Genesis 18 one through 15.
And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of memory.
As he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day, he lifted up
his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.
When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them,
and bowed himself to the earth and said, O Lord,
if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant.
Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves
under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves,
and after that you may pass on, since you have come to your servant.
So they said, do as you have said.
And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah, and said, quick,
three sees a fine flour needed, and make cakes.
And Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf tender and good,
and gave it to a young man, who prepared it quickly.
Then he took curds and milk, and the calf
that he had prepared, and set it before them.
And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
They said to him, where is Sarah, your wife?
And he said, she is in the tent.
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.
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years.
The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.
So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, after I am worn out
and my Lord is old, shall I have pleasure?
The Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh and say,
shall I indeed bear a child?
Now that I am old, is anything too hard for the Lord?
At the appointed time I will return to you
about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.
But Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid.
He said, no, but you did laugh.
Everybody, welcome to Christ Community chapel.
So glad you're here. Thanks for coming.
If you are here at our West service on Sunday,
I am on the screen because I am preaching live in East.
And let me tell you why I am preaching live in East.
We are growing.
I had a pretty fast rate so fast.
We count empty seats, every week
to find out where new people can sit.
And, the most empty seats we have are in our East service and our 830 West service.
So if you are at a very crowded service and you want to give up your seat
and go to one of the other services, that would be great.
I love having to ask you to do that because I love
what's going on with our church, so thanks.
All right.
This is our sixth week of our ten week series in the Old Testament.
We are looking at the life of Abraham, and we're calling this series Promises Made.
Promises kept.
One of the things I love about preaching is it forces me to sit
with a passage of Scripture for hours and,
just try to look at it from different angles, try to figure out
what God is saying, why God is saying it, and what it means to us right now.
You know, last week I preached on Genesis chapter 17 and Genesis
chapter 17 was about God making a promise to Abraham.
He actually made the promise in chapter 12.
It was a promise to make him into a great nation,
which meant lots of descendants.
Chapter 1724 years later,
Sarah, Abraham's wife, still hasn't gotten pregnant.
And my three points last week was God delays.
Abraham laughs and God responds.
Now this week, God shows up again.
But this time it seems to be for the benefit of Sarah,
who is eavesdropping.
And Sarah also laughs.
But it seems like it's a more cynical laugh than Abraham's laugh.
At least it does to me.
If you have your Bibles,
you can go ahead and turn to Genesis chapter 18 if you want to follow along.
And one of our Bibles is on page 12, where you can just wait
for the verses to come up on the screen that I'm going to highlight.
And I really just have three observations
about the 15 verses that we had read to us.
All right.
Here are my observations about God.
Number one, God is a multitasker.
God multitasks. That's number one.
Number two is God uses different approaches for different people.
He uses different approaches for different people.
And number three, God loves to flip scripts
to completely turn things on their head.
All right, let's get started.
The first is God is a multitasker.
I think that makes sense to us.
We all hope God can do more than one thing at one time.
But when I was looking at this passage, something jumped out at me that I hadn't
seen before.
So God makes a promise to Abraham
that he's going to be a great nation and have multiple descendants.
And he appears to Abraham in chapter 12, and then again in chapter 15,
and yet again in chapter 17.
And he makes it clear to Abraham that his promise involves Sarah.
But Sarah can't conceive,
and infertility is hard.
I've talked to couples, couples who have struggled with infertility.
And if you are struggling with infertility, I just want you to know
I'm sorry.
I know it's it's really hard in Abraham's time.
It was brutal, especially for the woman, because it was always
considered the woman's fault.
And you can tell how brutal it was for Sarah
because of what she does in Genesis chapter 16.
In Genesis chapter 16, she goes to Abraham and says,
why don't you try to have children with my servant girl Hagar?
And of course, that just explodes.
And you, you can figure out why.
First, Abraham is unfaithful.
And I don't know if Sarah kind of knew how
that would just break something inside of her.
Then she has to watch Hagar go through nine months of pregnancy,
and then when she gives birth,
she gives birth to a baby boy, and Abraham is overjoyed.
And that cuts into Sarah like a knife.
And Sarah finally has to come
to grips with the fact that she must be the one that's broken,
because Abraham has shown that he can have children,
just not with her.
So she is devastated.
And then these three mysterious men show up
and Abraham starts barking orders.
He wants them to stay for a meal and he has of a fatted calf killed.
And you can't really tell if that's just Middle Eastern hospitality,
where he realizes who they are.
But eventually he does realize that it's another visit from God,
and they sit down to talk.
And Sarah is eavesdropping, and this is what she hears them say.
This is verses nine and ten.
And they said to him, to Abraham, where is Sarah, your wife?
And he said, she's in the tent.
The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year.
And Sarah, your wife will have a son.
And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.
That's the first
time that she has heard the promise
directly from the mouth of God.
But it doesn't renew her hope.
She doesn't, like, come out from behind the tent and say
this, this wonderful news.
I had all but given up. But here you are.
And you've made the promise to me.
That's not what she does.
This is what she how she responds.
This is verse 12.
So Sarah laughed to herself, saying,
after I am worn out, am I, Lord is old?
Shall I have pleasure?
Okay.
There are two words that I want to
kind of highlight to you.
The first is the word that's translated worn out.
That's a very strong word in the Hebrew.
It means after I have become worthless,
after I have no value to anyone.
What she is saying is
I am utterly and completely in irreparably
broken.
Sarah is self-loathing.
That's the first word.
The second word that I want to point out is the word pleasure.
She says, after I am worn out, my Lord is old.
Shall I have pleasure in this?
It's easy to kind of infer from the context that she's saying,
well, I have the pleasure of having a baby.
That's not what the word means.
That word pleasure is the word for physical intimacy.
What she's saying is that
Abraham and I aren't like that with each other.
Not anymore.
What she's saying is that she is alone, and you can understand why.
I mean, you have Abraham's infidelity.
You have what she would feel like, his constant disappointment
in her month after month after month.
You can feel her just saying now I am absolutely worthless or whatever it is
their marriage
is broken and this is why I say this is what hit me.
This is why I said that God is a multitasker.
Because God is going to fulfill this promise to Abraham
to make him a great nation.
But in the process of doing it, he's also going to repair their marriage.
He's going to make Sarah whole again.
He's going to save her from self loathing.
And this is my point,
is that God's promises to you always have fall out.
You know, I told you last week that God's promised to you
if you are a follower of Jesus,
is to make you into something you're not.
That God is slowly but surely making you into
more like Jesus,
and that will have an impact on everything and everyone.
One God is multitasking through you to impact your spouse and your kids,
and your parents
and your friends and your classmates and your neighbors and everyone.
When you know that God is doing something in you,
but not just for you,
he is multitasking with you into other people's lives.
That's the first point.
The second point is that
God uses different approaches for different people.
That shouldn't be a surprise to us.
And if you are a parent who has more than one child, you know
you need to probably handle your children differently.
Like, I had one child that was pretty strong willed,
and that meant that I needed to give her
direct and firm discipline.
I had another child that if you look sideways at her,
she would just collapse because she felt the weight of my disappointment.
You know, when I played basketball in high school, in
college, my my best coaches,
always knew how to handle different players in different ways.
My my best coach.
My favorite coach, would never yell at me directly.
He would yell at one of my teammates and hope I heard, hey, I love that.
So in
three weeks ago, I preached on Genesis chapter 15.
If you missed that sermon, then,
you can read the chapter after this service.
But chapter 15 Abraham comes into contact with God.
It is wild and wooly.
It involves like sacrificing animals,
splitting them in half, creating a path,
a flaming torch, a smoking fire pot.
Deep, dreadful darkness.
The holiness of God descending on Abraham, pushing him to the ground.
It is terrifying.
That's Genesis chapter 15
here in Genesis chapter 18.
You have three men show up that seem pretty ordinary,
and they're sharing a meal,
and they're
there
communicating.
They're talking with Abraham, but they're communicating
with Sarah because they know she's eavesdropping.
They're there for Sarah.
They're speaking to her indirectly, like my favorite coach.
Right.
And they're they're so gentle with her.
Like. Like what?
So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, after I'm worn out
and my lord is all shall have pleasure.
The Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh
and say, shall I indeed bear a child now that I'm old?
Is anything too hard for the Lord?
I mean,
that is so amazing.
It's like he knows Sarah feels worn out.
He knows she feels worthless.
And when he says there's anything
too hard for the Lord, that word,
that phrase can also be translated as anything
to wonderful for the Lord.
It's like God comes
and he says to Sarah, Sarah, I see you.
I have always seen you.
And he's saying, it is what I've come.
I've come for you.
I've come to do something wonderful for you.
And even after that, when she
denies laughing, she lies about laughing.
And God says to her, oh, but you did laugh.
And you can almost see his smile when he says, oh, but she did laugh.
And he's saying, Sarah, I see you
and I still love you.
You couldn't have
two more different approaches
that God would take to Abraham and then to Sarah.
And my, my point is this, that
you may be sitting next to somebody
who had a completely different experience in coming to Jesus than you did.
I mean, the the very the core of what it means to be a Christian.
This is what you have to believe,
but you have to believe that you're a sinner,
that you need a Savior, that that Savior is Jesus,
and he saves you by his grace through his death and his resurrection.
Some people might come to that kind of realization
because sin has demolished them,
and they feel the coming judgment of God, and they are terrified
about the whole thing that's going to happen.
And they cry out to Jesus.
Then there are there are other people
who aren't terrified by the holiness of God,
but they're captured by the by the love,
by the, by the wonder,
by the gentleness
of a God who's like a shepherd who leaves the 99
and comes after the one.
So sometimes people tend
to want to take their experience and put it on everybody else.
And then some people, they
they are jealous of other people's experience listening.
If you have experience, if you came to Christ,
if somebody you know came to Christ because
they're terrified of the holiness of God, don't try to talk him out of it.
Don't try to say, oh, no, you shouldn't think about God like that.
He he's like the shepherd who left the 99 and came after the one.
Yeah. He is, he is.
But maybe that's the way
God approached them, because God knows them.
And if somebody feels like God is so wonderful to leave the 99 come after them.
Don't.
You don't have to tell them and just say you don't really understand
the holiness of God.
You should be scared to death.
God uses different approaches for different people.
That's my second point.
My third point is that God loves to flip scripts to just turn things on their head.
And this is what I mean.
So God makes this promise to Abraham,
and the promise is that you're going to be a great nation.
You're going to have multiple descendants.
But then
Sarah doesn't get pregnant.
They lose patience.
They shatter their marriage in multiple ways.
Sarah feels completely worn out, like she is worthless.
And that.
And God comes and visits her and just says, is
anything too wonderful for me?
And Sarah laughs
and God says, why did you laugh?
And then she says, I didn't laugh and God says, but you did laugh.
Put a pin in that for a second, right?
And then, because God is multitasking,
he not only is going to fulfill his promise to Abraham,
he's going to heal their marriage.
And he does because they reconcile, because nine months later
they have a baby.
And we pick up the story in chapter 21 of Genesis.
This is what it says.
The Lord visited Sarah, as he had said,
and the Lord did to Sarah, as he had promised.
And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age,
at the time of which God had spoken to him.
Abraham called the name of his son, who was born to him, who Sarah bore him.
Isaac and Abraham circumcised his son Isaac
when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.
Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born to him,
and Sarah said, God has made laughter for me.
Everyone who hears will laugh over me.
And she said, who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?
Yet I have borne my son in his old age,
when she says,
God has made laughter over me, and everyone who hears will laugh with me.
She's she's actually making a play on words,
because what God says to Abraham
is, okay, now you you have this son.
I want you to call his name Isaac,
which in Hebrew means laughter.
So what God does to Sarah
is he says, why did you laugh?
Is anything too wonderful for me?
And she says, but I didn't laugh.
And he said, you did laugh.
And then he says, okay,
now I want you to call your son.
Laughter.
So at every time Sarah called Isaac home, it was like laughter.
It's time to come home for dinner.
Laughter. Go clean up your toys.
Hey chuckles, it's time to go to bed.
All right.
Every time God was reminding Sarah
you laughed because you were so cynical.
You thought you were worn out.
You thought I didn't see you, but I saw you.
And I've done something so wonderful.
And I don't want you to ever forget
there is something God loves.
He took cynical laughter and he turned it on its head.
And he said, from now on, whenever you call your son, you'll be reminded.
You'll be reminded that I'm a God who does this.
My older brother Brian,
wrote a book years ago called splendor in the ordinary,
and my favorite story is in his last chapter.
It's about, a guy that lived on his freshman dorm,
named Charlie Crone.
This is the way he starts the story.
He says the year was 1974.
Beanbag chairs and lava lamps were the rage.
Dorm rooms were not yet filled with VCRs, CD players, and personal computers.
You can see how old he how many years he wrote this.
You know, go because he's still talking about CD players.
We were college freshmen living in a freshman dorm.
Charlie was on my floor.
Charlie was about five foot four with sandy blond hair and red rimmed eyes.
He was also the most profligate sinner I had ever met in person.
I mean, Charlie was a party reptile.
He cussed like a sailor.
My apologies to sailors drank with a frat house flourish, marijuana
smoke wafted underneath his closed door nearly every night until the wee hours,
and he regularly had his girlfriend in for days at a time.
They weren't studying.
For some reason, I also remember he was an English major.
Now, Charlie also happened to be a nice guy, a good Ole boy.
He laughed a lot, got decent grades, seemed to have plenty of friends,
but Charlie was about as far from being interested in Jesus
as anyone you could imagine.
Then he picks up the story.
13 years later, he says the year is 1987.
Beanbag chairs and lava lamps are the rage only in resale
shops and garage sales have long since worn out.
The college sweatshirt I bought as a freshman.
While flipping through the monthly alumni publication, my eyes
fell upon the following entry in the notes for our class of 1978.
Charlie Krohn, class of 78,
and his wife will begin their first term with Wycliffe Bible Translators this fall.
They'll be serving in West Africa.
I love that story.
It's like God says to Charlie,
you didn't know why you're an English major, but I knew
you're going to be a Bible translator
in West Africa.
Listen, whoever you're praying for,
don't stop praying.
Whatever you're praying for.
Don't stop praying for it.
Because God loves to flip scripts
to turn something completely on his head.
God is a multitasker.
He is multitasking through you
to people you know, people you don't know yet, right?
God uses different approaches for different people.
That's true too.
But the third thing is probably the best thing.
God loves to flip scripts
because nothing is too wonderful
for him.
Promises made and promises kept.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven.
I love,
this whole story.
I love the way you, appeared to Abraham
in Fire and Smoke and terror and holiness.
Because that you
also love how gentle you were with Sarah.
Endured not
loving, chasing after,
knowing how broken and worn out she felt.
But thanks for approaching each of us
that are here right now in different ways.
Thanks for being
relentless in your pursuit of us.
Thanks for multitasking.
Through our lives, I pray that you will impact, the people
that are in our lives right now through us.
But I thank you most of all,
because you delight
in turning cynical laughter into joy.
You delight in turning, profligate
sinners into Bible translators.
You delight in turning what we were into what we are.
Thanks for a wonderful Savior.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.