INTRODUCTION: Have you ever been at a restaurant and waited so long for your drinks, or for a refill, that you decide to just take things into your own hands and get them yourself? I witnessed just such a situation one day when I was in college at a TGIFridays in Covington. I had organized a trip of 10 of my friends to a Reds game one Saturday afternoon and we decided that we would eat dinner after the game at TGIFridays. It was really packed and our server was swamped so it took him a long time to get back to our table for refills. My friends Jim Gillkey and John Kuchenbroad were apparently near death from thirst and decided that they would go to the beverage station with all of our glasses and get refills. They ended up breaking the machine and getting us asked to leave a little earlier than we had planned on leaving. Instead of being patient and waiting for our server to fulfill the promise he made that he would be back as soon as he could, they jumped the gun and caused a disaster. That is what happened in our text this morning and is something that we often do in our day to day lives as individuals and as a society.
TEXT: Genesis 15:1-6
PREVIEW:
1. When you try to solve a problem instead of waiting for God to act, you often make a giant mess of it.
2. Sometimes a “good” resolution is not the perfect one that God had in mind.
3. A man cannot serve two masters, our way must give way to God’s way.
BODY:
1. When you try to solve a problem instead of waiting for God to act, you often make a giant mess of it.
a. Abram, knew that God had made a promise, but he grew tired of waiting to see how God was going
to bring it about and took matters into His own hands.
i. Genesis 16:1-16
ii. Instead of waiting on God, Abram decided that he would embrace the theory that God helps
those who help themselves and tried to implement the plan on his own terms.
iii. This is something that we all sometimes feel the pressure to do.
b. Abram’s and Sarai’s “solution” to the problem ended up putting a wrench in the works when God’s
plan began to be put into place.
i. Genesis 21:8-21
ii. To this day the world has been impacted by the results of this unwise decision.
iii. The teachings of Islam flow from the fact that they believe that God fulfilled His promise to
Abraham, Ibrahim, through Ishmael. The Ishmael versus Isaac battle created by Abram jumping the
gun plagues the world even to this day.
c. It is important that we are patient and wait on the Lord to enact His will and answer our prayers in His
time.
i. 2 Peter 3:3-13
ii. Any actions we take outside of His teachings and commands will most likely just mess up the
works.
iii. Story of when I tried to help fix the kitchen sink. One day when we were living in Garrison our
kitchen sink had a pipe get clogged and I yelled out to Dad who was chopping firewood. He told me
he would be there soon and that I should go to the hall closet to get his tools and meet him in the
kitchen. I got tired of waiting and since I had seen him fix the problem by removing the pipe that led
to the trap and cleaning it out before, decided that I would help things out by loosening the pipe.
Unfortunately what I had never seen him do and therefore didn’t think about needing to do was shut
off the water line feeding water into the sink before I loosened the pipe. This is something I’m sure
Dad was heading to do when I pulled that pipe before he was ready for it to be done. Needless to
say, by the time Dad got into the kitchen the minor problem of a backed up sink was now the major
problem of our kitchen being flooded. That is similar to what we often do to our lives when we try to
act before God is ready.
2. Sometimes a “good” resolution is not the perfect one that God had in mind.
a. Many times people take actions because it is “the decent thing to do” or because they feel that “it is right
or fair”. However, God does not call us to do what we feel is right or decent. He calls us to obey His
commands and follow His word. We don’t need to struggle to know what is right. We simply need to
search His word and pray that His Holy Spirit will guide us to His will.
i. John 16:7-15
ii. We need to listen to God’s guidance and His word.
iii. Humanity’s solutions, using our wisdom and learning instead of God’s guidance, will never be
superior to those of God.
b. We are not wise enough or high enough to see the complete picture and we end up making a limited
decision that does not serve the purpose as well.
c. Isaiah 55:6-13
d. Our desire to bring about peace or bring about what we think is wise or fair will often lead us as
individuals and as societies to go down roads that we ought not go down.
i. Even if the points make sense and appeal to our concepts of fairness and other things we as
individuals and a society hold dear.
ii. Colossians 2:4-8
3. A man cannot serve two masters, our way must give way to God’s way.
a. Galatians 4:22-31
b. God even had a bigger picture in mind when He created the Law of Moses.
c. It was good, but it would give way to something far greater.
d. We all are called to decide if we will completely surrender to God and truly let Him guide or if we will try
to do it ourselves.
e. IllUSTRATION: Wendy and I trying to steer the Millenium Falcon at Disney World when we were pulling
the ship in different directions at the same time, sitting duck and crashing.
CONCLUSION:
Joshua 24:14-24
What will your choice be?
