Scripture Focus: “Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee… and Sarah shall have a son.” — Genesis 18:14
Waiting has a way of making perfectly reasonable people start having ideas.
At first, we pray. We trust. We remind ourselves that God knows what He is doing. Then a little more time passes. Then considerably more time passes. Eventually, we can find ourselves thinking, Well, surely the Lord wouldn’t mind if I helped this along a little.
Abraham and Sarah knew something about that kind of waiting. God had called Abraham to leave his homeland and promised that his descendants would become a great nation through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:1–3). There was just one rather enormous problem: Abraham and Sarah had no children, and Sarah was unable to conceive.
Still, God kept repeating the promise. Abraham would have an heir. His descendants would become as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:4–5). Eventually, God made it unmistakably clear that Sarah herself would bear the promised son (Genesis 17:16, 19).
But promises do not always arrive with schedules attached.
Years passed. Sarah remained childless, and both she and Abraham grew older. The promise was still there, but everything they could see seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. That is a difficult place to live—between what God has said and what circumstances appear to be saying.
Neither Abraham nor Sarah handled every part of those years well. Fear got the better of Abraham more than once. Twice he presented Sarah as his sister rather than his wife because he feared that men who desired her would kill him (Genesis 12; 20). In protecting himself, he placed Sarah in extremely vulnerable situations, but God intervened both times and protected her despite Abraham’s failure.
Sarah eventually reached her own breaking point. After years without a child, she gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham as a secondary wife so that a child might be obtained through her, a practice known in their ancient culture (Genesis 16:1–3). Hagar conceived and gave birth to Ishmael, but instead of solving the problem, their attempt to manufacture the promise brought jealousy, hurt, and conflict into the household.
They had tried to accomplish for God what only God could accomplish for them.
That is where their story becomes uncomfortably familiar. We may never be tempted to solve a problem exactly as Abraham and Sarah did, but the impulse hasn’t disappeared. We can pray for direction and then grow impatient enough to create our own. We can ask God to open a door and then start rattling every doorknob in the hallway. We can surrender something on Monday and quietly take it back by Thursday because apparently heaven has exceeded our preferred response time.
What I find especially beautiful is that their failures did not cancel God’s faithfulness. He continued working with them, patiently bringing them to the place where the fulfillment could never be mistaken for something they had managed to produce themselves.
By the time God announced that Sarah would have a son within the year, both she and Abraham were far beyond the age when such a thing seemed naturally possible. The idea seemed so impossible that Sarah laughed (Genesis 18:10–12). That was when God asked the question that reaches far beyond their story: “Is any thing too hard for the LORD?” (Genesis 18:14).
At the appointed time, Sarah held Isaac in her arms.
God had kept His word—not according to Abraham and Sarah’s timetable, and certainly not through the solution they had devised, but exactly as He had promised.
That doesn’t mean every delay in our lives exists because God intends to perform some spectacular miracle at the end. Scripture doesn’t give us permission to invent explanations God hasn’t given. Sometimes we simply do not know why an answer has taken so long, why a door remains closed, or why something we have prayed about repeatedly still looks exactly as it did yesterday.
But Abraham and Sarah teach us something important about the interim: God’s apparent silence is not permission to take His place. The waiting years are not necessarily empty years simply because the answer has not yet arrived.
God was working on Abraham and Sarah as surely as He was working toward the fulfillment of His promise. Abraham had to learn to trust God’s ability to accomplish what had become humanly impossible. Paul later describes him as “strong in faith, giving glory to God,” and “fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:20–21).
I love that Scripture lets us see what came before those words. Abraham’s faith had not traveled a perfectly straight road. There had been fear, wrong turns, and attempts to take matters into his own hands. Yet God remained faithful to His promise and continued working with people who sometimes struggled to wait for it.
That doesn’t make our own waiting easy. There are prayers we desperately want answered and situations we desperately want changed. In fact, every believer is living in an interim of sorts. Christ has promised, “I will come again” (John 14:3), and we are still waiting for that day.
So we wait, not because nothing is happening, but because God is still God when we cannot see what He is doing. His faithfulness is not measured by our calendar. And when the temptation comes to grab the controls and manufacture an answer of our own, Abraham and Sarah remind us that sometimes faith is simply trusting God enough to leave in His hands what only His hands can accomplish.
If this Fireside Chat warmed your spirit and sparked fresh resolve to live what you believe, fan that flame with Scripture—“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). Pull a little closer to the Light, and carry it into the week ahead.
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