The God Who Sees Me | Genesis 16:1-13

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Good morning.

Please be seated.

Well, it's an immense honor uh to be invited and thank you, Neil, for the privilege of not only participating in glorious worship, but as well uh to have had the opportunity uh to do a conference on marriage uh in your church.

And so thank you.

Um when I called my wife this morning, uh she said my name, which is not a particularly unusual experience.

But she didn't say, My name is Dan Allender, uh but my wife doesn't usually refer to me by that name.

Uh she usually says something like, uh, you, hey, you, um, or hey, did you pick up the laundry?

Uh but she often greets me in the morning uh with a phrase like this Shugi, so good to see you this morning.

Uh that simple phrase, like Shugi.

I I don't know what you speak to one another when there are moments of endearment.

Uh I know there are tones of voice that my wife uses.

The word Dan can be spoken in many different tonalities.

And just as you have learned, if you had young children, we have five grandchildren.

Uh we have learned how each of them cries for hunger, uh, cries over boredom, cries over pain.

We we know tones, we know how words are spoken to communicate in a way in which it is a greeting, a welcoming, or a warning uh, or a kind of confrontation.

Uh what I want you to have in mind as we go to the scriptures this morning is what name and what names do you use for God?

Do you speak of him as Father?

Uh do you speak of Jesus?

Do you speak of the Holy Spirit?

In which case you're naming who God is.

But you happen to know that there are at least reported to be over 150 different names for God: El Shaddai, Jehovah Sabbath, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah Jirah.

And what I want to do, at least in our reflection today, is to talk about what are your names for God.

If you don't use various names, you're not speaking to the God who has revealed himself through the Word of God.

When do you use the name Jehovah Jirah?

When do you use the name El Shaddai?

Uh, and if your vocabulary is limited with regard to the names that you bring to God, the implication that I want you to have in mind is the intimacy of your heart with God is to some degree determined by the names that you use on his behalf.

If you have scripture with you, uh, I'd love for you to turn to Genesis chapter 16, and we're gonna read, frankly, one of the stranger stories in the Bible.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

Uh there are many reasons for underlining that phrase.

It's one of the strangest stories in the Bible.

Story of Hagar and Ishmael.

Now, Sarai, 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 Sarai said.

So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar, and gave her to her husband to be his wife.

He slept with Hagar and she conceived.

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.

Then Sarai said to Abram, You are responsible for the wrong I'm suffering.

I put my slave in your arms, and now she knows 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 Sarai mistreated Hagar, so she fled from her.

The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert.

It was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.

And he said, Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from?

And where are you going?

What I want you to do, if you want to gaze through the remainder of the passage, please feel free to do so.

But I want to come to verse thirteen.

She gave the name to the Lord who spoke to her.

You are the God who sees me, for she said, I have now seen the one who sees me.

Um this passage uh in some ways uh is an immensely heartbreaking passage.

And the reason is our naming of God, I'm going to make the claim, comes in the context of the brokenness of our lives.

We come to know who God is, not because we're faithful, not because things work out for us and we name God.

We find the name of God in the context of our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world around us.

I want to remind you that Abram becomes Abraham.

Sarai becomes Sarah.

These are our mother and father of faith.

They are the ones who, through the Abrahamic covenant, becomes the, in many ways, the heirs, the people of God who then give us the inheritance of faith in Jesus Christ.

It's your mother.

I'm talking today about your mother, and I'm talking today about your father of faith.

But I'm also talking about the reality of living in a fallen world where nothing works the way we think it should.

What I want you to remember is I'm talking about how did you come to name God and what are the names of God that actually have shaped who you are in relationship with God and shape something of your own intimacy with God.

This passage has a previous passage, and it's important to remind you that Genesis 16 doesn't just appear in the Bible, it comes after Genesis 15.

And if you remember what happens in Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abram.

And he makes this covenant in a way in which he says to him, I promise you, promise you, that all of your children will be like the sands of the sea.

They will be so magnificent, so many, that you will not be able to count them.

And he actually performs a really odd covenantal ceremony, really kind of equivalent to a wedding.

And what he does is he kills animals, cuts them into small parts, lines them down an aisle, and lights them on fire, and then God and Abram walk this aisle together in a ceremony in which God is saying this if I fail to keep my promise, this is what I will do to myself.

I will literally kill myself, burn myself, destroy myself.

What he's saying to Abram is, you can be 100% sure that even though you are aged, your wife is old, you will bear children, and they will be as many as the sands of the sea.

That's chapter 15.

Now we don't know the time difference between 15 and 16, though we have a hint that it's somewhere in the range of about seven to ten years before chapter 16 occurs.

Chapter 16, you've got a deeply broken family.

And that is Sarai names there is no children.

And she makes the manipulative suggestion that Abram have sexual relations with a slave woman in order to bear children to fulfill God's promise.

I I I I hope I don't have to like state it again.

Do you hear how broken this is?

God has said, I will keep my promise even to the very loss of my life.

And within seven years, Sarai is saying, I don't trust you.

I don't trust you, God.

You're not good.

You've not fulfilled your promise, but I'll keep your promise by figuring a way to get around the problem of my ancient womb and the fact that we are not yet pregnant.

What I want you to note about your mother is she's a highly manipulative woman.

She's controlling, she's demanding.

And what I want you to note about your father is that he's a coward and blame shifts on to her.

His response to this request is not, wait a minute, do you remember the ceremony?

Do you remember the animal parts broken and inflamed?

Do you remember the goodness of God in that moment?

Instead, what he does is he capitulates to a woman who's making a demand because he doesn't want conflict.

And he says, fine, I'll sleep with her.

He sleeps with her.

Then the consequence is as her, as Hagar becomes pregnant, she becomes contemptuous of her mistress, and there is conflict between two women.

Let me tell you, this is not an unusual story.

There are a lot of manipulative women in the world, and there are a lot of cowardly men in the world, and there are a lot of conflicts in families.

In fact, I want to go so far as to say this is the story of everyone in this room.

Very few of us trust God, even when he makes promises that are built on the cross.

We have a hard time believing his goodness.

And we often do things that work around his promise to fulfill his promise, and then we create more chaos.

And so when Abram says, She's yours, you deal with her, the verb that's used in the scripture is she mistreated her.

The fact is that verb implies something so severe that Hagar, a pregnant Egyptian woman, flees to what's called the Negev, the desert.

I don't know how to underline this unless you've actually looked on the YouTube.

If you've never been to Israel, you can get there really quick this afternoon.

All you have to do is YouTube it.

Go to YouTube and put in Negev, N-E-G-E-V, or the desert in Israel.

And what you'll see is it isn't a normal desert.

It is so desolate, so dangerous, there is no life to be found in the desert.

And for a woman in that day, pregnant to be in the desert, it was literally a form of suicide.

She is saying ultimately, it is so dangerous and so harmful to be in this context.

It would be better for me to flee to my own death in the desert than to remain in the chaos, cruelty, domestic violence of this home.

This is your mother.

This is your father.

These are our pillars, patriarchs of faith.

Most of us do not tell the truth regard to our families.

Most of us don't want to actually tell the truth about our own hearts.

Manipulation.

Cowardice.

That's playing out in every human being's life.

And with that, we often think God will not show up because of our own unrighteousness.

That God will not offer us opportunity for intimacy simply because we're such a mess.

But the fact is, God meets Hagar in the middle of her flight, literally, her suicidal labor to escape.

He meets her.

And what he asks is so, in many ways, pedantic, so like so normal.

Like two questions he asks.

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

In some ways, it's the most important two questions that any human being can ask of themselves and certainly can ask of the people they're with.

Where are you from?

And if you think that's as simply answered as Amarillo, uh Columbus, Ohio, uh, Detroit, this is not a question about mere locale.

It's actually asking the question, what has brought you to be where you are now?

And that is at least to say a multi-layered, multi-layered question.

You can't answer that in a sentence, literally in an hour.

It is a lifetime answer.

Where are you from?

And if that's true, how much more so is this next question?

Where are you going?

What is not the future of your life, standing before God?

Yes, that's all of our futures.

You and I will one day stand before the living God.

But the real question is, and what will be the steps you take before you face Him face to face?

Where are you going?

Do you actually think retirement is a biblical construct?

Is that where you're going?

You want to work very hard for 20, 30, 40 years, and then you finally get what you want for a series of 10, 20 years.

You get to play the golf you want to play.

You get to spend your time doing the hobbies that you find so thrilling and fulfilling.

Is that what you're gonna do with your life?

Is that what you're gonna do with your one broken, beautiful, holy life?

You're gonna spend at least three or four days on the golf course creating torturous frustration for yourself and for others.

That's your life.

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

Uh is where are you going that you're gonna pay for your kids' college education?

That's what you're working yourself virtually to the bone to accomplish?

Where are you going?

These are crucial questions.

Where have you come from?

Another way of asking that is what is the realm of manipulation and cowardice like your family?

How has it formed you to be who you are?

And where is that life that you have brought, where is it actually taking you?

And this is a question or questions that frankly I don't think we ask of one another.

We don't ask of our spouse, we don't ask of ourselves, we don't ask of our friends.

Where are you from?

I know the natural answers.

I tell you, I'm from a specific spot in North America.

It's not what the scripture is asking.

Where are you from?

What has brought you to be who you are, and where are you going?

But all for what end?

Whether you retire or whether you don't retire, that's your life.

From my standpoint, I don't believe there's a place for retirement.

Why?

Because we are in a war.

We are in a war with the kingdom of darkness.

Now, whether you retrench, you don't have to keep the job that you've been in for 20, 30, 40 years.

But if all you're going to do in your so-called retirement is to simply play games, to divert yourself from living in the midst of the war, then I have questions for you.

But not a demand nor an assertion that my way's right, your ways wrong.

What we need to be are people who name what's true about reality.

What's true of how you've come to be who you are?

Do you have the courage to name the manipulative powers of your mother and the cowardice of your father?

And if your response is, no, no, no, no, no.

I came from a good Christian home.

I came from people who really trust Jesus.

Well, I hope you remember I'm talking about your mother of faith.

And I'm talking about your father of faith.

There is no one more righteous than Abram and Sarai, and they're a mess.

So if you want to pretend that your own mother and father are holy, righteous, good, loving people, knock yourself out.

That's probably true.

But what's also true is they're sinners.

And therefore they need grace.

And if they say they do not sin, they're liars.

And the nature of sin is lust and anger.

And the nature of lust and anger is adultery and murder.

So let me tell you about your mother.

She's an adulteress.

Let me tell you about your father.

He's a murderer.

I'm not just talking about them.

I'm talking about the mothers who are in this room.

You're adulterers.

Talking about the fathers in this room, your murderers.

Look, this isn't me.

I'm not telling you something you don't know.

This is Jesus talking in Matthew chapter five about the nature of who we are as people.

I'm an adulterer.

I'm a murderer.

I struggle with lust and anger.

I can look at this story and basically go, look, seven years of waiting, already at an advanced age, they're clearly almost in their 80s by this point.

They don't have their first child until they're in their 90s.

This is ridiculous, God.

Don't give me a promise that biologically seems utterly impossible to ever bring about.

So when I say she's manipulative and he's a coward, I'm not talking about blaming your parents or even blaming you or me.

I'm simply saying this is what's true.

We all fail.

And it's in the context of our brokenness and other people's brokenness, in the midst of life not working, that many of us, maybe it's too extreme for the language of your own life, but we flee.

We go to the Negev.

We leave in order to escape what we indeed believe we can't bear.

And where does it take us?

Into more trouble.

So trouble begets more trouble.

And more trouble is the context for this God to show himself and ask that question.

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

We need to name God.

And our naming of God, our name for God, needs to be found in the midst of our need for rescue.

And it needs to be found in the moments of our own life where we know that He is good to rescue.

Let me give you a story as to how my son, who's now 30, came to name God when he was 10 years of age.

Many years ago, obviously, my son, 20 some years ago, a few years before that, a good friend of mine sat me down for breakfast and he said to me, as a good friend could, I'm really concerned about your life.

Well, great.

Talk to me.

And he said, Well, first I just want you to know, I really think you are a very, very boring man.

Thank you.

What what want me to learn how to tell better jokes?

What what boring?

He said, No, it's not so much you're boring.

It's you do nothing but work.

Therefore, you're living a boring life.

You're you're doing you and he asked, like, do you play?

Do you do you like go skiing?

Yeah, I do.

We were living in Colorado at the time.

And he said, Do you ever just go skiing for yourself with a good couple friends?

And I said, No, I take my kids skiing.

That's that's that's where I enjoy going.

He goes, Any other sports?

I said, Well, I play.

Tennis.

He said, Do you play in a league?

Do you know go out and really hit hard?

No, I play with my kids.

And he said, Is there anything you do that you do to enter into the glory of creation and do so in one sense for your own joy and pleasure?

And as he began, I began thinking, the answer was not really, not really anything.

And he said, I I want to take you fishing.

Well, my image of fishing was a pole, a line, a bobber underneath, like a worm, and you sit waiting for something to happen.

And I'm thinking, you're concerned about me being boring.

Frankly, I'd rather lock myself in a very dark closet than to think about doing that.

And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Not that kind of fishing.

I want to take you fly fishing.

And I had seen, like many people around that time, the movie A River Runs Through It.

And it was like, yeah, that sounds really intriguing.

He took me fishing.

Uh within the first five minutes after teaching me a little bit, uh, I had a back cast and I moved forward.

And as I went forward, something was I had hooked something behind me.

I turned around, and what had occurred, and he was silent, uh, I had hooked him in the ear.

Well, he was right.

This was fascinating.

Um, taking the the hook out, and eventually I got to do a little bit better, a little bit better.

And finally, uh, about three months later, I got an invitation to teach at a Bible camp uh in Montana.

And if you know anything about fly fishing, Montana is sort of fly fishing Mecca.

Uh uh normally with a request, I really do submit it to God, pray, ask.

Is this something that would honor you uh to say yes to?

Uh I didn't do that.

Uh being invited to Mecca uh to fly fish uh to teach at a Bible camp, it was like, no problem.

Yes, we'll come.

We arrived and there was this, I don't know, about a 15, 20-acre lake.

Uh and they had told me that that was one of the opportunities to fly fish.

So what I purchased, a friend gave me a lot of the gear, but I purchased what's called a fly fishing tube, which is like an inner tube with a little bit of a diaper in between.

Uh, and what you do is you have to put fins on your feet, you put the fins through these two things, pull the tube up, and you go out in the water.

You paddle out the water.

And I got to that spot uh about dusk, not quite dark, but but it's just getting a little bit dark.

And I went out in this cool mountain lake, literally, mountains of Montana around me.

It was just as almost idyllic and beautiful as any world I've been in.

And I got my line ready, got a fly on the end of my tippet, and I'm about to start fly fishing for the very first time in Montana.

As I started doing so, putting the cast out, waiting a little bit, bringing it back in, I started noticing that there were like a lot of birds flying around me.

I should also note, I'm not really much of an outdoorsman.

Uh frankly, I don't like even touching fish.

Uh but I I like, I like, I like being on the water.

Uh, I like the experience.

So I'm out there and these birds are flying over me fast, like really fast birds flying over me.

And I'm there watching them, thinking to myself, I thought birds went to bed.

Like, you know, gets dust, they go to bed.

Well, these birds were not going to bed.

They were just actually getting more and more and more and faster and faster.

After a little bit, it began to dawn on me.

These aren't birds.

These are bats.

I'm allergic to bats.

I'm severely allergic to bats.

I'm terrified of bats.

So I have a fly rod, and I began to create what I would consider to be a no-fly zone.

Like I'm moving my rod around, basically going, look, you have your space, I'm all for nature, all for God's creation, just I'm part of his creation.

I'm a son of the king.

You separate, divide, be all be elsewhere.

So I'm moving my rod around, but it doesn't seem to be affecting them at all.

And so I began moving them faster.

Uh you probably have heard you can never hit a bat.

It's not true.

I'm moving my rod around finally to a point where I'm trying to keep them entirely away, and I whacked a bat.

The bat fell into the water about 15 feet away.

I feel already horrible.

I've just whacked God's creation.

It's in the water, came up out of the water, and all of a sudden it can't fly.

Its wings are wet, but it sees a small island about 15 feet away.

And it begins to swim toward this island.

And I'm thinking, I'm the island, uh, and and now it's on guard.

Like I'm just I'm looking at the bat with kind of that away, away, go do whatever you need to do, but I am not your savior.

So it kept coming.

I'm uh I have no justification.

I'm I'm not proud of what I did.

Uh I just freaked out uh and I began whacking the bat.

And as the bat got closer and closer, I whacked it so many times, it finally went under.

Uh I I drowned one of God's creation, uh, and I'm I'm done now.

I mean, like, I'm whatever thoughts that this was gonna be a nice experience, it's all over.

I'm done.

I'm getting out of the water.

And so I got, it's pretty dark by now.

I get to the place where I can get out, take my tube, take all my gear, and I started walking down this dock.

Dock was probably close to 30, 40 yards.

And as I get closer to the, you know, to the ground, what I begin to see is uh something, like uh like somebody sitting in a chair at the very end of the dock.

And I'm thinking, oh, dear Lord, Lord, Lord, no, no, Lord, uh, please.

Just hope that he just got here uh and saw nothing.

Because already I just feel shame for what happened.

I killed a bat, I freaked out on the water.

This is not what a man does uh in the middle of a Montana mountain lake.

Uh and so as I'm walking by, and you know, like in church, you know this is true.

I mean, you're you're a couple hundred people, but if you don't want to see somebody, you know, you can sort of just you can you can check your phone while you're walking out if you don't want to see somebody.

So I'm walking by this guy.

He's sitting uh in a chair, and it's just a dock about that far, but I you know, I'm just gonna motor right by him.

But instead, as I get near him, he reaches up and grabs my arm.

It's about a 72-year-old man.

He reaches up, grabs my arm, and brings my face right down to his.

And he says, son, I want you to know I've been fishing for over 50 years.

And I want you to know I have never seen anything like that in my life.

What do you say?

Well, you're welcome.

But I made a beeline past him, went, my wife asked, How is your fishing?

Great.

Uh like nothing I've ever experienced before.

Uh the next day we began a Bible conference uh that was going to last three days.

And there were probably about 150 people in this small area, uh, and he was sitting about right there.

Now, uh I you probably have had many speakers, you have one of the best every week, but you know that we look at you, you think.

Because you're a group, you think you blend in.

You're just one of a group.

But actually we look at you.

Uh we know the people who are bored, have a sense that people who are already resenting and biblically critiquing what's being said.

Um you have the people, you know, you know, you just you know, you have kids who've been forced to come here and slouch, you have kids who uh actually are listening but actually thinking about the homework they didn't tell their parents that they need to do before.

I mean, you you faces tell a whole lot.

Uh so every time I got close to this man's face, uh, like, you know, you kind of sweep the eye, you look at people, but when I would get near him, I I would kind of do this.

Like I just didn't want to know that he existed because he had seen me in this less than tidy moment of my life.

So after we would finish, about 11 o'clock, 11:30, eat quick lunch, my son wanted to go fish.

I I've already indicated I I'm not really an experienced fisherman, so I would take him out at about 12 o'clock and we'd fish for two or three hours.

And we caught nothing.

After about two days of this, this gentleman saw us about to leave right after lunch, and he said, son, come over here.

I came over, expected something not so pleasant, and he said, uh, it's pretty obvious that you're not much of a fisherman.

I said, Yes, sir.

That's that's fairly uh clear, isn't it?

And he said, Yeah.

Um you're taking your son out, I'm assuming, with rods uh to actually fish.

And I said, Yes, sir.

He said, You're taking him out around 12 o'clock, between 12, 2, 3 o'clock.

Yes, sir.

Done that for the last couple days.

Yes, sir.

He said, Do you know the fish don't bite in the afternoon?

No, sir.

Um, generally, he said, fish bite in the early morning and then around dusk, like you did the other night.

I said, Well, what should I do?

And he said, Thank you for asking.

I mean, there's so many really good older men who don't have a clue of what they have to offer to younger men.

What are you doing with your one broken, beautiful life?

There are a lot of very competent people who want to do things that you have skills for, you have the ability to offer.

And it is an immense gift that this 72-year-old man came to me and acknowledged what's fairly obvious.

You don't know how to fish.

And he said, Well, what I want you to do is don't even go out this afternoon.

Uh, tonight, tomorrow morning, want you to go out.

We had plans for that evening, so he said, Tomorrow morning, want you to go out about 5 30 in the morning.

And I want you to go to this locale.

And he said, I'm pretty sure there's some trees down.

A lot of fish go underneath those kind of places.

And then he said, I'm I'm gonna give you uh some lures that you can use.

Uh, you're gonna catch fish tomorrow.

Your son's gonna catch a fish.

And I cannot tell you just that gift of having somebody say, Your son's gonna catch fish.

Next morning we were out early, we went out to the spot, we had his particular lures, uh, and we fished and we fished and we fished.

I had told my son we needed to be in at breakfast by about 8:30 at the absolute latest, and by eight o'clock, it was clear we were skunked.

No fish, nothing, not a bite, nothing.

And I'm telling you, I'm sitting in this rowboat, having taken my son with incredible excitement to the spot this good man had told me to go with the proper gear, proper time, and there was nothing.

And my heart began to turn against God.

The question of well, you you divide the Red Sea, you create the Rocky Mountains, uh, you raised Jesus and others from the dead.

What would it cost you, great God of the universe, to give my son one stinking fish?

It's not his fault he has me for a father.

He didn't choose me.

And so my anger turned against God.

My anger turned against myself.

Why am I so incompetent?

Why don't I have certain skills that would be so good for my son to have?

And about five to late, I looked at my watch and I just said, we need to go.

We need to go in now.

And my son was saying, no, please, Dad, could we fish just a little bit more?

And what I was about to say is, and what would five more minutes do?

What would ten more minutes do?

Simply create more frustration for me and for you.

I'm about to say, no, there's no point.

I don't know how you hear God, but I want you to hear from my standpoint, He is the Word.

Jesus is the Word, John 1 tells us.

Genesis 1 tells us that He created the earth with a word.

God loves to speak.

And He'll speak directly, He can speak indirectly, He can speak through a film, He can speak through a novel, He can speak directly through a friend.

Look, if He can speak through Balaam's ass, I have great confidence he can speak through me.

And that he will speak to me.

And what the Spirit at that point said to me was this do you want your son to hate hope like you do?

And I found something in my heart literally saying back to him, yeah, yeah, I do, because I'm preparing him for a life in which your dreams are often disappointed.

The things that you think will work out when you have worked so hard at a job, and then somebody else takes credit and they end up getting an advance, and three months later you end up getting fired.

Yeah, life doesn't seem to work out quite fairly in our world.

And I might as well teach my son what it's like to live in a fallen world where if God is good, and he is, he so seldom shows himself with the kind of goodness that we hear and read about for others, for ourselves.

But the Spirit said, and you hate hope that much.

And I can't tell you why that moment.

Something in me went.

No, no, I don't.

No, I I struggle with hope.

But I believe he's good.

And right now I don't think he's good.

And all I'm asking is one stinking fish, and there was nothing, but am I going to build my whole life with God on the fact that this whole fishing expedition just feels screwed up?

Something in me softened.

And I looked at my son and I said, Yes, Andrew, you can fish a bit more.

And he said, How many more?

How many more times can I can I fish?

Oh, I don't, I wasn't even thinking like number.

I'm just going.

Five.

Five more.

You can throw your line five more times.

Through his line, through his line, through his line three times.

Uh at this point, it was like, just get out.

Get the oars in, get prepared to begin to go back.

So I put the oars in, uh, turned around.

I could hear him drop it in the fourth time.

I wasn't gonna move, but I was just sort of sitting with my back to him, uh, and I could hear him throw it out a fifth time.

And within a few seconds, my son said, wait dad, don't move, don't move.

There's something there.

I've got something.

And it's like, yeah, sure you do.

And I turned around and his line was bent.

The line was taut.

And I said, uh, Andrew, uh, if you had a fish, it would be moving.

Move your move your rod around.

Like move it up, move it over, move it around.

And he did all that.

And there's nothing.

There's no movement.

No movement whatsoever.

And I said, I don't know what you've got.

You might have a boot, a tire, stick, who knows?

But uh you're gonna have to just pull up hard to see if we can save this man's lure so we can give this kind man back his equipment.

And uh I turned around again and literally began to row.

And at that point he said, Dad, dad, dad, stop, look.

And I turned around, and at this point, that bent rod and line was actually now moving.

I mean, boots don't move.

He's obviously got something, and it was bent over, and I looked at him and it's like, what's going on?

And so he finally, as he begins to hold the line, he's fighting a large fish.

And he fought for four or five minutes.

It's a really long time for a 10-year-old to be fighting.

And at one point he goes, Dad, I'm so tired, I don't know what to do.

And I said, I'll I'll take, I'll take your rod.

And he goes, like you did the other night.

I mean, he looked at me basically like, no, you're not gonna ruin this like you did the other night.

I'll fight this through after about another five minutes.

He brings up to the side of our boat a northern pike, about a 34-inch northern pike.

We were fishing for trout, 12, 15, 16-inch trout.

Uh again, I don't know if you know much about fishing.

I'm I'm not a great fisherman, but a northern pike, if you've ever looked at the face of a northern pike, they have very beady little eyes, a long nose, with incredibly sharp teeth on both the top and the bottom.

Uh they're satanic fish.

He brings it up to the side and he says, Dad, help me get the hook out.

It's like, whoa.

It's your fish, son, not mine.

Well, he figures out how to get pliers, he pulls it out, and we're able to get a photo of this moment.

It was one of the sweetest gifts.

He puts the fish back into the water, we begin to row away, and we're five minutes rowing, uh, and we're quiet.

It's just one of those, uh, I don't know if you've had moments like this in life where you're just so surprised at the goodness that you actually didn't, not not just didn't expect, actually believed couldn't occur.

Five minutes in, Andrew says this.

Dad, we have a God, don't we?

It's a ten-year-old boy growing up in a Christian home, and up to this point, I don't believe he had ever owned his own faith.

Taken to Sunday school, taken to Bible camps.

But I don't know if he had ever owned the word my, our.

We have.

We have a God, don't we?

And as a father, I'm so, first of all, I'm just so happy that my son was able to catch a fish.

But even then, so much more staggered that he's able to own that he has a God.

A couple moments pass, we're just quiet.

I'm rowing in, and he says this unbelievable phrase I know God's name, Dad.

I said, Andrew.

What is God's name?

He said, My God's name.

What a simple question to ask of you.

What is God's name for you?

Do you know he will one day name you?

That you don't know.

Why?

Revelation 3, verse 17.

Revelation 3:17

There will be a day you will stand before the living God, and he will give you a white stone, and on it a name that no one else knows.

It will be the most intimate name that you have ever heard spoken in your life.

To have my wife say to me this morning, Shugi, how did the marriage conference go?

Just those words.

Like, I am named, and something of my life is being pursued by the one I love more than anyone on the earth.

My wife has other names for me that she uses when she's really angry.

I'll not tell you.

But there's also other intimate names that she uses so rarely.

Those names are literally used four or five times a year.

But when they're spoken, they are spoken with a power that almost nothing on the earth can bring to my heart than the way she speaks those unique names to me.

And that will one day be your life as well.

You will have a name, and he will speak it, and your heart will resonate with a level of joy, joy that he has spoken your name and called you to be in his presence.

You don't know that name.

Now, frankly, I think there are hints about what that name holds.

If you'd come to begin to address the question, where are you from and where are you going?

The names that he has for you have to do with your suffering.

They have to do with where you have overcome, where you have, in the midst of your own fight with him, actually surrendered to him and found him to be even better than you thought he could be.

But we are to have names for God.

And yes, you get to use all the names that are in the scriptures to talk about him.

And if you don't know those names, uh, there are a lot of good books, uh, there are a lot of good websites.

All you have to do is plug into Google names of God, and I promise you, 20 to 30 will come up, but there are hundreds more.

What are your names for God?

But what is your intimate name for God?

My son, 20 years past, a few weeks ago, was talking about a struggle that he was in the middle of with regard to his work.

And I asked him, I said, How are you doing with a situation that could cost you, well, could cost you immensely.

It's a really scary, threatening prospect for you.

How are you handling it?

And his response was this.

I trust the God of the fifth caste.

He's been good.

I expect that there will be something that lands in my lap that promises again that he will be faithful.

You have a Egyptian woman.

Take that into account.

Egyptians were hated.

Women were chattel.

She's an Egyptian woman pregnant by a patriarch, despised by her matriarch.

She's suicidal, she's fleeing to the desert.

This is who God meets.

Broken, unexpected people.

People who have literally given up hope, given up any reason to actually trust that he will be good.

And he meets her on the road and asks two really pretty simple questions.

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

And in that encounter, she says, I saw God.

The name El Roy.

What does the word El Roy mean?

Such an interesting phrase.

I saw the God who saw me.

I have a witness to my life.

I have someone who knows my suffering, who knows my rebellion, who has known me as no one knows me.

I have seen that one who has seen me, and I know he is good.

My invitation to you is to open your heart.

Where are you from?

What suffering have you known?

What heartache in the midst of manipulation and cowardice have you known?

How has he in the midst of your own brokenness showed himself to be good?

And in that have you come to name him for yourself?

Please use the names of God that you find in Scripture.

But let me put it lastly: God is humble enough to let an Egyptian slave woman who's pregnant name him and receive that name as his own.

We have a good God who is also a humble God who wants you to name him.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dan.

We like to just take a moment just to kind of just ask yourself, what do I take away from this morning?

So let's just take a moment now and just kind of calm.

The Bible says this of Mary after God revealed some things to her, that she treasured these things up and pondered them in her heart.

Let's treasure and ponder some things for just a moment before we're dismissed.

Father, when we ponder questions like where have you been and where are you going?

We realize that our shame intersects with hope.

And hope is a good thing.

And so let hope abound in us today.

Let us not be shamed into silence or solitude.

Let us be set free by the hope that is ours in the gospel, that God sees us and he knows us.

And he's not ashamed to be called our God.

Let us not be ashamed to be his people.

Lord, let your word go out and accomplish the purpose for which you send it today.

Thanks for Dan and for his gifts.

We pray all this in Christ's name.

Amen.

Stand to your feet if you would.

Let me speak a blessing and a benediction over you.

Hold your hands out if you would.

May the God of the fifth caste, the God of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you.

You dismiss it.