Let’s give God a helping hand.
In Gen 12:10-20 and Gen 13. 14. we see how Abraham got hijacked from the Promised Land to Egypt.
Indeed, it is probable that the slave girl Hagar was probably picked up in Egypt by Abraham.
This week I want to look at
What happens when you try to give God a helping hand.
Impatience often brings us into trouble with the Lord. God can keep his promises without our help.
3.1. The promise - Gen. 15:1-6
The promise of God that Abraham will have an heir.
God made a promise to Abraham and Abraham believed God.
The trouble was that God never told Abraham of his timetable. We have no record of Abraham asking either.
Often we only listen to half of what God tells us to do. It is not that we PURPOSELY go out of our way to be disobedient.
It is that we often do not THINK about our Christian Life
3.2. Weak faith leads to human action Gen. 16. 17
Sarah and Abraham have been in the Promised Land 10 years and still no baby. So they start to WORRY. There is no record of them asking the Lord what to do. God has said it. True, but I think I better giver Him a helping hand.
So we see a scheme born out of IMPATIENCE.
A human plan to fulfil a divine promise.
This is true of us today. We live in the fast lane.
a) Fast Cars even minibuses. Mine can do up to 190 km per hour.
b) Fast Foods Mc Donalds, instant coffee and chocolate
c) Fast Living heavy drinking and partying
d) Fast Forward Button on the Hi Fi.
Perhaps the only "fast" we don’t practise is Fasting and Prayer.
Again Abraham did not set out to disobey God. He just did not ask the Lord for His Guidance.
So Abraham and Sarah thought out what seemed a reasonable course of action. There is no record of them having prayed through the plan.
Story: I know I get into the worst financial problems when I start doing things that I have not prayed about. And commit God’s money to things that I have not asked Him about.
3.3 God gives more details of how He will fulfil the Promise Gen. 18. 15
Thirteen years have passed from the birth of Ishmael. Abraham has been walking by faith. He has stumbled and made some bad mistakes, for example in Egypt and in the question of Hagar. And yet the Lord is still prepared to speak to Abraham and strengthens Abraham’s faith.
You see ABRAHAM’S HEART was right.
Many Christian commentators believe that this is the Lord Jesus in a preincarnation appearance.
One of the reasons for the visit is to establish Sarah’s faith. (The other reason was to announce the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a subject that I will not speak on this evening).
Abraham is 99 years old and Sarah 90. What is an impossibility to man is a possibility to God, if we will believe Him.
I wonder if Sarah’s faith was on the way out and she was starting to become disillusioned. How often we get like that when we cannot see the Lord’s will being fulfilled before our eyes.
Look at God’s love for Sarah. Many years earlier she had lost her faith that she would be the mother of nations.
She needed a personal revelation from God to restore her faith.
There is no substitute for hearing from the LORD FIRST HAND.
There are no "second hand faith" shops in heaven.
3.4 God’s fulfilment of the Promise - The Birth of Isaac.. Gen. 21: 17
At last the long awaited son is born. 25 years have passed since Abraham and Sarah have entered Canaan. God waited a long time so that they realised that this was a divine intervention of God to fulfil his promise.
Perhaps they would have thought little of it if they had had children at the usual child bearing age.
Isaac’s birth was supernatural and a result of divine promise.
Isaac means laughter. Is it not interesting how Sarah had laughed ironically when she heard the promise yet she laughs with joy at its fulfilment.
How often we laugh incredulously at something that God promises us and when it happens we rejoice.
Yet there was still the problem of Ishmael. It was impossible for them to coexist together.
This is a spiritual lesson for us.
Those living under the bondage of the law, signified by Ishmael cannot coexist with those living under Grace (signified by Isaac).
This was so in the Church. The Judaisers wanted to make all the Christians become circumcised. (Gal 3:13).
Let us read Paul’s commentary on Gen. 21 as we see in (Gal.4 2131).
What can we learn:
1. Something that is man made cannot coexist with what is God made. Man tried to fulfil God’s covenant man’s way. God’s way however cannot coexist.
Often we need to leave our religion behind to be open to serve the living God.
2. Even in Pentecostal churches we are trying to put chain back on people under the guise of proper Christian living.
1. For example some churches insist that women have long hair and pray with their heads covered or they dictate what clothes they wear. It is the inward and not the outward that Christ is interested in.
2. Another example. When I was in a Pentecostal church , we were always told: You mustn’t give your children guns to play with as Christians. So we tried to do this. This caused real strife with the children because all their friends were allowed to play with guns and so whenever they could they played with them. Then we stopped this nonsense and allowed them to play with guns. And the interest in guns soon wore off.
3.5 Conclusion.
What we do can have eternal consequences. The Arabs (descendants of Ishmael) have been warring for millenniums with the Jews, descendants of Isaac.
We need to walk in FAITH, which means spending time with the Lord.
It was after a personal meeting with the Lord that Sarah’s faith was strengthened and THEN she inherited the promise.
LESSON: a) God fulfils his promises. We don’t need to do it for Him. We need to be obedient when He tells us to go (like Abraham from Ur to Canaan) but when we don’t have a word from the Lord on important divine matters (like whether Abraham should have taken a second wife to fulfil God’s promise) we are not to undertake things in our own strength.
b) Let us not neglect our prayer life our Bible Study because we are too busy with our wealth. Abraham was wealthy. I bet he was a hard worker. Yet it seems that he was
"too earthly minded to be any heavenly good"
So let us put prayer into practice.
