What a Mess!

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis chapter 16.
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As many of you know who have been here, we are making our way, verse by verse, through the book of Genesis.
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And it is amazing to me how God, in His providence, will sometimes put the very perfect text for the day, even though we're not trying in any way to manipulate that.
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Because today is Father's Day.
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And today we are going to look at an event in the life of Father Abraham, the great father of the faith, where he failed.
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We're going to talk about how and in what way he failed, and we're going to talk about what we can learn from this event in the life of the great patriarch.
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Now I do want to make mention, I saw someone say, someone said online this week, they said on Mother's Day we hear messages about how great mothers are, and on Father's Day we hear messages on how much fathers need to do better.
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And that is, there is some truth to that.
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You go to a lot of churches and on Mother's Day you get Proverbs 31, oh how great the mothers are, and then on Father's Day you get a kick in the teeth.
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Well, again, not my intention today to go kicking teeth or stepping on toes, but there is a real sense in which what we're going to see today is a failure of leadership in the home, which will lead to stress and conflict and drama, which is certainly, as I said to the men this morning as we were praying, certainly it's ordained of God, God has a purpose for it, and yet at the same time we can see that there are still mistakes made from a human perspective.
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There are still things done from a human perspective that teach us lessons, and that's what we're going to look at today.
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The title is What a Mess, and I got that from Brother Andy, I don't know how many of you remember how many times, Brother Andy loves to say this world is a mess, and he's right.
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Turn on the news, open Facebook, look at a news feed, and there is no end of messiness that we see in the world, but the thing is, and I know Brother Andy would agree with me, it's always been a mess, ever since the fall, we are a mess, and thank God that he still works in the lives of people who mess up.
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Thank God that he has a purpose in our lives even when we fail.
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So I titled What a Mess, and it just says Genesis 16, because I'll be honest, I don't know how far we're going to get into it, I know this, it's at least going to be this week and next week, so it'll be What a Mess Part 1, and What a Mess Part 2, because there's a whole second half of this chapter that deals with Hagar engaging with the angel of the Lord, and I want to really spend some time with that next week, and who is the angel of the Lord, and we want to identify that person, and what he is doing in the life of Hagar, and prophesying about her son, and those things, and how the Apostle Paul we're going to see next week, the Apostle Paul in Galatians uses this as an allegory for the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, the Hagar and Sarai being an allegory there, so we're going to look at that next week, but this week we're going to focus mainly on the drama that is unfolding here in the life of the patriarch, so we're going to focus, we're going to stand and read only one verse, we're going to read verse 2, because I think verse 2 is the heart of the error, so let's stand up, and we're going to read Genesis 16, verse 2.
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And Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Go in to my servant.
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It may be that I shall obtain children by her.
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And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I pray that I would give a true and genuine exposition of it, that you would keep me from error and from cowardice, and Lord that everything that is preached today would be in accordance with your word and your will and filled with your spirit, and Lord that your spirit might be the teacher going in to the, not only the words would go in to the ears and to the mind, but Lord that the spirit would apply them to the hearts of believers, Lord, that we would be convicted and move towards closer conformity to the Lord Jesus Christ and for those who do not know Christ.
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Lord that today might be the day that you might take them from darkness to light, that you might take them out of the pit of sin and place them in heavenly places with Christ, which you do only by your grace and mercy.
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We pray this in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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In the last few chapters of Genesis that we have been studying, we have seen quite possibly some of the most powerful moments in the life of the patriarch Abram.
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He demonstrated great kindness and deference to his nephew Lot when their people were arguing and fighting with each other.
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Abram was willing to love his nephew and tell him you can have what you want and I will take whatever you don't want.
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He showed love and deference to him.
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And then when Lot was captured by Ketel Ammar and his kings, he went after him showing not only deference but love for his nephew and he went and regained his nephew and so there is a lot of love being demonstrated between Abram and his nephew there in chapters 13 and 14.
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And then we get the experience of Abram in coming to contact with a man named Melchizedek.
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He gives Melchizedek a tithe, Melchizedek gives him a blessing.
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And then we get to chapter 15 and we have this wonderful moment of faith and what we have been studying the last few weeks is Abram is there and God blesses him by telling him your descendants are going to be like the sand of the sea and you are going to inherit the land that is between the two great rivers and you are going to have this land and you are going to have this offspring and your offspring are going to be like the stars of the sky.
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And then he confirmed his promises to Abram in the self-maledictory oath.
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We talked about that last week where God had Abram split the animals in half and he in his presence in the smoking fire pot and the torch went through the center of those animals demonstrating that the covenant was a unilateral covenant from God to Abram and the promises were unconditional that God would fulfill those promises.
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So at this point I would say it would be safe to say that Abram is on a spiritual high.
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Abram is on what we might say as Brother Brian Boardman say he is on spiritual cloud nine.
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He is in a good place with God.
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He is in a good place in his faith and he is in a good place in his relationship to God's promises.
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He has been declared righteous.
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His faith has been confirmed by an oath.
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He has every reason to be assured in God's presence in his life.
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But then as we will see success leads to failure as his faithfulness becomes somewhat tenuous.
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And I wanted to mention something today.
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I don't often use my board and I don't even know that I have a working marker.
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But I'm going to use my board today.
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I'm going to throw out my teacher category here and just simply mention if we go through the Old Testament specifically, but we see this throughout the Bible, there seems to be a category of circularity with the people of God where they will start out in faithfulness and then somewhere along the way there will be the introduction of either doubt or assurance.
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And I think what is even worse is apathy.
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Even worse is apathy.
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You know what apathy is? You just don't care.
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You know, a lot of people, it's not an issue, I think I said this to you this week Brother Andy, didn't I? I said it's not often an issue of not believing, it's not caring.
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Say I believe it, it just doesn't, you just get apathetic about the faith.
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Right? And so our faithfulness will sometimes go to doubt and apathy and then that leads to what? Failure at some point.
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And then that failure leads to regret, remorse, or brokenness.
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And then finally to repentance.
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And then repentance leads back into faithfulness.
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By the way, if you've ever studied the book of Judges, and I know you have Brother Andy, isn't this the cycle? Isn't this the cycle? The people of God are faithful and then they experience doubt and apathy and then they're broken, they fail, and then God sends them a redeemer and there's repentance and then boom, they're back to faithfulness.
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And it's sort of this vicious cycle that happens.
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And we've seen this already in Abram's life, right? He's called out of Ur of the Chaldees and he goes, God doesn't even tell him where he's going, he just says, go from your country and your kindred to the land that I will show you.
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And he goes and as soon as he gets there, he builds an altar and he's faithful.
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He builds an altar in the north, he builds an altar in the south, he's faithful to God.
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And then what? Oh, there's a famine in the land.
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We're going to run to Egypt.
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Right? What happens when he goes to Egypt? Gives his wife over to Pharaoh.
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Not intentionally, but it's as a result of him saying, she's my sister and not my wife.
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And Pharaoh says, well, she's your sister, I can take her as my wife.
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So she gets placed into Pharaoh's harem.
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And now he, God has to intervene to save Sarai from what would be her shame being taken into the bed of Pharaoh.
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So we see this cycle already in the life, but God brings him out of it.
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God brings him back to where he started.
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God brings him out of the failure and he brings him back to a place where he can start over again.
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And he does.
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But you know what happened in that story? And this, I want to show you how that story ties to this story.
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God sent him back to where he started, but he brought all of the spoils of Egypt with him.
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You remember when he was in Egypt, the Pharaoh gave Abram something.
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He gave Abram the bride price for Sarai because he thought she was a brother or he was a brother, right? So he gave, he gave all of these things and what was included in those things, animals, right? We talked about camels and all those things and servants.
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And one of the servants that Abram received in the midst of that interaction was a young Egyptian girl named Hagar, who would become the servant to his wife.
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She became the handmaid.
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So now we see how the two stories tie together.
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Because now we come to the place where we are 10 years in the promised land.
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This is 10 years from the time they arrived.
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The text will tell us they're 10 years in and they concoct a scheme.
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Well, it begins in the mind of Sarai, but it is not, it is not argued from Abram.
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And one of the things Kent Hughes in his commentary on this text, he writes this at the end, but I put it at the beginning of my notes because I said, this is so good because this really should tell us in our minds where this is all headed.
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He said this, he says, remember that this all began when the people of faith began to distrust God's promise.
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All of this story begins when the people of faith begin to distrust the promise of God.
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I'll tell you this.
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I've had people come to me and they say, Pastor, I just, you know, I believe in Jesus, but I have trouble believing the Bible.
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I have trouble believing the word of God.
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That is the first step toward unbelief.
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When we start saying that the word of God is not trustworthy, when we start saying to ourselves, I can't count on what God says in his word, that's the first step.
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What did Satan say to Eve? Hath God said, right? That's the first step toward unbelief is taking the word of God and saying, you know what? I can't accept that it's all true.
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I'll take, I'll take 90% of it.
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10% of it is I can't handle it.
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Then it becomes 80%.
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Then it becomes 70%.
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Then it becomes 50%.
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And after a while, it's just you and God.
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I don't need the Bible anymore.
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God speaks to me.
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And then after a while, it's just you because you've abandoned God's word.
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And so, as I said, this whole thing begins when the people of faith begin to distrust the word of God.
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So let's look beginning at verse one.
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We see the drama beginning to unfold.
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It says, Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had born him no children.
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She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.
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All right.
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Now, this doesn't come as a shock, because we know that in chapter 15, Abram has already said to God, I don't have any children.
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Remember when God came to him, and he spoke to him and the first words out of Abram's mouth were, I don't have any children.
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Are you going to give me an heir in Eleazar of Damascus, who was his adopted son that he had adopted out of his household? He said, Is this is this man going to be my heir? So we know that Sarai has been unable to have children.
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If you go back to Genesis 11 and verse 30, that is how she is introduced.
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Remember in Genesis 11, we have the great genealogy that leads down to Abram and that genealogy concludes with a listing of the sons and daughters of Terah.
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Terah is the father of Abram and Terah is listed as in his descendants as Sarai, the wife of Abram, who was barren.
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So she is introduced to us as a barren woman.
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Well, remember, that's 10 years before now.
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Abram received a promise from God, Go from your country and from your kindred and from your father's house, and I will make of you what? A great nation.
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Here he is 10 years later, no nation, no child, only an adopted son and a wife who, like the land when he arrived, was barren.
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Her womb is also barren.
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And what did he do when the land was barren? He ran to Egypt.
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Now again, I want you to be, you might email me later, give me a call, say, Boy, you're really hard on Abram today.
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Please don't think that.
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I'm not trying to be hard on Abram.
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I'm not saying I would have done any better.
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I'm not putting myself on a platform and saying, oh, look down at this man who made a mistake.
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But we have to be honest here.
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If we cannot see that the great men and women of faith that we look up to themselves made mistakes, then we'll never be able to understand our own failures in light of God's grace.
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You understand we yes, if we cannot see that a life of faith is not a life of perfect decisions.
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Then every time we make a bad decision, we won't understand that we need to that needs to push us closer to the cross rather than further away.
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You see, that's the problem is we start to think it's about us and our ability to keep the law and it's not when we fail, where do we run? Hey, man, that's right.
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We run to Jesus.
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Praise God out of the mouth of babes.
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So Sarah Abrams wife had born no children.
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But Abram had a promise from God.
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He had a promise that you will have a nation come from your loins, not from an adopted child, but from your loins.
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And Sarai is beginning to feel desperate.
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I want to say something about that, because I also don't want you to think that I'm going to come off today as condemning Sarai as being absolutely horrible, because I want to say this about Sarai.
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I get it.
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Jen and I talked this week, I asked her if it was OK if I shared something from our own life, because sometimes I'll throw out anecdotes from our life only to find out later that that wasn't a good idea.
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So I try to make sure that it's OK.
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But you all may or may not know this, but we went 12 years in marriage before we ever had a positive pregnancy test.
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We were married when we were 19 years old, and our intention was to start a family immediately.
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There was nothing more in the world that either one of us wanted than to have a baby.
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And we tried, and it didn't happen.
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And month would come, and month would go.
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And we would hope that there would be that sign that we all know that happens when babies are pregnant, you know, and the sign didn't come.
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And it just kept going month after month and year after year until we came to 2004.
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It was five years married, and we met two beautiful children who needed a home.
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And at that point, we said, you know what? This is going to be it.
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God's not going to give us physical offspring.
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We're going to have two adopted children, and we're going to be thankful to God for providing two beautiful children.
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And we loved them.
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And we adopted those children.
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They became ours.
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But the yearning in my wife's heart to have a baby in her body never went away.
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And for seven more years after that, she would be yearning for that child to be in her.
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Not that it made that child any more valuable than the two that we adopted, not in any way, shape, or form.
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But the yearning to have a child grow within her and to be birthed from her was in her heart.
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And month after month and year after year that it didn't happen was a struggle in her heart when she would see her family members, ah, we're pregnant.
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And where you want to be happy for someone.
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And yet it's like a dagger to your own soul because you don't get to enjoy that blessing.
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And I saw her weep and I wept with her.
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By God's grace, in 2012, he gave us hope and then he gave us JJ and then he gave us faith.
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And we don't know if God's going to give us any more.
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But at this point, we know this, Sarai, her desperation here is real.
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And this is where we need to learn to read the Bible.
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As R.C.
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Sproul says, we need to learn to read the Bible existentially, not as an existentialist.
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That's a philosophy that we don't ascribe to.
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But existentially means that we need to read the Bible, understanding these are real people who existed at a real time and who had real emotions and real hearts and real, real minds that were really struggling with real doubt before we throw stones.
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Understand where she is.
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She's seventy five years old.
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She has yet to have a child and she is desperate.
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OK, so now we get to verse two.
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And Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Stop right there for just a moment.
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The word now there is important in the Hebrew.
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It denotes something seeming to have happened.
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The distinction of something.
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If I say now we go no further or now we're turning the tables or now we're going to do this.
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The word now is an interjection in the text, which gives us the idea that something has happened.
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And some commentators have made the thought.
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And I think that I could agree with this, even though you may again, you may want to disagree with me later.
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And that's fine.
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I'm not holding this as a dogmatic statement, but it could be that something has finally happened in her life that she feels like it's game over.
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And what some commentator says, maybe she is now experiencing menopause.
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Maybe it's whatever she could have.
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Maybe her natural her natural cycle has ceased and she feels now absolute desperation.
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God's not going to use me to give Abram a son.
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Because she says, behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Game over.
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So what does she do? She she has an idea.
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She says, go into my servant.
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It may be that I shall obtain children by her.
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And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
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Now, I want to make three observations about verse two, if if if you would allow me the time to make these observations, three observations.
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Number one, Sarai is aiming her frustration at God.
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Listen to it again.
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Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Up until this point, she's been unable to conceive.
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Now she feels like she will not conceive.
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And whose fault is it that she's not conceived? Well, the Lord opens the womb, the Lord closes the womb.
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So who is it that she's pointing fingers at? In a sense, she's pointing fingers at God.
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And don't we do that? Isn't it that when we experience times where we do not receive what we think we should have, or when we experience a pain that we don't think that we should have to have experienced, or we are suffering something that is crucial and harsh on our heart, that we look to the Lord and say, why did you, why did you decree this? Why is it this way and not another way? Again, I'm not condemning her as being worse than anyone else.
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I'm saying we're all this way.
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We experience something of magnitude in our heart of difficulty.
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And we say to God, why did you do this? Why this way? Could it have been another way? From a worldly perspective, she's crying out with hopelessness.
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The Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Now, the second observation I want to point out is that her decision to ask Abram to go into her handmaiden was not something that was out of the norm.
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In fact, this is a part of the customs of the time that they lived underneath.
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In fact, to us, it's totally scandalous, right? To us.
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Oh, my goodness.
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So your wife can't have a baby.
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So she gives you another wife.
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That's, I mean, honestly, that dog don't hunt, not in my house.
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That just ain't gonna happen, right? But the culture, in the culture in which Sarai and Abram lived, remember they came out of Ur of the Chaldeans.
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Where's that? That's Mesopotamia.
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The Mesopotamians had laws.
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It's interesting because it's only been in the last hundred or so years that through archaeology and excavations and things that we have actually found many of the writings that came from this time period.
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This is two thousand years before Christ.
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And there are tablets that have been unearthed, hundreds of tablets that have been earthed that gives us writings about laws.
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You've heard of the Code of Hammurabi, the Hammurabi Code.
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That's the law that was in Mesopotamia.
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And there's all kinds of writings that come out of that.
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I want to read to you just a couple of things that would have been in law at this particular time.
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The first one is from John Currid.
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He says this.
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He said that in the 19th century BC, there is a Lippet Ishtar Law Code of Mesopotamia, which states this, quote, if a man's wife has not born him children, but a harlot from the public square has born him children, he shall provide grain, oil, and clothing for that harlot.
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The children which the harlot have born to him shall be his heirs.
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That's law number 27 from the Lippet Ishtar Law Code of Mesopotamia.
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So the standard was if the wife can't provide a heir, then the man could go and get a harlot from the public square and could take her and produce offspring, and those offspring would be his legitimate heirs.
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And he would only have to provide for her some living wage.
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You know, he said grain and oils and things.
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Basically, he had to kind of take care of her, and he gets to have children by her.
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That's part of the code of the...
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And remember, that's where they came out of, right? And they lived there for 70 years, right? They had been in Mesopotamia their whole lives.
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They've only been in the new world, the new land, the Canaan land.
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They've only been there for 10 years.
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Ken Hughes makes a similar statement.
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This is from the Newsy tablet, number 67.
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He writes this.
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He said, quote, if Gilimanu bears children, Shinema shall not take another wife.
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This is the name of man and woman.
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But if Gilimanu fails to bear children, Gilimanu shall get for Shinema a woman from the Lulu country, a slave girl, as a concubine.
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In that case, Gilimanu herself shall have authority over the offspring.
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So again, if a man had a wife who couldn't have children, she'd go get a slave girl, give that slave girl to her husband, and now that slave girl produces children that become hers, right? They become her heirs.
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So this is not out of the norm.
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But I want to quote Brian Boardman now.
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Brian Boardman.
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You guys hear me quote Brian all the time.
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I hope one day we get him to come preach here.
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Wouldn't that be great? Mike and I both love Brian to death.
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This is what he said, though.
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He said something socially acceptable can be outright reprehensible on the side of God.
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Something that's socially acceptable can be outright reprehensible in the eyes of God.
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Think about that.
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Now just what month is it? It's June.
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What's June? Pride month.
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What is the world celebrating right now? Homosexuality.
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It's celebrating an ungodly sexual union between two people of the same sex.
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And all the businesses are now glowing with rainbows on their logos.
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Have all changed to that.
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Why? Because it's socially acceptable.
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And it's not only socially acceptable, it is socially celebrated.
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We celebrate the sin.
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We celebrate the depravity.
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But God does not.
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Somebody might, you might want, again, if you want to argue with me later, argue with me.
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But here's the thing.
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Somebody might say, you know what, David had many wives and Solomon, boy, he had more wives than he could count.
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You know, so certainly the attitude towards men and women and marriage was different under the Old Covenant and God made allowances for polygamy.
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Yes, but let me remind you that when Jesus was asked how God established marriage, he said it was one man, one woman for life.
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And that he pointed to the beginning.
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He didn't just point to the New Covenant.
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He pointed to the beginning.
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He said God made one man and he made one woman and those two, the man should leave his father and mother, the two shall become one flesh.
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We're going to see this this Saturday, right in this room.
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We're going to see Marianna.
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She's going to take Saddam as her husband and the two will become one flesh.
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What once, what right now is separated will be unified in one flesh forever.
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Till death do them part.
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That's the design God has.
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And you might, you might argue, maybe, so Abram didn't know that there wasn't a written code at this point.
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That may be.
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But here's where Abram fails.
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When Sarai comes to Abram and she says, here, take my handmaid to be the one to give you an heir.
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Abram doesn't seek the Lord.
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But instead, he listens to his wife.
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And I want you just for a moment, I want you to parallel this with what happened in the garden.
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Go back to the garden in your mind.
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There is Eve.
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She's speaking to the serpent.
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The serpent says the fruit is good for food.
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And what does she do? She takes the fruit.
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She gives it to her husband and he eats of the fruit and they are both condemned.
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Here is Sarai.
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She takes Hagar.
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Like the fruit, she gives Hagar to her husband.
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And instead of seeking the Lord, Abram listens to his wife.
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Let me tell you something, guys.
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Get in close.
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You want to hear this? We mustn't be pragmatists.
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In our leading of our families.
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What is a pragmatist? A pragmatist does what works.
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Whatever works.
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That's what pragmatism is.
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Whatever works.
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You've heard people say, well, if mom ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
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I know that's a cute little ditty, but let me say this about that.
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Your job is not to satisfy your wife.
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Your job is to lead your wife in godliness.
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And sometimes that may mean that she doesn't like every decision that you make.
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But if you are leading her according to the word of God, then you are doing what is right.
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The idea of if mom ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, get that out of your mind, because it's more important that mama be holy than mama be happy.
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And it's more important that you be holy than you be happy.
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God never in scripture says he's looking for you to be happy.
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But over and over, over he calls you to be holy.
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Amen.
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Marriage is not about pragmatism.
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It's not about doing what's easy.
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It's about doing what's right.
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And this is where I think Abram failed, and I really do think he failed.
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I think he failed first in faith.
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In the same way, when he left Egypt because it was barren, he leaves Sarai because she's barren.
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And in both, I think there's a lapse of faith.
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He fails in prayer.
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How? Because instead of listening to God and going to God and saying, God, is this your will? I mean, he had a direct line to God.
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You realize that Abram talked to God and God spoke to him.
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Can you imagine being able to hear the voice of God directly? But he didn't do that.
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He listened to his wife and he failed in his decision making.
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He listened to his wife and he did what she asked.
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So verse three.
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So after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife.
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Again, the whole parallel to the fall.
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Gave, he took.
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And all of this, we see a failure to lead.
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Verse four.
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And he went in to Hagar and she conceived.
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And when she saw that she conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.
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Now, for a minute, I just want to say this.
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There is no hero in the story.
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But if there is a victim, it's Hagar.
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Because she's the servant.
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She didn't have a choice.
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She's being used, as it were, like a like a rent a womb situation.
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There's no way she could have said no.
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So she is being used in this concoction, as it were, just as a baby making machine.
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With no choice of her own.
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She doesn't get to choose whether or not Abram comes and lays with her.
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She doesn't get to choose whether or not she makes Abram's child.
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So just for a moment, let's give her a break when we see she showed some contempt.
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Because she's in a difficult situation.
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But she did show contempt.
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And I imagine, again, I have sometimes sanctified imagination.
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And I spend all week with the text.
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I know you guys don't get to do as much as I do with the text.
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I get to really imagine like how this all played out.
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Like so all week, I've been sort of sitting there thinking, and I can imagine as her belly got more and more round, she was walking around, you know, kind of showing it off to the other ladies.
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I know you ladies, you get pregnant, you know, you want to show off that baby bump, right? And Sarai's never had a baby bump.
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She's never felt movement in her stomach.
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And you know, when the baby starts to kick, the mom will come and take the man's hand and put the man's hand on the stomach so he can feel the kick.
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And so she's going to Abram and she's saying, Abram, put your hand here and feel this kick.
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And Sarai is seeing this and she's absolutely devastated.
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She doesn't realize what she asked for.
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She doesn't realize how this would make her feel.
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And so there is hatred that develops.
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And Sarai says to Abram, may the wrong done to me be on you.
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I laugh because it was your idea.
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I mean, think about it.
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This was her idea.
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But now it's the wrong done to me.
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You've done me wrong.
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Guys, we've been there, haven't we? Where you can't make her happy.
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I gave my servant to your embrace.
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And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.
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May the Lord judge between you and me.
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Now Abram's, now he's in a rough spot.
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Failed to lead.
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Now he's got two women.
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One's bearing his child.
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The other is his beloved wife.
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And they hate one another.
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And by the way, verse six only makes sense in the context of Mesopotamian law.
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Look at verse six.
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It says, But Abram said to Sarai, Behold, your servant is in your power.
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Do to her as you please.
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Then Sarai dealt harshly with her and she fled from her.
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Understand that that is the whole concept here is when Sarai had Hagar as her servant.
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She was a servant.
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But when Abram took her, he took her as wife.
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Now she's no longer servant.
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Now she is in a position of wife.
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And so Sarai is looking at her and saying, You've got to do something about this, Abram.
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Look at what she's doing.
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She's showing off that baby bump.
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She's putting your hand on her belly.
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She's telling everybody I can do what Sarai can't do.
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She's calling me names.
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She's treating me bad.
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You better do something.
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She's yours.
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She's your wife now.
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She's under your authority.
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And Abram says, No, you do it.
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So he turns her back over to Sarai.
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He puts her back in the position and says, No, you handle it.
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Again, abdicating his responsibility, abdicating his position as the husband, leader and man of his home.
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What should he have done? He should have had a difficult conversation with Hagar.
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Let me tell you something, guys.
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Oftentimes, oftentimes.
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A difficult conversation is put away because we are weak and it leads to a much worse situation.
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Because we're not willing to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done.
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We don't do what we're supposed to do and it leads to a much worse situation.
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And it says Sarai dealt harshly with her.
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By the way, just to point this out, the words deal harshly here.
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Same words used by Moses of the taskmasters in Egypt who dealt harshly with the Israelites.
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Same language is used here.
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So Sarai, because of her anger with this handmaiden Hagar, who again is a victim in all of this.
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She's gotten a little attitude on her now, but she's still a victim.
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Let us not forget.
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And so Sarai begins to mistreat her like a taskmaster mistreating the Egyptians or the Egyptians mistreating the Israelites.
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And so what does Sarai do or Hagar do? She runs home.
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She flees.
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And what we're going to see next week is she flees towards Egypt.
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Why? Because that's where she came from.
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She's trying to get home.
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She's trying to leave this contemptuous situation and go home.
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As far as the narrative goes, it's as far as I want to go today.
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But let's just for a second, let's begin to draw to a close.
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I don't think that anyone can read this and not come away thinking it's a mess.
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As I said from the beginning, this whole story is messy.
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And you might say they were following the laws of the land.
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They were following the laws of the traditions that they grew up with.
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Beloved, as Christians, we have a greater law than the law of the land.
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And we have a greater law than any tradition that we grew up with.
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I hate it when people come to me and say that.
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I say, why are you doing this? It's against God's word.
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Well, this is just the way I was raised.
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Get over that.
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Don't use that as an excuse.
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Could Abraham use that excuse? Well, this is just the way I was raised.
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Well, this is just the way I was brought up.
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This is just the way I lived for 70 years.
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That is not an excuse, men.
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We are called to lead our families.
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We are called to go to God on behalf of our families.
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We are called to read the word of God to our families and to be the patriarchs of our home.
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The pastor, the provider, and the protector of our home.
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That's what we are called to do.
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Do we fail? All the time.
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But what do we do when we fail? We repent.
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Sometimes we repent in front of our children.
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Have you ever done that? Have you ever repented with your children, to your children? Daddy messed up.
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Daddy sinned.
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And Daddy is sorry.
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Have you ever repented to your wife? Honey, I failed as the leader of this home.
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I failed as the protector of your soul.
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I failed as the pastor of my home.
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Brothers, if we can't do that, if our pride, our selfish ambition is so great that we cannot repent to our children and to our wives, then there is something wrong in our heart.
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Because that's what we are called to do.
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So I ask you today, are there areas in which you need to repent? Maybe you are a wife.
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And maybe you don't let your husband lead.
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Maybe you don't want to be led.
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Maybe you don't want to have a man who is your pastor, protector and provider.
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And maybe you need to repent too.
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And I know some of you might say, well my husband isn't those things.
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We are going through 1 Peter right now.
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I encourage you to go home and read it.
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What does it say to do with a husband who is not a believer? You live a godly life before him.
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It's tough.
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But that's what we are called to do.
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There is no perfect person in the Bible other than Jesus.
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And all of the failures of all of the men and women in the Bible remind us that Jesus saves sinners.
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Remember this, even though Abram failed, he was a man of faith.
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Even when his faith faltered, he was still a man of faith.
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And even when he made a mistake, God did not depart from him.
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So brothers, if you need to repent, repent.
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Repent to your wives, repent to your kids, repent to your God.
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And know this, God is a greater savior than you are a sinner.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for your truth.
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And I thank you that your word reminds us that you are a great savior, even in the midst of our great sin.
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I pray Lord that today, men in this room would understand their call to be leaders in the home.
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And when decisions need to be made and hard tasks come before us, that we are to go to you and go to your word and seek your will.
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And Lord, I pray for the women in this room that they would understand their role, not to manipulate their husbands, but to submit to their husbands, as unto the Lord, as the word of God calls us to.
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Most of all, Lord, I pray for those who may have come today who do not know you.
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For Lord, maybe something I have said today has been offensive to them.
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And yet it is from your word.
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And I pray, Lord, that any offense that was made will be understood to be from the word of God, and not from the heart that is intending to offend.
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But Lord God, that they might see that there is a savior who is willing and able to save to the uttermost those who draw nigh unto God through him, the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Where Abram fails, Jesus never fails.
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And where we fail, we have one who can and will hear our cries.
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Lord, help us to repent and trust in him.
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In his name.