FEB 11 2024 | Genesis: Behind the Curtain S4E3 | Outcast and Outcomes

Sea Change Church · Genesis: Behind the Curtain · "Outcast and Outcomes" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · February 11, 2024
Genesis 21:8-20
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

The book of Genesis, chapter 21, verses 8 through 20. And once again, it's quite a story, so here we go. The child grew and was weaned. And on the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking. And she said to Abraham, Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.

The matter distressed Abraham greatly, because it concerned his son. But God said to him, Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring. Early the next morning, Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar.

He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba. When the water and the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bow shot away, for she thought, I cannot watch the boy die. And as she sat there, she began to sob. God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, What's the matter, Hagar?

Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation. Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.

This is the word of the Lord. Well, good morning. If you have your Bibles, open up to Genesis 21, 8 through 20. And yeah, just a special word to Eric. Just really excited to have Eric here for the last couple of years playing violin for us. Just amazing. And it just shows, like Chris said, the consequences and the outcomes of our life. You invite somebody in an Uber to come to church, and he was just saying, man, it just changed my entire life.

So yeah, keep rocking those Ubers for Jesus, you know what I'm saying? There's a word I want to write at the top of your notes today, if you can. The word is consequences. Write consequences. The sermon's actually entitled Outcasts and Outcomes. You see that Abraham gets into a pickle here because him and Sarah tried to take their story of their life into their own hands. They tried to make God promises happen for them, the things that God had told them.

And there was an issue, as you know, that God had promised a son to Abraham from which his line would be reckoned, through which eventually we know through the scriptures the Messiah would come. And God made them wait, made them wait for a while. And they got a little anxious. And Sarah says, why don't you just marry my maidservant? I can have a child through her. I don't know how she thought that was going to work out.

But, you know, it didn't. And you see what happens here is Hagar has that son. His name's Ishmael. And finally, according to their timing, God shows up, as he tends to do, and Sarah has her own child. And when that happens to Sarah, you start having some conflict in the family. This entire conflict was because they were trying to make their story happen on their own. I would say, even in little things in life and the big things in life, things have consequences.

And we see those consequences bearing out. We're in a world, I think, that wants to do what they want and forego the consequences, or at least gaslight the consequences, and just believe that they don't exist. And here we see that that is actually not happening. So there's two things today that I want to mention in this story. And it's a sad story. It's a story of a broken family. It's a story of a mixed family. You got moms.

You got stepmoms. You got two moms. You got all this going on. This is some things that it's kind of close to a lot of us, right? Excuse me. Around the 60s and 70s, that divorce rate started to spike. I was a product of that. And all of a sudden, where do you spend Christmas? Questions that you never needed to ask before. Now you need to start asking those questions. That's what's happening here. So here's two things that I want to just bring out of this scripture.

First, disobedience has consequences, and righteousness, its rewards. The Bible's super clear. Now, consequences is used a little bit pejoratively. You think of a consequence. It's something negative. But there are positive consequences, obviously. The Proverbs speaks about that. But God says, test me in these things. His word is, if there's anything, his word is really clear. That he wants to co-labor with us. And with our actions, actions either are going to bring rewards of righteousness, or oftentimes, they're going to bring the rewards of sin that leads to death.

Now, the story of redemption is so good. You're going to see God's redemption all over this story. He takes our mistakes. He takes our ashes. He turns them into beauty. God's amazing. But we could forego a lot of consequences if we just decided to walk in obedience. And this is something that Sarah and Abraham were not willing to do. And God makes it all work. The second thing we're going to talk about today is God is faithful to his promises.

Now, this promises thing that I talked about last week. First of all, you guys loved the music last week, the pre-bumper song. I've never had so many people say, oh, I think it was Naked Eyes, right? Promises, promises, or something like that. So I'll just play that one again, because you guys just love that. Bumper music matters. Just remember that if you're a pastor. But one of the things I will talk about is just, you know, we got to workshop the idea of promises a little bit in my small group.

And I realized that it's easy to think that everyone has your experience. And after I had preached it, I realized, you know, maybe I should have workshopped that beforehand as I heard from you. So we're going to talk a little bit about those promises again, because it really resonated with you. So I just want to hit that in the short time we have the other day. All right, let's go to the first one. Verse 10, disobedience has consequences.

This is Sarah speaking to her husband, Abraham. And she said to Abraham, get rid, circle rid, of that slave woman and her son. For that woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son, Isaac. Really interesting here. First of all, she just wants to rid herself of the consequences. Just get rid of her. Get rid of that slave woman. If she went back and looked, that slave woman's his other wife. She was the one that said, take her as your wife.

So she's degrading her. And she is actually, she's a second wife. But she is a wife. We talked a couple weeks ago about why God would let that happen and how it happened. So I can't go through that today. But she says, let's get rid of her. That woman's son will never share the inheritance with my son, Isaac. Immediately trying to separate herself from the consequences of the things that she wanted. That son, who will never share with her son, is the son that she said, maybe I can have an inheritance through him.

Man, how we change once things play out. We allow the history to play out and God's timing to play out. And we begin to see things in God's perspective and laying there. I want to say there's a few things that we see for these consequences. And I want to mention these consequences because these consequences are far reaching. They reach generations down the story. And if you read Genesis, you're going to see those consequences.

But I want to start with saying, I think it's a good spiritual practice to think about the things you're doing, the patterns in our lives, right? We have patterns. Patterns of righteousness, patterns of disobedience. And to begin to think, what could the possible consequences of that be? I don't think we do a lot of future casting with consequences, negative consequences. We do a lot of future casting with our positives, right?

When I'm going to have that house, who I'm going to marry, winning the championship. We just future cast all the time. These things are going to happen. But we don't look at our disobediences and think, oh, this could happen, that could happen, that could happen. We turn a blind eye to that. But we really have to do that as a spiritual practice to look through this. And if this is something that they had done, we wouldn't have issues like we do today in the Middle East.

I'm going to show you why that is and how that worked out and how these two sons became rival nations that still exist today and are fighting today because of their decisions. I don't think that when Sarah said, I just want a son for my inheritance, she kind of figured out that, you know, what might have happened or what did happen in October 7th back here, you know, not too long ago, had its roots all the way back to these two sons being divergent and becoming two separate nations.

And so we'll look at that in just a second. And maybe you haven't studied that. But let's look at these consequences. First of all, Sarah and Isaac, Sarah created a rival for herself and for her son. Verse 9. Verse 9 says, But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking her son. This word rival is super important. I think we don't understand that when we do things in disobedience, we create rivals for ourselves all the time.

We create financial rivals for ourselves when we don't do things God's way with our finances. We create rivals in, you know, physical rivals when we argue with somebody. But even the own sin in our lives, those invisible sins, create rivals of emotions in our lives. Emotions you might not have if you were walking more in truth. If you were not walking in certain addictions. You create rivals. She created a physical rival to herself.

But when we walk in disobedience, we oftentimes don't think of the consequences that we're creating enemies for ourselves. You're creating a something, sometimes it's, like I said, it's an emotion or it's a spiritual, a foothold for the enemy, Satan himself the enemy to attack you. But we accept a certain amount of pushback, right? Because we want what we want. And we tend to manage our sin thinking we can manage it.

And so I'll do this thinking that it's, you know, the dam is never going to be breached. The city below the dam is never going to be destroyed. We're just going to do what we can. And we see that it just gets away from her. I mentioned that a few weeks ago. Sin will always get away from you. You cannot manage sin. And so that's the first thing we see is she created a rival for herself and her son. And how many of us have created rivals for our families by just not doing things God's way?

Next one we see is Abraham would have to send his son away. Verse 14. Verse 14. Early the next morning, Abram took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and sent off the boy. She went on with her and wandered in the desert of Beersheba. It's easy to forget that this was Abraham's child. I think I actually kind of forgot because you just see the story of you have Ishmael and you have Isaac.

And Isaac's like the one who the promise comes through. So you're always thinking about Isaac as the son. Imagine sending your child away. He actually has this son. And he actually really liked this son. If you read through Genesis, he really liked Ishmael. But all of a sudden, because of the disobedience, his family was split because of that. And he had to send them away. And I said, so the second consequence is not only did Sarah create a rival for herself, but Abraham had to send his son away and you had the family be split because of the sin in their lives.

And the reason I'm bringing this story up like this is because we can't always change what has happened in our past. But we can change what happens in our future often. And so what I want to do is continue to put this idea of consequences. And if there's something you're walking in right now, you're like, hey, I should probably stop that. I want to encourage you, stop it. But if the Holy Spirit has told you to, you know, and you will know, I'm not going to tell you what those things are.

I would say remove those things from your life. We see that. This is really interesting. Hagar and Ishmael would be mistreated and subject to abandonment. His son would be abandoned. His wife would be sent out into the desert. So they have the mistreatment of them. I mean, how cold is that? Give them a flask of water and off to the desert you go? I mean, how does that work? But yet there's such a rivalry going on between in this family that when families are broken, you see some incredibly devastating things happen.

I mean, I experienced it. Many of you experienced it. I don't have to tell this story too, you know, too deep into this story in our modern age to know that this is true and that these consequences can often be changed. The interesting thing, now let's look at generations. If you were to go on a few chapters more in Genesis, we're going to run into a guy named Joseph. Remember, Joseph is sold, coat of many colors. You've heard of the play.

He gets sold, right? He gets sold by his brothers. But let's see who he gets sold by. If you look in your notes, Joseph would be sold to whom? The Ishmaelites. A few generations later. Genesis 37, 28. So when the Midianite merchants came by to his brothers, his brothers pulled Joseph out of the cistern and sold him for 20 shekels of silver to whom? The Ishmaelites who took him to Egypt. Did you ever know that the descendants of Ishmael who was sent into the desert here in this story was actually become merchants and then the brothers of Joseph through the line of Abraham's son Isaac, the other son, remember there's two sons here, they would sell him to the Ishmaelites who would take him to Egypt.

That's incredible. He gets sold into Egypt. So there's that division happening. Now what's so interesting is we know the story of the Israelites in Egypt. God redeems that story in Exodus through Moses and it becomes part of the story. And one of the amazing things is God just honors his promises. So we'll get to that point in a second. But look at how that works out. Once again, consequences have, disobedience has consequences and our righteousness has its rewards.

Now I want to talk, the second point here is about promises. And so last week when I was talking to a lot of people, people came up to me afterwards and I was really surprised about the way you guys spoke to me about your promises. I had some people come up to me and say, oh yeah, I grew up in the charismatic tradition. I got promises. God's given me promises. Somebody said, God has never failed on a personal promise he's given me.

And I was like, oh, okay, let's go. I think I was on point there. Somebody came to me right afterwards and said, I've never felt like I had a promise from God. I don't feel like I have promises from God. I feel like when things go bad, this got workshopped in my small group, I feel like when things go bad, God shows up and he's faithful so I know his promises are true. But he's never given me a personal promise. I had another person say, I used to have promises for my life, but I've kind of just stopped, you know, I've kind of gotten discouraged and I've stopped looking for promises because I don't believe in them anymore.

And I was like, whoa, I could go on and on and on. And I guess what the thing to come back to is this. One, God is going to work with individual promises and the way he speaks to you about your life is going to be individual to you. Some people he's going to speak and he's going to do things certain ways. But the thing that matters is this. And I think if anything resonated, and it was in my small group on Wednesday night that they brought up over and over again, and what you guys said regularly to me was, I want to focus on the promiser, not the promise.

That the promiser is greater than the promise. Whatever that promise is, God keeps his eternal promises, but whatever God has for my life, I want to focus on that promiser. Go to verse 13. God is faithful to his promises. Verse 13 says, I will make the son of the slave into a nation also because he is your offspring. So what's this verse talking about? This verse is talking about Hagar's son, Ishmael, who was the first one born.

I've already mentioned who he is before Isaac was born. And God says in verse 13, I will make the son of the slave. He's still calling her a slave. Now, real quick, just write Galatians. I believe it's in Galatians 5, but it's in the book of Galatians. There's a whole chapter about the slave woman, Hagar, and Sarah. And so if you go into Galatians, you can just Google it, Galatians, Hagar, and Sarah. It'll pop up, and you guys can study more this week, and you can go into the New Testament.

But it says, I will make the son of the slave woman into a nation because he is your offspring. I would say that the first thing you want to know here is that God's promises are greater than our failures. God made a promise to Abraham. Now, what was really interesting is this. I think God knew what was going to happen, right? Because God doesn't say, I will make your firstborn, I will make your firstborn the one who your offspring will become a nation and do this thing and promet it to your firstborn.

I had always thought that. I realized that God left himself an out. If you go back and look, God doesn't say you're firstborn. He says you're offspring. And so let me show you what it says here. If you go into the verse there, verse Genesis 13, 16, I will make your offspring, when he's speaking to Abraham about the promise earlier on, I will make your offspring, not your firstborn, like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then the offspring could be counted.

Now, this is important because Abraham screws it up, right? He messes it up. He's had a son with a slave woman. Then how's God going to fix this? God's like, no worry, I got this. Because we know in Romans, right, your mistakes are not bigger than God's faithfulness, right? We know that God comes and says to him, well, I will make a nation then out of your offspring. So he's your offspring. But then when Isaac is born, he says this is the one through whom the nation will be reconciled.

And so he is able. God leaves himself an out because he knows what's going to happen. He says your offspring. So the secondborn, which is Isaac, is the one through which he is reckoned. Because God didn't swear himself to a firstborn promise. He said it is the offspring. Now, the Arabs believe this as well and believe this idea as a nation. Now, if you don't know this, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations. If you think of all the Arab nations, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations.

You're saying, Adam, how can you make that claim? Because it says it in the Koran, right? And the Bible speaks about a great nation that will be there. I actually think I put the bit there in the notes. It says, the descendants of Hagar became the Arab peoples. Hagar bore Abraham, a son named Ishmael. It is believed in Islamic tradition that Ishmael is the ancestor of the Arab people. This is based on the belief of the Islamic Koran, which describes Ishmael as the prophet and forefather of the Arab nations.

And then you can look that up there. I didn't put the excerpt in there, but you can look it up. You know that there's two nations in Israel, I mean, in the Middle East? You know, there's multiple nations. But you have the Arab peoples, and multiple nations come from the Arab peoples. And then you have this little tiny country just surrounded by all the other ones. And that little tiny country is called Israel. And if you look at the scripture, the Jews believe this, Christians believe this, and the Islamists believe this as well, that all those people, those two nations, the Arab peoples and the Jewish people go back to these two children.

If you don't think the way you live your life has consequences, watch this story. Just one little decision. I don't want to wait on God's timing. Just one little decision. I don't want to wait on God's timing. I'm going to invite the maid servant to be the husband. It'll all work out. I got this. It's been a crazy 4,000 years since then that it's happened since then. The descendants of Ishmael are also mentioned in Genesis 25, and you can go on to look at that.

Here's the promises. And it was just all laid out. I want to encourage you to know the promises of God, the eternal promises of God, and to hold those tightly. No matter what situation you're on, to know the word of God. Remember that when Satan comes to Jesus and Jesus is being tempted, Jesus doesn't have a philosophical argument with the devil. He basically just starts laying down promises. Well, God says he's going to do this.

He will feed me. He's going to do this. Satan would come and lie to him. Jesus himself just lays out promises, and Jesus knew the promises. I will say that the promises are weapons. The promises are the weapons of your warfare. Scripture is the weapons of your warfare, and we want to live in Scripture. We want to continually live in the victory of Scripture over and over again. I put a couple down here just to help you out.

The first one is Philippians 4.19. And God will meet all of your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. Let's not just walk past that one, right? Let me just say this one again, okay? Because it's solid. And it's a big promise, right? It's a huge promise out of Philippians. Philippians is so full of promises. And my God, that's Paul, will meet some of your needs. No. God will meet all of your needs according to what?

The riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. The riches of his glory. If you could see the riches of God's glory, of Christ's glory. If you could see, he just has a treasure trove of riches that can just meet your needs over and over again in the way that he should meet them, in the way that he wants to meet them, to just deal on a regular basis. If you are in lack right now, God will meet your needs. It might not be the way that you think he should meet your needs, but he will show up time and time again to meet your needs.

And the Scripture is true. And you have to sometimes just cling to that Scripture. You've got to cling for your marriage. You've got to cling for your children. You've got to cling for your finance. You've got to cling for your church. You just have to cling on to it like with the talons of an eagle to hold to those promises when you don't believe because God's word is faithful and true. And only by holding on to them and knowing them will you know that they are true.

If you don't hold or know the promises of God, you will never know that they're true. You have to know the promises. The deceiver can deceive you if you don't know the truth. If he tells you you're an orphan, if he tells you that you're a victim, if he tells you that you are no good, that you are lost and beyond redemption and beyond repair, and your story arc, you've become the villain, he will lie over and over again.

Unless you can come to him with the promises of God, we've got to get on to the promises of God. Here's another one. 2 Thessalonians 3.3. But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one. I love that one. But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one. You don't have to raise your hand, but how many of you need some strength right now? How many of you need some strength right now?

How many of us need to be raised up to say, God, I believe you will strengthen me, God. I'm waiting. I need your strength. Father, God, strengthen me. You've got to know this promise, because if you don't know that exists, then you won't walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You'll lay down in it. But we don't lay down in the valley of the shadow of death. Yea, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

You see, we know these things. Equip yourself with the word of God. There's a Bible this thick where he has spoken to us with these words over and over again. And then the final take on. So the first is hold to the promises. Know the promises, guys. Just give you a little prescription. I had a pastor friend, and you'd go in to meet with him, and he had a prescription thing, just like he was a doctor, right? And he'd say, like, okay, you know, well, priests do this.

If you're Catholic, they give you, like, nine Hail Marys or whatever. So he would say, like, well, read C.S. Lewis and read the book of John and then pray, whatever. So I'm going to give you a little prescription right now, so without the pad. I would say go find yourself ten promises that matter to your story. Go find ten promises. It's pretty simple. Google. Give me a list. Actually, it's even better. Go to ChatGPT, all right?

Go to Chat, all right? Four. Go to ChatGPT four and put in, if you don't know that one, just go to Google and put in, give me a hundred promises of God and pick your favorites. Say, God, lead me to the promises that matter. Live on the promises of God. They are food. They are fuel. They will take you to the next level. And then the final thing is this today before I let you go. Practice righteousness and reap the rewards.

Practice righteousness and reap the rewards. I said disobedience has consequences and righteousness has rewards. I know it makes people uncomfortable, but Jesus in the Scripture and also a lot through the Old Testament, but also in the New Testament very prevalently, says if you do righteous actions, I will reward you in this present life. I'll show you here in a verse. We're not doing it for the rewards. We're doing it because we want to be righteous and do right things and because we love God.

But God can't stop himself for rewarding us when we do righteous things. It is the momentum of God and he has bound himself, like tying two hands together, he has bound himself to righteousness and rewarding, giving the rewards of righteousness to those who walk in righteousness. And so a couple of verses. This is out of the Old Testament. And this is David speaking. David says, The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands.

He has rewarded me. Now David knew, he wasn't speaking about he was completely clean. He knew he could not go into the Holy of Holies. He knew that. He's talking about actions that he has done that God is going to reward him for right actions. If you look in Mark, now some people came to me when I spoke about giving not long ago. Because I do believe that God has removed the reason to give. He has, I talked about that a few weeks ago.

He has removed, you know, you're no longer at a compulsion have to give anymore. But I believe that he has kept the benefit and the blessing of giving. And he still honors that blessing. So if you give, he will keep blessing you. Now some people get really, they freak out about that. Because they've seen it done really poorly on TV. I didn't say what he would give you. I just know God ties himself to it. And you see Jesus here saying kind of the same thing in Mark 10, 29.

Think about this about all the consequences. The consequences of your tongue, the rewards of righteousness of the tongue, righteousness of the heart, righteousness in your actions, in servitude. Truly I tell you, Jesus replied, no one who has left their home or their brothers or their sister or their mother or their father or their children or their fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age.

That's, now that makes some reformed people uncomfortable. I get it, okay? If you're Calvinist, that's going to make you uncomfortable. I totally get it, but it's there and you got to deal with it, okay? And I know you got some scriptures for me. I got to deal with those too, all right? It's pushing, you know, give and take. It says, in this present age, homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields. He's going to give you a hundredfold of those things.

And then it says this. He puts this little thing. Along with persecutions. Oh, why'd you have to say that? You ruined it, Jesus. And in the age to come, you will get this, eternal life. Mmm. I like that. I like that. That makes me feel good. But he does back it off a little bit, right? He kind of gives a little pushback there. But this is what he says. If you're willing to, and he means that he doesn't want you to leave your children.

He doesn't say, well, you know, God told me I should get a divorce. I'm going to leave my children and Jesus is going to, but that's not what Jesus is talking about here. There were people that were, that were, there was a whole bunch of reasons why people would say, I won't follow Jesus. Oh, my mom's still alive and whatever. And so they would do these things to not do what Jesus was asking them to do. But he goes on to say, if you're willing to do something as big as this, right, as big as this, in this present age, I'm going to reward you a hundredfold.

He says it. And he says, and you're going to get some persecutions as well. And those will probably feel like a hundredfold as well. I found that it's impossible to walk in righteousness without some major pushback from the enemy. We are trying to take some ground here at this church right now. Whoo, there's some blowback, I just got to say. There's some blowback. Could you be praying for us in our leadership? There's a just blowback from the enemy.

So be praying for that. But then it says this. Here's the thing that matters. And in the age to come, you're going to have eternal life. That's what we're going for, right? That's what we're going for. Amen. Take the houses, Jesus. I don't need the houses. I don't need the bling. I don't need the Tesla. No shade on anybody that has a Tesla. I don't need. That's all good. God, you want to get it? You can do that. I'll wash my hands of it if I need to.

Eternal life. I want to spend eternity with Jesus. And I got to tell you this. I mean it. If I only could spend all of eternity kissing Jesus' feet, it would be enough for me. If he just let me see his feet and kiss his feet for eternity, like that's my dream. To just see the feet, the wounded feet of Jesus and kiss his feet and adore him at his feet forever. Literally, that's all I want. I think he wants to give us more.

He's going to go like look into my face and I want to give you things. I tell you what, that's all I want. And you know how it happens? Righteousness. Take a look at your actions. Realize there's consequences. We never expected what was going to happen, Sarah and Abraham, in that moment. They have consequences, but so does your righteousness and it has rewards. And imagine if this church, we start living for righteousness together, what is God going to do?

Amen? Let's stand if you would.