Tickled By The Promises Of God - Genesis 21:1-21 Series

Well I thank you for joining with us and being here today. We’re going to look at Genesis 21 and Galatians 4. I call this two-for-one Sunday because actually there’s going to be two sermons today. These two sermons are represented in the passage that we’re going to look at, both in the Old Testament and then what Paul does is he takes this story from the Old Testament and he develops it in the New Testament with a different application. So it’s not like I can preach the same sermon. It’s like we’ve got a sermon going on in the Old Testament, we’ve got another one I’ll briefly touch on as we look at the New Testament.

So if you’ll open your Bibles with me to Genesis 21, we’re going to go back to this story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. It’s a continuing story. We’re kind of jumping in to the middle of this. We’re going to take a look at this story from different perspectives. When I say perspective, what I mean is you look at it from one angle. I don’t know if you like football, but if you watch football nowadays they have this ability to take a screenshot or a shot and then they’ll move the whole camera angle somehow all the way over to some other place. It’s a beautiful thing they do. I love it when they do that. We’re going to do that today in our passage and we’re going to look at the passage from the perspective of first Sarah and then we’ll change the perspective to the other characters in this story. So let’s see what God has to say to us and for us from Sarah’s perspective in this story.

Genesis 21. The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did to Sarah as he had promised. Now if you remember twenty-five years earlier (that’s a long time ago) God had promised to Sarah that she would have a child. At that time she was sixty-five years old and at sixty-five years of age she was it says past the way of women. In other words she couldn’t have children anymore. She was sixty-five and God promised her a child. Now we’re at the place where that promise is fulfilled. Now she’s going to have this baby at ninety years old. It’s just obviously a miracle baby. It’s a bizarre situation. This isn’t a virgin birth. This is Abraham and Sarah came together and they’re going to have a baby. It's just really an amazing thing. Sarah’s just going to be tickled by this in her life. We just sang a song about the evidence of God’s goodness all around, that His promise is in fulfillment. That’s what we see. We see the evidence of God’s goodness, we see the promises fulfilled. That’s what Sarah was seeing in the passage. She’s just delighted. She can’t believe it. We can’t believe it either. This is one of those things she sees and, wow, this is so big.

Now the application I see here is there is a length of time between the giving of the promise to the receiving of the promise. In fact any of the miracles that we see in the Bible, there seems to be a space between the announcement and the miracle itself.

Take the raising of Lazarus from the dead, for example. I can imagine being a disciple on the sidelines watching this and Jesus says, “Move this stone away.” And then He says, “Lazarus, come forth,” and then everybody waits. How long was it? Was it one minute? Was it two minutes before? I can imagine the disciples saying, “Is He going to do it again? Is this going to be one of those miracles? What’s going to happen here?” There’s a period of time that exists between the promise or the beginning of the miracle and the end of the miracle. And that happens in our lives too. There’s some times when we feel like we’re discouraged because of that. We’re discouraged because we wonder what is God doing? Can I be confident in anything that God is doing? What is He doing in my life? Sometimes there is a distinct space that exists between the presentation of the promise and the realization of it. And yes, we can be confident.

If you look at a verse in the New Testament, Philippians 1:6, Paul says this: Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it onto completion until the day of Christ. What he’s saying here is that this is not just something that is happening right now, but God is working in our lives. You can be confident of this. Young people, you can be confident that God is at work in your life and He’s going to bring it to completion. That doesn’t mean that everything we wish for is going to come true.