For you today, whether in a painful reality that doesn’t look like changing or maybe you have failed God and others, Sarah is your hope. This is the Bible story throughout. This is the gospel. Do not be deceived into thinking by your own efforts you can change a thing. It is all of Him and all because of Him and His promises for your life.
“For it is written: “Be glad, barren woman, you who never bore a child; shout for joy and cry aloud, you who were never in labour; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.” 28 Now you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise.” (Galatians 4 v 27-28)
But how do you live in such a circumstance?
I am pausing for a few days to meditate on Isaiah 54 before we continue in Galatians 4 to try and answer that one question. For there are many in exile, whether as a victim or because of their own sin. There are many in situations where they have done nothing wrong to equal their predicament. How do you live?
• Make the right Choice
How did Sarah move from Genesis 11:30 “Now Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive” to 21:1-2 “Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. 2Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.”? She got there by making wrong choices. Yes that’s right! It wasn’t by her own achievements. It wasn’t because she was righteous. It was because God was gracious. This has always been the gospel.
Genesis 16:1-3 “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, ‘The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.’ Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. “
What did she do with the painful reality of her life?
V2 she blamed God; V2 she spoke negatively and influenced Abram; V3 she moved in her own strength to fix her painful reality.
There are choices to make in a place where choice seems limited. Wrong choices and right choices.
Job 13:15 Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him;
Etty Jillesum, a Dutch Jewish girl in Amsterdam in late 1930s had an ambition to be a writer. She was captured by the Nazis, she could have gained freedom but she stayed with her people to help them. Her journals record a woman who on the outside was nothing but her inner soul was everything that beauty could bring. She gave herself to prayer. She no longer had an ambition for fame, now she was to create beauty in the hell of a concentration camp. She wrote, “nothing can happen to me … Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised toward Your heaven, tears run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.”
The more Etty’s plight became hopeless the more hope shone within her. She wrote, “by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, by admitting death into our life, we enlarge and enrich it.”
Her final words were written on a postcard she threw off Wagon Number 12, the train she rode to what she knew would be to her death in Auschwitz. She wrote, “We left camp singing.”
That’s a choice made in a painful reality. That’s a choice we must make.
Let us not be afraid to focus on the contradiction of our lives, let us not bury our head in the sands or even have false faith. When we have changed our perspective and hold on to hope because of it (see yesterday) then we are ready to make the right choices of what to do now in our painful reality. The choice is not try harder. The Apostle uses this story to say that the choice is not for the Galatians to become Jewish to be accepted by God. The choice is to sing. The choice is to be of a generous heart towards life, even towards the hatred you face and the impossibilities of anything changing for you. Sing.
Missions Paul 