Genesis 15:1-6
Introduction
How are you for waiting? Does it come easy for you? I happen to find waiting quite painful. Many years ago, I was helping out with a youth group and we took a bus to attend a special youth event in Toronto. This event was going to have a well known speaker—Jake the Snake Roberts. As someone who had watched some wrestling, I was kind of excited about this. We took the long bus ride to the church and waited. But Jake missed his flight and so we had to wait for the next flight to come in, except we had no information about whether he was on that flight. The second flight came in with no Jake the Snake Roberts. Did he ever show up? I don’t know as we made the decision to wait no longer and go back home.
How long are you willing to wait for someone before you give up hope? Will you wait longer than five minutes or fifteen minutes if a person is late for a meeting? Taking longer than expected may be a sign that the person is not taking seriously the promise they made to you or it may be that they are working on a different schedule than you are.
How are you for waiting on God? When you pray to God, how much time do you give God to respond? I will say that some of my most desperate prayers, prayers that were indeed answered the way I wanted, sometimes took decades. It really feels like God does not have the same sense of time that we do.
Tapping into these feelings can be very helpful as we begin the season of Advent. Advent means arrival, and although Jesus did arrive two thousand years ago, we take time each year to revisit the experience of waiting for the Messiah. Whether we like waiting or not, the Bible is full of stories of waiting, some of which might help us to understand what it was like to with for Jesus.
Waiting for Isaac
We are going to look at the story of two parents who have been promised a child by God as they eagerly await the birth of that baby. I am not talking about Joseph, Mary, and Jesus but rather Abram, Sarai, and Isaac.
Abram was a man of God who was called to leave his homeland and to journey to a new place, to a promised land. The Old Testament shares a number of adventures of Abram on his journey. But something really special happens in Genesis 15. God promises Abram that he is going to become a father of a child. This is rather surprising as Abram is 75-85 years old at this point, his wife is not much younger, and they were not able to have children even in their youth. Not only does God insist that this promise will be fulfilled, God broadens the promise by stating that Abram’s descendants will be more numerous than the stars in the night sky. We are told that Abram believed God and he was reckoned as being righteous.
But notice that God did not give a timeline. Hopefully, nine months from this promise, little Isaac would appear. And they waited and they waited and they waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. Did they misunderstand God? Did God change his mind? There had to be some explanation.
Then Abram got this brilliant idea. The initial promise did not specify that Sarai would be the mother. Perhaps Abram could speed things up by having a child with one of his servants, in this case Hagar. From this came Ishmael. While Ishmael was a blessing, God did correct Abram by specifying that the promised child would be with Sarai. So back to waiting they went.
Finally, Sarai became pregnant and then at the right time, she gave birth to a boy, Isaac. Interestingly, Isaac is a bit of a pun. The name came from one of the promises to Abram about the birth of the child and Sarai laughed in unbelief. But when Isaac was born, the family laughed with joy. Isaac means both one who laughs and one who rejoices.
In case you are wondering, this was at least fifteen years after that first promise. That was a long wait. Imagine being told “Congratulations, you are going to have a baby!” But then it takes fifteen years before the baby arrives. Some parents who adopt experience something like this. The waiting was long but the promise was great. Abraham and Sarah had their child and from Isaac, their descendants are more than the stars in the night sky.
Waiting for Jesus
Fast forward close to two thousand years and there is another couple. These two are not quite so old as Abram and Sarai. They too received a promise of the birth of a child. This time, God went directly to the mother, not just relying on the actions of the father. Another difference is that it seems as if the birth came close to nine months after the promise. Although, I’m sure that the circumstances, the miraculous conception and the unmarried state of the couple with all of the social drama that would cause made that nine months feel much longer. Still, it is a far cry from the fifteen years Abram had to wait.
But there was a longer wait. The Old Testament had numerous prophecies and promises about God sending a Chosen One, a Messiah to save the people. The religious leaders studied these passages and tried to understand what this would look like and when it would happen. The centuries between the time f the prophecies and the fulfillment were long and hard. Empire after empire took control of Israel. The people hoped that the Messiah would bring freedom but they had been waiting so long. Even once Jesus became an adult and started his ministry, there was skepticism by some. After such a long wait, an apparent fulfillment can feel like too good to be true. And yet Jesus was the Messiah and the chosen one and it was Jesus that would save the people.
As much as Israel had been waiting for the Messiah, Christians still wait for Jesus. For some people, this is eager anticipation for the second coming. They pay close attention to the news, looking for signs of the end. But there is another way that we wait for Jesus.
Here we are going through life. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is difficult. There are things that weigh upon us. There are people we are worried about. We are hurting on the inside. I do not have to go into details, we all know that there is suffering either to experience or to observe. And we wait for Jesus. What do we want Jesus to do? Sometimes we have very specific needs and sometimes it is a more vague but just as desperate cry for something—for anything. When will Jesus show up and do something to fix what is wrong? For some of us, we have been waiting far longer than fifteen years. Waiting is not easy.
I would like to share ten simple steps to make waiting for Jesus easy. Except none of them would work. All I can say is that God works on a different schedule than we do but at the same time God will be faithful to do all that he promised, although not necessary everything we want him to do. And so we wait.
Conclusion
Perhaps you have been waiting for the end of this sermon. Well, your wait is almost at an end. Life seems to be all about waiting. We wait to get married. We wait for the birth of babies, ours or for people in our life. We wait for a promotion and then we wait for retirement. And the waiting continues.
The good news is that there is more than just the wait. There is also the thing that we are waiting for. While all of our dreams do not come true, much of what we wait for does eventually arrive. For good or for bad.
Abram waited for Isaac and it took almost fifteen years. The people waited for the coming of the Messiah and it took a number of centuries.
We wait for Jesus to intervene in the situations that worry us most. I cannot give you a timeline. But I can say that Jesus promised to be with us through the power of the Holy Spirit. So we try our best to stay strong and we wait.
