Sarah – Hoping Against Hope
Pastor Mathew Magera – 6/30/19 – Sermon 356
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
It’s one thing to have faith. It’s another thing to
have a faith that is constantly challenged or unfulfilled. When God’s timing is
not on our watch we may defer to our own needs and desires in order to advance
God’s laziness into action leading us to a faith that is misguided and falsely
affirmed. It affects our relationship with God and it strangles true faith. How
can we be moved beyond this false sense of security and into the trustworthy
arms of God?
Grace and peace to you from God our Father, from our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Being the wife of Abraham, Sarah is often thought of
with a degree of dignity and honor. Let’s be honest, though. There are times in
her story where Sarah comes off as a bit of a shrew. “She could throw fits and
tantrums. She knew how to be manipulative. And she was even known to get mean…
She could be impatient, temperamental, conniving, cantankerous, cruel, flighty,
pouty, jealous, erratic, unreasonable, a whiner, a complainer, or a nag. By no
means was she always the perfect model of godly grace and meekness.”[1]
But, as we learn more about the life she lived, we can come to easily
understand her demeanor based on the constant challenges she faced. Most of
Sarah’s story is interwoven through the narrative of Abraham. Next to Eve,
Sarah is rumored to be one of the most beautiful women in all of scripture but as
her story can attest, beauty is certainly not everything.
When we think about Sarah’s story, we might remember
her name changing from Sarai to Sarah. We might think of how when she was
unable to conceive a child for her husband she decided to use one of her female
slaves to accomplish the task. We might also think of her laughing in disbelief
when she learns in her old age she will finally become pregnant. I believe
there is a reason these three events are the most memorable when it comes to
Sarah’s life. Each one demonstrates the challenges she faced in her faith and
each one shows how God’s intentions and timing could not be undermined.
Still, one of the many things we can learn about
Sarah that I want us to hear today is how two faiths are like two opposing
magnets, they do not and they will not go together. These two faiths are the
faith in divine grace and the faith in human effort. Faith in divine grace is
faith that depends on God’s timing. Faith in human effort, therefore, is faith
that depends on our timing. It’s impossible for them to go together. The story
of Sarah is a visual of the constant battle between the two.
Sarah’s story starts off not really being Sarah’s
story at all. In Genesis 12, God calls Abram. God says, “Go from your country,
your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.” God makes
a promise to Abram. The whole story starts at this moment with this promise.
When we think about Sarah, who is still Sarai at this point, we automatically
assume that she is part of this promise. God tells Abram to go and he will make
him into a great nation. He promises him descendants as numerous as the stars
but what we really tend to glance over is the fact that “on none of those
occasions had God ever expressly stated that [Sarai] would be the matriarch to
the nation in question.”[2]
We safely assume that because she is Abram’s wife that she must be but she is
not part of the promise at this point. Her hope and expectation may have been
to be the mother of this nation but she picked up her life and went with Abram
solely because she was following him and God’s promise and covenant with him.
She was dropping everything for him on pure faith, on God’s timing and
intention. This could easily have been a big burden for her. In the same
respect, if Sarai did have the expectation and hope that she would be the
mother of this nation, imagine that kind of pressure creating even more of a
burden on her. Abram was the one given the promise, but if it did in fact
include her, everything seemed to hinge on Sarai.
We know Abram and Sarai went childless for many
years but I imagine this doesn’t mean they didn’t pursue parenthood.
Unsuccessfully, I might add. Imagine Sarai now feeling like a failure. Not only
might she feel like she has let down Abram but she may have even felt as if she
had let down God as well. Her faith was challenged and she felt her hope waning
with every passing year.
You could say Sarai felt responsible for what was
taking place. She was in her 70s by this point and had not conceived a child.
Of course, this promise was not based on Abram or Sarai’s actions. It was based
on God acting when God wanted to. If Sarai had realized this, her burden could
have been lifted much more easily. But, it’s challenging even for us to have
faith that God will do what he promised. We still struggle with God’s timing
and surrendering to God’s control. Despite her faith, Sarai “knew from a human
perspective that her long years of childlessness already loomed large as a
threat to the fulfillment of God’s pledge.”[3]
It’s at this point where two incompatible faiths
collide and derail everything. Faith in God is a faith in divine grace.
Opposing this faith is faith in our own human efforts and abilities. Due to the
challenges in her faith, there were points in Sarah’s life where she wanted to
take God’s promises into her own hands. She didn’t want to relinquish the power
she thought she had, she didn’t want to yield her weakness to the supremacy of
God’s power. At the point she should’ve trusted God, she decided to take
matters into her own hands. I do not blame her one bit. For all we know, she
probably thought she was doing the right thing. She had to get Abram an heir.
If it came down to it I, too, would rather work to advance God’s plan by doing
something myself than to wait for and rely on him.
She went to her slave, Hagar, and had her step in to
be the mother of Abram’s child. In one way it seemed like a good idea. Sarah is
trying to look out for Abram’s future and God’s promise. But, in the end, all
it did was make things worse. The outcome of this would not be good for anyone,
nor would it advance God’s plan. We cannot depend on our actions and our
weaknesses when it comes to our faith in God. We must depend on His actions and
strength.
It’s like this. I want you to think about the last
time you had your vision checked. If you’ve ever gone to the eye doctor you
know the kind of tests they do to check your vision. They might give you
different lenses to see something and ask you if you think number one or number
two is clearer. They may put drops in your eyes to make your pupils bigger.
They may give you a glaucoma test or use that weird blue light to test the
pressure in your eyes. But, without a doubt there is one test that tends to
come up every single time and it’s that letter chart, or some variation of it.
If you go to the optometrist for the first time, you
will very likely encounter this test. We all can picture it too. It’s got that
giant letter right there at the top and then as you read down the letters get
smaller and smaller. I think that larger letter is there just to boost your
confidence. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I can see that first letter. And do
you know what that letter always tends to be? Yes, an E. You’re just as
confident as I am at this point. One letter down, 750 to go. You might start
cruising through the first several letters. H, B, V, Q, this is going great.
But, then there is always one letter that you get to and you realize you can’t
see it. You will reach that point and you will not be able to say what that
letter is. At this point, you have reached the key moment in this test. This is
the reason that you made the appointment for the eye doctor. This is the reason
the optometrist went to school so that at this point you could turn to them and
say, I can’t see that letter. Would you please help me, I can’t see it. I could
see the last letter but now I’m completely blind. Will you please help me? Give
me glasses, please. Only you can help me now. This is what we should do. But, I
don’t think we tend to do that.
No, instead, we choose to guess the letter. This
completely defeats the purpose of the eye test, doesn’t it? For some reason we
feel compelled to guess the letter like we’re on a game show and we would win a
pair of glasses if we got them all right. So we squint and say, I think it’s a
C. This honestly doesn’t help us, does it? In fact, it can only make it worse,
right? I mean, imagine you guess all the letters correctly and they tell you
that you have 20/20 vision. I don’t want to be around you on the road. You’ve
become a danger to yourself and others. We have to surrender control and stop
relying on our efforts as desirable as they are.[4]
This is what it is like to be in Sarah’s situation
and she chose to take matters into her own hands. Sarai, until now and for the
next 13 years or so would live a life with a challenged and waning faith. For
Sarai, if anything could go wrong for her, it did. She may have had it going
for her on the outside with her beauty but you can tell she hurt terribly on
the inside and I imagine her fuse was very short.
But through it all, God had not forgotten her.
Though she misplaced her faith in God, trying to advance his plan through her
actions, God still used her. It wasn’t until well after this event in Genesis
17 that Sarai’s name was changed to Sarah and God promised that she would be
the mother of this nation promised to her husband. When she was 90, well past
child bearing years, well past the desire to even try, God did what God does
and she gave birth to a son. By this point, “when His time came for the promise
to be fulfilled, no one would be able to deny that this was indeed God’s doing.
His plan all along was for Sarah to have her first child in her old age, after
every prospect of a natural fulfillment of the prophecy was exhausted and after
every earthly reason for hope was completely dead.”[5]
God’s power, and God’s power alone, would be on display. There was no question
about that.
Depending on God is not a walk in the park. It pits
two very desirable faiths against one another. When we have faith in God, we
surrender to him and throw off everything else. But when we are unable to do
that and we place our trust in our actions, we throw off God. It’s a very human
characteristic and Sarah’s story is one that we can relate to especially if we
have a challenged faith or if we are constantly battling our way through life
and wondering when God will finally relieve what ails us and eats away at our well-being.
In the end, God did fulfill the promise and Sarah
did become the mother she had hoped and expected to be. But, it wasn’t an easy
walk. Faith in Christ is no different. We have the promise Christ gives us, the
promise of new life, the promise of renewed bodies, a new heaven, and a new
earth. But faith is hard. Faith in God’s timing, faith in God’s intentions,
faith in God’s actions is hard. But, when we read the story of Sarah, though
faith may be hard, God never fails to follow through. How can we be moved from
our false security and rest in the trustworthiness of God? We have to fully
surrender that control and, as was true for Sarah, believe that God never fails
to follow through. We have to let the Holy Spirit constantly remind us of God’s
keeping promises in stories like this. In the tough times we have in faith, we
must remember this and hold this as the closest truth we can. God never fails
to follow through. Sarah hoped and hoped. She hoped so much yet you can imagine
how hopeless she must’ve been knowing that she was unable to provide that which
was necessary for a new nation to begin. Even in her mistakes, in her faith’s
frailty and weakness, God came to her still and fulfilled His promise in His
timing and in His way.
Life can be feeling like Sarah did for most of her
life. In the moments of impossibility, we can still depend on God. When we are
unable to hope in ourselves or in the world, we can still have hope in God and
in Jesus Christ. Human effort faith and divine grace faith will never go
together. When that moment comes and we have nothing left within us but to
fully surrender that power over to God, He will lift you up. He will take your
burden. He will forgive you and he will restore you. He will breathe life into
you and he will give you the rest you need. This is his grace in action,
letting us know that we can loosen our grip, relinquish our control, fully give
ourselves to him, and know for certain that in sending Jesus to die for us He
will not fail to follow through to fully provide us the life that Jesus died to
save. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.
[1] MacArthur,
John. Twelve Extraordinary Women.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005. Page 27.
[2] MacArthur,
John. Twelve Extraordinary Women.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005. Page 42.
[3] MacArthur,
John. Twelve Extraordinary Women.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005. Page 37.
[4] Illustration
concept used from material provided by Michael McIntyre.
[5] MacArthur,
John. Twelve Extraordinary Women.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005. Page 38.