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Trying to Help God Along

Sermon by Rev. Doug Pratt — April 27, 2008
 

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Abraham’s wife Sarah had never had any children by him. But she had a female servant from Egypt named Hagar. ²So she said to Abraham, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go and make love to my servant. Maybe I can have a family through her.”

Abraham agreed to what Sarah had said. ³After he had been living in Canaan for ten years, his wife Sarah gave him her servant Hagar to be his wife. ⁴He made love to Hagar. And she became pregnant.

When Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to look down on the woman who owned her. ⁵Then Sarah said to Abraham, “It’s your fault that I’m suffering like this. I put my servant in your arms. Now that she knows she’s pregnant, she looks down on me. May the Lord judge between you and me. May he decide which of us is right.”

⁶“Your servant belongs to you,” Abraham said. “Do what you think is best.” Then Sarah treated Hagar badly. So Hagar ran away from her.

Genesis 16:1-6

Great Leaders are People, Too
Abraham was undoubtedly a great man, one of the giants of history. From a nondescript, unpromising background he became the founder of a great nation, the revered patriarch of the three great monotheistic religions, and the man God used to prepare the way for the greatest mission of human history: reclaiming lost and fallen humanity. But Abraham, for all his skills as a leader, a visionary, a successful businessman, and a man of deep faith, nevertheless made some big mistakes in his personal relationships. He had a blind spot in the area of his home life—a flaw he passed on to his son Isaac and grandsons Jacob and Esau, with painful consequences.

There are many great leaders in the pages of history who have had problems in their personal lives. I recently completed a biography of Ronald Reagan—one of the most effective presidents of the 20th century. But for all his accomplishments in winning the Cold War and downsizing the federal government, he was not without his blind spots in his family life. He is, in fact, the only American President to date to have been divorced and remarried; and he has had a painful alienation from at least one of his children. Many successful people, in many different fields, have had problems at home. God wants us to do well in our personal relationships, every bit as much as in our jobs and tasks.

The Mistake of Abraham
When Abraham’s wife, Sarah, came up with a hare-brained scheme for starting their family, how we wish he hadn’t listened to her. If only he could have called up Dr. Laura or one of those other shrinks on talk radio, or gone on the Doctor Phil show, surely they would have advised him along these lines: “Abe, that is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. What are you and Sarah thinking? There is no way that plan could work without causing pain.”

But Abraham didn’t have the benefit of wise counsel. Think about his situation: he’s isolated, living as a self-sufficient nomadic family; the secular cultures all around him are caught up in the corrupt practices of polygamy and immorality (remember, Sodom and Gomorrah were his neighbors); and, worst of all, he didn’t have a Bible to guide him (because it hadn’t yet been written). And so, left to his own flawed thinking alone, he made a whopping blunder.

The problem, as Abraham saw it, was that God had made a promise to him but had not yet delivered. And Abe and Sarah were getting impatient as the years rolled along. After all, they were getting older, and having a baby tends to be something that requires some young and functioning bodies. So they decided that maybe God didn’t quite understand the way nature worked, or else He was distracted somewhere else in the Universe and had forgotten about them. The Lord was taking too long to answer their prayers, or He wasn’t doing it in the right way.

So they made that most fateful and foolish conclusion: they decided they needed to try to help God along. Rather than trusting Him to fulfill His promise and answer their prayers in His time and His manner, they took things into their own hands. And the result was a disaster—with painful consequences for all involved, all the way down to our own generation. For the division within the offspring of Abraham that began with the birth of Ishmael, the son of the slave girl Hagar, is lived out on our front pages: the ongoing pain between the children of Isaac (the Jews), and Ishmael’s children (the Arabs).

Key Lessons
Let me spell out as clearly and simply as I can the lessons we need to learn for our own Christian lives from Abraham’s mistake.

1. Never try to reach a good goal through sinful actions; it will always backfire.
2. Never stop trusting in God, even though His timing seems slower than you’d like.

Abe and Sarah decided that, since it appeared impossible for them to have a natural child together, they would try to reach a good goal (having a son to be their heir) through the means of Abraham committing adultery with a young woman of another race, producing a mixed-breed child.

To this day, we still have not learned these lessons.

Repeating the Mistake of Abraham
Consider these real-to-life examples of how we repeat the mistake of Abraham:

• A single woman, whose divorce was finalized just a few months ago, has been introduced to a man about her age who is also recently divorced. And within a short period of time he proposes that they get married. There are already some signs of potential problems in the relationship, and there are a lot of unresolved issues and tensions from their past and their previous marriages, kids, ex-spouses, financial concerns, etc. But they’re both lonely, and hooking up seems like the quickest way to end the pain. In their impatience they may be headed for another marital disaster.

 

• A father or mother wants to provide for their children with all the things financially and materially that those kids want. What parent doesn’t desire their child’s happiness and prosperity? But if there’s not enough money left at the end of each month to buy all they want, they are tempted to cheat on their income tax returns, or to “borrow” some money from their employer, or to take the more legal but still risky route of signing up and “maxing out” on more credit cards. And when their foolish choices are eventually discovered, they will bring much pain and shame.

 

• A young professional looking for a good job—a worthwhile goal—fears that his resumé doesn’t have enough to qualify him for the position he wants. He may be tempted to put some things on it he hasn’t really done, to make himself look more attractive—maybe an extra degree he didn’t actually earn, or a job title he never actually held. When that deception is discovered one day, the results will be very painful—and he may lose that job he got because of the padded resumé.

 

• A teenage girl wants to avoid conflict with her parents, wants to keep the peace at home. And family peace is a good goal. But if she decides to lie to her mother about where she and her friends are going to go next Friday night, in order to avoid an argument, it will backfire one day. When her mother discovers the lies, it will destroy her trust in her daughter.

 

• Abraham’s mistake is even repeated by Christian leaders. A decade ago, a number of churches, Christian organizations and charities made a bad, Abraham-like decision. They wanted to have enough money to do all the good things that they thought God wanted them to do: helping the poor, building sanctuaries, teaching students, etc. But their income wasn’t quite enough. So they were tempted when they heard about a great offer: a new investment fund set up by a financial whiz in Philadelphia, called “New Era Philanthropies.” If these non-profits would just invest large sums of money in this enterprise, they were promised that they’d double their money in a year. What a great plan! Unfortunately it was a scam, a classic Pyramid Scheme, and many of them lost all that they’d invested. They tried to increase their funds, but in their hunger for the big dollars they failed to do their homework.

 

• There’s one more example I’ve witnessed lately within the Christian world. A pastor and his congregation’s leaders were angry at their parent denomination for some foolish things that denomination had done, actions which were contrary to scripture. The congregational leaders decided that they wanted to break away from that denomination—which they believed was the most spiritual thing to do. To accomplish it, they had to gain the votes of the congregation. And in their zeal for what they thought was a holy and right cause, they launched a campaign that included deception and misstatements of the facts, slander and public criticism of those Christian brothers and sisters who disagreed with them, and manipulation of the church’s rules and processes to gain their majority. Even if their goal was a noble one, the means they used to reach that goal were inconsistent with scripture and Christian character.

Remember, repeating the mistake of Abraham—trying to reach what seems like a godly result by using ungodly methods—will always cause problems and pain. Resist that urge to “help God along.”

Trust God’s Timing
Some of you are in a situation like Abraham and Sarah’s, where you’re waiting for God to answer a prayer of your heart. And you’ve been waiting for what feels like an eternity. Maybe you’re trusting Him for healing (of your own body, or that of someone you love, or healing of your broken emotions and inner pains); or maybe you’re trusting Him to help and rescue a family member in trouble; or maybe you’re waiting for Him to bring you a new job, or help you out of a financial mess. Whatever your situation, don’t stop trusting. And above all, don’t take things back into your own hands. Leave it to God, and be patient.

We are blessed today to have some helps and resources available to us to make wise choices that Abraham simply did not have at his disposal. We have available to us the blessing of Christian books and counselors and advisors. We have the incomparable blessing of the guidance found in the Word of God. These are gifts from the Lord that are not to be taken for granted, but used for our own benefit to help us do what is right and get the most out of life.

The Rest of the Story
Before we close, let me give you a little peek ahead, at what will happen just beyond this story in the book of Genesis (in case you haven’t read it or don’t remember the story). God—no surprise, really, when we recall who He truly is—has not forgotten His promise to Abraham and Sarah to give them a natural son and heir. And He isn’t slow at keeping that promise. He’s just doing it in His own time and way, which ultimately proves to be better. Finally, a few chapters further along, we will see Him come through. A child will be born to this couple, now well into their “golden years,” that will prove to be a miracle, proof that this is a God-thing and not a human event.

And, to flesh out even more of the story, we can’t forget that lonely and frightened young woman left homeless and pregnant. Thankfully, though Abraham’s passive denial and Sarah’s active hostility towards Hagar were cruel and wrong, the Lord never forgot the young Egyptian woman in trouble. We find that God loves Hagar as much as He does Abraham and Sarah! He protects her in the wilderness—where she would probably have died of starvation or been killed by a predator or bloodthirsty criminals. He sends her back to the safety of Abraham’s home with His divine protection surrounding her. And he makes sure that her baby is delivered safely.

If only, here in Genesis 16, Abe and Sarah could have snuck a glance at the later chapters of their life story, they would have known what not to do. But they couldn’t. Nor can we, because each of us lives life in the present, and we can’t know the future. That’s why we have to place ourselves daily in the hands of the One who holds the future, renewing our dedication to Him to live each day according to the principles He has laid out for us in His words. We can’t see tomorrow, but if we are faithful today we can trust Him for what lies ahead.