Word of Salvation – Vol. 43 No. 11 – March 1998

 

Abraham and Sarah – the Parents

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on Hebrews 11:11-12

Scripture Readings: Genesis 18:1-15; Hebrews 11:11-12

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

suppose there are hardly any Christian parents who do not pray often that God would be gracious and save their children and grandchildren, and however many generations the Lord may give them.  I hope, actually, that there is not one parent here this morning who does not pray that every day.  It is a very biblical way to pray.  Jesus prayed not only for His disciples, but also for “those who would believe through them.”

But as well as praying for one’s children’s salvation, we need to pray for children, full stop.  Rachel snapped at Jacob once: “Give me children or I die.”  To which he retorted, “Am I in the place of God to open the womb or to close it?”  Children are a gift of God, and just because He hands them out right and left to all and sundry with extravagant largesse doesn’t make them any less a gift of God.  The experience of Abraham and Sarah, even in the modern world where we like to think we’ve got all these things quite under control – either to have or not to have – is far from uncommon.

There are some difficulties in understanding our text but the main point is plain enough: true faith will bear fruit for God.  We may not see that fruit in this life – or very little of it.  Nor can we specify what form that fruit will take.

But nevertheless, a life of obedience lived in true faith, resting in God’s promises, will bear results of eternal significance and meaning.

Of course, the real fruit which Abraham and Sarah’s faith bore was not so much Isaac, but the Lord Jesus Christ.  It was when he would see the light of day that Abraham really looked forward to, and the thought that one of his descendants would be the Saviour of the world gave him great joy.  But for very many years in Abraham and Sarah’s life, God seemed not even to have made a start in fulfilling this promise.

Well congregation, let us ask a few questions of this text today and learn something about this true faith that bears fruit for God.

First of all, WHAT IS TRUE FAITH?

In the children’s chorus, we sing:
            Faith is just believing what God says He will do.
            He will never fail us; His promises are true.

The first verse in our chapter tells us that “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  The Heidelberg Catechism speaks about true faith “being not only a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in His Word is true; it is also a deep-rooted assurance… that… I, too… have been given salvation.”

The common feature of all these definitions of faith is that true faith is an assurance about what we believe and so our minds are completely at rest about the matter and there are no shadows of doubt.

Yet Jesus spoke to a man one day who said, “Lord, I believe; help me really to believe – make my believing the real thing because I am struggling with it.”  And don’t we often, too?  I’m not talking about specific things like believing that God will heal grandma, or that He will give me this job, or a husband or wife or a child.  We simply don’t have specific promises given to us like that these days.

Abraham had a promise like that, but those kinds of promises were for the time when the Church was in her childhood in Old Testament times.  But the Church has now come of age and God means for us now to trust Him in a broader sense without specific little promises and fulfilments here and there to prop up our faith.  Because now we have the whole Scriptures which the ancients didn’t.  We have, says Peter, “a more sure word of prophecy” to sustain our faith.

Even so, we still at times have trouble with believing God even on the big questions.  Where are you God, in this world of trouble?  Have I, too, had my sins forgiven?  Or, because I don’t have that pretty normal and natural blessing that everybody else seems to have, and maybe it is children – perhaps I have not really been made right with God?

That struggle, whatever is the particular question, is nothing new.  And whether we belong to the Church in her childhood or the Church in her adulthood, we still often see plenty in this world and our lives that make us wonder about God’s promises.  Our text beautifully records – and here I read the way the footnote in the NIV translates it – that “…by faith even Sarah, who was past age, was enabled to bear children because she considered Him faithful who had made the promise.”

But Sarah wasn’t always so strong.  She struggled often to believe.  Indeed, sometimes she even scorned God’s promises.  And not without reason, humanly speaking.  She was 89 years old when the Lord and two angels visited the couple in Genesis 18.  The old King James is a bit more explicit in the way it speaks about Sarah.  It says, “It ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.”  That is the Bible’s way of saying Sarah had been through menopause.  All her productive life she had been barren.  But now, after she had ceased to produce ovum, she is supposed to believe she will conceive a child.

But the beautiful thing is that Hebrews doesn’t remember that.  Hebrews remembers and reminds us that, whatever struggles Sarah may have had at times, she overcame her doubts and her faith was revived, and she looked to God as one who keeps His promises even though they require a miracle.

Isn’t God gracious, congregation?  He remembers us according, as we say, to our better moments.  No, much more than that, He sees us and looks upon us, not only as we are in our better moments, but as we are in the Lord Jesus Christ.  He sees us in the righteousness of Christ.  He sees us now as we will be in the future when He will finally be finished with us; when we will be fully sanctified and without spot or blemish.  He sees us for what we truly are according to His work, not what, right now, we are struggling to be.

True faith is taking God at His Word and, in particular for us today, a simple belief in God’s promise of salvation through Jesus Christ.  But you can have true faith without all the time experiencing the fullness of true faith.  And don’t forget, faith will always be attacked by the devil.  So maybe even those doubts at times are, in reality, a sign of true faith, and therefore you should be assured.

Secondly though, let us ask, WHAT DOES TRUE FAITH DO?

True faith simply believes all God says He will do.  And therefore true faith simply obeys all God tells us to do because it believes that God uses our obedience to bring about what He has promised in His Word He will do.

So, therefore, true faith does not look at this and that in the world and make its decisions on the basis of what it can calculate about how things will turn out if we do this or if we do the other.  For just one example, if the Bible says certain things about bringing up children, whereas psychologists tell us that will have a terrible effect on our children, we will believe God and fly in the face of the psychologists if necessary.  At least Dr Benjamin Spock has had the grace to admit that he was wrong – but he has ruined a couple of generations.

And so, because Sarah believed God could make a barren woman, who had long ceased producing seed, able to conceive, God enabled her to do so.  But now I want to say something very practical about the way God works through our faith.  Listen to our text again… and again I read from the footnote’s translation because I think it catches the original better.  Listen:

“By faith even Sarah, who was past age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.  And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants…!”

That is a very interesting statement.  What the text is saying is that it was through the faith of Sarah that the one man Abraham, and he, too, as good as dead so far as bearing children was concerned, begot a son, Isaac.  Do you see what has happened here in the whole way the text speaks about Abraham and Sarah?  Abraham could not have produced Isaac on his own – we all know that.  But it was not just through the faith of Abraham, the great father of faith in the Bible, that Isaac was born; it was through the faith of Abraham and Sarah.

Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, how many men and women who promised so much usefulness for the Lord in their youth end up achieving little or nothing for the Lord because they married the wrong person?  Maybe they even led them away from the Lord entirely?  Young people, I plead with you, think long and hard about what kind of person you marry.  And don’t leave thinking about it until when you are emotionally involved with someone.  Think hard about it now, for when love is flowing in the heart it seems that reason flows right out of the head!

In other words, as far as the really important things are concerned, the things of faith, simply decide right now that if that person is not a Christian, however beautiful of face and figure – as Jacob’s Rachel was – you simply won’t give them a second look.  And I will even say also that if they are not Reformed, look very, very hard – for if they are not, the road will not be easy.  As Amos says, “How can two walk together lest they be agreed.”  (And if I were speaking to a congregation of Baptists, for example, I would say the same thing, only the other way round.)

Such a marriage may not be wrong.  But it will not be wise.  Marriage is such a thing that it should be able to be said of us all, as was said of Abraham and Sarah, that from that one (unit) came much fruit for God – whether children or whatever.  Young people, right from the beginning: fish in the right pond.

And I want to say another thing – to those who are already married.  How do you really become one?  When the Bible speaks about becoming one flesh, it is speaking of much more than sex.  The one flesh is only the physical, outward expression of a spiritual and psychological oneness.  Abraham and Sarah were one flesh, no doubt about that.  They had a good marriage.  But what made them forbears of the Saviour of the world was that they were one in the faith.

“By faith even Sarah, who was past age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.  And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants…!”

Peter says of husbands and wives that we are “heirs together of the grace of life.” And the only way we are going to grow in grace and faith together is by letting the Word of Christ dwell in us richly together.  Any happily married, spiritually thriving couple will tell you that many of their most precious times are times together with the Word of God.  One of the things that a person misses most when they lose their husband or wife is that they have no one with whom to have a close spiritual talk in a heart to heart way.  Young couples, middle aged couples: life is busy.  But whatever you do, make time for this so that you truly become one in the faith.

Now thirdly let us ask our text, WHAT DOES TRUE FAITH RECEIVE?
True faith will always be tried and Peter tells us that trials come “so that our faith, of greater worth than gold which perishes even though refined by fire, may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

And isn’t that what God did with Abraham and Sarah?  We know that sometimes God drives prodigals to the end of themselves to make them turn to Him.  But it seems that some of the most beautiful, simple and obediently faithful children of the Lord also have to be driven to the end of themselves – like Job, like Abraham and Sarah, like our Lord Himself – so that their faith is proved genuine.  And so God gets all the glory for the great good they do for Him.

Isaac is obviously the child of promise.  Sarah is barren in her youth; she is now passed productive life, and yet she gives birth to a son.  And from this son came the Saviour of the world; from this son comes the whole household of faith, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.  And so, from this one man, says our text – and he as good as dead – came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

But it took a long time to come.  So, people of God, don’t measure faith by apparent results.  People often show so much promise and seem so used of God in their youth – and what else would we want to see?  So thank God for that.  But remember King Saul.  Perhaps you don’t see much fruit – either in your church work or your family life?  Press on; and trust God.  A tree is known by its fruits.  But be careful what you think the Bible considers fruit.  The Bible very seldom has in mind souls won for Christ or even necessarily children going on for God.  Nearly always it has in mind growth in godly character.

But because a person is not apparently greatly used by God in other people’s lives and is even slow to grow as a Christian, it is not necessarily a sign they are not God’s children.  Remember the parable of the wheat and the weeds; and how the master said not to pull the weeds yet because some that looked like weeds now might actually be wheat but hadn’t yet formed heads so the workers would know they were wheat.  That is, they hadn’t yet produced fruit; but give them time and they would.

Through Abraham and Sarah’s faith God poured blessing on the whole world.  From them the Saviour came who was not the Saviour of the Jews only.  But God didn’t do that until, humanly speaking, it was too late.  And even then, Sarah only saw Isaac; and Abraham saw only Isaac and Jacob and Esau.

Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, never give up.  On your deathbed never give up hope and faith.  It might even be your faith on your deathbed that God will use to speak to that erring son or daughter.  True sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah, children of the Almighty God Himself persevere.  As good as dead as we may seem in terms of this world, God may still use us to do we know not what.  But it is the new world He is building out of the ashes of this old one that is the one that really counts and that we should really be concerned about.  So congregation, let us remember what we are told in Isaiah 51 about this matter:

“Look to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord: look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn; look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, who gave you birth.  When I called him he was but one, and I blessed him and made him many.”

People of God, it is the same God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Jacob, and the same God our Lord Jesus Christ trusted in and who delivered Him, who is our God today.  Let us, too, continue to trust Him, to obey Him, and to look to Him to bless our faith and obedience how, when and where He pleases.

Amen.