God of Possible
Notes
Transcript
Have you ever seen Star Wars? If you ask Star Wars fans which movie is their favorite, the most die hard fans claim The Empire Strikes Back is the best. In this movie, Luke Skywalker, under the direction of his former master, travels to the planet Degobah to seek out a Jedi master by the name of Yoda to complete his training. The entire planet is a giant swamp and Luke crash lands his ship in the water. The ship sinks, leaving him wondering how he’ll ever get out of there.
Well, Luke finds Yoda and begins training, where he learns a variety of skills that includes the ability to levitate objects. As he progresses in his training, the unthinkable happens: his ship sinks further into the swamp, leading him to a moment of despair. Yoda leads him to use his new object levitating ability to lift the ship out of the water. Luke said he will try, and that’s when Yoda says his famous line, “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” So Luke faces the ship, sticks his arm out, and begins lifting the massive ship out of the water! But it only works for a few seconds. It gets hard, and the ship sinks back into the swamp. Yoda gives Luke a little speech, then Luke stands up and says, “You want the impossible,” and walks away. Yoda then bows his head, closes his eyes, sticks out his hand, and levitates the whole ship onto dry land! It is an incredible moment, and a turning point for Luke! He turns to Yoda and says, “I don’t believe it.” And Yoda replies, “That is why you fail.”
Wow. It’s a miracle! The real miracle was that the ship was operable after being completely submerged in swamp water!
Our God is a God of miracles. As we look at Genesis 18 today, Abraham and Sarah are still waiting for God’s promises to be fulfilled. They now know that they will not life to see all of them fulfilled. Their descendants will inherit the promises. But they are also still waiting on descendants. Well, in this chapter God shows up again and Abraham invited him to stay a while. God agrees and Abraham calls to Sarah to prepare food for God and his two angels he brought with him. So they all sit down to eat.
What I want to do this morning is focus on verses 9-15:
Then they said to him, “Where is Sarah your wife?” And he said, “There, in the tent.”
He said, “I will surely return to you at this time next year; and behold, Sarah your wife will have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent door, which was behind him.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; Sarah was past childbearing.
Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?”
And the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, when I am so old?’
“Is anything too difficult for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”
Sarah denied it however, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. And He said, “No, but you did laugh.”
We see again that God is reconfirming his promise to give Abraham and Sarah a child. In verse ten he says that she will have a child by this time next year. This is almost identical to what he said in 17:21. So not much time has passed between the events of chapter 17 and chapter 18. Chapter 17 reveals to us that Abraham is 100 years old, and Sarah is 90 years old. Verse 11 is perhaps the most important verse in this whole chapter:
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; Sarah was past childbearing.
This is super important! This doesn’t mean the odds of getting pregnant were slim. This doesn’t mean the odds are not in their favor. This means the probability is precisely zero! There is a word for this: IMPOSSIBLE! It was never going to happen. Imagine being in the shoes of an old couple who was promised 25 years ago that they would have a child together, and now the ship for that has sailed from a natural standpoint. If you were in that position today, tell me you wouldn’t doubt God just a little bit.
It’s been 25 years! They were old when they started, and they are really old now! Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. But don’t you think that there is a little part of him that’s thinking, “Did I just waste the last 25 years of my life? I’ve seen God do some stuff, but this has never been done before.” God has let the situation develop to the point where the only way it can be pulled off is if he works a miracle.
Now, you may not realize this, but miracles aren’t actually all that common. We read about so many of them in the Bible, but if we were to chart out all the miracles of the Bible, you would find that they all occur in very specific periods of history. My current definition of a miracle is a supernatural event performed by God or through a messenger of God for the purpose of confirming the message of God. When God does something big, or reveals something new, miracles usually accompany the revelation. If you list all the miracles of the Bible, you will have a pretty long list. But if you were to reverse engineer that and count the number of days in human history where that doesn’t happen, you will see that true miracles make up only a fraction of all Biblical events, let alone human history. A miracle is a rare event.
What we are looking at is a rare event. How many people in all of recorded human history have ever given birth to a child at the age of 90? They make up an extremely tiny percentage of all human females to have ever lived. God has a promise to fulfill but now the only way that promise can be fulfilled is if he works a miracle in their lives.
Why does he do this? Simple. There are times in which God turns the impossible into possible so there is no other explanation than to say God did it. There had to have been critics of Abraham. We know there were. “Those who curse you, I will curse.” The naysayers were likely laughing at him for believing in such a ridiculous notion that this God would give this old couple incapable of having children a child. But God is going to do it. Even they don’t believe it, because as Sarah is listening in, she laughs and God calls her out on it!
Have you ever had the feeling that God wanted to do something in your life that seemed impossible? Have you ever found yourself in a situation that looked impossible to get out of? A relationship has gone south. You just got laid off. You got an unfavorable diagnosis from the doctor. You were told never to contact that person again. You filed bankruptcy. You had a car accident. The toxic person won’t leave. You have no idea how you are going to get to the other side of this. I have good news for you. God does.
Does God still do miracles? If you don’t believe he can, you’ll never see one. But if you believe he can, you will. Sometimes we look for God to do grand miracles in our time just like they were done in the days of Moses, the prophets, Jesus, the early church, and so on. But we are probably not going to see water turned to wine or someone walking on water or God send fire to consume a water soaked sacrifice. That doesn’t mean that he is not in the miracle business. God still heals disease. He can still make the blind see and the lame walk. He can make the deaf hear, but we also live in a society that looks for any reason to explain away the supernatural.
The miracles Jesus performed were to validate the message and identity he proclaimed. In John chapter 10, he points people to believe the works he does if they don’t believe the words he says. He basically says, “Look, if you don’t think what I am saying is true, look to the things I have done. They will confirm that what I say is true.” In John chapter 3, Nicodemus knew this because he said to Jesus,
“Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”
So Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus is at least sent by God not just by what he says, but by what he has done. God desires that we look to the works Jesus has done, in this case the miracles he has performed, as the evidence that Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, we don’t need God to perform another miracle like that to prove Jesus is true. He has already done that. So the miracles we look for today are not always these huge supernatural signs, but still supernatural activity in his creation.
There was zero chance Abraham and Sarah would get pregnant. But God did it. That was a true miracle. If God is capable of achieving that, don’t you think he can pull off the impossible in your life? Don’t you think he can do the thing you are giving up on? Can’t he heal your body? Can’t he heal your relationship? Can’t he redeem the situation you are in? Is there something you are facing so terrifying that only God could get you out of it?
Maybe it is something you have to start. Maybe God has given you this crazy vision for a future he has for you, but it is so outlandish that there is no way you could pull it off. Only he could do it. You’re either looking at a hopeless situation and think only God can get me out of this or you are at the base of the mountain looking up toward the summit and thinking there’s no way I can get up there. Only God can do it. Start climbing.
We’re going to do something a little different today. If you find yourself in any of those two situations, the first being a struggle you can’t see a way out of, or the second being a direction God is calling you into, you should not leave here today without being prayed for. So for the rest of our time here, if you need prayer for that thing going through your mind right now, I want you to come forward and let me pray for you. You shouldn’t leave here today without being prayed over.
