Sarah
Heroes of the Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Every single day we make choices that show whether we are courageous or cowardly. We choose between the right thing and the convenient thing, sticking to a conviction or caving in for the sake of comfort, greed or approval. We choose either to take a carefully thought-out risk or to crawl into a shrinking shell of safety, security and inactivity. We choose, either to believe in God and trust him, even when we do not always understand his ways, or to second-guess him and cower in the corners of doubt and fear.
How do you establish trust? I was thinking about this when I saw my cat sitting in his chair without a care in the world.
We have two pets in our home. We have a very large bunny named bootsy and a cat named JJ. Both of these animals have placed their trust in me and my family to provide for their physical and emotional needs. They know that every morning they will have food and water, a place to sleep and play, companionship and protection. They have trusting faith that all of this will be provided, even though it is within my power to remove it at anytime.
It made me ask myself, do I have trusting faith in God the same way my bunny and my cat do with me?
Today, we will look at a woman you may not think of as having trusting faith, Sarah. Pastor, is this not the woman who laughed when she was told she would give birth at an elderly age. Is this not the woman who took matters into her own hands when it seemed God had forgotten His promise to her. Yes and yes! I told you that God has established the lineage of Christ and built His church on the faith of flawed people. Yes Sarah did those things, but that is just a small part of her whole story. A story that placed her as one of two women mentioned in Hebrews chapter 11 as a hero of the faith.
By faith even Sarah herself, when she was unable to have children, received power to conceive offspring, even though she was past the age, since she considered that the one who had promised was faithful. Therefore, from one man—in fact, from one as good as dead—came offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and as innumerable as the grains of sand along the seashore.
The story of Sarah’s faith is a story of trusting faith. Sarah’s faith in God was invariably entwined with her love for her husband, Abraham. Together, Abraham and Sarah became the father and mother of the Jewish race. As such, Sarah remains one of the most important female figures in world history.
The Bible also tells us that Sarah was a woman of remarkable beauty.
There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to stay there for a while because the famine in the land was severe. When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, “Look, I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ They will kill me but let you live. Please say you’re my sister so it will go well for me because of you, and my life will be spared on your account.” When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. Pharaoh’s officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, so the woman was taken to Pharaoh’s household. He treated Abram well because of her, and Abram acquired flocks and herds, male and female donkeys, male and female slaves, and camels.
Hebrew folk lore ranks her right up there next to Eve, who was regarded as the most attractive and perfect woman who ever lived. (Of course, none of them had ever met my wife, so it’s really not a fair judgment.) Sarah was approximately 65 years old at this time. She was apparently “aged to perfection,” as they say, because she only grew more radiant with each passing year. Even at the age of ninety, Abraham was afraid that kings and princes would fall in love with her bewildering beauty—and he was right on at least two occasions! But more important than her unsurpassed place in history or her unparalleled beauty, was her trusting faith in God.
Her journey of faith was a long, unpredictable rollercoaster of highs and lows—sometimes there seemed to be more lows than highs. So to put Sarah’s story of faith in the proper context, we have to go back to the beginning. Sarah’s faith-journey begins with a...
Trusting Faith in the Pilgrimage
Abraham (who was then known as Abram) and Sarai were living together with Abraham’s family in the city of Ur, in Babylonia. And after Abraham’s brother died, Sarai and Abram helped raise their nephew, Lot, and lived with Abram’s father, Terah. But one fateful day, God spoke to Abraham.
The Lord said to Abram:
Go from your land,
your relatives,
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.
Neither Abram nor Sarai knew where God was calling them to, but they knew where he was calling them from! After the flood, Noah, his sons and their wives repopulated the Middle East. But it did not take long and they had become a godless society once again. Actually, they became a polytheistic society—that is, a culture that believed in many gods. Shem, Ham and Japeth (Noah’s sons) disregarded God’s command to spread out over all the earth and, instead, built a giant ziggurat—known as the Tower of Babel—as a symbol of their unity and independence. God, of course, destroyed the tower and scattered the people, confusing their language and forcing them to spread out from there over the whole world.
The city of Ur, by the time of Abram and Sarai, was dedicated to Nannar, the mood god. Its inhabitants were idol worshippers who had forgotten the one true God—the God of Noah. The Lord called Abram and Sarai out of that land to be pilgrims in search of something better—in search of God himself. And so, they packed up their belongings, left their relatives and their father’s house, and headed out into the great unknown.
It took a lot of faith to do what they did. Even more so, I think, for Sarah than for Abraham. Think about it. The Bible says that God appeared and spoke to Abraham, not to Sarah! All Sarah had known her entire life was heathenism and idolatry. She’d never heard of this God. What would you do if your husband or wife came home one day after fifty-some years of marriage and when you asked them how their day was, they said, “Well, honey, God appeared to me today and said we need to pack up all our stuff and hit the road!”
You might respond with, “What!? Where are we going!?”
“I don’t know,” your spouse shrugs. “I guess God will just tell us when we get there.”
It sounds crazy. And it probably sounded no less crazy to Sarah. But she loved her husband very much and she was willing to trust him on this. She really didn’t know God, but she was willing to step out on faith. A trusting faith.
Faith is like that, you know—stepping into the unknown. Not one of us has ever seen God. We’ve never seen Jesus face to face. Never met an apostle. Never held an original manuscript from the Bible. Never touched the Holy Spirit. Yet, God has called each one of us to to take a leap of trusting faith to have a better life— an eternal life. We never quite know, when we first answer that call, where we’ll end up. But it’s the journey that matters—getting to know the God who spoke the universe into existence, experiencing his grace and love in unimaginable ways, and knowing that someday—some glad morning when this life is over—we will no longer be pilgrims. That is a trusting faith.
Sarah’s faith began to blossom when God gave her a...
Trusting Faith in the Covenant
Before sending them off to Lord-knows-where, God made a covenant with Abraham.
I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,
and all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.
This everlasting covenant extends throughout all of Scripture and of time.
this promise eventually found its fulfillment in the nation of Israel. Abraham and Sarah would become the parents of the Hebrew people, and those people would inherit the “Promised Land,” the land of Canaan—which is better known today as Palestine. Although it took several generations and even a period of time as slaves in Egypt, God kept his promise. Abraham and Sarah’s descendents multiplied, were led by Moses and Joshua into the Promised Land, and eventually became a mighty nation.
But the national fulfillment of this promise was only the beginning. Ultimately God’s promise would not be fulfilled until the arrival of Jesus Christ. It is only through Jesus that “all the people of the earth” can be blessed. Paul explains the spiritual importance of this promise to all believers, saying:
just like Abraham who believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness?
You know, then, that those who have faith, these are Abraham’s sons. Now the Scripture saw in advance that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and proclaimed the gospel ahead of time to Abraham, saying, All the nations will be blessed through you.
You see, through faith in Jesus we are all a part of the same spiritual family as Abraham and Sarah—we’ve been grafted in.
That is, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but the children of the promise are considered to be the offspring.
So, it doesn’t matter whether you were born Jew, Gentile, Asian, European or American—we are all children of Abraham and Sarah through faith in Jesus Christ.
God doesn’t have two distinct plans for Jews and Christians; rather, we are all born again into God’s family through our faith in Jesus.
But what was probably foremost on Sarah’s mind, was the immediate fulfillment of God’s promise. If God was going to make Abraham into a “great nation,” that meant that Sarah was going to have a baby! God clarified that part of the promise.
God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name. I will bless her; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will produce nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
Remember, Sarah was about sixty-five years old now and up until this point she had never been able to have children. The promise of a little baby gave Sarah such hope and joy. This promise fanned the flame of faith within Sarah’s heart, but it wouldn’t be long before Sarah’s trusting faith experienced some rough St Landry parish roads.
Have you ever felt like you heard from God and you started down that path and then blam…brick wall? What can we learn from Sarah and the Bible about this
Trusting Faith in Our Impatience
Twenty-five years would pass between the time God first promised Sarah a son and the time she finally got pregnant. In the meantime, Sarah faced some serious struggles. She seemed to doubt whether or not God would keep his promise (for obvious reasons), so she took matters into her own hands. She was waiting on the Lord 12 Years
Sarai said to Abram, “Since the Lord has prevented me from bearing children, go to my slave; perhaps through her I can build a family.” And Abram agreed to what Sarai said.
The slave girl’s name was Hagar. She and Abraham did have a son, but things didn’t go quite the way Sarah thought they would. She ended up being hateful and resentful of Hagar and her son Ishmael. She eventually demanded that Abraham send them both away—kicking them out of the house and onto the street. Though I’m sure Sarah saw things going differently in her mind, this lack of faith and patience on her part has led to thousands of years of fighting and feuding between the descendant of Ishmael (Arabs) and the descendant of Isaac (Israelis).
Now, it may be hard for us to imagine recruiting a servant to sleep with your spouse, but that just demonstrates how badly Sarah wanted to be a mother! We can all identify with her there, can’t we? It might not be motherhood, but we’ve all wanted something at some point in life that we just couldn’t wait for—marriage, children, sex, a bigger house, a new car, a better job, whatever it may be. We may pray about it, but many times God’s answer is—Wait! There are all sorts of excuses not to wait though, aren’t there? After all, “God can’t steer a parked car, can he?” We even invent Bible verses to make us feel better about doing things our own way: “God helps those who help themselves”
Some of the worst mistakes of my life were made because I was just too impatient to wait for a “green light” from God. What about you? Can you identify? Sarah wasn’t a bad person and what she wanted was good, but she hadn’t yet developed the kind of trusting faith that was willing to wait for God’s timing. Whenever you’re facing a big decision (or even a little one), don’t rush things—pray about it, trust God, and don’t move until you’re certain that this God’s will!
Finally, after thirteen more years without a baby carriage, ...
Trusting Faith in God’s Power
The Lord came to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the appointed time God had told him.
I can only imagine the joy and excitement Sarah felt as she held Isaac in her arms for the first time. You can almost see the weight being lifted from Sarah’s heart—all those years of anger and bitterness melting away as she gazes at the tiny little hand wrapped around her forefinger. Finally, she can laugh again. Finally, she can celebrate new life. Finally, she understands the love and goodness of God. She finally understood the full extent of a trusting faith.
Trusting faith is powerful. “Faith sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, touches the intangible, and accomplishes the impossible.” But trusting faith is only as good as the one in whom it is placed. Trusting faith is only powerful if it’s in an all-powerful God.
Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
In other words, if something is God’s will for your life and you pursue it with a heart of trusting faith, then nothing in heaven or hell can prevent it! I want to give you something that I got from another pastor, but it is too good not to share here today. If you are taking notes, try to make sure you get all these verses.
• Human wisdom says, I’m not able—God says, I am able (2 Cor.9:8
And God is able to make every grace overflow to you, so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work.
• We think, It’s not worth it—God says, It will be worth it (Rom.8:28
We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
• You fear, I can’t manage—God says, I will supply all your needs (Phil.4:19
And my God will supply all your needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
• We say, I can’t go on—God says, My grace is sufficient (2 Cor.12:9
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.”
Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.
• We feel, I’m all alone—God says, I will never leave you
Be strong and courageous; don’t be terrified or afraid of them. For the Lord your God is the one who will go with you; he will not leave you or abandon you.”
Sarah’s life and faith radiate this truth. Despite all her mistakes and misgivings, God still accomplished the impossible through her. He kept his promise to Sarah, and we can rest assured that he will always keep his promises. One of those promises is that he will accept everyone who comes to him in faith and he will make them one of his own children. If you want to do that this morning...