Sarah: Defeating Your Own Purpose Series

Last Sunday, as Jennifer Johnson spoke and mentioned the fact that she knows that often what she wants she wants now, and that sometimes it’s hard to wait on God’s timing, I thought of the old story about the fellow whose constant prayer was, "Lord, I want the gift of patience, and I want it right now!" That, I submit, is defeating your own purposes.

Or again, the fellow who was voted as the most humble person in his community, but when they told him that he had been voted most humble, he wanted to know if he was going to get a medal to wear!

We are, I say, our own worst enemies. Too many times we defeat our own purposes. We know what we want to do, we have an idea of the direction we ought to be setting out in, but we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, destroying our best intentions, defeating our own purposes.

Sarai, wife of Abram, a little later known better as Sarah, wife of Abraham, was a designing woman who just about defeated her own purposes. She knew what her destiny was all about; and she thought she had believed God when He had promised that she and her husband would become the parents of a great and wonderful nation. Sarah, had she waited and trusted God; had she listened to her own purpose, would have done well. But instead Sarah took things into her own hands, Sarah laid unholy hands on her own destiny, and just about defeated her own purpose.

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Sarah and Abraham were old. Too old, the oddsmakers would have said, to bring children into the world. Yet had not God said, you shall be the parents of a great and mighty nation, as plentiful as the grains of sand on the seashore? Now, pray tell, how can anyone become the mother of a nation if she does not even have one little runny-nosed kid of her own?

And so Sarah decided to take matters into her own hands. Sarah made the decision that she knew God’s business better than God did. And Sarah urged on her husband another woman, the servant woman Hagar, and insisted that Abraham father a child by Hagar.

Mind you, it was not that Sarah did not know what she was doing. She made a clear and deliberate decision. "Abraham, I cannot, at my age, possibly have any children. Go to my maid Hagar and have a child by her.”

Friends, it will not work when you try to achieve God’s purposes or, for that matter, your own, by some means other than God’s means. It will not work to achieve your purpose, however noble, however wonderful, with an unworthy method. You cannot serve a moral purpose with an immoral strategy; you will have defeated your own purpose.

I know of a church which sought to build up its children’s’ Sunday School, and that’s a worthy purpose. But the method they chose ended up totally defeating the purpose, because it was an unworthy method. They ran a transportation program for children, and they attracted those children by offering prizes. Ride our church bus, and you may be sitting in the seat under which a candy bar is taped, and you’ll be the winner this week. Ride our church bus for ten weeks, and you’ll have a chance to win a brand new ten-speed bicycle. And the kids came and they rode and they burrowed under the bus seats and they claimed those prizes, and when the ten weeks were allover, the child that won the bicycle won it by stuffing the drawing box and another child that had tom up other kids’ attendance slips stole the bike from the first child!