In our message this morning we’re going to focus on how we need to have patience when following the Lord. Hebrews is a book of the Bible that frequently talks about following God in faith, and we read that those who are patient will be able to “inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12). In Hebrews 10:36, in the King James Version, we read, “For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.”
It is through patience that we’re able to both focus on God’s calling and pursue His calling, and thereby receive the promise. David said, “Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart . . . Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him” (Psalm 37:4, 7). Resting in the Lord and delighting ourselves in Him through worship and devotion is what will enable us to wait patiently while God works in His way and His timing.
This morning we’re going to look at the account of someone who was given a promise by the Lord that he would receive a great blessing. We’re also going to see how this individual was so impatient that he, along with his wife, took matters into their own hands, and tried to get ahead of God. If waiting patiently on the Lord is vital to receiving His promise, then what do you suppose happened to the individual that we’ll be viewing in this account, as a result of his impatience? Let’s get started by looking at Genesis 15:1-6.
God’s Promise Given (15:1-6)
1 After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” 2 But Abram said, “Lord GOD, what will You give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 Then Abram said, “Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house is my heir!” 4 And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir.” 5 Then He brought him outside and said, “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” 6 And he believed in the LORD, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.
I want to start by saying that when the Lord gives us a sure calling or vision to serve Him, then we must pursue that calling with all of our heart. The Lord gave Abram such a calling. He told him back in Genesis 12:1-3, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God promised Abram that He would make of him a great people, and that through him all nations would be blessed; therefore, Abram packed up and left everything behind in order to pursue that calling.
We see in Genesis chapter 15 that Abram eventually began to question the promise. He said to the Lord, “What will you give me, seeing I go childless . . . You have given me no offspring” (Genesis 15:2). Abram’s question was this: “How can I become a great nation if I can’t even have a child?” It would seem as though Abram had a good reason to be concerned, for when the Lord told him to leave his country and pursue God’s calling, he was actually seventy-five-years-old (Genesis 12:4).
Abram wasn’t young and nether was his wife Sarai, and he was probably wondering if they could ever have a child at such an old age, especially since Sarai had been barren her entire life (Genesis 11:30). There’s no telling how long Abram had been in waiting at the time he began to question the Lord. He was right at one hundred-years-old when his son Isaac was finally born (Genesis 17:17)!
So, here’s a hard truth to accept when following the Lord: God might give us a calling to pursue, and then that vision might not be fulfilled immediately. Christians often think that when God provides a vision that all a person has to do is take one tiny step of faith, and then enter into the fulfillment of that calling; however, the Lord’s timing is so much different than ours.
He might tell us that our calling will be fulfilled “shortly,” but God is eternal and time has no meaning with Him. Shortly could mean twenty-five years, as it did with Abram’s calling. I remember how when I was a child and would ask my dad to help me out with something, he would reply with, “Directly boy!” That word “directly” is supposed to mean shortly, but not with my dad. When he said “directly,” it actually meant later on, and it can be the same way with our heavenly Father.
Another thing to point out is that God wants us to do more than just take one tiny step of faith. He may cause us to take multiple steps of faith in order to test our willingness to follow Him. He wants to see how badly we want what He’s promised, so that by the time we actually arrive at the place of God’s promise, that we’ll appreciate what we’ve been given. Also, after taking multiple steps of faith we’ll be tough enough to handle the challenges that the calling presents once we arrive.
The Lord reassured Abram that he would become a blessing to all nations through a child of his own flesh. He specifically told him, “One who will come from your own body shall be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). God encouraged him further by telling him that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens (Genesis 15:5). So, did Abram believe the Lord? Verse six says that he did; however, as we’re about to discover, it wasn’t too long before he doubted yet again.
You see, Abram and Sarai both became anxious to see God’s promise fulfilled. Instead of keeping their focus on the Lord, they became preoccupied and obsessed with the promise. They began brainstorming and planning on how to make the promise come to fruition as quickly as possible. Let’s take a look at Genesis 16:1-3.
Acting from Impatience (16:1-3)
1 Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. And she had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar. 2 So Sarai said to Abram, “See now, the LORD has restrained me from bearing children. Please, go in to my maid; perhaps I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai. 3 Then Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan.
So, Sarai became impatient, and this was likely because she was rapidly nearing ninety-years-old (Genesis 17:17). Her impatience led to reasoning. She reasoned that since Abram was to have a child of his own flesh, that technically he would still be having a child of his own body if he had that child through another woman. Therefore, Sarai suggested to Abram that he should procreate through her maidservant. And Abram was actually foolish enough to listen to her, and he took Hagar to be his wife.
Let me tell you, not everything makes sense when following the Lord, and one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to try and reason things out. One commentator says that a large percentage of believers are admittedly confused because of reasoning, stating that “reasoning causes the mind to revolve around and around a situation, issue or event attempting to understand all its intricate component parts . . . Satan frequently steals the will of God from us due to reasoning. The Lord may direct us to do a certain thing, but if it does not make sense – if it is not logical – we may be tempted to disregard it.”(1)
To Sarai, it was illogical to believe a child could be born through her, since she’d been barren her entire life; therefore, she used reasoning to decide for Abram to have their child through another woman. As Sarai reasoned within her mind, and juggled her ideas around, she became confused and distracted to the will of God. She then convinced herself that the idea that “she” had come up with was the Lord’s will.
When we don’t arrive at the place of God’s calling quickly enough, we might start trying to reason things out on our own as to why we’ve not yet made it. And very soon we can become distracted to God’s will and His timing by the things that we have devised.
For instance, the Lord might tell us to become a missionary in a certain country and that we’ll have to raise our own support in order to get there. However, we feel that it will take numerous months to raise enough support to go. Therefore, we begin to reason that the sooner you we can arrive there, the more ministry we can do, and so we become impatient. We then start looking for faster ways to become funded.
Instead of raising our own support as we were told, we try to get a mission agency to fully fund us and place us on the field immediately, but then we just can’t seem to find an agency to do that. So, we struggle and waste time in trying to find funding through an agency, while we could have been using that time to raise our own support. It then takes even longer to make it to the place where God told us to go.
Jesus said, “O you of little faith, why do you reason among yourselves” (Matthew 16:8). A lack of faith leads to impatience, and impatience leads to reasoning; and whenever we become impatient and begin to reason, we then begin trying to force God’s hand to move when He’s not ready to move. We can’t force the Lord to do anything; and if we try to get ahead of God and do our own thing then it will only result in problems. Let’s now look at Genesis 16:4-5.
Consequences for Abram and Sarai (16:4-6)
4 So he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress became despised in her eyes. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “My wrong be upon you! I gave my maid into your embrace; and when she saw that she had conceived, I became despised in her eyes. The LORD judge between you and me.” 6 So Abram said to Sarai, “Indeed your maid is in your hand; do to her as you please.” And when Sarai dealt harshly with her, she fled from her presence.
There are consequences for taking matters into our own hands, trying to force God’s hand, and getting ahead of the Lord’s timing. The consequence of Sarai’s action was strife between she and Hagar, and between she and her husband Abram. Hagar came to despise Sarai and acted as though she were better than her; and Sarai became angry with Abram and blamed him for everything that had gone wrong.
Also, Abram was no doubt fond of his new wife and was likely troubled when she ran away, and he probably harbored resentment toward Sarai about this matter. What we can see is that relationships were strained because Sarai and Abram refused to wait on having a child in God’s timing.
When Sarai gave Hagar to Abram to bear a child, this is called “surrogate motherhood.” Some people today choose the option of having a child in a similar manner. In surrogacy, the surrogate mother is artificially inseminated and the surrogate carries the baby until term. After the birth she surrenders the baby to the contracting couple.
Over the past number of years there have been some strange newspaper headlines detailing surrogacy gone wrong. Situations are portrayed where the surrogate mother happened to be a family friend who later decided that she wanted to keep the child. A lawsuit would soon entail, and then strife, hatred and bitterness quickly entered the picture, and a long-time friendship would be destroyed.
A person can become impatient about many other things besides having a child, and you can guarantee that when someone takes matters into their own hands that trouble is sure to follow. You see, strife among relationships is not the only consequence of Sarai and Abram’s misguided actions.
The butterfly effect states that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes within the atmosphere, and through the ripple effect eventually produce a tornado on the other side of the world.(2) Consequences don’t just affect those within our immediate vicinity, but they can become long-term as they ripple through time. This was the case with Sarai and Abram’s wrong choices. Let’s now look at Genesis 16:7, 11-12.
Consequence for Abram’s Descendants (16:11-12)
7 Now the Angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur . . . 11 And the Angel of the LORD said to her: “Behold, you are with child, and you shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the LORD has heard your affliction. 12 He shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”
Another consequence for Sarai and Abram’s actions was long-term strife for Abram’s descendants – both on Ishmael’s side, and Isaac and Jacob’s side (Isaac and Jacob were Abram’s children born through Sarai). We read this: “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him” (Genesis 16:12). The descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac and Jacob would be at war with one another, brother against brother (Genesis 16:12).
And this struggle is still going on today, for Ishmael is considered to be the father of Islam, and Muslim extremists have declared a “holy war” on both Jews and Christians. Jews are from the genetic seed of Abram, and Christians are from the spiritual seed of Abram. Abram’s seed is continually under threat because of his poor choices on that one day.
Whenever we act from impatience and disobedience and get ahead of God’s timing, there are consequences. As we’ve seen with the example of Abram, those consequences could carry on for generations (cf. Exodus 20:5).
Time of Reflection
If the Lord has recently provided us with a vision for ministry, and He’s told us that spiritual blessings will come very soon, then we need to be patient. As we’ve seen, becoming impatient and getting ahead of God will only slow things down and lead to trouble.
In the “Parable of the Sower,” we read how the seed that fell on good ground would bear fruit, or become productive, but that it would “bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15). So, the best way we can become productive for the Lord is to exhibit patience. If God has given us a calling or vision to serve Him, and we’re running as hard as we can to get there, then we need to remember how the Bible says in Hebrews 12:1, “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (KJV). We must run with “patience.”
So, will we delight ourselves in the Lord through worship and devotion, waiting patiently while God works in His way and His timing, or will we run ahead of Him? Remember, getting ahead of the Lord can result in serious consequences for both us and our descendants.
Keep in mind that God promised Abram that if he would patiently wait on Him, that He would make him a blessing unto others (Genesis 12:2), so that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). So, how would all the families of the earth be blessed through Abram? The answer is that the Messiah would descend from his lineage. The Messiah is Jesus Christ, the one who came to save the world from the consequences of sin and bestow eternal life, by offering forgiveness through His blood that was shed on the cross; and Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
NOTES
(1) Joyce Meyer, Battlefield of the Mind (Tulsa, OK: Harrison House, 1995), pp. 86-87.
(2) “Butterfly Effect,” posted November 25, 2009, Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect (Accessed November 30, 2009).
