Like Father, Like Son

Listen, if you will be taking your Bibles and turning with me to the book of Genesis, chapter 26, I'm going to join you there in just a minute.

Genesis 26 · chapter mention

It happened again this week to me.

I was reminded of how much my children are like me.

Now, in some ways, that's good.

I sometimes.

Other ways, maybe not so much.

I I love it whenever people walk up to uh Nick, my youngest son, and he and I are working together and they come up to him and they're talking to him and they say, So is this your brother talking about me?

I love that, man.

I love it.

Um so but but they are like us, our kids, they are very much like us.

When Genesis 1 and 2 tells us that, you know, everything produces fruit after its kind.

That's not just talking about the genus and the species that we are.

It's also what we pass to our kids, our eye color, our hair color, our noses, our beloved oversized ears, whatever it may be, we pass those on to our kids, but we also pass things that maybe we would not like to pass to them.

So this past week, we're in the living room, and uh, Kim and I are having a conversation, and I don't even remember what it was that was going on.

It's it's kind of a PTSD mental block sort of thing, I guess, but but I was being very sarcastic, which is unfortunately how I parented uh growing up is through sarcasm.

And I was being, I was being sarcastic and kind of you know jesting with with Kim and Michaela and Nick were there.

And Michaela says, concerning Nick, Nick's my son, concerning Nick, she said, Oh, I see where he gets it from.

And I'm like, oh man, that's not good.

Now I I have told her on multiple occasions, this is what I told her, whenever like I see the crazy things that he he does.

I'm like, look, he was fine when we gave him to him.

So I don't know what happened after after that.

And I remind her, there are no warranties, no return policies whenever it comes to the kids.

But they are definitely, they're definitely our kids.

They're definitely, they act like their mother uh in very good ways, and they act like me for everything else.

But that kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

I mean, after all, um we're so much alike.

There's not much difference between us and our kids, or even our grandkids, and the world we live in, the things that we face, the stuff that we struggle with is stuff that they struggle with.

And so when we open up Genesis chapter 26, we get this beautiful, uh, although very complicated and in many ways simultaneously sad example of this.

Genesis 26 · chapter mention

See, Abraham was not a perfect father.

We talked about that last week.

The fourth concept of the sermon was Father Abraham had many struggles.

And so we shouldn't be surprised that his son Isaac had some of those struggles as well, because there's so much that is the same between the parent and the child.

So, what I want to do today is I want to walk through this passage and I just want to like underscore that fact that that's just normal, that what you experience and seeing how your kids have picked up some of the habits you wish they didn't.

Or maybe it's you looking at your habits and thinking, I didn't, I wasn't gonna act like my mother, and I wasn't gonna act like my father.

By the way, husbands never tell your your wife that she's acting like our mother, even if she does.

It's a very, very bad thing.

But maybe it's you and you carry these things and you don't, you know, you don't really want to, but I just want us to set in the grace of the truth that God works through that this morning.

And we're gonna walk through this passage to see that, looking at really four particular examples of how this works out.

We have the same struggles, we have the same sovereign, the same God, we have the same sins, and we have the same solutions.

So look with me, if you will, down to Genesis chapter 26.

Genesis 26 · chapter mention

Look at verse number one.

We're gonna walk through this passage together, and then I've got three words of encouragement for how we cope with the sameness of all of these struggles that we face as parents and children.

All right, here we go.

Now, there was a famine in the land because uh besides the former famine that had occurred during the days of Abraham, and Isaac went down to Gerar, Girar, to Abimelech, king of the Philistines.

Now, this should seem familiar to you if you're familiar with the story of Abraham, because he too faced a famine.

And you recall what Abraham did.

Abraham, facing the famine in the promised land, left and went down to Egypt.

Both of these patriarchs, Abraham and his son Isaac, faced the same.

They lived in the same world, they faced the same struggles.

We like to imagine that here in this 21st century world that we are so much evolved and that our problems are so unique and so 21st century, but I'm here to tell you that the problems you face are identical to the problems that were faced by people who lived 200 or 2,000 or 6,000 years ago.

We live in a fallen world that has its struggles and its pain and its sorrows.

Isaac faced the same kind of famine that his father faced.

And as this story opens up, the the narrator intends for us to see these parallels between what Abraham faced and what his son Isaac faced.

We have the same struggles.

Now, fortunately, while you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That statement is never more true than when we talk about the same sovereign.

Both Abraham and Isaac served the same sovereign God.

The narrator wants us to see this as well, because whenever you read these next few verses and hear God's voice speaking to Isaac, if you closed your eyes, you can almost hear him speaking also to Abraham, because the same promises that were made to Abraham were also made to his son Isaac.

You know that's the truth, right?

That God makes promises to his people, and the same promises that held true and were firm in the 60s and the 70s are true and firm today.

The old paths, ladies and gentlemen, still work.

We'll talk more about that here in a minute.

What's what the father does here, and the Lord Yahweh, proper name, appeared to him and said, Do not go down to Egypt.

Why?

Because whenever his father went down to Egypt, it created a catastrophe in his life.

And God is stepping in to this family dysfunction and trying to help Isaac shake the temptations he picked up from his father.

I am so relieved that I co-parent with God, aren't you?

That whenever it comes to raising my kids, there are many, many gaps.

And God, the Father of heaven, steps in and says, Hey, listen, your dad did not do well down in Egypt.

Stay here, dwell in the land which I shall tell you.

Look at verse number three, sojourn here.

This isn't your permanent residence.

This isn't where you're putting up your eternal mailbox, but you're going to live in this land.

And while you are here, God says, I will be with you, I will bless you.

Same thing he said to the patriarch Abraham.

For to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham, your father.

In other words, he says, the purpose for the promise, the foundation for it comes not because of just what I say to you, but because of the oath that I made to Abraham.

You and I still live in the wake of that promise today.

Whenever God said to Abraham, I will bless those who bless you, I will multiply you, I will make you a blessing.

And when God said, I will make your offspring as numerous as the people of the sands on the sea, in a very real way, we live in the echo of that promise.

God is faithful to us because he made a promise to Abraham, and more importantly than that, God is faithful to us because he made a promise to his son.

We rely on the promises of God, not just those that are made to us, but that those who that are made to others on our behalf.

Look at verse 4.

He says, I will multiply your offspring as the stars, as many as the stars on the sea, and will give you offspring, all of these lands, and in your offspring all of the nations of the earth will be blessed.

Again, sounds just like the promise made to Abraham because he says, Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge.

He didn't always, did he?

He dropped the ball big time.

He messed up in ways that you maybe have not.

And yet here he is, God in his grace and his mercy pulls from his memory files not all of his failures, but the times whenever Abraham was found the most faithful.

Thank God for that.

That my sins are cast as far as the east is from the west.

He says, My commands, my statutes, and all of his laws they were commanded.

Isaac served the same sovereign.

And so do we.

Sure, we face the same struggles, but we have standing beside us and surrounding us the same sovereign.

We need that because we also have living within us the same seed of sin, the same sins.

Isaac faced the same sins that his father did.

You recall Abraham's habit was whenever, apparently, whenever he entered a new land, he would immediately share with those who were there in that land, whether it was Pharaoh or the same area here, uh Abimelech, he would tell them that his wife Sarah was actually his sister because he was afraid that they would see her, and apparently she was a haughty.

I think that's how the Hebrew word is translated.

And he thought for sure they would kill him to get to her.

Now that may seem unreasonable to you, and like I'm okay with that.

Like that just seems bizarre.

It seems weird.

It seems like an like an unfounded fear, and in some ways, maybe it was, although those were different times.

And I mean, you know, it was Wild West, and people would kill you for things that they they wouldn't today.

And so maybe, but more than that, I think this is just showing how dysfunctional Abraham's fear was.

I think I've told you that if I were going to film Abraham's life and I had to cast the person Abraham as a character, in my mind, I picture Danny DeVito.

That's who I pictured.

I mean, he he was not some tall, got it together, you know, perfect husband.

Like he was a, he had some, I mean, we saw a couple last week, he had some real issues.

And so he would go in and say, She's my sister, and which exposed her to this horrific danger of being taken as another man's wife.

And twice God delivered him from this by going to the individual who's involved and exposing to them Pharaoh and then later uh Abimelech, a different Abimelech, saying to them, Hey, listen, you you want to be careful here.

God protects him.

And yet, even though God protects us, sometimes we have a way of passing these sins on to our children.

Isaac takes a page from his father's playbook.

Man, how I wish my kids did not do this, but they do, don't they?

They take plages, pages from our playbooks.

They they carry our insecurity and our struggles, and then they also pick up the coping mechanisms that we use to address these fears, these struggles, these angers, whatever it is.

And Isaac's doing the same thing.

When the men of the place, verse number seven tells us, ask him about this woman who was with him.

Literally, it's they ask him about his woman, the woman who was with him.

He said, Ah, she's my sister.

For it was it we feared to say, My wife, thinking lest the men of this place should kill me because of Rebecca, because she was a uh attractive in appearance.

Picked up those same sins from his father, saw how his father handled it and handled it the same way.

Boy, I'm not happy about that.

This is one place where I deeply wish that Genesis 1 and 2 wasn't true, that we do not produce fruit after our own kind, that somehow the fruit would fall far from the tree, but they they pick up our habits.

What do we do about that?

We have the same struggles that's gonna happen, the same sovereign who superintends all of this, but we do walk around as the same type of sinners.

They are the same type of sinners that we are, and of course, the solution has not changed either.

The old ways still work.

This the solution for sin has always been the same.

And sure, God wants us to repent and to turn away from our sin, but the real solution for our sin is faith and trust in the God who sins sovereignly the Savior.

Now, watch how God does this in verse number eight.

When Isaac had stayed there for a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebecca, his wife, and said, Oh, gross.

Wait, no, that's not in the text.

He says, Oh, gross.

Um, not literally, but there's something in this text where he is watching something happen.

I love to watch translators squirm on paper whenever they're trying to figure out what to do with this word laughing.

He saw Isaac laughing with Rebecca.

They pick up and they go all kinds of places with it, trying to trying to make it make sense, because in the Hebrew, literally, what is being said is Isaac Mazak.

Isaac Isaac.

You remember, you remember that Isaac's name was laughter.

Like his mom was in a tent, um, you know, her back was hurting, she was feeling very old, and and you know, that she, you know, knew that her days of bearing children were long gone.

And then she heard the angel talking to Abraham, saying, This time next year, your wife Rebecca, your wife Sarah is going to bear a child.

And she laughed out loud.

She l-ol'd.

And of course, God heard and said, Hey, you know, she uh Sarah laughed, and Sarah's like, No, I didn't really laugh.

And she's like, No, no, you you laughed.

You really laughed.

And so they named the kid laughter.

Um, I wonder what I wonder what my parents were doing when they named me Major.

I'm gonna look that one up.

That's a that's a that's a fleeting thought.

So they named the kid laughter.

Now, the Hebrew word that's used to translate what Isaac's doing with his with his wife is the is the laughter.

It's so in a way the translation may say Isaac was being Isaac.

I knew that was going to go over hard.

You guys will look later whenever your husband's doing what he's doing, and he's like, he's just being his, that's who he is, right?

And so Isaac's this just being Isaac.

It's another way of saying, like, because another translation for Isaac is Jolly.

And I want you to see the irony, the humor in the text, because what the author is kind of doing here is he's saying, Jolly was with a wink and a nod, because he knows the kids are watching.

He says, Jolly was being jolly with his wife.

And so he looks out at Bimelech and he sees this go down and he says, Okay, that's not something siblings do.

And so he calls Isaac in and says to him, Look, she is your wife.

Clearly, she's your wife.

How then could you say she is my sister?

Isaac said to him, This is why, because I thought lest I die because of her.

And Abimelech said, What is this that you have done to us?

Now keep in mind, Abimelech is not a apparently a follower of Yahweh.

He's a pagan, uh, proto-philistine kind of guy.

I mean, and yet he knows more about what is right and wrong.

And God uses him to speak truth into this broken situation.

God has some pretty unique ways to resolving the problems that we create in our household, doesn't he?

God can use the most unlikely people to bring us back to sobriety in the faith and to protect our families.

He says, one of the men might have might have lay with her, and you would have brought guilt upon us.

And so Abimelech does the right thing.

Keep in mind, picture what's happening here.

Isaac has this incredible fear.

And whenever Abimelech finds out that Rebecca's his wife, he doesn't actually kill Isaac.

Isaac's fear was not founded.

Instead, he protects Isaac.

So he sends this decree out, this presidential decree says, Whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.

He protects him.

What have we seen here?

They have the same struggles, but they live in the world that's ran by the same sovereign.

That same sovereign knows that we are the same sinners, that Isaac is going to have the temptations that his father did.

That's why he tried to warn Isaac what he should be doing and to avoid Egypt.

And yet Isaac still sins because he's a sinner, and that's what sinners do.

But God is a savior, and that's what saviors do.

And so the solution is the same.

God intervenes, he interjects, and he uses this pagan king to get in front of the catastrophe that Isaac was about to make of his household.

And if God can do that with a pagan king, what do you think he could do with the king of kings?

Jesus is the answer to our family struggles.

Now I know that sounds archaic and it sounds ancient, it sounds a little dated, but I'm here to tell you it works.

I was talking to a young couple yesterday about their faith, and the young man spoke up, he's in his early 20s, and I asked him where they were going to church at, and he told me, and he said, Listen, you can't do marriage without Jesus.

I'm here to tell you, some of you are like, well, you can muddle by pretty good, you can do okay, but I'm here to tell you your marriage will never be what it can be if it's held together with the glue of Christ.

Because the old ways still work.

You know, I read the other day uh or watched a podcast by Andrew Huberman at Huberman Labs.

Some of you may be fans.

He was talking about an unrelated topic, but he mentioned this.

He was they were talking about microplastics, which of course, if you know anything about the conversation, we're all kind of worried about all these little bitty bits of plastic that are making their way through our bloodstream and what that's going to do for us in the future.

And, you know, maybe it's the reason we're all kind of going crazy now, you know, and sort of trying to figure out what's what to do with the microplastics.

Do you know there is nothing they can do for microplastics?

Nothing.

They can't give you medication that cleans it out, they can't send you to like, you know, to have some sort of surgery, to have all these little bits of plastic taken out.

There's only one solution for this modern problem of microplastics.

Do you know what it is?

It is to take your old blood and move it out and let the body make new blood.

If we were a couple of hundred years ago, we would refer to that as bloodletting.

That means this modern problem of microplastics can only be resolved through some ancient technique that we once considered completely archaic.

And by the way, it is archaic, but don't miss the point here.

What I'm saying to you is sometimes modern problems are resolved by ancient solutions.

This is that.

This is that.

And so, what does it look like whenever we are the same, we have the same struggles, we're serving.

Same sovereign, we're facing the same sin, and we're looking for the same solution.

Like, how do we how do we maximize that?

How do we use that?

How do we lean into it?

I've got three words that I want to give you that I think will help as we try to figure out how to prevent passing our bad habits, our sinful habits, our fears, our phobias, our angers, all those things that we don't want to pass on to our children, how do we how do we build a wall to protect them from the toxicity that is the darkness inside of us?

Here they are.

Three words.

The first word is root.

Children must be grounded in.

In fact, they're going to be grounded in something.

And if you do not provide as a parent and a family unit the soil in which they will be nourished, someone else will.

Richmond will.

Washington will.

TikTok will.

Your kids are going to find a root.

Parents, let me just tell you, if you're concerned about the state of the world and yet you do not have your children in a Bible-believing church, you are in a complete uh denial for what the real problem is.

Your kids, our kids must be rooted in something.

That's why the psalmist says in Psalm chapter 78, verses 3 and 4, he says, I will open my mouth in parable.

Psalms 78:3

I will utter dark saints from old times.

Old uh from the from old things that we have heard and known that our fathers have told us.

What's he talking about specifically?

He's not just talking about the good old days, back to the 50s and 60s and 70s.

For some people, those weren't good old, good old days.

Some of us didn't have air conditioning right back in those days.

That's the the sometimes the good old days weren't all that good.

No, he's talking about the good, good old days.

He's talking about the days and the stories of God's deliverance and provision.

We will not hide them from our children, but tell them to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.

Your children need to hear, our children need to hear the glorious about the glorious goodness of Jesus.

They need to hear us as we are working through the problems of this world, consult scripture, call out to the Spirit.

They need to see those examples because those are examples that they desperately need to follow in this world, because I think we can all agree as adults that we don't have the answers, and the answers that we think we do have so frequently wind up going awry.

They need to be taught.

I've spent some time this summer reading the book Plutarch's Lives.

Um, it's a great read in part.

The author, an ancient historian who lived about the time of Josephus, takes two historic figures, one from Greek, uh Greece, and the other from Rome, and he brings them together and shows how their lives compare and contrast.

Whenever he comes to the topic of the lawgivers of Greece and Rome, he covers a man named Lacurgus, who was a Spartan king, and a man named Numa, who was the second Roman king.

These were the principal lawgivers of these two states.

Now, after Lacurgus died, Greek continued his policies for another 400 years.

He had incredible influence, not just in his generation, but in the generations that followed.

But by the time Numa died, within days of his death, the nation had reverted back to their old ways, their old plans.

They had dumped all of the laws that Numa had tried to instill and went back to the way things used to be.

Now, Plutarch picks up on this and he's trying to diagnose what happened.

How did one man succeed in passing his ideas and teachings down to the next generation for years and years to come, and the other one failed?

And he comes to one particular point.

He says Lycurgus had an education system.

He had a system that worked with the parents to teach children about the values and virtues of what makes a good member of the state.

Numa did not have that.

And Plutarch said, because of that, Lycurgus was able to pass down from generation to generation his beliefs.

Numa was not.

Do you want your children to receive the beliefs, not just the things that you do?

We don't to echo our brokenness, but to echo our hope.

If we're going to do that, they must be rooted in something.

Lycurgus refers to it as a deep dye soaking permanently into cloth.

The image is beautiful.

It's where you're just constantly dipping those kids into the purple royal color of the kingship of Jesus over and over and over again.

Root your children.

Now I know what you're saying, Major, but that's not always going to work.

And you're exactly right.

It's not always going to work because the person who's trying to root their children is not a great gardener.

That's me.

I fail.

So what do we do whenever it doesn't work?

Well, number two, we repair.

We repair.

I chose this word because of an article and a TED Talk that I saw from Becky Kennedy, who is the founder of Good Inside.

Now, if you're a parent, you probably have heard of this site.

I'm going to just tell you right up front, there are some good things on this site, but there are some things that do not align with biblical truth.

Because the reality is, is, and I'm sorry, but this is just truth, is that we are not good inside.

And whenever the state or society chooses to take the approach that we are good inside, I won't chase this rabbit too far, but that's how you create the distinction between the revolution that occurred in this country versus the revolution that happened in France shortly, shortly thereafter.

They believe people were basically good inside, and the government got out of the way, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their life because of that misbelief.

We're not good inside.

But that doesn't mean everything she says is useless because she makes this beautiful point of how parents blow it and how she tells this story of how she had blown it.

Now she's a tutor, a coach of parents.

And one night she comes in, she's been tired, she's working, she's cooked this meal, her kid walks in, little guy at the time, and dismisses.

He argues that he doesn't want to eat the food, he doesn't like it, and he storms and he leaves the kitchen.

And as he does, she yelled at him, which is not something a parent should be typically doing unless the kid's in danger.

She yelled at him.

And then she stood there after yelling at him and said, Here I am.

I've got this blog and I'm teaching and coaching and speaking about how to be a good parent.

And I just yelled at my kid.

And she, all this guilt rolled in on her.

Have you been there where you realize the damage that you've done, the mistakes that you made, and the guilt rose in?

And she says, How do you do that?

How do you process that?

She says, Every rupture needs a repair.

And if you're going to repair something, it must rupture first.

Most of us are pretty good at nailing the ruptures in the life of our kids, right?

She says, you got to repair those.

And she defines repair as not just an apology that ends a conversation, but an apology that begins a conversation.

I should not have done that.

I need, you know, last week you saw me and I wasn't at my best.

And I want you to know I'm sorry and I'm going to try to do better.

And then to continue that conversation with your child.

Now I know for some of us, like our kids are grown and we wonder, like, what good would that gonna do?

She addresses it, Kennedy addresses this that this never too late.

Please hear what I'm saying to you.

It's never too late as a parent to repair a situation.

God's grace extends as long as there is life, as long as there is a heartbeat, there is hope.

And so what Kennedy suggests is this thought experiment to help us understand how it's never too late as a parent to go in and to repair the things that we weren't able to properly root in the life of our kids.

She says this.

She says, just imagine if you received a phone call from one of your parents today, and your parents said to you, said to you, listen, I know when you were growing up, I made some mistakes.

And the parent names those mistakes and says, I shouldn't have done this, and I should have been more present and I should have been less angry and I should have showed you a better way.

And I want you to know, the parent says to you, your parent says to you, I want you to know that I'm sorry.

And if you ever want to talk about it or share your thoughts about it, I'm here and I want to listen to you, and I just want you to know that I love you and I want to do better.

How many of you would that would that would have no impact on your week if your parent called you and said that to you?

It would make a huge impact.

It's never too late to begin to repair what has sinned has broken.

This is not a new concept.

James chapter 5, verse 16, James encourages his readers to confess their sins to one another and pray for one another.

James 5:16

Why?

Because transparency is better than the fiction that we have it all together.

One of the greatest things that you could teach your kids is your returning to the cross after a broken situation.

One of the most dire truths they need to pick up is the importance of grace and mercy received from God whenever we get it wrong.

And the only way to do that, the only way to do that is when there's been a rupture, to not just try to sweep it under the rug, to pretend like it didn't happen, to get up the next morning and joke with a kid and hope that they forget.

No, no, we confess our sins and we go and we attempt to repair.

Root and repair.

Now I know what you're asking, I know what you're about to say, but Major, what if that doesn't work?

I mean, sometimes rooting the kid doesn't work because we fail, they fail, so we repair.

But what if repair doesn't work?

Well that leads us to the third point, which is to rest, to rest.

Let me just ask for a second, how many of you knew this was going to be the third point?

Begins with an R.

All of these things sort of end at the same place.

Trust, lean, rely, rest.

You know the reason they go back to this type of point where we turn back to God?

They go back to that point because this is where our ultimate hope lies.

It always goes back to Jesus.

It always goes back to Jesus.

I mean, there's no solution in this sermon or in anything that I say to you or anything that you ever read that is going to work long term without the eternal presence and power of the risen Savior.

Period.

And even if it seems to work for a little while, sooner or later, your kids, your grandkids, you, your spouse, our dysfunctional family is going to run into something that we can't get past because there's no human remedy for death.

So we rest, we rely.

We are co-parents with the Father in heaven.

And he picks up on the things that we cannot do, the things that we failed at.

I've said it over and over again to you as a church.

I promise you, I've said it more to myself that the Father loves our children more than we do.

And he is more equipped and more powerful to do for them what we cannot do.

He knows what to do, he knows where they are.

Sometimes kids, and I've seen it over and over again, sometimes our kids are brought out on a long limb and handed a saw by the Spirit.

And they just saw away and they receive the consequences of that.

They fall straight to the ground.

And as a parent, it's heartaching to watch a kid as he saws the limb out from an under herself, himself.

It's painful to watch that.

It's painful to watch them fall.

It's painful to watch the ache and the heartache and the pain.

But how many times, how many stories have you seen where someone, once they hit rock bottom, suddenly, that's the exact place they have to be to fully repent, to come back to the place where they desperately need to be.

We rest in this.

We rest in verses like that one in Philippians that we reference many times.

That the one, Paul says to the church of Philippi, the one who began a good work in you, I don't sweat.

I don't worry about it, Paul says.

I don't get sideways about it.

I'm not panicking because I know the God we serve.

He's the same God that Abraham served.

He began a good work in you.

He does not quit.

He will complete it to the very end.

Or Paul's letter, uh later letter to his son in the face, faith Timothy, this personal letter where he says, this saying is trustworthy.

For if we if we have died, here's what he's saying, this is a trustworthy saying, if we have died with him, we also will live with him.

Guaranteed.

If we endure, we will also reign with him.

If we deny him, there are consequences, he says, he will also deny us.

But it's the last stanza here that provides us with the greatest hope.

This is an ancient hymn of sorts.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

Man, I am so grateful for that.

That even in the points where I have not been faithful, I've been faithless.

I've not been, I've not been accurate, I've been off.

That there is someone here that I don't parent by myself.

It's not me and Kim just trying to brawl our way through this thing of how do we continue to parent 30-year-olds?

How do we continue to have influence in the life of those who now have kids themselves?

Like, yeah, we're called to work and to serve and to do the faithful thing, but at the end of the day, the faithful that the results do not rely on my faithfulness.

It relies on the faithfulness of the one who has always been there.

The old ways work because the ancient of days never changes.

Can I just ask you as a parent as we get ready to close here?

Are you trying to redo situations in life that have been troubling to you or your kids?

I I'm here to tell you based on what we read in this text.

Look, Isaac made some mistakes.

God protected him because of his promise, because of his promise to Abimelech.

And if he's going to do that for Isaac, he will also do it for you.

Because after Isaac, there came one who was greater than Isaac, who God made promises to.

He laid Isaac out and he drew his hand back with the dagger in his hand to take Isaac's life and to fulfill God's command.

Hebrews tells us that he was so sure in the promises of God that even if he had cut that boy's throat, that God would have brought him back to life.

That's what Hebrews tells us.

That's how certain he was in the faith.

But God stayed his hand and gave a substitute sacrifice for Isaac to survive.

Later on that same mountain, of course, the true father did not stay his hand when it came time to make a sacrifice for sin.

He went through with it.

The true Isaac gave his life so that you and I can point our children to the greatest hope they will ever experience.