Waiting on God's Promises | Jimmy Evans

this is genesis 12 telling a story about the promise that god made to abraham and sarah genesis 12 lord said to abram get out of your country from your family from your father's house to a land that i will show you and i will make you a great nation i will bless you and make your name great and you will be a blessing i will bless those who bless you i will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed abram departed as the lord had spoken to him and lot went with him and abram was 75 years old remember that his age when he departed from haran then abram took sarah his wife and lot his brother son all their possession they had gathered and the people whom they had acquired in haran they departed to go to the land of canaan so they came to the land of canaan abraham passed through the land to a place called shechem as far as the terrapin trees of mora and the canaanites were then in the land then the lord appeared to abram and said to your descendants i will give this land and there he built an altar to the lord who had appeared to him 75 years old 10 years goes by okay this is genesis 16. sarah abram's wife had borne him no children and she had an egyptian maidservant whose name was hagar so sarah i said to abram see now the lord has restrained me from bearing children please go into my maid perhaps i shall obtain children by her and abram heeded the voice of sarah then sarah abram's wife took hagar her maid the egyptian and gave her to her husband abraham to be his wife and abram had dwelt ten years in the land of canaan so he went into hagar she conceived and when she saw that she had conceived her mistress became despised in her eyes so sarah is struggling i'm sure abraham is too and sarah sees 10 years have gone by since the promise was given to us and we don't have a child and so she begins to reason the way we do all of us do this and she comes up with the bright idea that abraham is supposed to have a child by hagar as soon as she conceives now from that point forward sarah despises hagar and everything goes south because this is not god's will okay genesis 16 15. now abram is 86 years old so hegel hagar bore abram a son and abram named his son whom hagar bore ishmael abram was 86 years old when hagar bore ishmael to abram when abram was 99 years old the lord appeared to abram and said to him i am almighty god walk before me and be blameless now this is very very interesting because these are two verses 13 years apart okay ver the first verse verse 16 there says and abram was 86 years old when hagar bore ishmael the next verse says and when abram was 99 years old the lord appeared to him so there's a 13-year delay between those two verses and i'll tell you why in just a minute so from the time that god gave abram the promise to the time the promise was fulfilled there were seven steps here are the seven steps number one a promise from god at 75 years old very clear promise that we just read number two obedience and waiting on god for 10 years till he was 85 okay number three doubt in human reasoning now when we're waiting on god this is this is the big issue is time goes by more time than we think is appropriate and we begin to reason and i believe i'm married to a woman been married to a woman for 42 years so i kind of think like a woman sometimes and so you have to to survive if you're if you're a smart husband so i think that that abram was thinking like this okay or sarah was thinking like this god gave abram the promise not me i may not be special to god like my husband and i may not be the one that god's going to use in fact part of the reason that god may be waiting to give us the child is just simply so we'll wake up to the idea it's not going to be by me men can have children later in life but not women okay and this is i believe this is what she's thinking and it leads her to the human reasoning to the conclusion it's not going to be by me it's going to be behagar number four sin and the resulting consequences ishmael when ishmael was born abrams prayed this prayer and said may ishmael live before you and what he's asking is i want you to bless ishmael i know he's not the one that you promised and god said i won't bless him i won't do it there's an isaac coming but i won't bless ishmael number five further delay for 13 more years why did god not speak to abram for 13 years well it wasn't because he didn't love him because he loved him okay and isaac is still going to be born when a child is 13 years old in the jewish society they're bar mitzvahed a boy and so a boy in the jewish society a boy becomes a man when he's 13. when i was 13 years old i had a jewish friend that i went to school with and he was bar mitzvahed at 13 years old and we were like seventh graders at crockett junior high and uh he was the only jewish friend that i had and the only thing i knew he he got thirteen hundred dollars from his relatives when he was in the seventh grade and i thought i'm converting okay hoping my relatives will cough it up but so when he turned 13 years old they bar mitzvahed him so god says to abram you're going to raise this child you're going to take responsibility for your behavior now you guys wanted to have ishmael isaac will not coexist with ishmael and i still love you and the promise is still on its way but for 13 years that when listen when they circumcised ishmael when he was 13 years old sarah conceived right after that so that's the reason for the delay further delay number six continued faith by abraham this is very remarkable remember he's 86 years old when when ishmael's born he's now 99 years old when god shows up at their tent one day and promises that this time next year they're going to have a child and sarah laughed okay and the lord said sarah laughed when i said that sarah said i didn't laugh and the lord said yes you did let me say the lord has really good hearing but don't argue with jesus that's the good idea so romans 4 not being weak in faith he did not consider his own body already dead since he was about a hundred years old and the deadness of sarah's womb he did not waver at the promise of god through unbelief but was strengthened in faith giving glory to god and being fully convinced what he would had promised he was able to perform and therefore it was accounted to him as righteousness what this is giving us an account for is when the lord came by at 99 years old the lord appeared to abraham at 99 years old and he said i'm coming back next year and sarah will give birth and abram believed that even though his body and sarah's body were as good as dead he believed and it was accounted to him as righteousness number seven is the promise is fulfilled at 100 years of age 25 years after it was given and this is genesis 21 the lord visited sarah as he had spoken or as he said and the lord did for sarah as he had spoken for sarah conceived and bore abraham a son in his old age at the set time of which god had spoken to him and 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 100 years old when his son isaac was born to him and sarah said god has made me laugh and all who here will laugh with me the the name isaac means laughter or to laugh so this is a happy ending god's so gracious god's so gracious you know abraham lied twice about sarah being a sister they had ishmael rather than waiting on god and at the end of all that god shows up when they don't have any chance at all of having a baby god shows up blesses them and fulfills his word to them and they have a baby that's what you call the grace of jesus the grace of jesus is the foundation of our faith and the grace of jesus is what makes everything good happen in our lives it's not based how good we are it's based on how great he is somebody say amen [Music] foreign

Channel: Jimmy Evans

Views: 13,268

Rating: 4.9201994 out of 5

Keywords: Jimmy Evans, Christian, marriage, Daystar, MarriageToday, Gateway church, preaching, christian

Id: 9U-P7Bjzfq0

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020