Please turn in your Bibles to the 16th chapter of Genesis, and we're going to begin reading in the very first verse. Genesis chapter 16, verse number 1. God had, of course, promised Abraham a son. Abraham was old and had no son. Now Sarah, Abram's wife, bare him no children. And she had a handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarah said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing. I pray thee, go in unto my maid, it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarah. And Sarah, Abram's wife, took Hagar, her maid, the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife. And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. And Sarah said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee. I have given my maid into thy bosom. And when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes. The Lord judge between me and thee. But Abram said unto Sarah, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand, to do, do to her as it pleaseth thee. And when Sarah dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face. And the angel of the Lord found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to shore. And he said, Hagar, Sarah's maid, whence cometh thou, camest thou? And whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress, Sarah. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself unto her hands. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Ishmael, because that the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man. His hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him. And he will dwell in the presence of his brethren. This story is an old and pathetic one. It is the story of Abram's great sin. But sin is contagious. And when there is one sin, there are many others. Sin is like quicksand that drives men down to despair. It is like a rope with no end. It is like the elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am not a photographer of lewd and sordid places today, and I would not call all of the corruption that came about in this world because of this man's sin to light. But suffice it to say that sin binds and blinds and grinds and damns and destroys. And sin is why Jesus came into the world. Now you say, preacher, this is Christmas. Why don't you preach to us a Christmas sermon? Christmas is the result of something. Christmas is the effect of a cause. The cause is sin. Jesus said, let us go into the next town, but I may preach there also. For this is why I came. And what did he preach? He preached the gospel of good news. Good news of what? The remission of sin. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. Long lay the world in sin and error pining till he arose and the world felt his worth. The coming of Christ into the world, the purpose of Christmas, is not beautiful trees and packages. This is not the reason for Christmas. The reason for Christmas is that the world had sinned and had to have a Savior. And this message on sin this morning is not unrelated to the coming of Christmas. It is the cause. It is the purpose. It is indeed the reason for Christmas. Sin is why he came. Had men been able to save themselves, to lift themselves by their moral bootstraps, to have gotten themselves out of their sinful condition, rightly related to God and into heaven any other way, then Jesus Christ surely made a mistake when he came. But there was no other way. Sin broke the heart of God. Sin robbed heaven of its fairest jewel. Sin brought Christ to be born in a manger, despised and rejected of men, to live a perfect life and die on the old rugged cross. The sin of the world is the reason Jesus came into this world. Three things I would briefly suggest to your attention this morning about the sin recorded in this chapter in which we find ourselves this morning in our journey through the book of Genesis. Number one, consider the contagion of sin. We do not live to ourselves nor do we die to ourselves. Whether we live or die, whether we sin or live good lives, we effect other people. Sin is never contained. It is never bottled up and isolated. There is never a man that ever sinned that did not affect other people because of his sin. Consider, first of all, the source of sin in the heart of this man's wife, Sarah. It was her idea. She dreamed it up. Now she had to justify what she did. And all who sinned rationalized the purpose for which they sinned. Satan came in the Garden of Eden and said, God is against you. And Adam and Eve believed God. Believing they would live, they chose to follow him. Men always justify their sin. I told the congregation on Wednesday night, and we do have services on Wednesday night, and they're free, and you're all welcome, by the way. I told the congregation on Wednesday that this little chapter here in the book of Genesis was a real Harper Valley PTA. Now she starts off with the theology of a hypocrite in explaining her sin by justifying the fact that everyone else is just as evil as she. I have justification to sin. I have reason to sin. It had to begin somewhere, and it began in her heart. First of all, she blames God. She says, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing. It is his fault. God is to blame. He made me this way, and so I am justified in my sin. Later we notice that she carries this to its logical conclusion, and now blames her husband. Her maid despises her, and she says, it's your fault. Now you're to blame. Never does Sarah ever seemingly come to an age of reasoning for her own sin. Never does she comprehend that she is to blame before God. Never is there any guilt placed at her doorstep. But I call to your attention the fact that it is said simply, and the eulogy of Sarah in the book of Genesis, quote, and Sarah died and was buried. That's all the Spirit of God remembered to write in the eulogy of this woman. Why? Because she never learned the mercy of confession, forgiveness, and reinstatement. She never learned to experience the grace of God in her life. It was her fault. It began in her life. Sarah was the origin of the sin. And then Abraham was the partner in sin. He was all too willing to respond to her disbelief in God. The man is the head of the home. But he gave up that position when he responded to the leadership of this woman. Everywhere you find a great church and great homes and great nations, you find great men. Men are the heart of the nation, the head of the home, the backbone of the church. God calls men. God uses men. And Abraham was never quite the man that he was after he became a partner in sin. God's man. And then there was Hagar, the mistress, the maid, who was the object of the sin. Now I raise the question, could she have deferred? Could she have said no? As a maid that was owned and possessed by this family, did she have the right to say no? Was it her privilege to refuse? I do not know. But I do know this, that there are some inexorable laws of God that are set into motion. And when sin is begun, there are few degrees in which it can be stopped. The Bible says God is a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers in the third and fourth generation. Now this does not mean that the kids are whipped because the parents are bad. Our God's personality is not like that. But it means simply that in the framework of a family unit, in the framework of a society, we are not isolationists. And certain laws are placed into effect in which innocent people are harmed. An innocent person may be injured by a truck because the driver is drunk. He is not paying for the driver's sin. But it is a fact of life that other people are affected. And as a part of the family, in a sense, Hagar, the object of the sin, paid as well and was thereby involved. There is Ishmael, the illegitimate child that is born. He, the result of the sin. And I think in many ways the most pathetic of all because he had no control over the situation. Someone has run the genealogy of the Saxons and the Jukes and compared them with a great Christian tradition, a family of great Christian tradition in which there were statesmen and preachers and lawyers and great attorneys and doctors outnumbering the other family, ten to one, as far back in history as they can trace them. Because way down the line there was a father, a grandfather, an ancestor that chose to serve God and one that did not and for generations to follow. The family was reaping the results of the direction one set, the direction the sail was placed and the die was cast in that ancestry. If you renounce God and disbelieve God and set your sail against Him, there is very little chance that your children will grow and know Jesus Christ. There is an effect in the contagion of sin that is almost unstoppable. Some time ago a father had a lovely daughter who on her first date went to a dance. It happened in Illinois. The boy with whom she was dating on this first date as a junior in high school was involved with the girl in an automobile accident. Both of them were killed. The officers reported to the father that in the automobile they had found in the wreckage the broken remains of a whiskey bottle. The boy was inebriated and his drunken condition had caused the wreck. The father was infatuated, was infuriated and determined to find the cause and found who had sold both of them under legal age that bottle of liquor. After weeks he was unable to find the source and one night came home frustrated and jittery and decided to go to his own closet where he kept that private bottle that he thought no one knew about. But it was gone. And in its place a note that said, Dad, it's a big night. It's the night of the prom. We didn't think you'd mind. We borrowed your bottle. Love, Pam and Dick. Be sure in your life there is a contagion of sin. A story is told of a blacksmith who was commissioned by the king in the age almost from the realm of antiquity to make a chain stronger than any chain in all of the kingdom. He did so and the king came and it was made. But he was commissioned to make it again and make it stronger and larger yet. And it was so strong that nothing in this world could break it. The king, the king after the blacksmith had proudly done his job, ordered that he, the blacksmith, would himself be chained by his own chain. And so he was, for they were enemies from youth. When you live your life with or without God, when you set yourself away from or toward the will of God, there is a contagion. There is a cancer -like spreading condition in sin that grows and grows and grows and spread all through life. Everything that you touch, everything that you touch, every job that you have, everyone with whom you come in contact. Hey, Sarah never thought down to the last child and the last friend and the last one that she knew that she would ever experience the contagion of sin that she did. But sin is never isolated. One person never sins that it does not affect other people. Secondly, let us give consideration to the result of this sin. The first result was, of course, in Sarah's life. The result in her life was the exact same kind of result as always followed sin and followed all the rest of them. It was simply a downward trend. Abraham had forgotten God, gone into Egypt, and the Bible says went down into Egypt. The disciples went down when they backslid to the Sea of Tiberias. David, the Bible says, looked down from his rooftop. The Bible tells us Samson went down to Timnath. Jonah caught a ship going down to Tarsus. Every time a man goes away from God in the Bible, he has pictured as going down. You see, the main characteristic of sin is that it does not exalt as Satan promised in the garden. It's disillusionment. It's disappointment. It always comes up less, provides less than it promised. That indeed is what the Greek word for sin means. It is missing the mark, coming short. It never hits as high as it aims. It never pays as much as it produces. It never gives as much as it promises. It is always down. It's always short. It always comes up a little bit late. It always comes up a little bit short. Notice, Sarah would make of herself the queen of the Jewish people. Now, without the Messiah to be born through them, she was going to be just another woman. She wanted to be a queen. She wanted to be the wife of Abraham, the mighty patriarch, to exalt herself. And immediately, the Bible says she was resented by Hagar. There is her first payment for sin. Resentment. Resentment. Resentment. How many times do I see it? That people that expect to exalt themselves by sin end up being despised and hated and resented by the very ones they try to impress. Resentment. I've known of so many young couples with whom I've counseled that have experienced premarital sex that have ended up hating each other and have destroyed their marriage because the loss of respect was gone in that marriage. Young people, if you really love that boy or that girl, I want to warn you this morning that you are running the very severe possibility of the risk that you will end up hating the one you love the most. Resentment. Resentment is one of the effects of sin. Now, in the life of Abraham, he as well came up short. His result, too, was down. His penalty was relinquishment. Now, that may be a new word I've coined there, but it sounds good in the outline. He relinquished the place of leadership that God had given him. It was his position as the head of the home, as the man of God, and particularly in the Hebrew home, to make the decisions. Now, when he had first cowed before her and had first sinned before God and had begun to be tarnished as the image of the godly head of the home, something happened. He began to lose confidence in himself. And when his wife came and bawled him out and first said, it's God's fault, and then said, now it's your fault, he said, she is in thy hands to do as seemeth good unto thee. He, in that position, when he let in that moment, when he allowed his wife Sarah to make the decision what to do with the maid, relinquished his God -given leadership as the head of the home. He was to be here, God's man, but he was here. He came short. It was down from what he was intended to be. Then there was Hagar, her judgment, judgment, the extent to which she came up short, the extent to which she went down, the only direction that sin ever takes a home and ever takes a life and ever takes a man, was one of rejection. She was rejected. Now she is driven into the wilderness. The angel of the Lord comes to her, and as a partner in sin, she thinks she will now be Abraham's wife. Now Sarah is the nobody, and she the somebody, and she resents Sarah. She looks down on Sarah. She by sin has exalted herself, and the angel of the Lord God comes to her in the wilderness, and what does he say? He does not say, Hagar, Abraham's wife. No, no. He says, Hagar, Sarah's maid. God did not honor the union. God did not recognize the illegitimate relationship. She, in the eyes of the angel of the Lord, was still Hagar, Sarah's maid. She was not honored. She was not elevated. She was rejected. She could not obtrusively walk into this relationship and exalt herself. God would not allow it. And she was still subjugated yonder to the realm of being merely the servant of the mistress, of the wife of Abraham. She was rejected. She was rejected. And then there is the result of the sin. The boy that was born named Ishmael. He came up short as well. His punishment, his sin, his condition, not punishment for him, but the effect of sin that contagiously spread into his life was the result of rebellion. He said, Thou shalt make a great nation, meaning a large nation, not a particular good nation. And the descendants of Ishmael are to this day wild men, fighting men. The Bible says, every man shall be against him, and his hand shall be against every man. Rebellion. Many a father, rebellious against God, has likewise raised a rebellious son. Now all of the result is in. But thank God our Lord does not leave us in this kind of a status quo. He moves into a situation. He moves into a circumstance and begins to heal, begins to love, begins to lift, begins to bless. Now see what happens. The remedy of sin is my final word, and it begins thusly. The Bible says, she was driven into the wilderness. She had been the handmaiden in a court of ease. In luxurious circumstances of beauty, she found her daily fare. And yet now, because of the providence of life, over which she may or may not have had much control, she was driven yonder into the wilderness, and it was the best thing that ever happened to her. Because there, she met the Lord. She had no consciousness of God in the tents of ease. In the palace of luxury, no time came for her to concern herself with the will of God, and the work of God, and the word of God, like the prodigal who had to go from the rich man's home to the husks of the pig pen. So many a man has never found the Lord in the neon jungle of the great city until he has himself been driven to the barren desert place of his own wastefulness. Yonder out there alone in her desert experience, there she met the Lord. The Bible tells us the angel of the Lord appeared unto her. Forgive me if I seem repetitious when I continue to refer to the types of Christ in the Old Testament, but all of these are types of Christ. The slain lamb, the shepherd, the smitten rock, all of them. The angel of the Lord is one of the best Old Testament incarnations and symbols and types of Christ. Indeed, there are those who think that our Lord himself did literally, physically reveal himself to people in the Old Testament as the angel of the Lord. For though he became a man on Christmas morn, he did not merely begin to exist on Christmas morn. He always was. He is eternal. He merely began to live in flesh and blood for 33 years on Christmas morning. The angel of the Lord, great type of Christ, came to him. How many a man, down and out on the road of life, rejected by sin, disappointed by life, has been driven into the waste place where, thank God, there Jesus Christ, in the quietness, was just waiting to speak to him, to meet him, to meet him, to find him, to reveal himself to him. He revealed to her a beautiful fountain, a fountain of water with which she could refresh herself. Need I say to you that he is the water, that he is the fountain of everlasting life, that he is the spring of life eternal from which men drink and find there again that they ever thirst for the things of this world. She was refreshed because the angel of the Lord, the Jesus of the Old Testament, came to her and pointed to her the way of life. But notice that he sent her back where she was in humility, in repentance, for the ground is level at the foot of the cross. There she must walk back that same way she had come. There she must go back in that same condition of repentance and make everything right she had undone that was wrong. Oh, but thank God he did come to her and he always comes. From Abraham yonder the 14 generations to the Babylonian captivity, the people of God began to prosper. And yonder then there were 14 more generations of peace and prosperity. But for 14 other generations, from the end down until the birth of Jesus Christ, the Jewish nation, yea, indeed the world, had sunk to its lowest state. And in that condition, when things were the worst, Jesus Christ was born into the world. He did for the world what he did for for her. When she was the farthest away from God, like a root out of a dry ground, not nourished, not watered, but in the most unlikely time and unlikely condition. When the world needed him the most, he was born. When Hagar needed him the most, he appeared. And so it is that when this world today, many of us that live in it, I believe, need the Lord the most, he is always the most available. What do you need from him today? What can our Lord do for you? Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out. You say, I'm too bad, I'm too weak, I'm too poor. The Lord hath not need of me. Yes, that's probably true. But oh, how you, dear friend, have need of him. And how available is our Lord Jesus Christ, the water, the fount, the angel of the Lord to you. Born in a manger, yes, but born in your heart by faith is the question. There was in the news this month, the story of a man, a sailor, who came to find from another country refuge in this beautiful land of the free, in the home of the brave. And quite by accident, for the first time in our history, one seeking refuge was accidentally turned away from the doors of this beloved country. And all the nation wept. And our president apologized and assured that it was an accident and would never happen again. Well, thank God, not one weary pilgrim has ever come to that gate. Not one man has ever come needy in the desert of life, seeking a refuge from sin to that savior who has ever been turned away. Today, he'll come into your life. He'll meet your need. Whatever needs you have, our God is able to fulfill it. Let us stand and pray together, please. Our Father, we thank thee, when indeed did long lay the world in sin and error pining, that he came forth and the world felt his worth. Thank thee for the coming of Christ into the barren desert of the world, when in history man needed him the most. Thank thee that when sin had driven Hagar into the desert place, there the savior came and ministered to her when she needed him the most. And thank thee, dear Lord, that in the lives of little children and men and women and boys and girls, you still meet needs. You still come to men when they need thee the most. Thank thee for our savior, our Joshua, our Jesus, of whom thou hast said, call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sin. Thank thee for thy coming. In the Lord's name we pray, even that of Jesus, our personal wonderful savior. Amen. Amen. Amen.