Dear Church family,
As always, yesterday proved delightful for me to join you in the process of worshipping God through singing, praying, preaching, listening, loving, learning, and conversations with one-another. It’s important to remember that a worship service is wholistic. It’s the whole service, not just one piece of it. As God’s people (the Church), we are worshippers, and this is not reserved for only Sunday morning; it should be what you are doing right now as you read this letter…worshipping God by responding to how wonderful and all sufficient and good He is! Our worship happens when we realize how needy we are, and how sufficient God is to provide all that we need, namely, in Himself and all by Himself. Our worship happens when we are thankful to the Lord. A “thanksgiving offering” is all that we can really ever do to worship the Lord. If you aren’t thankful, then you aren’t worshipping God.
With that being said, I hope I can extend some of the worship service into your ‘today’ by adding an ‘addendum’ to my sermon on Genesis 21:8-21. Lord willing, this will help you continue to worship the Lord today.
It would have been a sub-sermon of that sermon if I would have mentioned the way that Galatians 4 applies Genesis 21:10, “Cast out the salve woman with her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.” So allow me to elaborate on this to you because this truth is so important for every Christian to fully grasp. It’s fundamental but powerful.
Here’s what Galatians 4 tells us about God’s divine plan to cast out Ishmael and Hagar from Abraham’s household in order to preserve Abraham’s promised child, Isaac:
God provides us with the Spirit to live a successful fruitful Christian life:
In a chapter where I explained all of God’s gracious & supernatural provisions for His man, Abraham, Isaac, and even the outcasts, it’s fitting to also give credit to the Spirit as the One Who God has provided for us to aid us in our Christian journey.
Here’s how Galatians 4 puts it:
Galatians 4 says that Ishmael represents the law and Isaac represents the Spirit, showing us how to live the Christian life by God’s Spirit and not by God’s law.
Galatians 4:28-31 says “28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.”
Here is the gist of what Paul is teaching us:
Isaac represented the work of the Spirit which corelates to us as Christians: God has made us born again through His sovereign grace, whereas Ishmael was born through human effort and represented the works of human effort and keeping the law to attain salvation.
And Paul’s point to the Galatian Church is to say, don’t live your Christian life with all of the “thou shalts and thou shalt nots” as your ultimate power and wisdom. Yes, God’s law is good and we shouldn’t throw it out (Rom. 7:7-12), but the point is that if you shoot for God’s law, you’ll likely miss it, but if you aim for God’s Spirit, you’ll hit the law with it.
Ishmael represents the way that many Christians try to live… “I need to do this and I need to do that…Bible reading, praying, discipling another believer, evangelism, turning my eyes from evil things, doing acts of charity, etc.”
And you can do all of those things in your own effort! The unsaved world is filled with moral people. But that’s not our goal as a Church. Even spiritual disciplines are not our goal, though we should continue to do them.
Our goal is not an Ishmael who is blessed in a sense (Gen. 21:18), & who God is with in a sense (21:20), but who has not been born of God’s Spirit!
But rather, our goal is to live as Isaacs, born of the Spirit and continuing to trust the Spirit in the way that we live our life (Gal. 3:3).
Galatians will apply the Ismael/Isaac – law/spirit contrast in a continual sense. We’ll be told that the way that we depended on the Lord to give birth to us supernaturally by His grace through His Spirit, leading to our justification, is the same way that we continue in our sanctification.
And yet we too often think that the way we began our Christian journey as little dependent children is different than the way we grow as Christians.
Galatians 3:3 rebukes the Galatian believers for not understanding that we continue the same way we began: “Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?…5 does He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?—6 just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
So the Galatian believers are being told that they need to continue the same way they began in their relationship with God: focusing on faith and God’s Spirit instead of focusing on following God’s law (which are all good things). Yes, we should keep God’s law (I would add spiritual disciplines to this)! But we should not act as if it’s our power, our Savior, and our solution for living a Godly Christian life. We live like unconverted Judaism if we do that!
Galatians 5 will go on to put it this way, (my paraphrase) ‘if we walk by the Spirit, He (HE, not us) bears fruit through us’ (Gal. 5:16, 22-23)!
That is to say that we need to depend on an Isaac kind of life (born of God’s Spirit) as opposed to an Ishmael kind of life (born according to Abraham’s singular human efforts) in order to truly bear the fruit of Christian growth.
And if you fast forward in Isaac’s life, you’ll see that not only was he born of God’s Spirit (The Spirit claimed full responsibility and credit for Isaac being ‘the fruit of the womb’), but the fruit of the womb that Isaac goes on to bear through his wife Rebecca will be through her barren womb. In Genesis 25:21, He prays for her, and then she gives birth to Jacob, and God’s Kingdom continues.
So this shows us how we live as Isaacs in correlation to the message of Galatians:
We’re born of God’s Spirit, and we pray (The Spirit cry’s out through us!…Gal. 4:6!), and we ask God for His power to be on display through us, and He grants us fruit through our barren ability to do it ourself (This is exactly what John 15:5, 7-8 says!)!
Therefore, the life of Isaac demonstrates the Christian life for us from beginning to end, but we often stop at the beginning! Remember, we are the result of a human’s barren ability to make us born again into God’s Kingdom (notice John 1:12-13), hence we have been born of God’s Spirit, AND we are barren in and of ourselves to produce Christian fruit/growth through our lives, but the Spirit is able and our part is to continue to place our faith in Him, the faith that made us born again by His Spirit, and the faith that will continue to bear fruit through our lives and glorify God.
So if you are going to live like Issac, then it means two things:
- (1) You need to know and focus on the Holy Spirit in your life! (hence, pray!)
- (2) You need to cast out the Ishmael in your life (Gal. 4:30, Gen. 21:10)
Now what does it mean to cast out the ‘Ishmael’ in our life?
It means to throw away your Christian lifestyle that tries to depend on human ingenuity, human effort and your own ability (this can take religious forms too. Note, Jer. 7:14!). We cannot walk by the Spirit and continue to live our Christian life as God intends without both clinging to the Spirit’s all powerful and all-knowing work through our lives AND throwing out our trust in our abilities/spiritual disciplines/law keeping.
Therefore, Gen. 21:10 is for us as it says: we need to cast out the habit of living by the flesh/law instead of by the Spirit.
Remember “cast out the slave woman with her son” = our own self effort to do the right thing for God, aka: the law. And we must cast out that mentality.
And it will be hard like Abraham in v11 (it displeased him!) because what you are doing when you cast out living by your flesh is you depart from ‘the fruit of your labors’ (just as Ishmael being cast out was the fruit of Abraham’s efforts quiet literally. He was his son!).
And when we depart from the Christian mentality of ‘my skills, my spiritual habits, my plans, by strategies, my vision, etc…will produce Christian growth and Kingdom growth in my life,’ you are departing from your human pride, as subtle as it might be, and you are departing from something like your precious child which shares in your own DNA. It will feel like you are casting out your beloved child, an Ishmael that was created from your own efforts, your own abilities, but it fell short of God’s plan.
Speaking personally, it’s so hard to cast aside my flesh and instead, walk according to the Spirit. I want to do both: depend on my flesh and my efforts, inflating them to a god sized level (or close), AND depend on the God’s Spirit. But God says, ‘I can’t do both.’
I’m still learning how to do this, but I am learning, and if we want to have a truly spiritual Church, the Body of Christ and not just a 501(3)c institution, then we must learn how to cast out our flesh babies, our focus on moral achievement or whatever it is for you and for us.
I’m sure that this truth could be misunderstood like it’s promoting laziness or a lack of motivation to work hard for Kingdom growth and spiritual sanctification, but that’s not what it’s meant to do. We’ll be working hard with all of His energy that works within us (Col. 1:29) while “worshipping God by the Spirit, glorying in Christ Jesus AND putting no confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3:3).
Therefore, I pray that we would all together focus on what the Spirit of God can do to help us. God has provided for us the Spirit, now let’s believe it, like Abraham, live by faith & trust God.
?And what does that mean to live by faith and trust God?
Believe that God’s Spirit is enough to help you fight against your flesh and bear fruit for God! And believe that God has provided enough for you in Himself!
Indeed, God has provided all that you need to live the Christian life (2 Peter 1:3-4!) and it’s all in Him! Let’s believe it together. And God has provided His very own Son for your life to save you from sin and Hell and death; now let’s not assume that God won’t continue to provide for us in the same way that He did at first. He gave us His Son, and He’ll provide everything else that we need for our Christian journey (Rom. 8:32) (but not all all that we want).
At times, perhaps, we’ll run to our Ishmaels and invite them back into our household. We’ll say, ‘hey Ishmael, my strength, my skill, my intelligence, my strategy, my Church, help me.’ And they will all be broken cisterns like Abrham providing for Hagars need; it will run out (Gen. 21:14-15).
My prayer for us, WOL Chapel, is that God will open our eyes as He did for Hagar in Gen. 21:19 to what He has provided for us, Himself! His Spirit! His living water (John 7:37-39!).
In summary: Jeremiah 17:5-8 says,
“Thus says the Lord:
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
and makes flesh his strength,
whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 He is like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see any good come.
He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
With love in Christ and fruit from His Spirit,
Aaron
