LifeLink Devotions for Tuesday, September 10, 2024

 Sometimes our faith in God’s promises is tested by another person’s lack of faith. Abraham has just been through some exciting faith-building experiences, including an upward look into the spiritual kingdom of God that would result from God’s covenant with him, but his wife was not on the same page. We can only speculate as to why she didn’t have the faith of her husband. Was she tired of the social stigma of being childless? Was she simply devising a plan to protect herself as her husband had done when they went to Egypt? Did she know more about Abraham’s doubts than we are told because she lived with him every day? Did she think that God had given her special permission to break His covenant because the end would justify the means?

Whatever the reason for her small faith, Sarai devised a plan to help God out in the accomplishment of making Abraham the father of a great nation.

Genesis 16:1-2 “Now Sarai, Abraham’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abraham, “The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”

While presenting the plan to her husband, she justifies it by blaming God for her condition. There is no faith demonstrated in the power of God to change her current condition; there is only the scheme to humanly fix the condition. Abraham’s response shows us that his faith still had some growing up to do also: he accepts the plan and participates in it.

Just think of all the emotional tension that must have existed in Sarai and Abraham at this time. Both want God’s promise to be fulfilled, but for different reasons. Sarai wants a family. She wants to be a respected part of society. She has given up hope that it will happen naturally for her, so she chooses to give another woman to her husband and share him with her. She is willing to suffer those emotional consequences for the emotional benefits she hopes will come later.

Abraham also wants a family, not for the emotional benefit but rather for the spiritual. His motives may be more pure, but his method is still wrong. In fact, we can call his motives sinful, because Romans 14:23 says that “everything that does not come from faith is sin.”  When we set aside the power and provision of God to accomplish His promise and use our power and provision instead, we sin.

My friends, there are some important issues for us to consider in this story as they relate to our own walks of faith. How many of our choices are made based on human reason and understanding rather than faith in God’s purpose and plan? How many of our choices are based on emotional responses to circumstances rather than faith in God’s power to provide? How many of our choices are our attempts to hurry the process and bring fulfillment to the promises of God? How many of our choices are responses to our emotional need to fit in and be accepted by others?

Consider carefully your circumstances right now, and before you make your plans, seek God’s purpose, seek His plan, and trust His promise. Then WAIT. Because faith waits. And while you wait, your faith grows, and in the end, God’s glory will be experienced.

Pastor John