Name him "Laughter" - Steve Craig

Let's pray.

Father Jesus, Holy Spirit, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

Just thank you for teaching us about yourselves and especially drawing us close to you.

And now, Holy Spirit, I just ask that you would teach us this morning that uh that you you take uh your word and make it come alive and and then uh just speak into each of our hearts.

Give us something that we can go away with from you.

And so we thank you and we trust you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay, once again we're gonna break away from kind of uh Christian tradition this morning.

It seems that the uh at least when I was growing up in church, that on Mother's Day we all got together, we thanked our moms.

On Father's Day we all got together and forgave our dads.

And uh today I want to honor all the dads.

We do have great dads here.

You know, you sacrifice and you love and you and you feel a deep, deep responsibility for your uh for your family and uh and for your children.

And so we certainly honor you for that.

You know, as dads, we've got a bit of an uphill battle, um, mostly because we get compared to God.

Um it's kind of tough, you know, because as earthly dads uh we fell.

You know, our dads have all of us, our dads have have failed us at times, some of us um our dads have completely failed us.

And so it's good to be reminded, like Susan said, that we have uh not just a father, but a daddy.

You know, the in the Bible, Jesus says calls uh Father God Abba Father.

Um Paul in Romans and Galatians says that we don't just have a father, we now have an Abba father.

And Abba simply is the Hebrew word for daddy.

If we went over to Jerusalem as a group right now, we would walk the streets of Jerusalem, and what we would hear is little kids saying, Abba, Abba, Abba.

It's daddy.

And so so it's not disrespectful, it's not irreverent, it is the absolute truth that we have a daddy in our God.

We have a father, um, we have a daddy, and it's been his plan all along to adopt us as his children, and that's what he's done.

And so we can't help, I guess, on Father's Day, to think of our daddy father, our Abba father.

But we can also be thankful for um our physical dads.

You know, we've done the best we can with what we have to work with, and uh and there's a bunch of wonderful, happy kids running around here, and some wonderful, happy adults running around here, and so I think our dads are doing a pretty good job.

So way to go.

There's a pretty famous dad in the Old Testament.

His name's Abraham.

Um, Sarah, his wife, was not able to have children.

And God comes to Abraham in Genesis 15.

He says, Do not be afraid, Abram, for I will protect you, and your reward will be great.

But Abram replied, O sovereign Lord, what good are all your blessings when I don't even have a son?

Since you've given me no children, Eliezer of Damascus, a servant in my household, will inherit all my wealth.

You have given me no descendants of my own, so one of my servants will be my heir.

Then the Lord said to him, No, your servant will not be your heir, for you will have a son of your own who will be your heir.

And the Lord took Abram outside and said to him, Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can.

That's how many descendants you will have.

And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.

Well, time passes, and he and Sarah they get impatient.

And they believe God, you know, they had some faith.

They believed that God was gonna sort of do what he said.

Um but they decided he needed a little bit, you know, of their help.

And so Sarah went out and found a surrogate mom, um, a maid of hers.

And uh Abram and she had a son named Ishmael.

But that wasn't God's plan, and that wasn't the child God was uh telling them about.

And so in Genesis 17, then God said to him, This is my covenant with you.

I will make your fat make you the father of a multitude of nations.

What's more I am changing your name.

It will no longer be Abram.

Instead, you will be called Abraham, for you will be the father of many nations.

I will make you extremely fruitful.

Your descendants will become many nations, and kings will be among them.

I will confirm my covenant with you and your descendants.

After you, from generation to generation.

This is the everlasting covenant.

I will always be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

Then God said to Abraham, Your responsibility is to obey the terms of the covenant.

You and all your descendants have this continual responsibility.

This is the covenant that you and your descendants must keep.

Each male among you must be circumcised.

You must cut off the flesh of your foreskin as a sign of the covenant between me and you.

Oh man.

Things were going so good for Abraham.

Jim Gaffigan has a uh a funny bit where he talks about how the tests in the Bible keep getting more difficult.

You know, it's uh don't eat the fruit, build a huge boat, cut off the end.

Let's say be circumcised.

You know, it just gets more and more difficult.

And as a quick aside to the guys, you know, God's gonna ask us difficult things.

You know, sometimes we need to humble ourselves, apologize to our wives, apologize to our children.

We might need to get a second job, get us caught up financially.

We might need to file our back taxes or share our time or share our money, get help with an addiction or a problem.

But here's the question would you like to trade places with Abraham?

For me, uh no.

I like it.

Do it as a baby do it as a baby, forget it ever happened, sort of way.

That's uh that's a good plan.

So whatever God asks us to do, we can uh do it cheerfully and be thankful we're not Abraham.

But then God said to Abraham, Regarding Sarai, your wife, her name will no longer be Sarai.

From now on, her name will be Sarah, and I will bless her and give you a son from her.

Yes, I will bless her richly, and she will become the mother of many nations, kings of nations will be among her descendants.

Then Abraham bowed down to the ground, but he laughed to himself in disbelief.

How could I become a father at the age of 100?

He thought.

And how can Sarah have a baby when she is 90 years old?

And so Abraham said to God, May Ishmael live under your special blessing.

You see, Abraham is a man of great faith.

But at this point, he still doesn't believe it.

He's like, Oh, that's nice, God.

That's a good blessing.

But we'll just apply that nice blessing to my son Ishmael over here.

Because obviously you haven't noticed that I'm a hundred years old.

And Sarah's ninety.

But God replied, No, Sarah, your wife, will give birth to a son for you.

You will name him Isaac, and I will confirm my covenant with him, and his descendants as an everlasting covenant.

As for Ishmael, I will bless him also, just as you have asked.

I will make him extremely fruitful and multiply his descendants.

He will become the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.

But my covenant will be confirmed with Isaac, who will be born to you and Sarah about this time next year.

When God had finished speaking, he left Abraham.

This is a cool thing.

Because God says you will name him Isaac.

And so when we think of it, we think of, okay, Isaac, his name is Isaac.

Isaac is the Hebrew word for laughter.

What God said is, you will name him laughter.

Laughter.

In fact, this whole story is about to revolve kind of around laughter.

I used to think of God, you know, as a mean and angry God.

You know, he was kind of half judge, half scientist.

You know, he's looking at every little detail, just ready to smack me when I uh when I messed up, you know, kind of like he looked kind of like uh Michelangelo painted him on the Sistine Chapel, except angrier.

And um, but that isn't how God interacts with me.

My my interactions with God on a day-to-day basis are a little more like interacting with Columbo or Monk.

Now, I don't know if you know those TV shows, and this is just a metaphor, and this is my side of the interaction.

But uh with Columbo and with Monk, they're both TV detectives, and they both act like they don't know what they're doing.

You know, and they'll ask a question, it doesn't make any sense.

But in the end, you realize that they did know, that they saw more, they saw better, they understood all along.

Now, that's kind of how my interactions go with God.

Where I'm like, God, you do not know what you're doing.

I mean, this is a no-brainer.

This is the obvious thing to do here.

I need you to do this.

You do this, everything's fine.

You know, and and and he doesn't seem sometimes to know what he's doing.

But the truth is, he sees better.

He understands more.

He's way ahead of me.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

And a cool thing about God is he is not that angry, detailed judge.

He is a loving father with a full personality.

You know, he uh God talks, I mean, the Bible talks about God laughing and crying and being sad and having joy.

You know, it's a real relationship with the real God.

Well, Abraham at that time saw God a little more like Columbo or Monk.

And so he kind of humors God.

Oh, thanks for the nice little blessing.

We'll just apply that one to Ishmael.

No, God says, You and Sarah are gonna have a son together.

And we and we are going to name him Laughter.

It isn't long before the Lord drops by to remind Abraham and Sarah that he hasn't forgotten.

In Genesis 18, where is Sarah your wife?

These visitors come to um come to their camp, and they don't really know who they are.

One of them's the Lord.

Where's Sarah your wife?

The visitors asked.

She's inside the tent, Abraham replied.

Then one of them one of them said, I will return to you about this time next year, and your wife Sarah will have a son.

Sarah was listened to this conversation from the tent.

Abraham and Sarah were both very old by this time, and Sarah was long past the age of having children.

So she laughed silently to herself and said, How could a worn out woman like me enjoy such pleasure?

Especially when my master, my husband, is also so old.

Then the Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh?

Why did she say, Can an old woman like me have a baby?

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

I will return about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.

But the Lord said, No, you did laugh.

But the part of the conversation that might be encouraging for some of the some of us this morning is at verse 14, where the Lord says to Sarah, Is anything too hard for the Lord?

It's pretty much the exact same thing that the angel said to Mary.

Do you remember when the angel came to Mary, said that she was going to have Jesus?

And she said, Well, how can that be?

I've never even been with a man.

And the angel said, Is there anything impossible for God?

Is there anything too hard for the Lord?

Is there anything too difficult for God?

It's a rhetorical question.

No, there is not.

There is nothing.

There is nothing too hard for God.

Even if you can only sort of believe it.

Abraham and Sarah still only sort of believed it.

They both laughed.

For some reason, when I thought back about the story, I remembered Sarah laughing in the tent, but I hadn't really noticed Abraham laughing first, but they both laughed.

They both only sort of believed it.

But he said it, he was going to do it.

You know, God doesn't love Sarah and Abraham any more than he loves you.

And you may be going through hard times right now.

I mean, it could be with your health or with your finances or with your children or with addiction or fighting depression or something that just seems too hard.

There is nothing too hard for God.

There's nothing.

And he loves you.

He will keep his promises.

Just like he did with Sarah and Abraham.

And in Genesis 21, it says that the Lord kept his word and did for Sarah exactly what he had promised.

She became pregnant and she gave birth to a son for Abraham in his old age.

This happened at just the time God had said it would.

And Abraham named their son Isaac.

Eight days after Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him as God had commanded.

Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born.

And Sarah declared, God has brought me laughter.

You see, God has brought me laughter.

Literally.

Her son's name was laughter.

And to her soul.

Both.

God had brought laughter.

A son named laughter and laughter to her soul.

Then she says, All who hear about this will laugh with me.

Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse a baby?

Yet I have given Abraham a son in his old age.

You see, God did it.

There is nothing too hard for God.

A son named Laughter.

Just laughter in general.

And she says, everyone that can hear, everyone that hears about it is welcome to laugh with her.

I was thinking about how children bring us a lot of things.

You know, they uh some difficult things, some things easier.

But one thing they do bring us is laughter.

One thing God gives us is laughter.

In Psalms 126, it says, We were filled with laughter, and we sang for joy, and the other nations said, What amazing things that the Lord has done for them.

What a great God, what a great father, what a great daddy, what Abba Father we have.

You know, he's cool, he's wonderful.

And he does what he says.

If the worship team wants to come up, and let's stand up, and we'll finish here in a minute.

You know, this morning we haven't just looked at a historical story from the Bible.

We've actually done a sort of a uh a genealogical.

Genealogical, that's a great word.

A uh we sort of studied genealogy.

In Galatians 3, 28 and 29.

So we sort of studied our own genealogy this morning.

We kind of took a look back, not just at a story in the Bible, we sort of took a look back at our family tree.

In Galatians 3.28, it says, There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ.

And now that you belong to Christ, you are true children of Abraham.

You are his heirs, and God's promise to Abraham belongs to you.

What was God's promise to Abraham?

That you would be blessed.

That you would be blessed.

And so when we put our trust in Jesus, simply turn to him and say, you know what, I'm gonna depend on you.

I'm gonna trust in you.

We are heirs of Abram and Sarah.

You know, there are great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandpa and grandma, Abraham and Sarah.

And you are the person that God promised to bless.

And you can trust God's promises.

You can trust that God loves you.

You can trust that God wants to bless you, that he is for you, that he is going to bless you.

You're God's kids.

In a sense, you're Abraham and Sarah's grandkids.

You are not jinxed, you are not cursed.

Bad things aren't waiting to happen to you.

Good things are gonna happen to you.

You are blessed.

You are the people that God was talking about.

We are the ones promised to Sarah and Abraham.

So laugh if you want to.

Someday we are all gonna be laughing together.

Because God loves us, he's for us, and he keeps his promises.

So let's pray.

Father, thank you for being such a great God.

Thank you for being our daddy, our Abba, Father, our daddy.

We just praise you.

We're so thankful you adopted us as your children.

We're so thankful that no matter what you say, we can trust you.

We know that you're for us.

We know we can wait on you.

We know that we can depend on you.

And we thank you.

And we love you.

And in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.