Friday, October 13, 2006
By Faith... Abraham - Part II, Part 34 of 79
TEXT: "By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude--innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore" (Hebrews 11:11-12).
IDEA: God keeps His promises according to His purposes and not ours.
PURPOSE: To help listeners realize that God keeps His promises in His own way and in His own time.
Have you ever been frustrated with God?
Have you met other people who were?
What bothers them?
I. We are sometimes frustrated with God when we feel that God has not kept His promises to us. Why?
Sometimes people have been upset because they have taken a promise for themselves that God never made to them.
Someone who has bothered to count them has said that there are over 3,000 promises in the Bible. That may be true, but they aren't all made to us.
Children's songs can be misleading. One that I dimly remember:
Every promise in the book is mine,
Every chapter, every verse, every line . . .
What promises did God make to Abraham? He would have a land and a posterity as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sand on the shore of the Mediterranean.
II. We are sometimes upset because God hasn't kept His promise right away.
God fulfills His promises in his own time.
God's promise to Noah that there would be a great flood took over a century to fulfill.
God's promises to Abraham were not fulfilled in his lifetime.
Abraham was promised the land of Canaan, but when he died, he only had a plot of ground in which to bury his wife.
Abraham was promised that he would father a great nation. He had a son who was born when he was 100 years of age and two grandsons were born when he was 140.
Sometimes our frustration comes out of waiting for God to work in His time.
III. We also get upset because God keeps His promises according to His own purposes and in His own way.
That obviously frustrated both Abraham and Sarah. They wanted to help God out.
Abraham suggested to God that He fulfill his promise through his chief servant Eliezer of Damascus.
Sarah decided that God should use her Egyptian maid Hagar as a surrogate mother.
God's promises to us are for His purposes, not ours.
In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, we acknowledge that when we say, "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." But down deep inside we may actually want our own will to be done.
God keeps His promises but in His own time, in His own way, for His own purposes.
