Children of The Promise

When Sam asked me to choose a week to preach,

I just chose any week that was free.

I didn't realize it was going to be on Hagar and Sarah.

It's a pretty difficult passage.

And I also remembered about three months ago,

at heartbeat, Steve said that we should really dig into the Bible.

And he read through the passage in Hagar and Sarah

and found out something that he never found out before.

So I've got double pressure now.

Hard passage and Steve saying that he understood this clearly.

So I feel a bit intimidated right now.

I think it's more important that it's not just because that is a hard passage

or what Steve has understood, because it's God's Word.

So let us pray to help us understand it and help us to live in light of it.

Let's pray.

Dear God, we thank you for your Word.

Pray that we will submit before your Word.

Pray that you can help me to speak clearly

and be faithful to your Word.

And that we will live in light of what you say

and believe in what it says.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Okay.

So one of the great things about telling the Gospel

to people that have never heard the Gospel before

is that they have a very refreshingly different perspective.

So I'll recall a time I was doing student ministry in China.

I've just learned Mandarin for about three months or so.

I was sharing the Gospel with a uni student in China.

And then I read through a Gospel tract with him

and I basically shared with him how you can become a Christian

and probably quoted John 3.16

and told him that if you believe this honestly

and pray it in your heart with me

then you can become a Christian.

He says,

I can't pray this and become a Christian.

I can't believe in Jesus.

I can't pray this.

And I asked him why.

And he said,

because I have a lecture at 3 p.m.

I said,

how does a lecture at 3 p.m.

affect your decision of becoming a Christian?

He says,

doesn't it say in your tract that 3.16, right,

that you have to pray to believe in Jesus at 3.16?

So you can actually see that maybe a few things.

One thing is that I didn't tell the Gospel clearly.

The other thing is that non-Christians

or young Christians are very eager

to pick up anything about the Christian faith.

And we have to be clear in our communication.

Sometimes it is Gospel

and sometimes it's just my bad habits being transferred to him.

So hopefully we need to communicate the Gospel clearly.

But this is some of the pressures that the Galatians are facing.

Remember the Galatians,

they just believed in the Gospel,

but they've been facing pressure

from a group of false teachers

from the Jewish background.

They've been telling these Galatians

that you have to be circumcised

and you have to observe various fluid laws

in order to receive God's promises.

So it's under this background

that Paul is preaching,

writing this message.

And just like a good sermon,

this passage is in three parts.

So I'll just break down each part for us

and walk through it.

So the first part of this passage

is the history of Hagar and Sarah.

We can see that in verses 22 to 23,

where Paul recounts the history of Hagar and Sarah.

And we know that he's recounting history

by the way he introduces these verses.

At the start of verse 22, he says,

it has been written.

So if you know your New Testament well,

this is how Jesus

and other New Testament writers

quote the Old Testament.

So they want us to look at the Bible carefully,

so let's look through Genesis chapter 16

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

and chapter 21.

Before we read that on the screen,

I'll just tell you a little bit of backstory

of what led up to these passages.

So in Genesis chapter 12,

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

we recall that God made a promise to Abram

saying that he will bless Abram

and have a great nation through him.

And Abram is challenged by that message

because he doesn't have any kids.

And in chapter 15,

he basically had some doubts

because God reaffirmed the promises to Abraham,

but Abram said,

I only have adopted heir, Eliezer.

So I can't build a nation through that, right?

But God reassured him

and in chapter 15, verse 6,

it's a very famous verse.

Abraham believed in God

and it was credited to him as righteousness.

So let's look at what Abram did

after that chapter.

I'll read the first half of Genesis chapter 16.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

I'll start from Genesis chapter 16, verse 1.

Genesis 16:1

Now Sarah, Abram's wife,

had borne him no children,

but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar.

So she said to Abram,

the Lord has kept me from having children.

Go sleep with my slave.

Perhaps I can build a family through her.

Abram agreed to what Sarah had said.

So after Abram had been living in Canaan for 10 years,

Sarah, his wife,

took the Egyptian slave Hagar

and gave her to her husband to be his wife.

He slept with Hagar and she conceived.

When she knew that she was pregnant,

she began to despise her mistress.

Then Sarah said to Abram,

you are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.

I put my slave in your arms

and now that she knows that she is pregnant,

she despises me.

May the Lord judge between you and me.

Your slave is in your hands,

Abram said.

Do with her whatever you think best.

Then Sarah mistreated Hagar,

so she fled from her.

The angel of the Lord found Hagar

near a spring in the desert

and it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.

And he said,

Hagar, slave of Sarah,

where have you come from

and where are you going?

I'm running from my mistress, Sarah,

she answered.

Then the angel of the Lord told her,

go back to your mistress and submit to her.

The angel added,

I will increase your descendants so much

that there will be too numerous to count.

And we will stop the reading there.

So one of the things that we should notice there

is that God made a promise to Hagar

that a great nation will be also built through her

because she is the wife of Abram.

So if you look at the history of Ishmael

and you look at Islam in particular,

Ishmael is recognised as the forefather of Mohammed.

And Ishmael is head of several Arabian tribes.

So you can actually see from one act of disobedience,

not only did it cause family's drive

between Sarah and Hagar and Abraham,

it actually had a huge impact for the world,

which we experience right now.

Let's read through Genesis chapter 21.

Genesis 21 · chapter mention

I'll start from the first one again.

Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah,

as he has said,

and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.

Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham

in his old age.

And at the very time God has promised him,

Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him.

When his son Isaac was eight days old,

Abraham circumcised him,

as God commanded him.

Abraham was a hundred years old

when his son Isaac was born to him.

Sarah said,

God has brought me laughter,

and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.

And she added,

Who would have said to Abraham

that Sarah would nurse children,

yet I have born him a son in his old age?

The child grew and was weaned.

And on the day that Isaac weaned,

Abraham held a great feast.

But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian

had born to Abraham was mocking.

And she said to Abraham,

Get rid of the slave woman and her son,

for that woman's son will never share

in the inheritance with my son Isaac.

You can see Hagar and Ishmael is driven away once again.

And just as an aside,

before we go back to Galatians,

we actually want to look at this story as a side note.

We can look at the story of Abraham and Sarah.

The Bible isn't ashamed to hide their flaws.

Abraham is the father of many nations,

is called a man of faith.

But yet in these passages,

we can see that Sarah is the one wearing the pants.

She told Abraham what to do.

She told him to sleep with Hagar

and take her as his wife.

And she drove her away

when things didn't work out.

So if you were to write the Bible

of one of your founding fathers,

if I was to write the account,

I would just write all the stuff,

good stuff about him

and just leave out all the bad stuff

because it's embarrassing.

But that's not what the Bible does.

The Bible isn't ashamed to hide these flaws.

And this is one of the many, many factors

that contribute to the historicity

and the realism of the Bible.

So the Bible is true.

So if you have questions about the Bible,

please talk to me or Sam

and one of the other leaders.

And one of the things that you can talk to,

talk to Ko as well.

Ko loves talking about the historicity of the Bible.

I talked to him a few weeks ago.

He talked to me.

I just sat there and listened for

maybe 10 minutes or so.

And I talked to him just before the service

and listened a bit more again.

So he loves to talk about the Bible.

Please ask him.

And he would love to tell you

why the Bible is true.

And throughout the series,

let's go back to Galatians.

Throughout the series,

we've been talking a lot about the false teachers

and what they have done to the Galatians.

But we have not really explored

their cultural heritage or their motives.

So let's borrow from our vision series

and I'll get the AV team to bring up the iceberg.

The iceberg is,

this is one of the things

that hopefully we'll be exploring

in the vision series.

So one can use an iceberg

to represent what people do.

If you see people's behaviour,

it's like the tip of the iceberg.

It's just a tiny, tiny bit of

what makes them tick.

But beneath that,

there are values and worldviews and beliefs.

And it's those things that drive a person.

So if you look at Genesis

and look at the brief snapshot

of what the false teachers are like,

you can sort of basically tell

what they've been doing.

They've been pressuring the Galatians

to circumcise and observe fruit laws.

But let's explore why they do that.

They would have believed

that they were God's chosen people

because they were descended from Abraham.

They are Jews that are circumcised.

Now they have believed in Jesus.

So in some sense,

you can almost imagine them saying

that we are doubly blessed.

We've got the best of the old

and the best of the new.

We've got both mixed together.

So they believe that they've got

a mix of Judaism and Christianity

that they want to tell other people.

They believe that that is the way

to be blessed.

And they don't want the Galatians

to miss out.

They want them to be circumcised

and observe these laws.

And on the flip side,

they would have thought possibly

that those that didn't undergo circumcision

or observe the fruit laws,

they would have been missing out on things,

missing out on God's promises and blessings.

So it is to this background

that Paul is writing to the Galatians.

And the way that he helps them to understand

is to interpret the historical facts

that we have read in Genesis

as an allegory in verses 24 to 27.

So when I heard the word allegory,

I was a little bit shocked

when I first read it

as a Christian about 20 years ago.

Because I've been taught that

the right way to read the Old Testament

is biblical theology.

You have to read the Bible in context

and you have to read the history

and how it's real and fulfilled through Jesus

and how this is real for us now.

But why is Paul using an allegory?

Is he reading the Bible wrong?

So I guess the answer is,

well, it's probably me, not him.

So let's work out what this means for us.

So let's put this allegory together

and compare Hagar and Sarah side by side.

We have two women, Hagar and Sarah.

Two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.

And this is a story we've just read about

in Genesis 16 and 21.

We also have two covenants,

old and new.

And there are two types of people,

slaves and free.

So Paul, if you look at the book of Galatians,

Paul has already touched on

what the old and new covenants are

in Galatians chapters 2 and 3.

Galatians 2 · chapter mention

The old covenant is for those

that want to be right before God

by observing the law.

And it says in Galatians chapter 2 verse 10

Galatians 2:10

that clearly no one is justified

from observing the law.

In fact, those that are trying

to establish a relationship with God

through the law

are cursed and are slaves to the law.

The new covenant is through Jesus

and what he has done for you on the cross,

which gives us freedom.

So imagine what the Jewish false teachers

would have heard when they heard this allegory.

They would have agreed with all these points.

Yes, Hagar and Sarah,

the first four points,

Ishmael, Isaac,

slave and free,

old and new.

If we were to say that there were two cities,

what would you have thought

their expected answer would be?

They would have expected Paul to say

and there are also two cities,

one in Arabia and one in Jerusalem.

The ones that are from Hagar,

they're outside of God's promise.

Whereas the ones that are descended from Sarah,

they're the ones that are truly God's people.

But that's not what Paul says in this passage.

The last contrast is that

there's the earthly Jerusalem

and the heavenly Jerusalem.

Those people that were the Jewish false teachers

would have been shocked by this comparison.

Because after all,

if you think about their worldview,

if you look at the iceberg,

they would have believed truly about Judaism.

They believe that they are God's people

and they believe they are the free ones,

they're the blessed ones.

But what is Paul saying?

The ones that are observing these laws

are in fact slaves.

They are not God's people.

So that's exactly opposite

of what they were expecting.

Paul is implying that their belief system

is completely false.

And so if we understood this passage properly,

we can see that Paul didn't interpret the Bible wrongly

or forget his biblical theology.

Rather, he's using concepts

that are close to the hearts of these false teachers

and what is said by them probably,

that he's using these concepts

to communicate to the Galatians

and the false teachers

and to tell them that

what the false teachers have been preaching is wrong.

So this is not bad exegesis.

It's not bad understanding of the Bible.

In fact, it's actually good communication.

Paul is using things that are close

to the Jewish people's hearts

and turning it on them

to make them understand the gospel.

So having a look at what it means

for the meaning of the allegory,

let's have a look at what it means for the Galatians.

Paul returns to plain language

in verses 29 to 31.

He's not using the allegory anymore

and he just tells the Galatians plainly what to do.

Paul tells the Galatians

to get rid of the false teachers

and to get rid of the false teachings

that they have been bringing to the Galatians.

He quotes Genesis chapter 21, verse 10,

Genesis 21:10

in verse 30.

Get rid of the slave woman and her son,

for they will never share in the inheritance

with a free woman's son.

We can see that Paul is very serious here.

He doesn't want the Galatians

to mix Judaism and Christianity together.

He doesn't want them to rely on both the law and Christ.

So having had a look at,

had a really brief snapshot

of having a look at what it means for the Galatians,

let's look at what it means for us.

So the way that we can help us

to understand what something is,

is to look at the flip side

and to understand what it is not.

So this passage,

I think one of the things

that it is not telling us to do

is to get rid of our culture completely.

Paul is not saying that

to become a Christian,

you must stop being Chinese or Australian or etc.

I don't know.

Yeah, I should say etc.

But yeah,

Paul is not saying for us

to abandon our culture.

After all,

Galatians chapter 3,

Galatians 3:28

verse 28,

says that there's neither male or female,

Jews or Greek,

slaves or free.

We are all one in Christ Jesus.

We are not to abandon our culture

when we believe in Jesus,

but we are to be joined together as one body.

And it's also not telling us

to abandon our history.

He's not saying that

the old covenant is bad

because it's just old

and the new covenant is good

because it's new.

If that was true,

I think our last series

is not very useful.

We celebrated history.

We celebrated the history

of the Reformation.

We celebrated the gospel truth

that we've been preserving

for the last 500 years.

What this passage is saying though

is there's one encouragement

and one rebuke.

So the encouragement here is that

just like the Galatians,

we are not Jewish,

I don't think.

We don't have a Jewish background.

So what that means is that

just like the Galatians,

if you believe in the gospel,

you can be just like Sarah's children.

You will belong to the heavenly Jerusalem.

You'll be part of God's people

with his blessing.

And I want to expand this point

a little bit more

by telling you of the stories

that I've encountered

when I've been running through

the Investigating Christianity course,

both once there

and I've been running

another instance on Friday nights.

There have been quite a few ESL students

that have been bringing their kids

to Friday youth

and their parents have been hanging around

and they really want to hear the gospel,

which is really great.

That's why I've been running

the course on Friday nights

in the office.

And both the September course

and that one,

most of the people

are from a Chinese background,

from mainland China,

and they have the same question.

We think,

they phrase a question like this.

We think that

the Christian faith

is a Western religion.

We from China

have no exposure to this.

We come from an atheist background

and we have our Buddhism

and Taoism

and Confucianism.

And I think it's just

you have your Christian faith

for the West

and we have our own faith

in the East.

And it's really hard for us

to believe in the gospel.

The encouragement

from this passage

is that

no matter

what your ethnicity

or your background,

the Christian faith

is for you.

All you have to do

is to believe

in what Jesus has done

for you.

So if you want to know more

about what it means

to believe in Jesus,

please talk to me

or put it on the

communication card.

I would love to talk to you

more about this.

And it is that simple.

No matter what your background is,

you can come to know Christ.

With this news,

there's also,

on the flip side,

there's a reminder

and a rebuke.

So one of the things

that Paul reminds the Galatians

to think about

is to get rid of the slave woman

and to get rid of

the false teachings

and the false teachers.

And one of the things

that we can do is,

if you look at the iceberg,

which has always been there,

is that it's easy for us

to have Christian behaviours.

We'll go to church,

we'll go to Bible study,

and we'll pray

and read the Bible.

But sometimes we have to ask us,

what is the worldview

beneath all these things?

We might even have

some of the values,

like core values

in this church,

they're on the wall,

outside the church.

If you're going to pass away,

you'll hear about the core values.

These are important

to our church

and important to us.

But we have to actually ask us,

right at the bottom,

our worldview.

What is real for us?

Because the great danger

is for us

to mix

our Christian faith

with something

that we believe in.

And I'll actually bring

an illustration from,

I've got one from

the Chinese congregation

I used in the morning.

So,

this is a story

about a pastor,

he's a Canadian Chinese,

and his mum

who is involved

in ancestor worship.

And,

actually this is,

like,

the matter of ancestor worship

and paying respect

to the elders

is not that far

from me.

When I do certain ministry

in China

or when I have to go

to funerals

for non-Christians

in Hong Kong,

we will be pressured

to pay respect

to our ancestors

and to worship

ancestors in the past.

So,

this particular pastor

has a mum

and his mum

has lots of,

like,

Chinese idols

and,

like,

a lot of ancestor

worship places.

I'm not sure

whether you've seen them.

The little red things

with the glowing lights

and you put,

like,

rose pig

and oranges

and other things.

And,

she became a Christian

but she didn't want

to get rid of her,

all her idols

and all these

worship places.

And,

she told her son

this story.

Imagine,

if you've known

your old friend

for a long time

and you've met

a new friend

who is better.

Jesus is this

better friend

and,

it would be really

disloyal of you

just to abandon

all your old friends

just because

you've got a

better friend.

the best way

to do it

is to,

why don't you

just spend time

with your old friends

and spend time

with your new friends

and they'll be

all fine.

And,

that's the way

she thought about

Christianity.

And,

although we won't

laugh at this,

we actually need

to ask ourselves,

is Christ

just a little bit

better

on what you rely on?

Or,

is Christ

at the centre

of your world view?

If Christ

is at the centre,

it will affect

everything else

that you will do.

The values

that we have

outside at the church,

it won't be

just

something you put on,

it's not something

that we are asked

to do,

it will be flowing

out of your heart.

If Christ

is at the centre

of your world view,

what is said

in Galatians chapter 2

Galatians 2 · chapter mention

will be true.

It is not

I that live

but Christ

that lives in me.

If it is true,

our behaviours

isn't just something

that we do

on Sundays.

We wouldn't just

come to church

and at the first second

we will just

dash out the door.

I remember

there was a

traditional church

I went to

about 20 years ago.

The pastor

is just standing

at the door

greeting people.

He's expecting

people to leave.

People are

wanting to get

out of the church

and spending

time to do

their own things.

But if we are

keen for the gospel,

we would want

to encourage

our brothers and sisters.

We would want

to tell people

within church

that doesn't

know the gospel yet

how they can

encounter Jesus.

So I actually

want to ask us,

is there anything

that you are

placing along

with Christ

right at the

bottom of the

iceberg

that is real

for you?

It's not,

you're just thinking

that Christ

is a little bit

better than

what you have

here.

If there is,

Paul would

probably ask you

to do the same

thing.

Get rid of

these things.

Get rid of

these things

so that you

can hold

on to Christ.

Believe in

Christ,

hold on to

Christ so

that the

things that

we value,

the things

that we

believe,

the things

that we

do is

actually

flowing from

what you

hold dear

in your

heart.

And I hope

that God

can help

us to do

that.