Dear Church family.
It was thrilling to worship God with you yesterday. And it was good for me to preach to myself from Genesis 16. Isn’t it amazing how even though Abram & Sarai sowed sin through their own impatient schemes (Abram marrying another woman & Sarai abusing her maidservant, Hagar) and reaped chaos and disaster as a result, yet God was sowing goodness (Hagar’s baby would be blessed in a sense and Hagar would discover God!) into Abram & Sarai’s reaping disaster (a child from another woman, abuse, contention, etc…). While Abram & Sarai wronged this Egyptian woman, God ends up using Abram & Sarai’s incredible sin in order to find Hagar and save her in the wilderness (Gen. 12:1-3). Indeed, God was sowing goodness into Abram & Sarai’s disastrous results. Praise our God that He actually uses our wrongs and sows good through them. That should describe your Biblical world-view!
This story shows the epitome of broken families and contorted relationships, and yet it also shows us that God is up to something really good in the midst of really bad things. You see God’s sovereign power to work salvation and faith granting redemption apart from human works. There is no earthly reason that Hagar should have come to discover Jesus (‘the angel of the Lord’) through her circumstances. She was driven away from a “Christian” couple, Abram & Sarai, through their poor testimony, and yet God found Hagar in the wilderness of affliction and saved her, blessed her, and revealed Himself to her. And Hagar responded by faith in “the God Who sees her” by obeying His very hard word to go back to Sarai and submit to her and also exclaiming the God Who she met as “the God Who sees her.” Not only that, but she set up a monumental well in commemoration of “the Living One Who See Me.” Then she told Abram to name her son, “Ishmael” which is what God told her to do, further proving that she went back to Abram’s household with faith in God, not shying away from obeying God in a difficult circumstance and publicly telling others about the way that God heard her.
This is instructive for us. Our faith should be that which responds to the God Who sees and hears us. We should get the sense that He hears us and sees us in our affliction. Furthermore, we should obey Christ’s very hard words to us. Isn’t that what it means to be a disciple of Jesus? “Take up your cross and follow Him.” It will be difficult and go against every impulse of our body and brain at times. And yet our faith is proven by obedience, just as James 2 says.
My son Micah asked me this past week, ‘will Hagar be in Heaven?’ I said, ‘yes, I believe she will be.’ That is based on her response of faith to God.
But isn’t it amazing how God saved that kind of woman in those circumstances? It’s just incredible to me and it gives so much hope and encouragement to know that God overwrites and overrides yours and my knucklehead decisions. I’m sure that we’ve all been like Sarai & Abram at times in our life. Perhaps you have reaped some irreversible damage that you live with today (Like Ishmael would be against everybody! Abram was married to two woman!). Yet God is beyond your mistakes and remains good through them. He is constantly sowing good, saving people and making them born again apart from our methods, good or even bad!
Praise the Lord for His overwriting grace in our life. Isn’t He incredible? As I said in my message yesterday, this is not an excuse to slack off, but it’s a reason to show off our God even more. He’s wonderful. The God who created everything ‘good’ in Genesis 1, though we ruined it, is still the God Who is creating good things through our very bad sinful decisions. Take heart, it doesn’t all depend on you. That’s what it means to be a Christian. We have imperfect faith that staggers and faulters at times in epic fashion, but our imperfect faith is in a perfectly faithful One Who continues to bless, and we know that His blessing is on the basis of Jesus, not us.
With love in Christ,
Aaron
