El Ro-ee: The God Who Sees Me

Thank you.

Good morning.

Wow.

It's so good to be here and to hear all those different languages worshiping the Lord together, isn't it?

I think of the scripture that says the day will come when every knee will bow, when every tongue, when every language in every language will confess that Jesus, Yeshua, is Lord to the glory of the Father.

Aren't you glad we got a head start on this?

Praise God.

Well, I was so inspired by all the different languages that I thought I would start with a Hebrew lesson, a quick Hebrew lesson.

Is that okay?

You ready to learn some Hebrew?

Okay, it's a very simple, it's very simple.

You ready?

Here it comes.

El Roe.

Up on the screen now.

Let's try that together.

El Roe.

El Roe.

This is a name of God, and it means the Lord who sees.

The Lord who sees.

El Roe, the Lord who sees.

Interestingly, it's very similar to another Hebrew name of God that we find in Psalm chapter 23.

Psalms 23 · chapter mention

It's just one Hebrew letter different, but it's pronounced the same in English, El Roe or El Roe, the Lord, our shepherd.

And although they're different, spelled differently in Hebrew, they share the same function.

They reveal the same function that God not only sees, but that God guides.

That guide God is guiding us.

The idea of God seeing us isn't the idea that he's looking over us, making notes of everything we do wrong.

That he's looking over us with a billy club, ready to bop us when we do something wrong, but he's looking over us through the eyes of love and grace and compassion to guide us as a shepherd guides his sheep into our destiny.

Isn't that good?

Elroe, the God who sees, or the God who sees me.

Now, this Hebrew name of God holds a revelation that I believe can change your life when you get a hold of it.

And I'm going to give you a couple of personal examples of this.

The God who sees me.

We need to go back to the context of this revelation.

The name comes from Genesis chapter 16.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

And it's connected with a woman named Hagar or Hagar.

She's the mother of Ishmael, who becomes the father of the Arab nations.

And by the way, if you want to understand how complex the Middle East situation is, it goes back to Ishmael and Isaac.

So it's very, very complex and goes back very far.

So Agar is the mother of Ishmael, who becomes the father of the Arab people.

Kind of ironic that a Jewish evangelist called to reach his own people would be giving a message today about the Arab people.

But it makes total sense in the light of this global impact weekend.

God is good.

And God loves everyone.

Now let me recap the story for you.

God has called a man named Abraham, that's not yet his name, but he becomes Abraham at 75 years of age.

Wow.

That's pretty late in life.

And he tells Abraham to go to a land that he will show him, to leave everything behind, his culture, his family, his identity, everything, and to pick up and leave and go to a land that he would yet show him.

Friends, that's faith.

Abraham waking up every morning saying, Lord, which way today?

Can you imagine?

That's what Abraham did.

Sarah, his wife, was nine or ten years younger than he was, so she would have been 64 or 65, and we're told she was barren.

She could not have children, but yet God promised not only would they have a child of promise, but that child would grow into a great nation that was more than the stars of heaven or the sands of the seashore.

That was God's promise if they obeyed him.

But she was barren, and they tried for 10 years to fulfill this vision.

Of course, Sarah became frustrated, Abraham became frustrated, and Sarah came up with an idea.

And that's where we pick up the story in Genesis chapter 16.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

You can follow along on the screen.

Now Sarai, yet to be Sarah, Abram's wife, had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar.

And so she said to Abram, The Lord has kept me from having children.

Go sleep with my slave.

Perhaps she can build a family, or we can build a family through her.

So Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

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

He slept with Hagar and she conceived.

Now, so far, so good.

Abraham is going to have a son.

They're going to fulfill this promise through Hagar.

But then everything goes wrong.

Let's read on.

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

Then Sarah said to Abram, you're responsible for the wrong that I'm suffering.

I hear the ones that are married laughing.

I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows that she's pregnant, she despises me.

May the Lord judge between you and me.

Your slave is in your hands, Avram said.

Do with her whatever you think best.

Then Sarai mistreated Hagar, and so she fled from her.

So Sarai blames Abram for her idea.

Now I'd really like to preach on this for a few minutes.

Because I have experienced this same thing in my home.

And if I had a marriage ministry, I would, but since I don't, I'm going to leave this one for Pastor Jimmy to deal with, okay?

Pastor Jimmy, go for it.

I will say this: that Abram had the last word, as we husbands usually do.

Yes, dear.

Hagar goes from the favored and trusted, the beloved, to despised and unwanted.

Think about this.

Nothing's changed.

This is human nature.

There's nothing worse than a family division.

Isn't that true?

This is a really bad day for her.

Now we've all had bad days.

Some of us bad weeks and months.

We go through difficult times.

Welcome to humanity.

Welcome to life.

When we signed up for this, we were never promised in the Word of God that we would tiptoe through the tulips.

Some of you remember that reference.

In fact, we're promised a more difficult, more challenging life when we follow the Lord.

Isn't that true?

We're not promised that all of our challenges will go away.

We're promised more challenges, more difficulties.

Life is about challenge.

Life is about working through difficult circumstances, but we have the Lord now to see us through.

We've all had bad days.

You know you're having a bad day when the bird that's singing outside your window is a vulture.

You know you're having a bad day when people send your wife sympathy cards on your anniversary.

Or when you have to pay your Visa card with your MasterCard.

Some of you can relate to that.

You know you're having a bad day when you find out that your pacemaker only has a 30-day guarantee.

Or how about this one?

You're having a bad day when your children's school calls to surrender.

What starts out as a great thing for Hagar turns into something terrible.

Hagar goes from delight to despair.

She goes from elation to desperation.

Can you relate?

And she runs away.

Now we pick up the story in verse seven.

Let's go there.

So Hagar in despair runs into the desert, and we're told that the angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert.

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

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

And where are you going?

I want to stop there.

I want to just I just want to focus on this question for a few minutes.

Where have you come from?

And where are you going?

Think about this.

So let's look first at the first part of the question.

Where have you come from?

Hagar replies, I'm running away from my mistress.

Now I had a sense as I read this many, many times, there's something more here to this that God is asking.

This is a really, really important question that the Lord is asking Hagar and is asking us.

Where have you come from?

What is God really asking Hagar?

Where have you come from?

I went back to the Hebrew and I began to really dig into this, knowing there was something more.

And as I looked at it in the Hebrew, I noticed something.

It was a revelation, it just like a light going on.

I saw the same language in this question that I saw repeatedly in the Passover Exodus story, when God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

It's repeated throughout our history.

It's the watershed event in Judaism, the God who delivered us out of Egypt, who brought us forth out of Egypt.

And in this question, where have you come from?

I saw that same language in the Hebrew, and then it hit.

What God is really asking Hagar is not where have you come from, but where have you been brought from?

Don't miss this.

If you ask me, where have you come from?

I'll tell you I came from Phoenix yesterday.

I flew from Phoenix.

But if you ask me, where have you been brought from, what has God brought you out of, in other words, I'll have a much different answer for you.

I would tell you about a Jewish boy that was searching for truth from the time that he was knee.

A Jewish boy who had been taught the Shema, Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one who had learned all about the rich heritage of my people, that I was one of the chosen people.

Remember asking a teacher in synagogue, what does it mean that we're chosen?

What are we chosen for?

And she said, Jonathan, we were chosen to be persecuted.

So I thought, well, that's not for me.

I'll think I'll find some other direction.

But I was searching.

I always believed that there was more to this life.

I always was curious about what happens after you die, and I was searching for those answers.

I'd tell you about a Jewish boy who went on to college and in his search for God, there's an interesting verse that says that the Jewish people have a zeal for God, but without knowledge.

Because Christ wasn't an option for me.

Jesus was the other God, the God of Christianity.

We had our God, they had they had Jesus, we had Jesus, or they had Jesus, we had our God, the God of Israel.

But for me, God was a distant God who had done great things in our history and then disappeared, was untouchable, unreachable, his name unpronounceable.

And so we have a zeal for God, but without knowledge, and so we search in all the wrong places.

I tell you about a boy who got involved in the cults, the occult drugs.

I referred to myself as an unlicensed pharmacist.

I'll let you figure that one out.

Following the Grateful Dead, I got involved in Hare Krishna until I found out that if you wanted to move forward in Hare Krishna, the masters shaved their heads and I had already been losing my hair.

I said, they're not getting one hair from me.

So that was it for Hare Krishna.

I tell you about the Bible study I went to at age 20, the third Saturday night of May in 1980, in Amherst, New York, when I was confronted with the gospel and for the first time in my life felt my separation from God and prayed a prayer.

I don't remember the prayer, I just remember going home and knowing that something had changed and trying to reject that for weeks, but overwhelmed with the desire to read the Bible, went on a search to find the Bible and read the Bible for the first time.

You'd think as a Jew that I'd read the Bible cover to cover were the people of the book, but I had never read my own scriptures.

I remember reading the Bible for the first time.

I began in the book of Matthew and discovered amazingly that Jesus was Jewish.

I thought that he was Catholic.

I discovered that he was born in Israel.

I thought he was born in Rome, in the Vatican.

I thought that Jesus was his first name and Christ his last name, Jesus Christ, son of Mr.

and Mrs.

Christ.

And then I discovered that he was sent to his own people, the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

I can't communicate the shock of that discovery.

And then discovering that all of the first disciples were Jews who never gave up their identity as Jews.

They never formally converted to Christianity, they had found their promised Messiah.

It completely transformed my life.

I tell you about the incredible experiences reading the scripture and God speaking to me.

A transforming experience that went from knowing about God to knowing God personally.

And my life was completely changed at age 20, 38 years ago.

And I've never been the same since.

Praise God.

Praise God.

That's where God brought me out of.

That transformation, that same transformation that Paul had on the road to Damascus.

Think about Paul.

He's beaten with rods, he's stoned, he's left for dead, he's ostracized.

And he goes on in his faith.

Why?

Because he had an encounter with Jesus himself that transformed his life forever.

Peter, James, John, Andrew were transformed when Jesus said, Come follow me and I'll make you fishers of men.

And they could never go back to their old life because of where God brought them from.

Their encounter with Jesus.

My friends, that's our anchor.

That's the anchor that keeps us from swaying during tough times, that helps us to make it through the trials and tribulations of life.

Where has God brought you out of?

Never forget that experience that transformed your life and made you a new creation and Messiah.

It's no longer you that lives, it's Christ, it's Messiah that lives in you.

Do you get that?

That's what God is asking Hagar.

Where have you been brought from?

And friends, if you didn't have an experience like that, if you haven't had a transformational experience with God, he's knocking at the door of your heart.

Today's the day of your salvation.

Don't miss this opportunity to be transformed from within to become a new creation.

Hagar was an Egyptian slave who had been given to Abraham and Sarah by the Pharaoh because he was interested in Sarah.

She was a beautiful woman, and as a result, a plague came on the house of Pharaoh.

So he started to give Abraham everything.

He loaded it up with slaves, male and female, with animals.

And Hagar came along with that package to stop the plague.

Think of this woman who was delivered from a plague, who became part of the inner circle out of a huge household.

Abraham had well over a thousand in his household, and it's Hagar that becomes the trusted handservant, maidservant to Sarah out of this huge household.

Part of the inner circle where she experienced the blessings of God in her life.

Where has God brought you from?

What crisis has God brought you out of?

Think back on that moment.

You may be going through a crisis today.

You may simply have drifted away from him because of the cares of the world.

Think back on what he did for you, on where he's brought you from.

Where have you come from?

And then he asks, Where are you going?

The Bible tells us that Hagar was headed for Shur, which is part of the Arabian desert.

It's on the northeastern border of Egypt.

Interestingly, she was brought out of Egypt.

The grandmother of the Arab people was brought out of Egypt generations before the children of Israel were brought out of Egypt.

And now she's going back to Egypt.

She's going back to the old life, and there's nothing for her there.

Friends, if you are drifting back to the old life, listen to me.

There is nothing there for you.

The enemy may be tempting you and telling you, go back, it was a better life.

There is nothing there for you.

There's nothing for you in Egypt.

Where are you going?

I love the verse in Proverbs 29 that says, where there is no vision, the people perish.

The reason for that is because without vision, there's no hope.

Hope is confident expectation on what is yet to come to pass, on things that haven't yet taken place.

And without vision, you have no hope.

Without hope, you have no purpose.

When we lose our vision, we lose our hope.

And when we lose our hope, we stray from God and we slip back.

I love Philippians 3 22.

I press on to take hold of that which Christ has taken hold of me for.

Friends, every one of you in this room has a destiny.

A destiny that God ordained for your life before you were ever born.

Think about it, it's mind-blowing.

Every one of you has a unique purpose to fulfill.

If you don't know what that is, find out, find your place.

Get a vision for your life because when you have vision, you have hope.

Hagar had lost her vision.

And God shows her her destiny.

Let's look on.

It says, Then the angel of the Lord told her, Go back to your mistress and submit to her.

The angel added, I will increase your descendants so much that they too will be too numerous to count.

The angel of the Lord also said to her, You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son, and you shall call his name Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your misery.

Ishmael actually means the Lord hears.

In that moment, God renews Hagar's hope.

He gives her a new vision for her life.

It's not in vain, it's not wasted, it's not over.

And here's something really cool.

This is the first time the angel of the Lord appears in the Bible.

We see the angel of the Lord again, two chapters later, where one of the three men that visit Abraham is the Lord himself, and Abraham bargains for Sodom.

Gets the Lord down to ten.

Amazing Jewish passage, by the way.

This is the same angel of the Lord that wrestles with Jacob and changes his name to Israel.

Who is the angel of the Lord?

This is the pre-incarnant Jesus.

This is Yeshua himself coming to save the grandmother of the Arab nation.

Isn't that amazing?

Jesus himself.

What an amazing picture.

How God loves the Arab people.

You can clap for that one.

That's an amazing thing.

And that's where this passage comes from.

Genesis 16, 13, she gave the name to the Lord who spoke to her.

You are the God who sees me.

For she said, I have seen the God who sees me.

Or another way, I have seen that God sees me.

Now, friends, this is the revelation that will change your life.

It's not the revelation that God sees.

It's not the revelation that God cares.

It's not the revelation that God loves.

It's the revelation that comes when you see that God sees.

When you get it that God really cares about you.

It's not the God who loves the world that he sent his only son.

It's now the God who loves you.

And there is an incredible revelation when you see that God sees you.

When you have the revelation that God is really watching you because he loves you, he cares about you.

He has a destiny for your life that he's committed to fulfilling because Jesus is not only the author of your faith, he's the finisher of your faith as well.

Amen?

That's the revelation that comes when you see that God sees you.

And I want to tell you this, all of us, pastors included, leaders that are here visiting from other countries, we need times where we see that God sees us.

We all go through challenges and trials and tribulations, but there's times we need to know that He's intimately concerned and in control.

I want to close with a story that illustrates that this meaningful story to me personally.

I call this the shoe story.

There's shoes.

And during that time I became very close to the leaders of the ministry that I now lead, Jewish Voice.

I began to travel to Phoenix to work with them, became a member of the board, did some of the television programs, and the founder and president of Jewish Voice suffered a stroke coming to one of our outreaches in Russia.

They had to fly him home in a hospital bed.

He never recovered from that.

And a short time later, the board of Jewish Voice asked me to assume the leadership of the minister.

At first I said, absolutely not.

I'm a missionary.

That's my heartbeat.

I have no interest in Christian television or moving back to the states, but I will help.

So I began to travel back and forth to Phoenix, and it was wonderful.

The staff loved me, the board loved me.

It was a great, great experience.

And as I got more involved, I made the transition.

I came back to the United States and eventually I moved to Phoenix and took over Jewish voice.

All was going well as it was with H'gar for a while.

And then everything began to change.

The staff began to find problems with me.

I kept hearing over and over again that's not the way that Brother Kaplan, our founder, would have done it.

I met with resistance everywhere.

Nothing was going right.

And over the next year and a half, I got more and more miserable.

I reached a point of despair, of hopelessness.

I had been in ministry 25 years.

Yes, I had the anchor of a God who loves me, clearly understanding my call, but I couldn't do it anymore.

I just had reached my limit.

And I called the wife of the founder and I said, I need to talk with you.

And she said, Come over for dinner.

She could hear it in my voice.

She invited another board member, and I just began to, I began to expose my heart.

I just can't do it anymore.

I I've got to do something else.

It's not working.

And I began to doubt that God even cared, that God was even watching.

Yes, I had the assurance of eternal life, but I sure wasn't walking an abundant life.

And I made this statement.

I said, I can never fill your husband's shoes.

She sprung up off the couch and said, Oh, that reminds me.

And she ran into the bedroom.

A minute later came out with three boxes, and inside the boxes were brand new shoes.

Now, I have a really unusual shoe size, and I thought, that's great, but I can never wear these shoes because I have to custom order my shoes.

They're eight and a half triple E.

She opened one of the boxes of these brand new shoes, and here is eight and a half triple E.

Friends, that's the God who sees.

At that very moment, I saw that God sees me, and it transformed my life once again.

I went back to that ministry the next day with the assurance that this was God's call on my life.

Not only could I fill his shoes, I was wearing his shoes.

Hallelujah.

And they were the most comfortable shoes that I ever owned.

I wore holes in all of them.

Folks, you may be going through a terrible trial.

You may be in despair, you may be experiencing hopelessness today, but I want to tell you: God sees, God cares, God loves you.

And he wants you to see that he sees you.

He does.

Lord, thank you that you are the God who sees.

I pray for those that are going through trial and tribulation, even hopelessness, that they would see even today that you see them, that you care about them.

Guide them to their destiny.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.