The Blessing: Sent Out, Not Pushed Out (Andrew Meher)

Andrew Meher: Well, I want to invite you then to open up your Bible to Genesis chapter 21. Genesis chapter 21. We're gonna start reading in verse 8 in a moment, and we're gonna go down through verse 21. If you're just joining us for the first time this summer through June, July, and August, we're doing a study through the book of Genesis. And we're focusing on a particular theme. So we're not covering every chapter and verse of Genesis through the summer, but we're focusing on the theme of blessing. There's this theme of blessing that emerges right in chapter one of Genesis, especially as it pertains to humans. And what does God want to do through humanity? And what we've been learning and exploring. Exploring in a big picture way is how God has never had a plan B. Humanity totally dropped the ball, and God is still committed to bringing a blessing to all of humanity through humanity. That's good news for you and me. That's good news. Because that means that in all of the messes of your life and my life, God still wants to move. And so what we that we've just been exploring that and reveling in the good news of that reality this morning. And we're going to continue to do the same in a passage that I found personally very ⁓ encouraging and powerful this morning. And it's the story of Hagar. So let's read the text together, chapter 21, starting in verse 8. And then I'll pray for us. It says this, the child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar, the Egyptian, had borne to Abraham, was mocking. And she said to Abraham, Get rid of that slave woman and her son. For that slave woman's son. Will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac. The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to Abraham, Do not be distressed about the boy and your maidservant. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because he is your offspring. So early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water, and gave them both to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders, and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was gone, She put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down nearby, about a bow shot away, for she thought, I cannot watch the boy die. And as she sat there nearby, she began to sob. God heard the boy crying. And the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, What is the matter, Hagar? Днопі. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation. Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. And while he was living in the desert of Peran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we ask that ⁓ your word this morning would go deep into our hearts, into our minds, into our bodies, Lord. That we would live out the delight of your word, as Psalm 119 tells us. That we would delight in your law, that we would delight in your instruction, that this word, Lord, Would sink deep into the fabric of who we are this morning. So, Spirit, I pray that you would open our eyes to see, our minds to understand, and our hearts to receive what you're saying to us this morning. In Jesus' name, Amen. I I want to just preface again, as I've mentioned a couple times this summer, ⁓ that I I'm kind of intentionally offering a little bit more of a what I'm calling a devotional style of preaching. During this series, a little bit more reflective. So if you're a note taker, you're welcome to take notes when I preach. I know some of you like to do that, but if you just need to close your eyes and listen and listen to what God is saying, that that's welcome as well, as we're as we're in this summer posture of listening to God about what he says about blessing. But so we get into this in our in our text that we just read. We are faced with probably the biggest of Abraham and Sarah's messes that they have to deal with. It's on full display here for us. It is here in their horrible treatment of Hagar, the maidservant of Sarah. Now, Hagar is a woman in the biblical story of Genesis who is sometimes not given much thought. But it's really profound the amount of tension, attention that God gives to Hagar in the story. Let me just start with that idea for a minute, because Sarah. The one who would bear the promised child is only ever spoken to directly by God one time in all of Genesis. I was really surprised when I realized that. And it's the words that we read last week. It's when God says to her, No, you did laugh. There's correction and there's rebuke. It's the only words that Sarah receives directly from God. I was shocked by that. Hagar, on the other hand, as we'll see shortly, has two full-blown conversations directly with God. This is the second of the two encounters with God that we read this morning. She, even in the first conversation, names God, gives God a name. is given a promise directly by God. This is someone who is outside of, in a sense, the main story of Scripture, but still deeply matters to God. I think that is an encouraging point that we should remember. Remember the point of Abraham and Sarah about them being blessed, right? Is that they would be blessed not so they can feel comfortable, but that they can be a blessing to every nation, every people of the earth. This is why God wants to bless them. And today. We see God's ultimate intention of blessing all people by how he gives special attention to someone even like Hagar on the outskirts of the story. There was a ⁓ poet by the name of Lucille Clifton, an African-American poet. She was in the early to middle part of the last century. And when I think of Hagar, I think of a particularly profound poem that Lucille Clifton wrote about the struggle, the trial, and experience of black women in particular, that really helps us get a sense of what it might be to be a person on the margins of the main story like Hagar was. The people in power in the story here, Abraham and Sarah, put Hagar in this impossible situation where she needed to try and survive. Black women have obviously historically experienced, you know, not only racial marginalization, but gender marginalization as well, and often kind of go unnoticed in most of the big historical narratives that we tend to talk about. They just survive instead. And this poem that I want to just briefly read to you, it's very short, is fascinating about how a woman like Hagar, on the edges, with no agency, might feel about the life that is laid out in front of her. She can't make her own decisions. She's stuck with whatever's handed to her. There doesn't seem to be any way through. Unless somehow a way can be made where there is absolutely no way. And this is what Clifton's poem kind of captures beautifully. Here's what she writes. She says, Won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life? I have no model, she writes. Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman, what did I see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. The poet asks us to celebrate with her because she is still here, living some kind of life, some kind of existence. She's not fully sure what it is, but it is a kind of life. It's in a place of uncertainty, a desert, sort of like Hagar was in. And somehow she keeps going. Hagar is like this woman. We first see the maidservant come on the scene just a few chapters earlier in chapter 16. And she comes into the story through horrible circumstances. Abraham and Sarah are agonizing over God's promises. How will they have a son to be made into this great nation, they wonder? And so Sarah, in one of her moments of panic, tells Abraham to take Hagar as a second wife. It's her maidservant. Have a child with her, Sarah says, so that that son can be my son and be my heir. Now we have no record of Hagar's willingness to play this role in the story. We have no clues suggesting that she was part of the decision-making process. Rather, what we have is a record of Hagar being forced into surrogacy, forced into sexual relations with her boss's husband. So what happens? Of course, Hagar gets pregnant, and Hagar starts to feel that she's now Sarah's equal because she has borne Abraham a son. This is actually a very logical thing in that culture for her to assume. But Sarah now turns around in chapter 16 and blames Abraham for the whole thing, and a massive fight and conflict ensues. Sarah starts to treat Hagar horrifically and harshly. So Hagar does the only thing she knows how to do in this situation. She runs away. And Hagar is encountered by God as she's running away. And God, oddly, tells her to go back to Sarah and to listen to what Sarah asks her to do. Now, this might sound like terribly cruel advice from God. At least I think it is. I don't know about you. Except that if Hagar had stayed out there, she would have died in the wilderness anyway. At least she would survive in a kind of life. God wants Hagar and her child kept safe because, as God says in chapter 16, I will increase your descendants so much, Hagar, that they will be too numerous to count. God promises that her son Ishmael will be a great nation, and Hagar gives God a name. You are the God who sees me. Anyone ever feel like you need to feel seen by God? Hagar felt seen by God in this moment. So Hagar is not unfamiliar with encounters with God and knowing that God is with her. As we see her story that we read this morning. So, anyway, what happens? Hagar goes back to Abraham and Sarah and she stays there. Ishmael, her son, is born and grows up and is likely a teenager at the time that our story takes place. But now there is a conflict and there's trouble again. And Sarah can't take it anymore. And she says to Abraham that he needs to drive Hagar out. The words in Hebrew are quite forceful here: exile her, cut her off, push her out, drive her out. And notice in the first encounter in Genesis 16, it is: take my maidservant, and here it is: get that slave girl out of here. She's demeaning Hagar in any way possible. Sarah is worried that Ishmael will share in the promise and the inheritance with her own newborn son Isaac. Now we're following ⁓ Hagar's story here this morning, but it is worth just noting for our benefit that when we allow our anxieties about God's faithfulness to control our lives, like Sarah and Abraham did, we end up creating Hagar and Ishmael situations in our lives. Friends, God is going to bring the promise, not you and I. But so many of the messes that we see in Genesis and we see in our lives are produced because of the bad decisions we make out of fear and anxiety, and they leave us with huge messes and consequences in the future. But what I find so comforting in the midst of all this, in this story, is that God does not do what I would do. Maybe this is what you would do too. Here's what I would do. If it were me, I would go back to Abraham and Sarah after the whole Hagar debacle happened in Genesis sixteen. And I would say, Guys, your life is a soap opera now. And I don't think this is gonna work out. You two are nuts. I'm gonna find someone else to bless so that they can be a blessing to the nations. This isn't working for me. That's what I would say if I were God. Because you and I, let's be honest, we see a certain amount of mess and we're like, hee, I'm staying away from that. But thankfully, God is not like us. God waits. And God asks Hagar even to wait and to trust him. In the midst of this mess, God just waits. God asks Hagar to wait and to survive in this kind of life that she is living, so that God can do what he plans to do, even through her, as he will through Abraham and Sarah. Finally, God tells Abraham, even though he's nervous about letting Hagar and Ishmael go, that even though Sarah has said all this, God says, Abraham, go ahead. You can send Hagar away. And he reassures Abraham, I'm going to make Ishmael a nation too. It is interesting that before, in the first story, God told Hagar to go back. But now God tells her, it's time to go. Sometimes we are tempted to run away from difficult circumstances before God says it's time. If we leave at the wrong time, we may miss out on the life that God wants to develop and give us in the midst of the trials and those difficult circumstances. But when the time is right, as with Hagar and Ishmael here, God says, it's time to go now. And this brings us to the point of our text. Sarah told Abraham to push Hagar out. Hagar had spent years being harassed, chased, mistreated by Sarah, and now she was, after all of that, being driven out, cut off, pushed out. of what seemed like the only place that made sense for her to be and perhaps the only place she had ever known. She may have grown up in their household. I remember a particularly difficult season in my life where I thought that God was going to do some really incredible, amazing things, and I had a sense that God was going to use me in a particular way. And it came to the point where I suddenly started to feel really pushed out. Almost like driven out from the situation. Like nothing's working. I was suddenly feeling like I'd been cut off. I was on the outside looking in, isolated and forgotten about, on the margins. I I felt like a failure in ministry. I I was unsure of what had even happened. I I was really bewildered, like w how you guys are acting like this is my fault. Nothing was working. I remember one day going on a walk in the evening and praying and asking God, like, Lord, what is going on? Why does it feel like everything is wrong? Like I'm I'm on the outside looking in. I was hopeless. Nothing made sense. I just remember this vividly, and I just walked around feeling like this is inexplicable. Have you ever been in that place? Like what what is happening right now? Has it happened with with a job of yours? A a relationship? A neighbor? A friendship? A season of illness or sickness in your life? Like, God, what's what's going on? Seasons in our lives where where it's been so bad. And then at the end of it, you're left pushed out like it was all your fault to begin with. Like, what the heck, God? This is what Hagar probably felt like in this moment. Driven out. God was all that work and staying and working for Sarah and listening to whatever she said. Was it all for nothing? I suffered. Did I do what I was told in that season, God? Didn't I do what you asked me to do? Just to be pushed out? Just to get driven out? What was the point of all that faithfulness, God? But this is when we need to have our eyes opened more than ever to what God is actually doing in the midst of these trials and in these sufferings and in these seasons where it seems like we're being pushed out. Because you see, while Sarah said to drive Hagar out, the text says that Abraham sent Hagar out. Do you hear the difference? Hagar, Sarah hoped, would be driven out, exile, hostility. Abraham sends her, prepared with food and water. This is significant. Hagar wasn't just suffering for no reason in that season. God was preparing her. All of the grief. She had to endure from Sarah over the next decade. Can you imagine it? All of the harsh treatment that Shirley followed her daily for her and her son Ishmael? She held fast to the promises God had given her, quietly and patiently and obediently as God had asked her. Now, to be clear, God was not approving of anything that happened to Hagar or how Hagar was treated. But God was certainly going to use that mistreatment to do a deep work in Hagar so that she was ready to be sent where God wanted her and wanted Ishmael. See, in my story I just shared, I felt like I was being pushed out in that season of life. But little did I know that it had been that season that God used to prepare me to be sent here to plant the church. And the circumstances that led to me feeling like I'm being pushed out, I gotta go. We're actually not being pushed out, but rather God sending me out. I was frustrated about those difficulties and questioning what was possible, but here we have found in the highlands of New Jersey a kind of life. Now that I'm on the other side of that season, I I I've learned this funny thing That it often can feel like you're being driven out. Your circumstances might actually be telling you, you indeed are being driven out. You're being pushed out, you're being cut off. But if God is with you, you've actually been sent out, not pushed out. If God is with you, what seems like being pushed out is actually being sent out. Even though the very circumstances of your life point to the opposite, point to the push-out, point to everything just falling apart, and all the blame falls on you, and you have to walk away. And everyone thinks it's your fault. If God is with you, you've actually been sent out, not pushed out. It doesn't matter if there's real success on the other end of that or not. All that matters is that God is with you. And if God is with you, all of that was not really being pushed out. It was being prepared to be sent out. So, friends, is God with you? Is God with you? You see, the problem with the hardships that lead to being pushed out in different life seasons, the problem with all that is we can become really bitter. And we can become extremely grieved over what has happened to us because it really does hurt. Can I get an amen? These things are horrible and they shouldn't happen to us. Being pushed out and experiencing strained relationships or losing opportunities or feeling like a lack of purpose, that's really painful. But if we ignore the pain and the sadness, hear me. If we ignore the pain and the sadness, we will not actually be able to see that God is with us. If we try and go right to everything's gonna be fine, praise God, instead of going, this really hurts, we won't actually get to see everything will be fine. Does that make sense to you? We can't deny what's real the pain, the sorrow, the shock, the bewilderment. But if we pay attention to it, we'll be able to start recognizing God's voice in the midst of that. And we'll notice that God is starting to open our eyes to a new way forward that wasn't there before. In Hagar's desperation, after they run out of food and water, she leaves her probably young teenage son under some shade somewhere and walks away. Because she can't bear to hear him suffer from starvation and dehydration. Now you've got to understand when it says they ran out of food and water, it's not like they had their last meal, and she's like, Well, you're on your own, and just walked away. It had probably been weeks or however long they could last without a drink of water or a bite of food. Starvation had surely hit their bodies. They were feeling the physical effects. Hagar was at the end of her rope, and so she walked away. And then after Hagar walks away, the text says she had a thought. Literally, the the NIV translation we read says she walked away, for she thought I cannot watch the boy die. But more literally, what she's saying there is she's thinking, do not let me watch the child die. It's a very simple statement of desperation. Yet the Hebrew here implies she's talking to someone. Do you hear that? She's not just saying, I don't want to see him die. She's talking to someone. Do not let me see him die. She's praying. One commentator actually says it this way that in a sense Hagar utters one of the first prayers in the Bible. Do not let me see the child die. That's a pretty good prayer to pray. Isn't that interesting how we can all relate to that on some level? Whether you've ever had children or not, there's something we implicitly understand about we don't want to see children die. We understand that children represent life, hope, future promise. This is in keeping with God's blessing in Genesis that we be fruitful in and multiply. This is the blessing that God has given us, that there be life. But I want to draw your attention specifically to the way Hagar prays this prayer. She prays out of desperation. It's not really a special prayer. She doesn't get on her face and say, ⁓ Lord, Father, I beseech thee, or something. There's no special fancy language. It says she thought, do not let me see the child die. It's a very basic prayer that any of us might pray. It's a prayer of absolute desperation at the end of her rope kind of prayer. It's a there's absolutely no way out of this kind of prayer. It's a there's nothing possible that can happen now to save me kind of prayer. And these are the kind of prayers, friends, that God loves to answer. God answers in a very fast sequence of responses. The text says God hears and then God calls to Hagar and then God reassures her, saying, I heard you. And then God promises her and reminds her again, hey, I'm going to make you a great nation. By the way, God said to Abraham before he sent Hagar out, I'll make Ishmael a nation too. And now to Hagar, he says, I'll make Ishmael a great nation. God opened her eyes to a new way, this woman on the edge, trying to survive, outside of what it seems to be the promises of God. But the text says that God was with the boy as he grew up. God was with them. Even though they were pushed out, the circumstances looked like they were being treated harshly and hostily. The reality was because God was with them, they had been sent out. I want you to see that when you feel pushed out, when you are bewildered about what has happened in your life, when you aren't sure where to go or what way might be open to you, your simple, desperate prayer is the most important thing you can do. Because when we have that posture of prayer, God opens our eyes to see that we have not been pushed out. We have been sent out. What circumstances in your life feel like you're being pushed out of? What spaces do you feel like you're finding yourself on the margins of, on the outside looking in, cut off from? Some cases it may be inexplicably so. Have you prayed yet? Have your prayers become desperate questions asking God for life? Or have you, in the midst of your anxiety, like Abraham and Sarah, birthed more Ishmaels? Friends, I want to challenge us as a church that there are blessings even when it seems like we're being pushed out. But we must be people who pray those desperate prayers and ask God to open our eyes to see the way forward. Ask the Lord this week in those situations to open your eyes. Ask God to bring life where there has been bewilderment, where there has been death, where there has been confusion. Ask the Lord for life and see how he answers. Because if God is with you, you have not been pushed out. You've been sent out. Would stand with me?

Genesis 21 · chapter mention Genesis 21 · chapter mention