When Faith Fails

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Last week, I began preaching on the life of Sarah, who is the wife, of course, of Abraham.
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And if you want to be opening up your Bibles, we're in Hebrews chapter 11.
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And our point last week was that, and we looked at what we said was Sarah's early life, which we kind of said that tongue in cheek because the earliest we see her in Scripture is already at 65 years old, but in the early part of what we learn about her, we learn two things about her which are very positive.
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We learn first that she was externally very beautiful.
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The text tells us that Abraham, as we talked about last week, was so concerned about her beauty that he was willing to deny that she was even his wife for fear of losing his life as a result, that someone might think that she was so beautiful that they would be willing to take his life.
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So her external beauty is something that the Scripture makes an important point to stress.
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Yet what we also talked about last week was her internal beauty, the beauty which was expressed in the submission to her husband.
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We see in the text a submissive spirit, a spirit that followed along after her husband when he was commanded by God to go into this land, which they had never seen.
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They had never been to and from where they would never return.
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And she goes right along with him.
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And I made the point last week to point out how in Peter's writings, in first Peter chapter three, he makes the stressful point to say that the most beautiful thing that a Christian woman can do is not to adorn herself with gold and jewels and outward expressions of beauty.
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But the most beautiful thing that a woman can have to adorn herself with is love and submissiveness to her husband.
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That is how a Christian woman expresses true beauty.
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And that in Peter uses Sarah as his example.
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So this week we're going to move on, we're going to go away from Sarah's early life, and we're now going to look at Sarah's responses to the promises of God.
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But before we do that, let us read our opening text, which is Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 11.
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And let's stand together as we read this, giving honor and reverence to the word of God as we stand, it says in chapter 11, verse 11.
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By faith, Sarah herself received power to conceive even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful.
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Who had promised our father and our God, we thank you for this opportunity to gather around your word, to seek its truth and to be encouraged and instructed by it.
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I pray first and foremost, father, that you would keep me from error as I am a fallible man, I am capable of preaching error.
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And Lord, I pray that you would keep me from that.
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I pray to also, Lord, that you would protect the congregation, protect their minds and hearts.
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And help them to absorb the truth and keep them, Lord, from error.
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And Lord God, as we study the text of Scripture, we so want to know what it says and how it can be applied to our lives.
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And I pray, oh, Lord, we will see that today.
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And be encouraged by it.
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We love you, we praise you, we thank you.
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In Jesus name, amen.
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If you're taking notes, you'll remember last week I said we were going to break the story of Sarah down into three parts.
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We were going to do Sarah's early life, which we did last week.
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Then we're going to look today at Sarah's responses to the promises of God or to the promise of God rather.
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And then we're going to look at Sarah's reception of the promise of God.
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And we may get to both today.
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It depends on time.
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But the first response that Sarah provides for us in Scripture to the promise of God is the response that I am entitling circumvention.
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Circumvention.
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What does it mean to circumvent something? It means to go around it, it means to avoid it and go your own way.
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You've probably heard or used that word circumvent before.
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And this is what we see when we read the story of Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament.
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God had promised Abraham.
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You will have a nation which will come from you and this nation will be above all other nations of the world, blessed of God, and be used as the vehicle through which all the nations of the world shall be blessed.
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That's a little bit of a transliteration, a little bit of a rather paraphrase of Genesis chapter 12, where God promises to Abraham that he will have a nation which comes from him and through that nation, all the world will be blessed.
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So this is the promise of God to Abraham.
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You're going to have a nation.
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Well, to have a nation, you have to have a child.
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So when God first makes the promise to Abraham saying you're going to have this nation come from you, he says, but I can't have a nation come from me.
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I'm seventy five years old.
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My wife is sixty five years old.
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The only person I have is Eliezer of Damascus, who is the son of one of my servants.
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And the custom of the day was if you had no children of your own and you were a nobleman with a large inheritance to leave, that you would choose from among your servants, one of the children to become your legal heir, as in a sense, an adopted child.
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So here Abraham is seventy five years old, his wife sixty five years old, they're well past the age of childbearing, and they say, look, this is all I have.
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And God promises to Abraham, he says, but no, Abraham, it'll be from you that a child will come.
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So now Abraham, at seventy five years old, has to look to his wife, Sarah.
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So far, she's barren, so far, no children.
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And of course, Sarah herself recognizes this, one of the great and most powerful problems of this time in history for a woman was to be unable to bear children for her husband.
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Many of you are familiar with the story which would come later, and it is the story of Samuel's mother, who was unable to bear a child, and she prayed and prayed and prayed to have that child.
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Why? Because her husband had two wives.
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She and another wife and the other wife was able to bear all these children, and what did she do to her? To Hannah, she gave her a hard time.
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Look, I can give him all these children.
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And you can't.
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It was a great stigma in that time in history to be unable to bear children.
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And this is where Sarah was, 65 years and yet no children.
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So upon hearing the promises of God, of this physical offspring, and by the way, if you're taking notes, if you want to know where this promise is, it's in Genesis 15, in Genesis 15, verses one through six is where God makes the promise to Abraham.
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He will have a physical offspring.
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I'll go and read it to you.
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It says, After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, said, Fear not, Abram, I am your shield and your great reward.
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But Abram said, Oh, Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.
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And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring and a member of my household will be my heir.
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And behold, the word of the Lord came to him.
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This man shall not be your heir.
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Your very own son shall be your heir.
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And he brought him outside and he said, Look towards heaven and number the stars, if you are able to number them.
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Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be.
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And then, of course, that very important Old Testament passage, Genesis 15, six, and Abraham believed the Lord and it was accounted unto him as righteousness.
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So here we are, the promise of God to Abraham, you're going to have a physical descendant.
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So now where does everyone's attention go? To his one and only wife, to Sarah, at that time, Sarah, they look to Sarah.
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Sixty five years.
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And yet no child.
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So Sarah decides to circumvent the plan of the Lord.
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Maybe that's too harsh.
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Perhaps Sarah just thought she wasn't included in the promise.
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Maybe she thought Abraham was the only one who was receiving this promise from God.
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Maybe she just thought, you know, because, as I said, we could think of it as circumventing or we could think of it as just sort of excusing herself.
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This promise isn't for me.
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It's just for him.
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So if it's just for him, we've got to provide for him a vehicle through which this child can come.
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So in chapter 16.
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Verse one, it says now Sarah, Abraham's wife, had born no children.
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She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.
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And Sarah said to Abraham, behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
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Go into my servant.
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It may be that I shall obtain children by her.
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And Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah.
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Now, most of us read this story and it is very unsettling because, well, it goes against our most common understandings of right and wrong.
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If there was a family here who was not able to have children, as you know, my wife and I've been married for 12 years and as of yet have been unable to have children.
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So what did we do? We went and adopted two children whom we love and have taken as our own, and they are our own children.
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Never would we have conceived of such a plan as this.
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But remember again that in history and in the time in history in which this was.
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Custom was much different than it is today.
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The idea of taking on a second wife or taking on a concubine.
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Was not considered as heinous as we would consider it today, but yet I still implore you to remember God never changes and God never commissioned the taking of a second wife.
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God never commissioned the taking of a concubine.
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God never commissioned there being multiple people within a marriage.
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God's commission for marriage has been and always has been.
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One man will have one woman.
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For life.
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That's the way he created us, he created, as I said last week, he created Adam and Eve and no spares.
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It was going to work, it had to.
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There was no other choice.
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And I think sometimes we need to remember that, too, about marriage.
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But anyhow, getting back to the point, Sarah was a victim, I think, of her customs, the customs of the day.
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I'm not trying to alleviate her guilt and the failure of her or Abraham, but I am saying that sometimes we look upon the customs of the day and we see them maybe as being less heinous than they truly are.
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And so when she sees this opportunity for her husband to go out of the marriage bed and to enter into another bed and to produce a child, she looks at this as the opportunity.
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Maybe I'm not the one who's in the promise.
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Maybe I'm supposed to just look upon as Abram has a child with another woman.
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So she produces and concocts this plan to produce a child.
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And as such, she uses a cultural solution to solve a spiritual circumstance.
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And in doing so, she introduced a host of problems which would last even until today.
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Most people know this already, but it's always important and important, I think, to point out that the son of Abraham through Hagar, whose name was Ishmael, is the person to whom the Arab nation traces back its history.
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And they claim to be the rightful heirs of Abraham's faith and Abraham's promises.
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And thus, even to today, we have a great divide between those who would be considered the sons of Isaac, the Jews, and those who would be the sons of Ishmael, the Arabs.
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So this problem had long lasting or this failure had long lasting consequences.
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So in the attempt to circumvent the promise of God, Sarah brings in a multigenerational problem.
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So that's her first response to the promise of God, not a very positive one.
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Let's look at her second response to the promise of God, because perhaps she gets a bit better the second time, perhaps maybe now she will respond in a positive way.
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Let's look at her second response to the promise of God.
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This happens in Genesis chapter 18.
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We've looked in Genesis 16.
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Let's jump to Genesis 18 and go to verse 10.
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The first response to the promise of God, circumvention.
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Now the response to the promise of God, laughter, straight up laughter.
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The first time she went around it, now she just laughs at it.
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Listen to the text.
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The Lord said in verse 10, I will surely return to you about this time next year.
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And Sarah, your wife, will have a son.
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This is God in human form, which we can only understand to be a pre-incarnate visitation of Jesus Christ.
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Why? Because in John chapter one, we understand that no one has seen the father.
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The son is who exegetes or who gives the explanation or the exposition of the father to the world.
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So this is Christ himself is speaking to Abraham and Christ is speaking to Abraham here.
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And he's saying this time next year, Sarah is going to have a son.
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And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.
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We can all get a picture.
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Here it is.
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The Lord of Glory is speaking to Abraham.
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They're discussing the promise of God.
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They're discussing what's going to happen.
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Jesus makes the promise to Abraham.
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God makes the promise to Abraham, you're going to have a son.
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And she's listening in just out of range of the eyes, but just within earshot so that she can hear the promise that's going on.
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It says now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years.
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The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.
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That's just a fancy way of saying she was no longer able to in any way naturally bear children.
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The way of women was had ceased to be with Sarah.
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So the text says, so Sarah laughed to herself.
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Saying, after I am worn out and my Lord is old.
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Shall I have pleasure? The Lord said to Abraham and notice if you are looking at your Bibles, if you are looking at your ESPN, whatever translation you have, you'll notice the Lord there is an all capital letters.
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If you ever see the all capital letters, Lord, it's not that way on the board, but it is this way in your text, all capital letters.
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Lord is means that the translation is Yahweh or the divine name of God.
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So since the Lord said to Abraham.
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Why did Sarah laugh? And say, shall I indeed bear a child now that I'm old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time, I return, I will return to you about this time next year and Sarah shall have a son.
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Now, listen to this, it says, but Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh.
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For she was afraid, he said, no.
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But you did laugh.
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Beloved, it is so easy to sit in judgment over Sarah.
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It is so easy to look at somebody like Sarah and say, how could she possibly laugh at the promise of God? But yet think about it.
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As I say, a lot of times try to read the text existentially, meaning read it, remembering that these people actually existed.
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They were real flesh and blood human beings that lived at a particular time in history in a particular space.
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They were they had hearts that beat, that were beating.
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They had lungs that were filling and contracting.
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They had blood that was flowing through their bodies.
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They were real live people.
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With real life emotions.
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And at this point in her life, she is 90 years old.
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I'm looking around, I don't see anybody who's yet 90.
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I may be missing somebody.
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I don't want to leave you out.
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But I don't see anybody.
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But is Miss Eudine here? No, Miss Eudine is one who is who has reached her 90th birthday.
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Isn't that correct? Eudine's older than 90.
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But we have very few of us ever even see 90.
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And here to consider the fact that at 90, you're going to have a baby.
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I heard a few of you laugh.
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What a tremendous thought.
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What a tremendous thing to believe.
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It seems to be an absurdity.
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She said, the way of women is past.
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It's gone.
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I am 90 years old.
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This time next year, you will have a child.
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And she laughs.
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Beloved, we can't condemn her when we understand her, but it was God who made the promise.
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God has made many promises to you and to I that upon first hearing them, we have a hard time believing.
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Many people have trouble believing in the doctrine of justification by faith because they believe they want they have to do something to earn their salvation.
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That's when you say no, salvation is by grace to faith.
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They laugh within themselves.
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They say, I can't be that easy.
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It's just as easy for us to laugh at the promises of God.
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It's just as easy for us to hear immediately the promises of God and not seeing how they could be fulfilled in our own lives.
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And this is where Sarah was at this moment.
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She laughed and then she lied.
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Why? Well, the Bible tells us because she was afraid.
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Wouldn't you be if you just laughed at the Lord and got caught? The story is not hard to interpret.
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It really isn't.
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We can picture it in our mind.
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She's standing out of eyeshot, but within earshot, she hears the promise of the Lord.
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She laughs to herself.
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She gets caught and immediately says, I didn't do it.
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And the Lord says, yes, you did.
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Busted.
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And here she stands.
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One commentator made an astute point.
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He said it was likely that she learned this behavior from her husband.
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And the behavior of lying when she got caught because her husband had already given her so many examples of being willing to bend the truth when he was in trouble.
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He was willing to hide the fact that she was even his wife.
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Now, we cannot leave the story of Sarah there because the text does sort of leave us hanging with the life of Sarah.
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We know that she has a child.
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We know that the child is Isaac and we know what goes on in Isaac's life.
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And we're going to begin studying Isaac in a few weeks.
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We know how the story goes.
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But never in Genesis do we really see a picture of repentance and faith in Sarah.
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We never really see this.
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This is why the New Testament is so precious to us in the life of Sarah, because the New Testament describes to us things that we don't necessarily see in the text in Genesis.
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It describes to us the implications that aren't explicitly stated.
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And what does Hebrews 11 tell us about Sarah? It tells us that she did believe the promise of God.
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You say, now, wait a minute, Pastor, the text says she laughed.
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The text says she laughed initially, as I think anyone at 90 years old who said you're going to have a baby at 90 years old.
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I think any one of us, anybody, no matter how strong their faith would say, that's hard to believe.
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But when we go to Hebrews 11 and we look at verse 11, it says that she counted the one who made the promise to be faithful.
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As such, there was a moment in time where she laughed, but that moment was quickly squelched by the faith that was really and truly in her heart, the faith that caused her to set out after Abraham, the faith that caused her to be that wife which supported this prophet husband that she had, the faith that sustained her through so many years of not being able to have a child, the faith that she failed to exercise in the story of Hagar.
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She made a mistake and she failed.
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But yet she still had faith.
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It was still there.
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Beloved, that is what is so important for us to understand from the story of Sarah is that though we can readily point out her failures, it helps us to understand that she was a flesh and blood individual who, even though she had failures, reminds us that even in failures, God can still glorify himself in us.
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She had faith.
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She had faith that was imperfect.
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Beloved, does anyone here have perfect faith? Is there anyone here who could stand? And if I need to, I'll sit.
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But is there anyone here who could stand today and proclaim perfect faith? No.
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One of my favorite passages in scripture is one that most people never read the way I do.
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It's one of those little passages that when you read it, you read right past it.
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And a lot of people I don't think ever even look at it.
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But I want you to think of it today.
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I want you to think about this passage.
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I want you to go there with me, because in Mark nine, Jesus has a man come to him whose son is brought to him and laid at his feet who needs to be healed.
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It's Mark nine.
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Twenty four is where we're going.
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This man brings his son to Jesus and he says, I asked your disciples to heal him, but they couldn't do it.
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So Jesus, first Jesus rebukes the disciples.
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He rebukes them for their unbelief because they were unable to heal this boy.
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Then he looks to the man and he says to the man, a very important truth.
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He says all things are possible for one who believes.
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Now, just remember, when you read verses like that, don't let the health and wealth gospel come in and influence you to think that that's some form of name it and claim it garbage.
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It's not.
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Jesus is simply making a point here about faith in him and what faith in him can accomplish.
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Faith in him can accomplish miracles.
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Faith in him because he is the miracle maker.
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He is the one who can do it.
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It's not the faith itself.
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It's the one doing the miracle that is the power.
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And he says all things are possible for the one who believes.
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And in the response of the man in Mark 9, 24, to me, one of the most powerful responses in scripture, I know, like I said, people read pass it, never see it.
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Immediately, the father of the child cried out and said, I believe.
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Help my unbelief sounds like a contradiction, but it's not a contradiction, he told the truth.
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I believe, but I know I have doubt, I believe, but there's still an inkling in my heart.
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A failure, help that part, I don't know if you've ever been here, but I know I have or I could look to the Lord and say, I believe with all I can.
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But yet it's like and I hate to make a trite comparison, but it's like those old cartoons where you see the angel sitting on one shoulder and the and the little demon sitting on the other shoulder.
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And I realize, again, that's sort of a Warner Brothers example.
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But but it seems like there's always this influence of doubt that's trying to come into your heart.
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There's always this influence of doubt that's trying to come into your mind.
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There's always this this voice that's saying it's not real, it's not true, don't believe it.
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And yet.
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We know we believe.
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We know we trust, but yet our faith is not perfect, that's what this father said, that's why I believe this verse is so powerful, because he he proclaimed in one sentence what it could take books to fill the volumes of the theology that he proclaimed, he says, I believe I have faith.
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Pistou believed faith, I have faith, but he said, help my Apostle, help my unfaith, help my lack.
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I have belief, but I also fail.
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Help me.
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Where I fail, beloved, I see this again, looking back to the story of Sarah, I see in Sarah's life a real and living faith that also was accompanied.
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By times of failure and rather than judging her for her times of failure.
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I think we should be encouraged that God, who is faithful.
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Was faithful enough to see her through her failures, I want to end with an illustration and and some of you have probably heard it, and I normally don't I normally don't go to illustrations like this, but every once in a while there's one that stays in my mind and I think it's a good illustration.
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So I use it.
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It's the illustration of the two water pots that the farmer had and he carried them every morning to the well to get water and bring it back to use for the watering of his field and for his animals.
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So every morning he would get up and he would put the water pots on, he would go to get water.
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And one of the pots had a hairline crack in it.
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So he would take the two pots, he would put them on the shaft and he would take it to the well and he would fill the water pots up and by the time he would make it back from the well, one of the pots was only about half full because the hairline crack had begun to drip and it had dripped out.
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And so really only one of the pots was able to really fulfill the intended purpose.
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The other pot was always losing about half of what it was supposed to do.
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And the two pots were talking one day, as you can tell, it's a true story.
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And the two pots in conversation with one another, the pot that was cracked was feeling sorry for itself.
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It was saying, I can't do the job that I'm supposed to do.
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I can't fulfill all that my the farmer has for me to do.
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I feel like such a failure.
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I can't do it right.
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I've only made for one thing and even that one thing I can't do.
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And of course, the the the whole pot, the one that had no problems, looked upon the crack pot and said, Yeah, you're right.
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You're not good enough.
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You're not doing what you're supposed to do.
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You were made to carry water and you can't even do that.
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Right.
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So finally, the pot with the crack cried out to the farmer and said, Why do you keep using? Why not either fix me or throw me away? And so the farmer carries the pot out and he shows the field and the pathway to the well.
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And he said, Look at this side.
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It was barren, it was empty, it was nothing, just dirt, spurs and sand.
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He says, But look at this side.
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And there were beautiful flowers.
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And different types of vegetation that had grown up.
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And he said, I've known about your crack all along.
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And he said, So what I did was I planted seed on your side.
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So that as I carried you back every day, you watered that side.
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Obviously, the moral of the story is God can use crackpots, but I think there's more to the story.
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We will never arrive at full sanctification until we reach glory.
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When we shed these mortal bodies and the perishable puts on the imperishable, the mortal puts on immortality.
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And until then, there will be cracks, there will be failures, there will be times when we cry out to the Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.
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And it is in those times that we can look at the life of Sarah and those like her, who though in their failings, God used.
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And be encouraged.
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Not encouraged to fail, but encouraged that even in our unfaithfulness, God is always faithful.
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Let's pray.
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Father, we thank you for your faithfulness.
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We thank you that as the song says, there is no shadow of turning with the that you sustain us, even though we cannot and will not ever be able to sustain ourselves.
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For our failures, Lord, we seek repentance, we seek forgiveness, we seek strength to overcome.
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And at the same time, Lord, we trust you in everything to be able to see us through our failures and raise us up and conform us to the image of your son.
35:37
Lord, I pray for an encouraging spirit.
35:40
I pray that that encouragement would fill our hearts today to seek to live as Christ, to not focus on those things which we are failing on, but to focus on your faithfulness, to see us through our failures.
35:56
We love you, Lord.
35:58
We ask you to see us through our week and through all that we do to bring glory to your name.
36:07
And it's in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, we pray and for his.
36:12
Amen.