Steiger International

Then the LORD took note of Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as He had promised. So Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the appointed time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore to him, Isaac. Then Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Now Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with 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." The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.

So, twenty-five years of waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled ends with eight verses. That’s it. Eight verses to tell that Isaac has finally been born. It seems kind of understated, doesn’t it? The main point is, of course, that God keeps his promises. And perhaps that was so obvious to the writer at this point that it seemed like a given, and it didn’t require more than a few sentences.

But even if we have learned by this point that God keeps his promises, I still think there are other important lessons we can learn from this passage. First, I notice the phrase, “at the appointed time.” Yes, it refers to what the messengers had said to Abraham and Sarah regarding when the child would be born back in Genesis 18, but there is also something insistent in Scripture about the concept of an appointed time—that there is a time set for when things will occur.

On a grand scale, there was an appointed time for Jesus to come, and the time that his Kingdom will come in its fullness has been appointed. But in our individual lives, too, God has an appointed time for keeping his promises. Often, though, that time is farther away than we want it to be. Many believers go through a “dark night of the soul,” when God seems far away and his promises seem hopeless. God does show up, but the darkness always seems to last longer than we want. At the same time, when God finally breaks through, we’re never quite ready for it. When Christ was born, the people missed it, and they killed him. When Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, they wanted to go back. We are never quite ready for God’s promise when it does arrive.

So often, we just want the Kingdom of God and we want it now—on demand. But it doesn’t work like that. I wrote last year about how Abraham’s wait is our wait (http://www.steiger.org/mark_sermon_nov_07.htm) , and I still believe that there is something significant about times of waiting. We don’t want God to be so slow, but no matter what, we need to take what we can out of the waiting time. His promises are sure, and he can be trusted. So let’s stop demanding that God give us what we want, when we want it, and instead learn what we can while we wait for the appointed time for his promises to be fulfilled.

The main thing I wanted to talk about, though, is the fact that even after the glorious promise of a son is fulfilled, the next day (or in the middle of that night!), Abraham and Sarah wake up and have a baby to take care of! There are difficulties involved when a child is born—loss of sleep, diapers to be changed, all sorts of things that those of you who are parents understand. Just because the promise has been fulfilled doesn’t mean that life becomes pain free. Fulfillment of the promise doesn’t take away all our problems.

Also, even though the child has been born, Abraham and Sarah are still the same people. Sarah still has problems with jealousy, and Abraham still has conflicts with other people in his life. Sometimes it seems like we think that if we just have “the one thing” fulfilled, everything will be fine. But it’s not true. Even when the promise we are waiting for is fulfilled, there is still stuff in your life that needs to be dealt with.

We are strange creatures. We think we can find a key to life that will somehow take away all our pain and problems. So we try all sorts of different things while waiting for the promises of God, and we’re always disappointed.

Instead, we need a realistic, biblical expectation about the Kingdom of God. Abraham and Sarah received a total miracle—there is no way someone Sarah’s age could have a child—but they also had a baby that cried and pooped and learned to say, “No!” Even when people have a supernatural encounter with God and receive the promise of their Father, they still have issues. The Children of Israel were freed from slavery by incredible demonstrations of God’s power, but they not only wanted to go back to Egypt, but God also had to give them the Ten Commandments to teach them how to play fair. The followers of Jesus saw crazy things happen after they received the Holy Spirit, and Jerusalem was turned upside down. But they still had all sorts of issues. Ananias and Sapphira, Spirit-filled Christians, lied to the disciples and pretended to be something they weren’t. The believers in Corinth, also filled with the Spirit, had so much jealousy and chaos in their church that Paul said it would be better if they didn’t even get together. Peter, who was not only filled with the Spirit but also did incredible miracles, was so worried about what others thought of him that he bailed out from eating with people who were different from him.

God’s promises are sure, but when I get the one thing I’m crying out for, life will not instantly be pain and problem free. We need to deal with that. We can have real encounters with God and still have issues. Sometimes we say, “I thought that was supposed to take care of it!” But no… It’s part of it, but not all. We grow up in the world and can’t avoid being shaped by it, but it is contrary to the Kingdom of God. That means that God is in the process of reforming and reshaping us in the way of the Kingdom. It is a process.

Isaac interrupted Abraham and Sarah’s lives for a long time. This was no momentary discomfort. Receiving the promise had a huge, long-term impact on their lives. Isaac was the fulfillment of the promise, but they still had to change everything to receive it.

A few thousand years later, The Promise caused a lot of things to be interrupted as well. And today, I believe Jesus comes to us, even those of us who are already believers, and asks, “Are you willing to be interrupted by me?”
Am I willing? Am I willing to be interrupted as long as he wants? Or am I constantly resenting his interruption in my life? See, Jesus’ Kingdom is often at odds with my kingdom. We want him to take away our problems and do tricks, but we don’t want to follow him. And when we do want his Kingdom, often we demand it, now. We forget that he is Lord.

When we decided to follow him, we gave him permission to interrupt our life, so we need to stop resenting him for it.

It is possible that we want the reality of the promise but we don’t want God to interrupt our lives. But part of welcoming his promise is that our lives end up being different from what we thought they would be. Abraham and Sarah’s lives were different. Those of you who have children know what I’m talking about. And that is the case with many of the promises God has made in our lives. Receiving his promise will always bring about the best life possible, but there will be consequences to receiving it. Perhaps we need to just make up our minds now to accept all of God’s promise, rather than demand that he do it our way and at our time.