Abraham & Sarah

Reading from the book of Genesis.

And God said to Abraham, As for Sarai, your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.

I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her.

I will bless her, and she will become nations.

Kings of people shall come from her.

And then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?

Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?

And Abraham said to God, Oh, that Ishmael might live before you.

And God said, No, but Sarah, your wife, shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.

I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to Church this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

It is great to gather together with you all.

And we are moving into a new part of our marriage series where we're looking at particular marriages in Scripture as case studies for what marriage is and what marriage means.

So that's what we're looking at this morning.

Would you pray with me?

Our Father in Heaven, your word is true, and it is a light to our feet, a lamp to our path.

Lord, your word gives us the guidance that we need in order to patiently endure the trials of this life.

Lord, I pray that you would give us hearts that are willing to be surprised by your goodness and your kindness.

Lord, give us hearts that trust your promises, so that we might hold fast to you and hope in you, knowing that when we hope in you, we will not be put to shame.

Lord, I pray that as we consider especially our marriages this morning, Lord, that you would help us to hope for the goodness that you have promised us, that the examples that you have shown us in the marriages of Scripture, that we would be able to hold fast to your promises, and that we would be able to, Lord, understand the goodness that you have laid out before us and hold to it, Lord.

Father, we praise you for your loving kindness and ask that you would speak through your word this morning in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So what we've seen so far is we've seen the shape of marriage throughout Scripture.

And that's the way that the first part of this marriage series has gone.

So we've looked at marriage through the lens of creation, fall, redemption, and glory.

That four-part outline is the outline of the whole narrative of Scripture.

And we've seen that marriage must be understood through this narrative because that's the way that God communicates it to us.

We see that marriage was created by God in the beginning, that because of sin, all of humanity fell, but that's also the fall of marriage.

So the marriages that we live in now are corrupted by this sin.

Likewise, we see that Christ Himself comes to seek his bride, and this shows us the pattern of marriage that we participate in, of the pattern of redemption between Christ and His church.

And we look forward to a hope of glory.

So now that we see the whole story of Scripture and we see this grand narrative of how marriage is understood in the narrative of Scripture, the question now is, well, how do our particular marriages, how do our particular lives connect with this grand narrative of Scripture?

How do another way to ask that is how do our marriages have meaning?

What are our marriages about?

Now, our culture would say that your marriage is fundamentally about a it's an opportunity for self-expression.

And your marriage is actually if I was reading through this past week uh to gain some understanding, but one of the things that's cited in the Obergfeld decision, which was uh the decision, the Supreme Court decision to uh legalize gay marriage in the United States in 2015.

Uh one of the ways that it describes marriage there is it is one of the main events in life for self-definition.

This is what marriage fundamentally is in our culture.

It's an opportunity for self-definition.

That's legally how we understand marriage.

Now, that means that what we think marriage means or where it finds its meaning, what we would judge it by is whether or not it fits your self-definition.

And it allows you the opportunity to express the truth of who you think you are inside.

And so whether or not you're in a good marriage or a bad marriage, whether or not you're in a meaningful marriage or in a meaningless marriage, in our culture's metric would be well, is this allowing me to express the particular characteristics that I desire to uh express out into the world?

And is my spouse uh uh enabling that to happen?

Are they participating in that project happening or are they in the way of that happening?

Now, in my marriage, that my wife's answer to that would it will vary depending on how hungry I am.

And so whether or not our marriage is uh meaningful or not is just go is is on this roller coaster because it doesn't connect up to any, there's no transcendence that it's able to connect up to.

Because our culture has no category for transcendence, we've spent the last like 200 years eliminating that and calling it foolishness, then we're only able to find meaning as it connects to ourselves.

And so what that devolves into is uh uh ultimately meaninglessness.

It's a very shaky ground to build a relationship on, to build a uh uh uh uh a connection that could that could last and endure.

But the way that the Bible describes these marriages and the way that we see that they are meaningful, is it shows us the whole narrative of redemption.

And it shows us how God had created man, Adam and Eve, to participate in bringing this glorious creation that he had made into a fullness of glory.

And when you see that your marriage connects up to this project of God to bring his creation into a fullness of glory in his presence, well, now that's a different metric by which you would assess your marriage.

And when you reflected on what whether you're not your marriage was meaningful, you could be having, you could have a series of very bad days.

Even years.

And say, well, is you might even find like I'm not really able to express myself in this marriage.

And you say, well, is your marriage good or bad?

Well, actually, it's still good.

Because I see in scripture there are these marriages that go through these radical difficulties, these uh absurd conditions, and I look back on those marriages and I say they are good.

And I understand that they are good because I see how those marriages connected up to this grand theme of Scripture, and they they demonstrated a trust in God and a faithfulness to God.

And those marriages have this depth of meaning.

Well, I want us to be able to start to get in particulars how particular marriages can join up to this transcendent reality of the story of redemption that God is telling.

The glorification of his son, Jesus Christ.

And so we're going to look at three marriages in Scripture, and the first one that we're looking at this morning is the marriage of Abraham and Sarah.

And the marriage of Abraham and Sarah is one of the uh most famous marriages in world history.

I'd say it's it's up there.

Um I'm trying to think of some others, but Brangelina's, it didn't make the if they had stuck it out.

Listen to how the New Testament describes Abraham and Sarah.

In Hebrews 11, verses 8 through 12, it says, By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place, that he was to receive an inheritance, as an inheritance.

Hebrews 11:8–12

And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.

For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.

That's pretty transcendent.

That's pretty meaningful.

By faith, Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised.

Therefore, from one man and him as good as dead were born descendants, as many as the stars of heaven, and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

From where I'm standing, I can see those descendants.

That's a meaningful marriage.

They're celebrated for their faithfulness.

And we see that their marriage itself was central to the promise that God had given them, and it was the location of their obedience to God.

Like for Abraham and Sarah to remain faithful, patiently faithful to one another because of the promise that God had given them, is the same as them remaining patient and faithful to the Lord.

And so their faithfulness to one another is this expression of their faith in God.

They are an exemplary marriage.

In 1 Peter 3, 4 through 6, in Peter's instruction to wives, he holds up Sarah as an example.

He says this in 1 Peter 3, 4 through 6, but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.

For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands.

As Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, and you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.

What a glorious picture of their marriage and the dynamic that they had in their marriage.

Men, you are like Abraham when you hear the call of God and you pursue him.

And the glory of their marriage is shown in this pattern.

And consider what in both examples you can see, like in Abraham being called out of his home to a place that he'd never been, to a promise that he can't see from here, and continuing in faith to follow the Lord, what fearlessness he shows in that faith.

And then for Sarah, what is what is commended for wives in order to be like Sarah?

It says that they would not fear anything that is frightening.

Now, I don't know what things you typically fear in my life, it's things that are frightening.

And Sarah didn't.

She is marked for her courage, because it is a courageous thing to look to your husband and see, oh, he's got a call from the Lord.

I'm going to follow him where it takes him to these dangerous places.

Now, if you were to just hear these examples of Abraham and Sarah in Scripture, and you hear the wonder of their faith that's being described in this call of fearlessness, this exemplary fearlessness that they had in their lives, and you didn't know the story of Abraham and Sarah, you just uh heard these examples, and you might, you would think, like, okay, well, what did what was their marriage like?

Was it like, it sounds like it would be like an action movie.

They're going into these dangerous places, and maybe it, maybe Abraham hits Goliath with the stone, and Sarah courageously holds him down while Abraham chopped his head off.

Maybe that was the moment in the story.

It was like a Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith type of relationship.

A lot of Brad Pitt this morning.

And Angelina Jolid, apparently.

They're not an exemplary couple.

They did have danger in their life.

Famines that they had to flee from.

On two occasions, Sarah is kidnapped by a tyrannical king.

Those are stories worth remembering.

There's a Abraham has to go off to war to rescue his nephew.

Their life is surrounded by danger and attack, but that's not what is celebrated in the New Testament when they're reflected back on.

Mostly, what is being celebrated, mostly what Abraham and Sarah did that was so glorious that we look back on and see as exemplary in their marriage, what they mostly did was wait.

That's what they mostly did.

They patiently waited for the Lord.

That was the center of their glory.

They had a patient faith that continued to trust in the Lord.

Now, what is patience?

Patience is desiring what God has promised you and living as though you will get it while you don't have it.

So patience is you you in order to have patience, you have to want something.

Patience isn't uh uh I'm losing the word.

Patience isn't ambivalence.

It's not, oh, it could go either way.

Patience isn't uh patience is is in order to have patience, you have to have desires.

They were not zen.

They had not eliminated the pain of longing by eliminating their desires.

That's boring.

There's good stuff out here.

Good promises from the Lord.

Want them.

It's painful to not have good things that you desire.

Desire them.

You should not tame your desires for good things.

Wow, what a wild thing to- I haven't got nervous saying that.

So we're all so like indoctrinated, and we're all like these closet Buddhists in our culture.

It's insane.

Good stuff is good wanted.

So that's part of patience.

You don't get to have patience if you don't want stuff.

You just have ambivalence.

So patience is desiring what God has promised you.

And then you live as though you will get it.

That means it's it's like.

Sometimes my children will desire things.

Like a cookie, for example.

And they'll for them to have patience once they finally get it, they'll be able to, once they finally get the cookie, they'll be able to look back and they'll say, I acted like I trusted my parents to give me something good.

Rather than look back and say, I acted like my parents were completely untrustworthy and only enjoyed withholding things from me.

So you consider your own life and how you act towards God.

Is it marked by patience?

When you look after, like, there's a question we don't often ask or don't often consider when we're waiting for God to give us something or deliver us from something or fulfill a promise, saying, Well, what if you knew he would?

How would you act now?

Would you act whiny and complainy and accusatory of him?

No, you wouldn't.

You'd want to be able to look back and be like, yeah, I lived in trust that whole time.

So it's acting like you will get it from God.

And in order for it to be patience, it means you're acting like that while you don't have it.

So you're thinking, I've waited for cookies before.

I know what it means to have patience.

I fin I finished my undergrad.

One time I had to make multiple offers on homes before one finally came through.

I know what it's like to have patience.

This is Mickey Mouse patience.

This isn't patience of what we're what we're talking about with Abraham and Sarah.

The type of patience that we're talking about with Abraham and Sarah is waiting in faith until you're dead.

And then once you're dead, trusting that God will bring life.

That's why they're written up in the New Testament.

Because they waited until it couldn't be done.

And they trusted, once it couldn't be done, they trusted that God could do it.

That's a different type of faith.

That's a different type of patience.

Now, if our marriages are to be like theirs, they are to be marked by this type of patience.

Patience for each other.

Patience that for your spouse, that there is a glory that they will come into one day that is beyond anything you could imagine.

You long for that and you desire that for them.

And you act like you will get it.

You act like you'll see it while you don't have it.

So we're going to look in their story, and we're going to see the promise that they trusted in, how in their story they showed impatience, and how the Lord cultivated this faith in them.

So here's the promise in Genesis 12, verses 2 through 3.

Genesis 12:2–3

The Lord said to Abraham, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

This is the promise that Abraham is given for him and Sarah.

And you should think this kind of rhymes with Adam and Eve, doesn't it?

He blesses them, he says, Be fruitful and multiply and take dominion.

He comes.

To Abraham with this promise, and he says, You'll be multiplied into this great nation, and you'll have a land and a people.

That's kind of the same thing.

And then, like Adam and Eve, they become the locus of blessing and cursing for their whole posterity, which is us, based on their obedience.

Here it's a bit different for Abraham, because it's not like it's based on his obedience, based on how other people relate to him, which is odd, will be the blessing and cursing of the world.

It's how others relate to him.

If they bless you, they're blessed.

If they curse you, they're cursed.

Now, so you would think Abraham comes to Sarah and he's like, hey, we're moving.

I got a new job from God.

We're going to have to make a nation.

And it'll start, it'll be us two, and it's a land, and she's like, How's the land?

He's like, I haven't been.

And so they go to it, and you would I'm sure they were thinking, like, okay, well, we're we're probably gonna uh get pregnant soon, then I think.

This is already a close call.

He's 75, she's 65 at the time of their call.

And they move to the land, and for 10 years, they have no offspring.

Ten years.

2015.

Now it's an odd decade to choose 2015 to 25 because almost nothing has changed in the past ten years.

That's a long time.

So after this 10 years of waiting, Sarai has an idea.

Genesis 16, 1 through 2.

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children.

What's the promise of God?

Children.

She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.

And I don't know if you've read much of the Bible, but when you see Egyptian, you should go, ah, Egyptian.

That's a Bible reading tip.

She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Go into my servant.

It may be that I shall obtain children by her.

And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

It's ten years.

She's seventy-five.

Abram is eighty-five, about.

After ten years, she finally has enough evidence.

I can't get pregnant.

The Lord's prevented me from conceiving.

I can't conceive.

You guys who've tried to get pregnant have had difficulties with getting pregnant, you know, ten years is a long time.

It's a long time.

So she finally has enough evidence.

She finally reaches a point where she just concludes this, I know this can't happen.

But we've had this promise for this good thing that the Lord has shown us.

But we have to face reality here.

Now that we know this can't happen, we're going to have to find some other way.

And so her other way is for Sarai to offer her servant Hagar.

And she says to Abraham, Here is Hagar.

Have her as your wife, and then she will bear offspring for me.

And in case, because we need to be taught to make these connections, the scripture adds this line, and Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

What does that sound like?

Adam and Eve.

And Adam listened to the voice of his wife.

Eve holds out the fruit, which is a good fruit.

It's not a bad fruit.

It's a good fruit.

And says, take and eat.

And what Adam should have said was the Lord has forbidden this.

He has another promise for us.

And if we take this for ourselves without trusting him to give it, this is denial.

We're saying that God is not faithful, that he's not to be trusted.

Like Adam, Abram listens to the voice of Sarai, and the fruit that is held out of Hagar, he takes for himself.

And the family is plunged into this confusion and chaos.

In verses 3 through 4, so after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife.

And he went into Hagar and she conceived.

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

So Hagar sees that she conceives, and now Hagar looks with contempt upon Sarai.

The whole order of the family has completely fallen apart.

Because here's the issue.

You know what Sarai means?

My princess.

Means my princess.

Exactly.

You ought to know what Sarai means.

Your daughter's name is Sarai.

You didn't go with Sarah.

Nice.

Yeah, sister.

Yeah, exactly.

Shout out to Sarai.

In Redemption Kids, right now?

Go get her.

Go get her.

Let's bring her out.

Means my princess.

Hagar, the Egyptian, means stranger.

The stranger is now treated like my princess.

And so she looks with contempt upon Sarai because she's the one who gave birth to the prince.

So she should be the princess, right?

And so the whole dynamic of the family is confused.

The servant is dishonoring the master because the husband, rather than taking responsibility for his wife and holding fast for her, listened to her and denied God and the promises of God.

And so the whole family has fallen into chaos.

And nobody knows where anything goes anymore or what the promise is headed towards.

Because you see, their faithfulness within the family is the same as their faithfulness to God.

It is the location where we get to demonstrate, it's the arena where we get to demonstrate our faithfulness to God.

If you can't honor the covenantal faithfulness to the person that you can see, if you can't defend the covenantal faithfulness to the person that you wake up with every day, you can look at them.

How do you think you can honor your faithfulness or the covenantal faithfulness to the God that you can't see?

And so when it collapses here at the level of the family, and they deny the faithfulness of God, then we can see that their family is, it collapses.

Nobody knows where anything where anything goes anymore.

Sarai, who is called my princess, is now looking with contempt.

She is the one who has the promise from God, and her husband is doing nothing to bring it back to order.

And so Sarai goes to Abram and it says, My mistress is looking at me with contempt.

May the sin that is being done to me be upon you.

And oftentimes we read that and it's like, gosh, Sarai just seems horrible in this story.

You know, because it's like, yeah, you're sorry, your mistress is looking at you badly.

And now this is Abram's fault.

She's doing exactly the right thing when she does that.

Because she recognizes the disorder, and she comes to Abram and says, take responsibility for this.

And what Abram says is, You are my wife.

She is in your charge.

Hagar is in your charge.

Do with her as you please.

Now these these feels harsh to us, perhaps, but it's exactly the right thing in this circumstance.

Abram takes responsibility.

He calls Sarai his wife.

She is brought back into the right station and places Hagar as her servant, which is what she is, and the order is brought back in to the family.

Now the Lord goes and pursues Hagar, and she is brought in along with Ishmael into the covenant people because when she desires to run away from Sarai, her servant, the Lord goes and visits Hagar and says, Go and return to Abraham, go and return to Sarai.

And why would he do that?

Because Abraham and Sarai are the ones who, if you bless them, you'll be blessed, and if you curse them, you'll be cursed.

So he calls the people who aren't of the promise into the family of promise so that they might receive the blessing.

This is exactly what happens with the Gentiles for the whole rest of the Bible.

So the people who didn't have the promise go to the family that has the promise, and in them we receive the blessing.

The blessing is the blessing is through Abraham for the world.

It's through the particular, for all the nations of the world.

Okay, so what we see here is their wavering faith.

It's ten years.

It's a negative example.

Don't do that.

Don't try and take for yourself what can only be given by God.

Why didn't they have patient faith here?

Like what fundamentally were they believing about God or not believing about God that caused their faith to lapse at this occasion?

I think they didn't believe that God could surprise them.

They didn't think they could be surprised.

Now, our faith, well, let's just go into the story.

Another thirteen years passes.

No child from Sarah.

And the Lord visits Abraham again to establish his covenant with him, and he establishes the covenant of circumcision with them.

And he comes to Abram, who has one illegitimate child, and he says, No longer will you be called Abram, but you will be called Abraham.

No longer just father, but you'll be called the father of multitudes.

Now, Abram's thinking, it's weird enough that my name's been father this whole time.

And I've gone and introduced myself to all these people, and it's like, who are you, father?

Oh, no kidding.

Where are your kids?

Where are you and Sarah's kids?

When it got uncomfortable.

Sarai's.

Well, we d we don't have any.

Okay, it's an odd name.

Now you'll be called father of multitudes.

Well, I have one child.

It's uh it's kind of a story.

And he changes Sarai's name from my princess to the princess.

The princess of the world.

What's your kingdom like?

Well, we still have tents.

Where where's your where are the princes that you've made?

There aren't any.

There aren't any.

Okay, these are odd names, people would say.

But maybe, I don't know, maybe they have a good sense of humor.

They'd still hang out.

And God said to Abraham, so he comes to him and he and then he gives him, he puts a fine point on his promise, and he says, And God said to Abraham, As for Sarai, your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name, the princess.

And I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her.

I will bless her, and she shall become nations.

Kings of peoples shall come from her.

This is Abraham's response.

Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?

Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?

And then Abraham goes on and he says to actually just before this, he says to him, to God, consider Ishmael.

Now this is 13, 14 years later.

So Ishmael's 13 or 14.

And Abraham's starting to think, you know, not only 13 or 14, he can do something that he wasn't able to do a little while ago.

We could get some offspring going here.

He could be the one that this promise is fulfilled through.

So he offers him up and he says, consider Ishmael.

This God is a reasonable course of action.

He is my offspring.

We can get him married, and that promise that you've promised to us can start to be fulfilled.

God says, no, it will be Sarah's offspring.

She is the one.

Now it's absurd.

It's absurd because they're just too old.

The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.

She'd been through menopause.

She can't have children anymore.

And so the way that God cultivates their faith is he brings them into this surprise that causes laughter.

This is this I can't even.

God, what are you talking about?

Sarah and me would have children?

This is crazy.

We're dead.

We can't have we can't have children anymore.

We have the one.

Consider him.

No.

No, I know you're laughing.

It is wild.

But this is what I'm going to do.

And Abraham believed God.

Abraham is in a point where he says, I can't see life from here.

And then he has this laughter, and it's something it's a faith that's something like this.

I can't see life from here.

Wouldn't it be wild if God still brought life from here?

A couple of months later, the angel of the Lord comes and visits them.

They prepare a meal.

And while Sarah's sitting in the tent, he's talking with Abraham and says, This time next year, Sarai is going to, Sarah's going to have a child.

He's going to have a son.

And Sarah laughs to herself again while she's sitting in the tent.

She laughs and says, Shall I have pleasure?

I whom is good as dead?

And then the Lord responds to Sarah and says, Is anything too hard for the Lord?

But too hard is not really the best translation here.

It's really, is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

At the appointed time I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

Now she was embarrassed because she had laughed, and that's why God was talking to her.

And God actually, just before this, had said, Why is Sarah laughing?

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

And so Sarah denies it.

She's embarrassed that she laughed.

She denied it saying, I did not laugh.

She was afraid.

And then one of my favorite lines in scripture is when God says, No, but you did laugh.

And I think it's this like soft rebuke.

It's barely even a rebuke.

Like it one way that I think is right is he's like, keep laughing.

You should keep laughing.

Because it's wild, isn't it?

It is wonderful.

It's not too wonderful for me.

Nothing's too wonderful for me.

When we follow God, why can we have patient faith?

Because we know that something is coming and we can't, nothing is too wonderful for what's coming.

Now it's hard to have a faith like that.

A faith like that means you'll be surprised by the goodness of God.

Why can you patiently endure the marriage that you're in?

How can you remain faithful in patience to your spouse?

Because marriage can be long.

How can you faithfully endure that?

Because you're expecting there's a surprise that it there can be a surprise that's coming in this that's more wonderful than I could possibly imagine.

That's why God cultivates this sense of there's a surprise coming for you.

The surprise comes.

Genesis 21, 5 through 7.

Abraham was a hundred years old.

That means Sarah was 90 years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

And Sarah said, God has made laughter for me.

Everyone who hears will laugh over me.

And she said, Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?

Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.

Isaac, what they named their son, means laughter.

They named him laughter.

Because there's this surprise that the Lord had for them.

Now, this is the shape of our patient faith that we must have in our marriages.

That there, this is the shape that our lives should have.

There's a laughter coming.

Now, if you think of this in just like an ordinary scale, like there's a laughter coming at the end.

Like we'll be swallowed up in joy at the end.

And so I'm gonna act like there's a laughter coming now.

I might not have it now.

But I'll be patient.

I desire it.

I want it.

I want the laughter that's coming.

I don't have it now, not in its fullness.

Sometimes I get glimpses of it and I celebrate with gratitude.

But I want to act now like I know that it's coming.

Because the truth is, for the Christian, it is.

The glory of your spouse is coming.

The glory of what your marriage means, it will be shown.

Now we are the people who hear of Sarah.

Everyone who hears about this is going to laugh over me.

Now, where are those?

Yeah, isn't that wild?

Now there's a question: why did God wait so long?

100 years is long.

That's a long time to wait.

To see the promise fulfilled.

And you know, the promise of 75, it gets promised at 75, but that's a long time to not have kids when they're desiring this.

Why wait so long?

Well, God wanted to wait until they were dead.

He wanted to wait until they they couldn't have children.

Seventy-five would be wild.

We'd say if the story was seventy-five years, we'd say, wow, that's that's pretty old to have kids.

190?

It's impossible.

It's impossible.

And that's because he wanted to show them that the surprise of their story is that God can bring life from the dead.

Because the true offspring that will come from the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is Jesus Christ.

And the faithfulness that he will show is that he will go into death itself, and from that death, on the other side of that death, will become a glory that rescues the world from sin.

And so the call of our lives for these the lesson to learn from Abraham and Sarah, what marks them as glorious, is their patient faithfulness, trusting that God will bring a surprise that is more wonderful than we could possibly imagine.

To have a marriage like theirs, that is fruitful like theirs, must be marked by this patient faithfulness.

Be encouraged towards this patient faithfulness.

Believe there's a surprise coming.

The Lord has told me there is.

There's a surprise coming.

All right.

I went a little long, so we'll skip the question today.

That's a particularly good question.

Alright, let's do the question.

Alright, let me find this real quick.

Alright, is it possible that a desire doesn't come true because it doesn't align with God's plan?

How do we know when to let the desire go?

Oh, wow, great question.

Yes, how gracious and merciful that uh must much many of our desires don't come true.

I don't know if you guys listen to a lot of Garth Brooks, but he's got this song called Some of God's Greatest Gifts Are weans.

We can be friends.

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

Now, of course, our desires can deceive ourselves.

We can have wicked and bad desires, and think they're they can be cruel and horrible and would lead to our own destruction.

And God in His mercy prevents us from receiving those desires and them being fulfilled.

But for the Christian, our desires can be refined towards higher and higher goods.

You know, more and more closely aligned with the good things that the Lord calls us to.

And those are more indestructible.

Like think of the suffering of a life like Paul's.

And he doesn't experience that suffering and think, okay, this is evidence that I'm desiring the wrong things.

He has such certainty from what he sees from the Word of God and from what the Holy Spirit shows him as he expounds that word, that he knows I'm desiring good things.

So because we can be self-deceived, well, that doesn't mean we're constantly deceived.

And you can know by looking at the Word of God what things are good and what things aren't good.

And so you should desire those things that are good.

And you should not try and hedge your desires so that you are not hurt once you don't get them.

That's not the way that we're called to hope in God.

We hope for surprises.

And when we finally hope in Jesus, we hope good things for the people in our lives.

We pray for them, we pursue these things, we know that He can bring life from death.

And there's a sense in which, like, whether you can see it or imagine it happening, if it's a good thing, it almost like doesn't matter.

Because he can bring surprises.

He can bring surprises.

So, yes, you can be self-deceived into desiring bad things.

You can know what good things are.

Your capacity for self-deception is not the same as an inability to know things in a certain way.

And then trust that the Lord will refine your desires.

That's what he does for Abraham and Sarah.

Their desire becomes so fixated on just getting the thing rather than seeing the promise of God fulfilled.

And the Lord accommodates for that, and then he cultivates their faith over the course of their lives so that they are able to see more purely and more truly the fulfillment that God has called them to, and then he has them hope in that, even in the face of death.

So the the Lord won't stop working on you to be able to know and discern.

Alright.

Let's take communion together.

In 1 Corinthians 11, verse 23, it says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me.

1 Corinthians 11:23

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So on the night before he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and he broke it.

He said, This is my body which is broken for you.

And he took the cup, and he said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Now he invites us together this morning to partake of this sacrament, so that we might cultivate this hope, that on the night before he was crucified, that that death accomplishes life for us.

He is the fulfillment of the one who looked into death and he trusted there was hope on the other side.

And the Lord brought him into a resurrection.

What a surprise! So we gather together with this sacrament to proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Now, why do we proclaim his death?

Because he's alive now.

Now that's a wonderful surprise.

So we can have an absolute faith in him that he will bring us from death to life.

We remember that in this meal.

We hope for that in our marriages, that we would have a patient faith that looks forward to that resurrection.

Holy Father, we pray that you would bless this meal together.

Lord, that as we partake of this sacrament, that we would remember your sacrifice for us, the surprise that came out of it.

And Lord, that we might learn to cultivate a faith, that you would cultivate in us a faith that looks forward to the wonder of your surprise.

And that we would act in patient obedience to you now.

Faithfulness to our spouses, faithfulness to you.

Trusting that the thing that we don't have now, the wonder of the surprise of full redemption, Lord, that we will one day have it.

Because you've promised it, Lord.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.