Family Advice From The Life of Abraham

Good morning, church.

Hey, be taking your Bibles and turning with me to the book of Genesis, chapter 16.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

I'm going to join you there in just a moment.

I just want to make one comment about what Mike has just shared, which is, Mike, I think we don't want you doing math anymore.

Because I don't I do not like the idea of thinking that I am now 20% of the age of this country.

That does not sparkle with me.

Thank you, Mike, for your passion and for pointing us towards what are some very important issues related to what's happening in our culture and in our nation and our community.

Over the next four or five weeks, we're going to be walking through a series focused on the family, but it's going to be focused on a particular type of family.

I mean, maybe in a way, the only type of family there is.

I have a theory.

I think that what makes for compelling television is a presentation of dysfunctional families.

And I believe the reason my hypothesis goes like this: the reason that it is compelling televisions where you're watching, you know, whatever housewife's or whatever, if they're still doing those, or, you know, some documentary or something on Dateline or just dramatized family struggle.

The reason we like that so much is because it helps us to know we're not that weird when we think about our families, that this is just how families operate.

And this isn't new.

This is not an American having weird uncles and complicated kids and you know, crazy parents or whatever, that that's not a that's not an American phenomenon.

That that truth extends way back to the days of Genesis.

And so what we're going to do over the next four weeks is we're going to look at the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and examine how God is working within their broken relationships, what he's calling them to, and how you and I can leverage that truth to strengthen the family units around us that we have impact to do so.

And so uh I want to begin by sharing with you a bit of confession about all of this.

And that is a lot of what you're going to hear over the next four or five weeks is in many ways, it's a confession.

Because I've not done well as a parent.

I've not, you know, I'm not blown it in certain ways, but in in other ways, I've just I've just failed.

And I feel that way.

And I feel the weight of that.

And all I can do is turn to the grace of the Father and say, God, you you know where the gaps are, and you know where I have failed.

And I need you to step in.

And so that's my that's my hope.

It's my liberation.

It's it's all that I've got.

And so I want you to know when I when I share what I share up here with you, there's not a thing that's being said up here that hasn't pierced my heart deeply.

And I don't turn and reach for the power and grace of God to cover what I cannot.

How many of you need that as parents in here, or as spouses, or as children trying to minister to your parents or siblings?

It's tough.

For me, probably the greatest expression of what this looks like is preparing for the ministry.

Because I've got one of those stories, like a lot of pastors have had.

I have sacrificed far too much for the ministry in my family.

Not for Jesus, not for God.

You can never sacrifice too much for the God that we serve.

But I've sacrificed sacrificed far too much for my idea of ministry.

There was one semester in seminary which was not that long ago, uh, only about 5% of the of the birth of this nation ago.

And you could do the math.

And one particular semester where I was pastoring, I was working for the seminary for three separate professors.

It was the most any student had ever TA'd for uh for the number of professors in different disciplines.

I was doing a research project for the North American Mission Board and preaching for the seminary uh around North Texas.

Um it was a lot.

It was a lot.

And if someone looking from the outside, they might would look at that and say, oh well man, Major really loves the Lord.

And I and I think I did.

You know, Major's very dedicated, and I and I think I was.

But you know what Major was really trying to do?

Major was really trying to overcome a deficit.

He was trying to prove to everyone that he could, in spite of his vision impairment, knowing that that was going to be a big question, and I had something to prove, and I proved it at the expense of my children.

You do not want to do that.

Those of you who have young kids, the price is far too great.

See, the truth is, anytime that we attempt to do by our own effort to accomplish by strategy what God has given by promise, we are in a dangerous, dangerous place.

Now, that's my story.

You have your own.

Abraham was working on one here in chapter 16, verse number one.

We're going to walk through this passage together and we're going to see how Abraham failed.

There's some peace in that, right?

That the guy that God used to start the nation was at times a terrible father and a wretched husband.

Terrible, terrible husband.

And yet God redeemed him and used him so the rest of us can find some hope that we've not gone too far, that God's grace cannot reach us.

Now, through the through this chapter, what we're going to see is three separate moves.

And I want you to know in advance what they are because I want you to see how simple they are.

And I want you to see how simple these moves are, because I want you to feel how simple, how simple this all is.

I mean, how easy it is to fall into trying to do things our own way.

But how clear it is that we must not do that.

So here are the moves in this text.

We're going to see them, we're going to see the cause of their impatience, we're going to see the consequences of their impatience, and we're going to see the cure for their impatience.

All right, here we go.

The cause.

Look with me, if you will, at verse number one.

Now, Sarah, Abraham's wife, had become, had borne him no children.

This was the problem.

It was a problem number one, because God had promised Abraham many years prior, more than 10 years prior, that he was going to make him the father of many children.

And now here they are, late into their retirement age, and yet there still has been no children.

And of course, promises are glorious and they're a blessing, but they come with their own weight if you try to figure out how to get them done.

And something this significant, how do you do this at this age?

She had borne him no children.

And so all of this pressure pushes in on her, and without the scaffolding of belief in God, she's just feeling the weight of all of it until something pops.

And springing out of her is this ingenious idea that she had concerning her female Egyptian servant, whose name was Hagar.

Sarah came to Abram and said, Look, behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Now that's an important phrase.

If she really believed that and the promises that God had made, that God had promised her she was going to bear children, that Adam was going to have children, and that she was his wife, so you can do the math on how that should work out.

If she really believed that, and she believed that God was the one who was in charge of her barrenness, there would be some place for hope.

Like I don't know what God's doing in all of this, but I believe that God said A, but I see that God is doing B, and I don't know how that connects together, but I know somewhere along the line something important is about to happen.

Something miraculous is about to happen.

See, the real problem for Sarah is the same problem for you and I, and it's a problem of belief.

It's the cause of our issue.

We don't trust God or his timing.

And so out of her springs this idea, she busts, and out of her springs this idea.

Here's what you do, Abraham.

Go in to my servant, that so it may be, that she may obtain children by her, and Abram listened to the voice of Sarah, his wife.

Abram is not unbiased in this exchange.

I would imagine there was very little fight in him to prevent this from happening.

Abraham and Sarah had cooked up this very logical plan.

It makes sense, doesn't it?

Sarah is aging and barren.

Hagar is young and fertile.

And for the purposes of Abraham and Sarah's relationship, Hagar was little more than a commodity to them.

They owned her.

Now the Bible may declare something is the way it is without endorsing it, you understand.

And so the Bible isn't saying this is okay.

It's just recognizing here's how these broken people operated.

And I can tell you, based on the principles and teachings of Scripture, that you will never experience God's best for your life if you're treating people as a commodity to be used.

This is especially true of your family.

I mean, sometimes it's easy to turn to parents, to grandparents, to children, to grandchildren, and to friends, neighbors, cousins, brothers, sisters, and expect for them to fill some gap in our life that they were never meant to be leveraged for.

People are not commodities to be used.

They're treating Hagar as just a piece of property that they could fertilize and have them incubate a baby for her, for them.

You will never experience God's best that way.

Secondly, you will never experience God's best by treating God like an employee that you can order around.

God works on his own timing for his own glory.

Man, how many of you wish that like you could get that past your memory, past your eardrum, and past your memory into your heart?

God doesn't respond to my demands.

He loves me and wants to give me what's best for me, but I've got no idea what that is.

But I just feel the pressure of it pressing in on me.

And without the scaffolding of belief, it's just pushing and pushing and pushing.

Until finally out of me springs this genius idea.

I'll just work 60 hours a week for 14 months.

And somebody will notice and and I'll make it work.

We can never, it is dangerous to attempt to accomplish by human effort what God has promised by miracle.

This is, of course, we've all gone through this in our lives, and then also we witnessed it in the life of others.

It's like it's like the couple who can't wait for the house they can afford.

And so they buy the one they can't.

It's like the single person who really can't wait to be married.

And so they rush in and they marry someone and they call it love, but but it's not biblical.

And they're out on a limb.

And unless God redeems those situations in some miraculous way, unless the miracle comes in and touches those lives, they are headed for horrific experiences.

And that's exactly what happened to this couple.

So that's the cause.

Let's look at the consequence.

There's always consequences.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

You aren't making a decision that's going to be isolated without touching every other aspect of your life.

Life is too compact for that to happen.

If you feel like life is crowding in on you, you're not wrong.

Like it's here, and everything is connected to everything else.

They thought they had it all together, but verse number three, which is not in your slides, but I'm just going to read it to you, tells us how things began to unravel.

Sarah, Abraham's wife, please notice how the text continues to repeat who she is.

It's not because the author thinks you forgot it from two verses ago.

He's just making a point.

That like they're outside bounds here.

This is not, we know this is not God's plan because this is not God's design from the beginning.

Jesus said, from the beginning it was not so.

All of these aberrations about marriage and the designs we try to slant and and conform marriage to can not work to accomplish God's best.

God gave the design for marriage, and this isn't it.

Abraham, his wife, looked, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and watch the particular words that he uses here.

Gave her to Abraham, her husband, to be a wife to him.

The words took and gave are probably familiar to you if you've spent any time around Genesis chapter three, where Adam and Eve are in the garden.

They have all the Bible that they need, which is two verses long.

Verse number one, go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

I don't need to tell you guys what that means, right?

Go.

You do that thing, right?

Verse number two, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That's it.

That was their Bible in totality.

They got at least half of it wrong.

She took the fruit and she gave the fruit to him.

That's where the fall started.

The the commentator, the narrator here is doing a great job at like hinting at the fact that like this is not going to end well.

The garden did not end well for the first family.

This isn't going to serve the first family of Israel very well either.

And of course, you can see that because this fix seems to work, but only for about half a verse.

Look at verse number four.

And he went into Hagar and she conceived.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked at with contempt on her mistress.

Of course she did.

She's young, infertile, able to do what her mistress could not.

The anger and frustration that she would have felt towards the one percenters would have been expressed on her face, the way she held that baby, the way she held that baby back, the way she would have weaponized Ishmael before her.

You know, that's the funny thing about things that we want, that we pray for, experiences that we want, that we we pray for.

We cannot determine how they are going to impact our emotions.

You just don't know.

Now you want the new job, and that's great, but you don't know how you're going to respond to the frustration.

You can know you've never been there before.

You want the new relationship with the new person, and the old person is like problematic, and you've been married for a long time, and you're just so convinced that the new person has all of this stuff to offer, but you can't possibly know.

Set aside for a moment what the scripture says, you, your emotions, you can't possibly know the complicated nuances of that relationship and how damaging it's going to be to separate this from that.

Will they ever trust you?

If you've left one spouse for them, with like there's going to be some work that's going to have to be done to make that problem work out.

You see, you can't fully know what kind of emotional struggle you're going to experience whenever you make a decision that seems so clear to you.

Been there many times, haven't you?

All I need is this job.

All I need is this experience.

All I need is this resource, this financial security.

And I get there and I find out that what I'm really searching for is just it's just beyond the horizon.

It's just not here yet.

Well, this is Sarah.

She's she's wrecked by this.

And she goes to Abraham and she does the most reasonable thing possible.

She blames her husband.

Listen, I pay a lot of prices for these jokes.

I just want you to know.

So you need to do better.

Because this cost me, I'm sacrificing for you.

So Sarah goes to Abraham and says, May the wrong done against me be on you.

I gave my servant to you, uh, to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.

She's not accepting responsibility for her part of this, which she certainly should, because this was her idea, at least verbalized.

It may have been Abraham's idea somewhere in the recesses of his mind, but it was her plan that was put into place.

And she turns to him and says, This is your fault.

Why would she do that?

Husbands, let me just lay something on you here, and this is not to diminish the value or impact of wives in their home.

But husbands, the Bible is very clear.

Ephesians chapter 4 says, you are to be Christ in your home.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

That's a weight.

I share that with every couple whenever I marry them.

I start with the wife because that's what Paul did in Ephesians chapter 4.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

I say, hey, listen, here's the you're called to subject yourself to reverence, to respect your husband.

I get some strange looks on that one today, Carrie.

I'll just tell you.

And it's a lot.

Like, you know, I just, I, I don't have, I don't have the confidence to go to Kim and tell her she should respect me, that she should honor me, that she should serve me.

Like, but she knows me way too well to know that any of that's like legitimately mine, mine in my hand.

And yet, here's the Bible that says, respect, honor your husbands.

And I lay that on the on the spouse, and I can kind of imagine the new grooms over there thinking to himself, okay, Pastor, set me up good here.

This isn't this is nice.

This is good.

But then I turn to him and say, But what God is given to you is far heavier to carry.

She's supposed to honor you the way the church should honor Christ.

You are called by God to love her in action, to love her in honor, to love her in discipline and in preparing her soul.

You're to you're to love her the way Christ loves the church.

Good luck with that.

I've been at that business for 33 years.

I'm not there yet, guys.

I mean, I am miles away from that.

But yet it's laid on me, husbands.

It's laid on us.

This is our responsibility.

You are to be Christ in your home.

There's some sample of that in here.

Like she sees that, and Abraham knows it, and she maybe he doesn't, because he what he does next is is even more reckless.

She says to him, May the Lord judge between me and you, um, and uh but between uh between you and me, she says, May the Lord judge between me and you and me.

You know what's right, Abraham.

And you didn't prevent this.

And you should have.

She's not faultless.

But he's he's to be priest in his home.

So what does Abraham?

Do.

This is the consequence.

You can watch how this thing sort of erodes and devolves.

Abraham said to Sarah, look, she's your servant.

She's in your hand, your power.

Do to her whatever you please.

He advocates.

He just throws his hands up and says, I don't want any part of this.

And he takes a step back and he goes downstairs and he turns on the television and he watches six hours at Sports Center.

Or something.

It's easy.

Guys, when we can't fight and we know that we can't, because you just can't, you just can't win those arguments, right?

Whenever you're wrong, it's it's easy to flee and to run away.

And the best place to run away to is the coffee shop, extra hours at work, the basement, the yard, the golf course.

A lot of places that we can flee to.

And they all have their proper place, right?

They have their proper place.

But yet we use them very often to do what Abraham is doing here, which is to quit, just to take the easy road out.

You can kind of imagine him throwing his hands up and seeing the complicated knot that he is tied and thinking to himself, this, I don't know what to do with this.

I don't know what to do with this problem.

And throwing his hands up and saying, I don't know, just whatever you want to do.

Don't ask me, throwing his hands up.

This is huge consequence for the family.

Creates this rupture between the two of them.

Of course, Hagar is caught in the middle.

Very important to remember whenever you read this story that Hagar is not the villain.

I understand what happens later in the Bible with her descendants.

I understand what has occurred since then in the Mideast and the conflict that occurs over there.

They're not the villains, okay?

He's not the villain.

She's not the villain.

They are, in this case, especially in this text, Hagar is the victim of this couple's manipulation.

And she is abused and recklessly done away with.

You cannot do things your way without someone you love getting hurt.

It's just not possible.

Collateral damage is not collateral, it's everywhere.

And whenever we attempt to accomplish by our own strength what God has decreed by his power, we are in dangerous territory of hurting ourselves and people that we love.

Pretty good motivation to do things God's way.

Okay, finally, so what's the cure?

What's the solution for this?

Because many of us find ourselves, in fact, I'm just going to say all of us find ourselves in some way in this pipeline where we've experienced the cause, the frustration, the impatience, the not waiting on the Lord, the looking at the promise and not following through to allow him to work on his own timing.

What do we do in a case like that when we find ourselves in this situation?

What do I do whenever I look and I'm like, I'm just, man, there's so much, so much.

If God gave me another chance, I would do differently, but I can't rewind the clock.

What do I do from this moment forward?

Watch what happens next.

Look at the cure.

She is sent out into the desert, and the angel of the Lord finds her.

Verse number seven.

He finds her down near the springs on the way to Shore.

Now, Shore is essentially the boundary between Egypt and Cana, the promised land.

There was a large defensive wall and a single pool that was there to nourish travelers as they made their way from Cana down to Egypt.

Now you know where Hagar is from, so what Hagar is doing is she's going to the only place she knows to go to.

She's going home.

She's retreating, broken, pregnant.

The Lord finds her there, and watch what God says to her.

He says, Hagar, calls her by her name, and then gives her title, her role.

What does he say?

Servant of Sarah.

Do you think she wants to hear that right about now?

No.

God has a way of telling truths to us, even if we don't want to hear them.

Telling us what we are, who's we, who we're serving.

Like he has a way of doing that.

He's not here to make us happy.

Now, ultimately, his holiness given to us in Christ will make us happy, but his objective is not to make us happy.

God isn't waking up in the morning and thinking to himself, how do I get a dopamine kick to her, to him?

It's not what he's doing.

He lays it on her.

This is the real life.

This is really where you are.

And there's no way of getting around it, but that doesn't mean there's an end.

And we all wake up sometimes and we see the carnage of the causes and the consequences of our actions, and we think to ourselves, what are we going to do?

And all we can do is just stand here and just look.

Look at what's left.

And it's difficult to imagine, but that doesn't mean that there's not a way back, that there's not a way forward, that God is done with you.

God is not done with her.

He asks her the a similar question or takes a similar approach as he did to Adam and Eve, who was alluded to, who were alluded to earlier.

He says, Where are you come from?

And where are you going?

You think she fell off God's GPS system?

He's like, he's got her tagged, but like something happened and he lost her for a few minutes.

He knows where she came from.

He knows where she's going.

She's running home.

She's answering this, he's asking this question so that she can verbalize it and acknowledge what's going on here.

She said to him, I am fleeing from my mistress, Sarah, the one you just referenced.

And the angel of the Lord said to her, How many of you know the commands of the Lord are not always easy?

I mean, yeah, his burden is light and it's easy, but it's like, it's tough.

Sometimes I don't want to do what God tells me to do.

He says, return to your mistress and submit to her.

That's not fair.

Can we just acknowledge that?

It's not fair.

In your relationships, whenever you whenever you show love, whenever you want to show truth, frustration, or hatred, it's not fair.

How many times I've shared this with individuals who are in conflict in a church or in a family or in a community, I say to them, here's what you should do.

And they look at me about like that's that's crazy.

Because it's not fair.

And the truth is, yeah, of course it's not fair.

It's not fair to be the last one to receive a blow.

That's not fair.

But it is exactly what Jesus did for us, and it's what we are called to do for him.

God is not telling her to do something fair.

God is telling her to do something that is best for her relationship with him and best for his glory.

And there's nothing better than that.

Life's not fair, is it?

The angel of the Lord gives her this promise.

He says, I will surely multiply your offspring so that so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.

Do you know who else had received that promise?

Abraham.

She receives the same promise as the patriarch receives.

God blesses her.

God has a way of superintending problems that we create and making out of them a great nation.

So God tells her, Ishmael is going to be his name, and he's going to be a wild donkey of a man.

What a weird translation, a thing to say about someone's unborn child.

Your child is going to be a wild donkey, and God's telling her the truth.

He's going to be a wild man, and you're going to call him Ishmael, which means God hears and he gives her this promise that it's going to be okay.

It doesn't feel okay right now, and it's not going to be easy.

But if your concern is for the well-being of your child, the best thing you can do is follow me.

How many of us would do well to hear that?

That it's not going to be easy, it's going to be frustrating.

You're going to eat a lot of crow.

You're going to have to say some things that make you uncomfortable, make them uncomfortable.

But it's the best thing you can do if you care for the well-being of your child.

So she stands up, she calls the place, the Lord has spoken, or the Lord spoke to her.

She called the place, you are the God who sees.

Whenever you were not in the place where you were leading your family well, God, God saw.

She sees this and she dedicates the whole place to the God who sees because truly she says he has seen and heard from me.

He looks after me.

Can I just tell you, God looks after you?

It is a dangerous thing to attempt to accomplish by strategy what God has promised by miracle.

We work ourselves in the corners, we cannot possibly paint ourselves out.

And the greatest way that we find ourselves in this situation is when we become impatient for God to move.

You know, timing is crucially important to God.

He's all about timing in Scripture.

Abraham received the promise, but had to wait.

His descendants, where God tells him, are going to go into Egypt and they're going to be there for a little while, and they're going to have to wait 400 years.

And then Moses comes out and he's ready to be the savior of Israel, and he makes this bone-headed decision and has to flee into the wilderness where he has to wait 40 years.

David was appointed king, but then he had to wait for God to move.

Jesus wasn't 13 whenever he started his ministry.

He was 30.

Jesus himself had to wait.

Timing is everything.

That's why Paul says, in the fullness of time, when it was just right, God is all about timing.

That's why we're told in the Old Testament, things like, be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.

Um fret not yourself.

Or from the words of Isaiah, Isaiah says, But they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

I know you've heard that verse a thousand times before, but hear it one more time.

They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.

Weary, you're tired, you don't know what to do.

Isaiah says, if you'll just stop running the treadmill, if you'll just wait, you will find fresh breath and renewed strength.

Later, Jeremiah, Isaiah's counterpart to the south, as they were falling to the Babylonians, says, The Lord is good to those who wait on him.

It's good, Isaiah says, that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Paul in the book of Galatians says, Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for we will reap if we do not give up.

What's he saying?

He's saying, wait, be patient.

And then James, of course, probably the most direct encouragement to wait, he says, Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord.

Establish your hearts.

Put your feet in and just stand there and be patient.

And wait.

Don't try to accomplish by human struggle and ingenuity what God has dedicated by promise and miracle.

The scaffolding of our belief is the only thing that stands between us and the pressure just blowing out somewhere and us concocting some crazy idea of our own making that will lead to a place not unlike what Abraham and Sarah faced.

I want to give you, in the final few minutes we have here together, three principles that I think will help do this.

Because it's easy for me to stand up here and say, be patient.

And you know what that's going to do if I yell it enough?

It's going to make you very anxious and impatient for the sermon to end.

Be patient.

How do we accomplish this?

Here are three principles that I think if we meditate on will help us to wait on the Lord, to honor God's work in our family.

Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, here they are.

God is our source of patience.

God is our source of patience.

This is important for us to realize because the truth is, if you do not realize that God is your source of patience, everything becomes about you and must be accomplished before the clock runs out.

Some years ago, Kim and I went to, we took the kids to Disney.

We told them for Christmas, we're buying you all Disney passes.

But what we did not tell them initially is that we were getting a, because we got a deal on it, we get we're getting a one-day uh park hopper pass to Disney.

It was a bargain.

But can you imagine trying to see everything that Disney has to offer in those four parks in a single day?

Man, I still remember sitting there on the tram riding across.

We got there just as soon as the parks park opened, but you know, we were still late, like there was like 15 or 20 minutes trying to wait on the the tram to get there, and then we got to wait in the line and like my knees like bouncing.

You know how you do, like my knees bouncing.

I'm like, oh no, the top you know, we only got 12 hours to to see everything here because there was this there was this deadline that was looming out there.

That's the same kind of sensation for us.

Like, if all there is in this world is all there is in the world for you, then of course you're going to we're going to be anxious and we're going to be impatient and we're going to be pressing and the scaffolding of belief is going to not be there.

And so we're going to feel this pressure to do things our way as quickly as possible, because after all, you've only got 10 or 20 years left to live.

You don't know, you don't want to waste those.

Makes the most sense possible.

Leads to catastrophe.

God is the source of patience.

This is this is why this is most clearly seen whenever Moses very anxiously is saying to God, I want to know you reveal yourself to me, and God reveals Himself to Moses.

He could have revealed any piece of his character to Moses that he wanted to, but the character, part of his character that he revealed to Moses was the part of his character that said, I am patient.

If we are going to show and share patience in our homes, it's not going to be because we've created it.

It's going to be because God from his heart has longed it to us.

He is the source of patience, no different than he's the source of love.

God is the source of patience.

Number two, patience is not built, it's grown.

That doesn't mean you can't work on it and practice it and develop that skill.

God allows us to have something to do here on earth while we're down here.

But whenever you open up the book of Galatians, you see Paul first off challenging the people to avoid the works of the flesh, and then in the place of the works of the flesh, to allow in those voids in their life to grow the works of the spirit.

And one of those works of the spirit, right up front, is patience.

It's a work of the spirit that God grows up inside of us.

What does that mean?

It means the closer you connect to the spirit, the more you engage with this love that comes on, this uh patience that only comes from the heart of God.

He's he's he has a monopoly on patience because he's eternal and he never has to rush to do anything.

And through the spirit, he allows us to experience the growth of the patience in our life.

How do we experience that?

I would suggest to you that sure it happens through prayer.

Why wouldn't a preacher recommend that we pray more?

You should be praying more.

Pray.

You see God's face.

And the more you call out to God and ask him for his help, the more you return to the Spirit and say, I need your work in my life, the more we realize it's not up to me.

Now I know Sarah is old, and this doesn't make any sense, and the math no longer is even reasonable to talk about.

But yet, God, I'm turning to you, and the more we pray to him, the more we rely on him, the more the scaffolding of belief is secured, and we are patient to wait on God.

Number two, reading his word.

The Spirit is the author of Scripture.

We're told that.

And the more we hear the Spirit's voice, the more we see the Spirit work, the more we understand that God is working on his timetable and not ours.

All right, number three, waiting is not wasted time.

Waiting is not wasted time.

As God, according to Peter, tries our faith, it develops patience.

It's really the only recipe for patience that works.

For God to cause us to see how he's worked in the past.

You know, I waited.

You know, I waited.

And whenever I waited, and I didn't get out ahead of God, something happened, and I can see his hand all over my life.

My kids are about to move to Charlotte.

If I seem emotional to you, that's why.

They were originally heading to Nashville.

And in the course of their preparation to move, they were delayed by someone who did not do their job.

And it was so frustrating, and I get it, because whenever you're moving, I got all these moving parts that have to be taken care of, and they're two very focused individuals, and they do their job, and they think everyone else should do their job right too.

And so they were very frustrated.

They were they were delayed.

And then two days after that happened, when they were at our house and they were so frustrated at how this guy hadn't done his job and it didn't work out.

Two days later, they got another phone call, and it was an incredible job opportunity for them in another city, in another state that would not have been on the table if they weren't delayed.

Now, I I know sometimes the story's not quite that clear.

My prayer is for them is that they they see, and I think they do, they've talked about it, they see how that how that God delayed them here.

It wasn't fun, but it was necessary, so that over here this thing could open up.

God has a reason for why we are where we are, and why the promise didn't work out exactly like we intended.

Wonder how many nurseries Sarah created in her mind over the course of the years.

When maybe it seemed like maybe she was pregnant and then she wasn't, and how many heartbreaks and how long, how difficult that must have been.

But at just the right time, we may not always know why or what comes up comes from it, but we do know at just the right time, God accomplishes his good pleasure in and through us.

The thing that we must do is to avoid the danger of attempting to accomplish by human effort what he has promised by miracle.

And they're all miracles, right?

And if you you know, if you have raised a teenager, that whole experience is miraculous.

The things you don't do, the restraint you show, it's miraculous.

Man, it's miraculous that couples stay together as selfish and as man, as as as many opportunities as there are today to flee, to redream some false narrative if you just give up and yet marriages remain, they stick together.

That's a miracle.

And that's not accomplished by our effort alone.

It's accomplished by the promise of the one who said, Listen, I'm not going to leave you.

I'm not going to forsake you.

You're not always going to enjoy where I lead you to.

We're going to wander through some valleys of the shadow of death.

But you don't need to fear evil because I am with you.

That's his promise.