Genesis 21 tell of Isaac’s birth, which you would think would be a moment of great joy, but Isaac’s birth leads to even more jealousy and strife. On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham threw a big party for him. During the party Sarah sees Ishmael “playing” with (NRSV) his younger brother Isaac – the Hebrew there can also be translated “mocking” (KJV) – and that’s all it takes for Sarah to again demand that Hagar and the now-teenage Ishmael be driven out into the desert. Abraham is distressed at this but then God sides with Sarah assuring Abraham that he’s going to bless Ishmael too, and so Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael packing into the desert where they wander until their water is gone. Not wanting to watch her son die, Hagar leaves Ishmael in the shade under a bush to die and walks away and then sits down to weep as any mother would for her child. But then the text says “God heard the voice of the boy” and God makes a promise to Hagar that is almost identical to the promise originally made to Abraham: “I will make a great nation of him” (v. 18). Ishmael and Hagar are eventually rescued and the story goes on to say that Ishmael went on to live in the desert and Hagar found him a wife.
But there the story of Ishmael and Isaac gets even more complicated. It moves from a family squabble to a world-wide conflict. According to Judaism and Christianity, Isaac, though the second-born son of Abraham, was the favored child because he was the first born child to Abraham and Sarah. Muslims, however, trace their lineage to Abraham through Ishmael and view him as the favored son and heir. Muslims believe the Jews changed and distorted the Bible in order to establish themselves as the heirs of Abraham’s Covenant blessings. We Christians, in the opinion of many Muslims, adopted the Jews error by basing our New Testament on the flawed Jewish Bible which we call the Old Testament.
According to
Islamic tradition, Abraham raised his family in
But let’s not go too far down that road, because that’s not what today’s message is about.
Instead, I believe this story is about three things: it’s about patience, power, and perfection.
Patience
The story is about PATIENCE because it reveals what happens when we take things into our own hands instead of patiently waiting for God’s promises to be fulfilled. In fact, I specifically titled this series “Standing on God’s Promises” because standing means that you aren’t running with God’s promises, or jumping with them, or moving in any way with them. You are standing on them, patiently waiting for God to finish what he started.
Ishmael’s birth came as a result of Abraham and Sarah trying to find a logical solution to their problem of having a son. They simply couldn’t wait any longer on God so they took things into their own hands. I don’t know about you, but I’m not the most patient man in the whole world. And, quite frankly, most of the time when I take things into my own hands whatever I do ends up backfiring on me.
We recently had some painting done and after our painters left we had our roof repaired from hail damage and the roofers messed up four little spots on our front porch where a compressor they were using vibrated making marks on the paint. I figured I could take care of that, after all, it was only four little spots, so I got the paint out of the garage and touched up the paint. Unfortunately, the more I touched up the four little spots, the more they showed. Finally I resorted to painting the entire front porch – and I must say it looked great. But then there I noticed that the paint wouldn’t get dry. Come to find out I used the wrong paint on the porch and I had to call out our painters again who had to pressure wash off my paint job and then repaint the porch. That’s the kind of things that happen to me when I take things into my own hands, when I don’t wait, when I don’t stand. I could give you about a million of these – many involving my work as a pastor, others just because I’m an impatient man. My point is, this story teaches us to wait patiently on God to fulfill his promises – he will, you can count on that.
Power
The story is about POWER because it shows the contrast between what the Spirit can accomplish versus what the flesh can accomplish. That’s what the Apostle Paul believed about this story. In the fourth chapter of Galatians Paul tells us that Ishmael was born “according to the flesh” while Isaac was born “according to the promise.” Believe me, there is a huge and far-reaching difference in those two.
Ishmael, was born to a slave (Hagar) and was the result of Sarah and Abraham trying to fulfill a promise God had made within the limitations of the flesh. There’s a kind of metaphorical meaning there in the fact that he was born of a slave that says to you and me that when we take things into our own hands – the things we do are born into slavery and will forever be tedious, difficult, and weak. Why? Because we’re doing them in our own strength and so we become slaves to what we are doing.
It’s like the situation you see so often in life where a person tries to live out someone else’s expectation for their life instead of their own. Many a well-meaning parent has saddled their child with expectations that they will be a lawyer, or a doctor, or an auto mechanic, when that wasn’t God’s plan for that person at all. And so the person spends their life slaving away at something they aren’t gifted to do nor interested in. They are living “according to the flesh” instead of “according to the promise” and that is a difficult way to live.
Even churches do the same thing. I’ve shared with several of my colleagues that I believe the first few years at NewSong we were operating “according to the flesh” instead of “according to the promise.” I’d read a book about some church and get excited and take those ideas to the Elders and off we’d go. But so often what we did seem tedious and tiresome – and there was no power in it. It has only been in recent months that we have begun living as “children of the promise” believing Jesus’ own promise that “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ And you know what? It’s like the difference in night and day.
The solution to our problems does not lie in what we can do. We don’t need to take things in to our own hands. If we rely only on our power, on what we can do, we are still “slaves to the flesh,” and what we can accomplish is limited. We need to rely on God’s power – his limitless power, and to live as children of the promise.
Perfection
Finally, this story is about PERFECTION because Ishmael’s birth was not part of God’s perfect plan, instead he was born of man’s imperfect plan. There are countless books in print about the will of God. Books like “How God Guides,” or “Hearing God.” One of the best books about this is a little 85 page book called “The Will of God” by Leslie Weatherhead. I don’t have time to give you a book report on that book, but one thing I learned from that book and my own study of Scripture is this. God has a permissive will and God has a perfect will.
God’s permissive will is best understood in contrast to his perfect will. The Bible teaches that God has a perfect plan for your life and my life. He's omniscient and caring - he created us and he knows what is best for us, and has planned accordingly. God’s perfect will will get us from point “A” to point “B” in a straight line. And God’s perfect will isn’t a secret; we discover his perfect plan for our lives by seeking Him through his Word, His Spirit, and His people.
Because we have free will we often don’t follow God’s perfect will for our lives. We choose our own way and he permits it – this is God’s permissive will. Instead of the straight “A” to “B” line of God’s perfect will, we meander over here and over there. The image that comes to mind for me here is the newspaper comic “Family Circus” where the mom is standing on the front stoop of their home calling for little Billy, who is right next door climbing in a tree, to come home. He responds “Be right there” and then you see this dotted line where he goes all over the neighborhood before finally arriving home.
I believe God does that with us sometimes. He allows us to take the long way home – it is his permissive will, but it is not his perfect will. The story of Isaac and Ishmael is a classic example of this. While God’s will was eventually done – Isaac was a forebear of the Messiah – a whole bunch of damage was done – and continues to be done today (Muslim-Jewish issues) because God “allowed” this to happen. God loved Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael. And so He blessed them all, even though what occurred was probably not in their, or our best interest. Why? Because he loves us.
The question facing each one of us this morning is are we going to be patient, or are we going to take things into our own hands? And do we want to operate in God’s power through His Spirit, or do we want to operate in the power of our flesh? And finally are we going to take the straight path to God, or are we going to go around the world before we finally arrive “home?”
Trying to solve the situations life throws at us through our own methods will never equal what God has promised to do, we must wait and trust in the Lord and God is completely trustworthy. His promises never fail. That’s really what it all boils down to. God loved Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael was given a blessed life yet he was not the child of promise. When God promises us something, it may not make sense or seem like it is take a long time to come, but He is faithful.
I pray that we can all have the patience to trust in the Lord’s unfailing promises so we can operate in his power rather than our own and so we can follow his perfect path rather than the one we blindly choose ourselves. Let’s all make an effort to do that, beginning today. Let’s pray.