Sermon Transcript
Hey, a disclaimer before we start this morning. This story— I don’t think I’m centered, hold on, then my whole world will be off skew and we don’t know where we’re going. The story that we’re looking at this morning, this is our disclaimer, this is not a story about getting what we want. This is a story about the goodness of God, And in the end, it’s a story about getting something far better than we could have ever envisioned. So, if we walk into this kind of looking for a way, because we all want a miracle, right?
If we are looking for a way to kind of trigger God to deliver the thing that we want, we are going to miss the point. It’s not about getting what we want. It’s about the goodness of God and about getting something far better than what we want. We will likely be tempted to think, because this is how I think, right? I want what she got, or I want something similar to what she got.
I want something as unlikely as the thing is that she got. And so, I’m just telling you upfront, if you feel yourself kind of moving in that direction, I get it, but that’s not where we’re headed. We don’t get what she got. That’s not the story. We get something better.
Disclaimer over. Okay, Sarah had a problem, a heartbreaking, world-defining kind of problem. No doubt it stung her heart most days, if not every single day, everywhere she looked was a reminder of her problem. She couldn’t escape it. She couldn’t forget about it.
She couldn’t move on. She couldn’t have children. And to make matters worse, the problem definitely seemed to reside in her because her husband had a child with another woman, which presumably meant that he could have children, but she couldn’t. Not only is it what she wanted the most, but it is what her culture told her she needed to have in order to have any value as a woman. And then, perhaps most crushing of all, God had promised her husband Abraham.
God had promised Abraham. He had promised Abraham over and over and over again. He promised Abraham that He would build Abraham into a great nation. So, she must be asking herself, right? This has to be going off in her head.
Would God build her husband into a great nation? Without building her into one? Talk about feeling left out, right? Imagine your spouse gets invited to a party, but on the invitation it specifically says, don’t bring Sarah, right? We’re cool with you.
We’re not cool with her. Like, how could you give a husband something without also giving it to the wife? But she must have felt that way. You can just see the calculations that must be going off in her head. She is probably thinking something like, you know, God promised her husband many descendants, and that is not happening through her.
So, she— and she regrets this later, okay? She absolutely regrets this later. But because she wasn’t having any of the descendants, she told her husband to go try to have a baby with another woman. So, maybe she could build her family that way. So, he does it.
He has a child with another woman. And again, that was a bad idea and she admits that later, but nonetheless, it happened. He has this kid and that’s the only kid in Sarah’s family, if family is really the right word, like if your husband is a baby daddy somewhere else. Is that really her family? You know, modern people aren’t the only ones who have to sort this kind of stuff out.
People in the Bible had to sort it out too. But anyway, whether it’s her family or not, it’s the only family she has. So, if her husband is going to have descendants, if her husband is going to become a great nation, that’s it. That baby over there with that other woman, That’s the only option she’s got. And she’s getting older, and she’s getting older, and she’s getting older.
She’s way past the point of being able to get pregnant. You know, menopause not only happened, but she can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore because it happened so long ago. Meanwhile, her husband’s son keeps getting older. So, this is it. She’s on the outside looking in to God’s promise to Abraham.
And then God comes along and dares to say, Sarah, the descendants will come through you. The great nation will come through you. You will have the child. That’s where we pick up our Scripture today. We’re looking in Genesis chapters 17, 18, and 21.
We’ll just look at 17 and 18 to start with here. They’re on your note sheet there in front of you, but we’ll start with Genesis Genesis 17:15, God also said to Abraham, as for your wife, I will bless her, and I will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her. Abraham fell facedown and he laughed, and he said to himself, will a son be born to a man who is 100 years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of 90?
And Abraham said to God, if only Ishmael, that’s the kid that he’s the baby daddy of, if only Ishmael might live under your blessing. Then God said, yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant. For his descendants after him. The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.
And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Abraham and Sarah were already very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, after I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure? Then the Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh and say, will I really have a child now that I am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord?
I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.
Into Sarah’s broken, hopeless heart, God says, Sarah, you will have a child. So, she laughs, and Abraham laughs. Later in the story, she laughs again, okay? But when she laughs again later, it’s for a completely different reason. The first time she laughed, both her and Abraham must be thinking something like, what are you, an idiot, God?
They’re laughing at the absurdity of it all. It’s so far past any chance of reality, there’s no use even entertaining it as a thought. It’s beyond their imagination. It’s not something they could even dream of. It’s like somebody telling you that you’re going to be 50 feet tall someday.
Like, it’s not in the realm of possibilities. What you’re saying doesn’t even make any sense. So, she laughs.
But her laugh is more than just at the absurdity of it. That’s part of it for sure, but there’s another part of her laugh. It’s pain. She’s laughing to defend herself. She’s putting up a wall.
If I laugh at it, I won’t get my hopes up again. If I act like it’s nonsense, if I never entertain it as a possibility, I won’t get hurt. So she just stands back, and criticizes. If she does that, her heart will never be crushed. Now, she’ll never be happy either, okay?
This is just a side note, extra little tidbit for free. Someone who only scoffs at others is, is, is never happy. At best, they’re just kind of neutral. In order for your heart to soar, you have to open it up to the possibility of pain, but she has decided to close herself She won’t wish again. She’s probably been down that road way too many times.
But God shoots straight through all of Sarah’s defenses, looks over, calls her out, and says, why do you laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord? Or more literally, is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
Her laugh, her first laugh, and Abraham’s laugh, their first laugh, and God’s response give us a window into both when miracles often occur and how miracles often occur. So, when a miracle occurs often and how a miracle occurs. So, first, when. Oftentimes, not always, okay, not always, but oftentimes, God seems to wait until there is nowhere else in which to place our hope before He works. God could have given baby Isaac to Sarah at any point in her life, but He waits until she’s 90.
He waits until the only possible way this could ever come true is if He works. She has nowhere else to place her hope. In fact, she doesn’t even have any hope. God seems to do this sometimes, like when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus had been ill, and then he got worse, and then he died, and then he’d been dead for 4 days, and then Jesus raises him back to life.
Why didn’t Jesus just heal him before he ever died? Why did he wait 4 days until after he had been dead? Okay, I don’t really know. I’m not going to answer that because I don’t think we’re told. But this is a noticeable trend.
Many times, a miracle occurs when there is nowhere else to place our hope. You hear people tell stories sometimes like this, right? Maybe they’re in a car accident or something, and they say something like, a piece of shrapnel missed my heart by a centimeter. And they say, it’s a miracle! And that’s totally true, it is, and praise God, I don’t want to take that away from you, but like, there’s a skeptical side of me.
Actually, there may not be another side, it might just all be skeptical. I’m not sure. But it says, if God wanted to keep you safe, why didn’t He just keep you from having the accident in the first place? Like, instead of having the pain of shrapnel go somewhere— I mean, it missed your heart, so hallelujah, right? But it still hit you, right?
So instead of that, wouldn’t it have just been better to arrive safely at your destination without any shrapnel anywhere? Wouldn’t that be better?
I don’t actually know because that doesn’t seem to be how God does it a lot of times. Why did Lazarus even get sick in the first place, right? Forget about healing after he’s ill. How about he just never gets sick? Why wasn’t Isaac born when Sarah is 35?
I don’t know. But it does show many times, okay, not always, but many times God seems to wait until there is nowhere else to place our hope and then He works. People say maybe He does that so that no one can deny that it was God who did it. No one can say it was technology or coincidence or anything else. Maybe that’s why God does it this way.
Maybe He’s waiting for us to kind of break in humility to say, wow, I, I was getting, um, you know, my head was getting too big, I was getting too prideful, I thought I had the world by the tail kind of thing. You’ve kind of knocked me down a peg to put us in a humble position. Maybe that’s why he does it. I don’t know, we’re really not told, but that seems to be when a miracle often happens. Okay, how a miracle happens.
I’m going to say this And you’re going to think, that’s the least profound thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t need to write that down. Okay, but I actually want you to write that down because there’s more to it than will first appear. Okay, how a miracle occurs. God works, God moves.
God works, God moves. That’s how a miracle occurs. Are you writing that down? I know you’re like blown away. You just can’t You can’t wrap your mind around that big of a truth.
You just can’t tweet it out fast enough. I totally understand. Here’s why I wanted you to have that in print, okay? Because this is what I didn’t say. I didn’t say you need to have sufficient faith in order to get God to work or move.
I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that because in this story, faith is completely absent. Anytime I hear someone say, that miracle isn’t happening in your life because you don’t have enough faith, I want to say, have you met Sarah?
She didn’t have any faith, right? Zero. In fact, she laughed because of how ridiculous the thought sounded to her. God worked. God moved.
That’s how it happened, apart from any act of faith. In fact, God worked in spite of a complete lack of faith. In spite of ridicule, God worked. He was ridiculed. They both laughed at him.
They laughed at his idea. Does that sound like they had faith?
Yet, God still worked. He still moved. How does a miracle often occur? God moves, period. You know, we’re doing this series on miracles, more specifically miracles in the Old Testament, and we as modern people can often look at other moments in history, or we can even look at other cultures that exist in our world today who believe in the miraculous, and we can kind of think of them with this haughty superiority.
Oh, look at those simpletons who don’t understand the way the world works. Of course, they could be duped into believing that a miraculous event happened because they don’t know any better. But this account shows us they are not simpletons. Our arrogance is unfounded. They know how the world works.
Sarah knows this is not a possibility. So, we can’t say, they don’t know any better. They do know better, right? That’s why she laughed. They were just as skeptical as you and me.
So, perhaps, okay, perhaps with these miracles we’re talking about, Perhaps we could take off our I come from a superior culture attitude and consider the possibility, okay, just the possibility, the reason they believed it happened is simply because it really happened.
Not because they aren’t as smart as us, Just a possibility for us to consider. Okay, so Sarah laughs. God says, is anything too hard for me? I’ll be back in a year. You’ll have a baby then.
Which brings us to our next set of verses. This is the Genesis 21 block on your note sheet there. Now the Lord was gracious 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 very time God promised him. Sarah said, God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.
And she added, who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age. So, sure enough, the 90-year-old woman gets pregnant, and has a son. I thought about asking if anybody here this morning is 90 years old, but if there is, you may not want to get outed as a 90-year-old. Now, you may wear that as a badge of honor.
You totally should. That’s what you should do, but we don’t always do what we should do. It’s awesome if you’re 90. I hope I get to 90 someday. It’s possible some of you may not want to, like, raise your hand for that, right?
Some possible— some of our 90-year-olds here want people to believe that they are some other age, a sporty 85 perhaps, right? I don’t know what you’re going for. So instead of having anybody raise their hand, let’s just picture a 90-year-old that you know. And who knows, maybe it’s the person you look at in the mirror every morning, okay? But my grandma was 93 or 94, and when she passed away.
We don’t know how old she was because she actually had conflicting birth records, but I’m envisioning her when I think of a 90-year-old. You’re probably picturing somebody similar. Okay, now think about that person getting pregnant.
You kind of laugh, or at least smile, just thinking about it. Right? For us in the time we live, we might immediately begin to think about medical concerns, right? Like, are mother and baby going to be okay? Who’s going to take care of the kid, you know, when he’s a teenager if mother’s not around anymore?
But okay, let’s just skip over those concerns and assume they are all taken care of somehow and focus, let’s draw our attention to when the baby is actually born.
And a happy mother, a happy 90-year-old mother is holding her happy baby. Are you picturing that? We might laugh, and if we did, we would laugh like Sarah laughed the second time in a joyful kind of disbelief. Now, her first laugh when God said she would get pregnant was like this jaded, cynical disbelief. But after the baby is born, all of that is gone.
She has a laugh of amazement, of awe, of wonder. It’s still kind of rooted in disbelief if you think about it. Her first laugh was, this is never going to happen. Her second laugh is, I can’t believe this just happened. It’s like the kid at the circus who can’t believe she’s watching an elephant walk on top of a ball.
Are you just, is this happening? It’s like me every time I see giant redwoods. They always kind of take my breath away. Even, I mean, I’ve seen ancient redwoods a bunch and bunch and bunch of times, and I always think like, am I really looking at this? This is amazing.
It’s like it’s beyond belief even though I’m kind of looking at it, and that’s why we love it. Sarah’s second laugh shows us the joy of a God-sized gift. There’s actually nothing for you to write down for that point, but that is a point on your note sheet, the joy of a God-sized gift. If you feel like you’re somebody who needs to write something down, you just draw a little smiley face next to joy, maybe. The joy of a God-sized gift.
Sarah has the kind of laugh that you have on Christmas morning when you open the present you really wanted but never thought you could have. She has the kind of laugh when the girl or boy who you never thought could be interested in you is interested in you, and it’s for real. It’s not like a joke. It’s like it’s actually happening. They really are interested in you, and you think, am I living in a fairy tale?
If you’re in that situation, especially if you had to wait and wait and wait for that to happen in your life, you almost can’t help but laugh when it does happen. Sarah’s son is named Isaac, which means laughter, and his name has this kind of double meaning. On one side, it’s a reminder that she never needed to doubt that her first laugh was ungrounded. It’s kind of a judgment on her, you never needed to do that. Nothing is too wonderful for the Lord.
But his name is also a reminder of God’s goodness, that God provides the type of joy and the type of laughter that can’t really be contained.
Now, we could just end with that this morning, and it could be kind of a sweet place to stop. God provides what she wanted most, and everyone lived happily ever after. But one, that’s not true. They did not live happily ever after. And two, if we ended there, you’d walk out into the world hoping for a gift from God, whatever it is that you’re hoping God will give you, you’d walk out there still hoping for it and you’d be unprepared with what to do with it if you ever got it.
Because there is a danger in receiving the one thing for which we have always hoped. There is a danger. You used to think, remember, you used to think, if I could— or some of us are still there— if I could have this thing, Then I would be made. Life would suddenly be worth living if I had this. This is the thing that would change my world from black and white to full vibrant color.
You used to think that. And then some of us got the thing. It happened. And we laughed like Sarah. Such joy, praising God.
But there’s a danger, because just like that, your joy can turn dark.
Your joy can move to obsession, stress, paranoia. Think about it. If this is the thing that adds color to your life, as soon as you get it, you might start to freak out about losing it. Either slowly or quickly, you can, not always, but you can begin to reorient everything else in your world to ensure the preservation of the one thing that matters. It becomes a kind of god to you.
Everything else in life is now sacrificable. Everything is now something that can be used in service of the ultimate. This actually seems to be what happened to Sarah. Sarah did not live happily ever after with Isaac. She started to freak out.
In the very next verses after Sarah says, God has brought me laughter, the very next verses, her joy turns to paranoia. And she says to Abraham, get your other son who you had with that other woman, get him out of here, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac. She’s obsessing over Isaac. She perceives a threat to the only thing that matters in her life, so she’s going to squash it. She can no longer be joyful because she’s stressed about the thing that makes her joyful.
Can you relate to that? I’ve got to have the job. I’ve got to have the job. I’ve got to have the job. If I had this job, I would be made.
You get the job. Laughter for a minute, but then fairly quickly, what if I lose this job? Is somebody gunning for my position? Who can I trust? Who’s an enemy?
Joy’s gone, right? Or, I gotta have this relationship. I gotta have this relationship. You get the relationship. You know, the person who you could never believe would be with you is with you.
And then fairly quickly, joy can turn into jealousy and possession. Who’d you go out with? Was anyone pretty there? Let me see your text messages. Hand the phone over.
How can we break free from that? How do we get out of that descent into paranoia? How can we hang on to the joy that we had at first? How can we hold the gift with an open hand? So that we don’t squeeze it so tight that we kill it.
It happens like this, okay? Your ultimate joy, your deepest laughter, your Isaac— it can’t be that gift that we’re talking about. In fact, your biggest treasure must be, if you’re going to keep your joy, okay, if you’re going to keep your joy, which some of you may not want to keep your joy, and you go your own way and let me know how it works out, but if you want to keep your joy, your biggest treasure must be something that cannot be lost or diminished. Your source of contentment must be totally secure if you’re going to keep your joy. Must be never at risk if you’re going to keep your joy.
It must be something that can never come under threat, something that is never in jeopardy. And only then, okay, and I don’t think that I’m overstating this, only then can you have the laughter that never ends.
Because, just think about this, if the source of your joy can be threatened, then your joy itself crumbles. So my question for all of us is this, whether you’re a Christian or not, I think this is a great question for everybody to answer, like, is— because we all want the joy that never ends, right? We want that. Is there any— is there any some kind of like totally secure fountainhead of light that will always continue no matter what? One you never have to wonder if it’s in jeopardy.
Is there any fountain like that out there? It can’t be kids.
Sarah found that out, right? Throw all your hopes into having a kid and there’s all kinds of ways that you can lose kids. Even if they grow up and still love you, and I hope that happens, but if they still love you when they grow up, you worry. About them. You worry if they will get the job they need.
You worry if they will get the relationship. You worry if their kids will be okay. The joy becomes a stress again. So finding consistency in kids, never going to work. And obviously, it can’t be in romances, those go up and down.
It can’t be a job, an asset in the portfolio. It can’t be a clean reputation. It can’t be your status. Or standing in a community, if any of those things are the thing that makes the stars sparkle at night for you, if they hang the moon for you, then you’ve set yourself up to be stressed, and your laughter will be temporary.
But There is a true Isaac who is true laughter, whose birth was also miraculous, whose birth was also long awaited, who was desired so deeply that creation itself groaned in anticipation of His arrival. He is an Isaac who will never leave us or forsake us. He’s an Isaac whose relationship with us and His desire for us are so strong that they will outlast the earth. His inheritance was not hoarded for Himself. Both He and His Father share the endless riches of His inheritance with others.
This is Romans 8:32, right? For if God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us all things?
Until Christ is our treasure, our laughter will not be as deep as it could be. Or to the extent that Christ is our treasure, to the extent that He is the one in our life that makes the stars sparkle at night, to that extent, our joy will be secure. See, this is why this is not a message about getting what we want. It’s a message about getting far more than what we want. The Bible says God is able to do immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine.
What is that? What can He give us that is so far beyond what we could ever comprehend? It’s Him. He’s the gift. We get Him.
The exceeding wonder of His beauty is ours forever, never to be diminished, never to be threatened, never to be put into jeopardy. That’s why if we’re longing for a job or a status or a child or a relationship or a relationship without conflict, it’s totally fine if we want those things, and it will be a joy if we’ll ever get them, and we will praise God, and we will sing, and we will celebrate, and we will laugh, like Sarah, and that’s just awesome.
But God is able to give us a joy that so far exceeds those joys that it is beyond our comprehension, and that joy is guaranteed to be ours in Christ. We don’t need to wonder if it will ever happen. It has been promised. It was purchased through Christ’s death. It was sealed by the gift of the Spirit.
It is Certain. It is far better than we could ever ask or imagine, and it is a treasure that will never fade.
At the end of one of my favorite book series, Lord of the Rings, so yes, I am a nerd. Join me, will you? Like, it’s great over here. One of my favorite book series, at the very end of Lord of the Rings, Evil has been vanquished, goodness has triumphed, but the battle has taken a toll on our heroes. They very nearly paid for the victory with their lives, but they were rescued.
Now, they were rescued after they collapsed and passed out and thought they were going to die, so they didn’t know that they had been rescued because they were still passed out. They didn’t know that they had won the battle, and they had been asleep for a while after passing out. Then one of them, Sam, wakes up and he begins to realize everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.
So he says— he sees another character there. He says, Gandalf! That’s another character. He says, Gandalf! I thought you were dead!
But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come Untrue? What’s happened to the world? And Gandalf replies, a great shadow has departed. And then Gandalf laughs, and the sound was like music or like water in a parched land.
And as Sam listened, the thought came to him that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like an echo of all the joys he had ever known. He waved his arms in the air and said, I feel, I feel like spring after winter, like sun on the leaves, like trumpets and harps and all the songs I’ve ever heard.
Do you know you have access to that kind of joy in Christ?
One day, we will wake up and we will see Him. We will see the true Isaac. We will see Him face to face.
When we do, everything sad will come untrue, and He will give us the full riches of His inheritance, and we will live in His laughter forever and ever.
So, may the promise of that day Work backward and give us joy in all the days until then.
Let’s pray.
Father, how amazing that You provide laughter, that You give us a true Isaac, that You rejoice with us, that we share in Your inheritance, Lord. We pray that that image of what will happen and is certain, we pray that would flood into our heart and give us a laughter and joy that can never fade. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
