Sarah clung to the things God said, along with her husband, for some twenty-four years. She believed and prayed and did what she could to apply her faith. Sometimes she and Abraham made big mistakes because they thought they had to help God fulfill his word, and while we shouldn’t commend them for this, we can at least admire the fact that they took the words of God seriously. By God’s grace, when the time was full, Sarah’s persistent faith in the speech of God caused her to be with child at the age of eighty-nine and to bear a son at the age of ninety. Sarah’s persistent faith in the words of God led her to taste the joy of God as he fulfilled his promises in his own time and way.
Now, those of you who know Sarah’s story well might object and say that Sarah isn’t the most stunning example of faith in the Bible, for after all, when the Lord appeared and told her at the age of eighty-nine that she would have a child within one year, she laughed. And she didn’t laugh for joy, rather, she laughed because she doubted the words of the Lord. She laughed because she was afraid to believe. She laughed because she had been living with the deep pain of one who waited long on the promises of God. As Solomon later wrote in Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” and indeed Sarah’s heart was very sick. So again, you might object and say that we really shouldn’t look to Sarah as a model of faith but I would say two things in return.
On the one hand, we must understand that Sarah’s laughter came after twenty-four years of actively clinging to and waiting on the promises of God, and sometimes living by faith is very painful. Sometimes waiting on the Lord is just plain excruciating. We believe in the Lord and in his words, but then the things we’ve been hoping for don’t come to pass, and they don’t come to pass, and they don’t come to pass. Eventually we get so discouraged and filled with pain that every reiteration of the promise feels like a knife piercing into our hearts. This is where Sarah was in her life and I think we need to have compassion toward her.
When God, for the seventh time, promised that she would soon be with child, Sarah’s heart cried out, “Stop it, God, please stop it! I know you mean well but your words are killing me! Your words are hurting me! Please stop it!” This is what Sarah was feeling when she laughed—it wasn’t that she didn’t believe God, it was just that she hurt so bad, and who can blame her? Would you believe God if he told you, after so many years of waiting, that you would have a child at eighty-nine years old? I think we need to have compassion and give Sarah some space to vent. God did.
On the other hand, despite the pain of faith that was there in Sarah’s life, she did walk in obedience to the promises of God. I don’t want to be inappropriate here, but what I mean is that Sarah did what was necessary for a woman to become pregnant and she did it in faith. I don’t know what her attitude was at the time and I don’t think it’s all that important, rather, what’s important is that she believed in God and took action on the basis of his promises. Sometimes that’s what genuine faith looks like. It acts despite the intensity of the pain. Beloved, not many eighty-nine-year-old women go to bed with their ninety-nine-year-old spouses at all, much less think that they’re going to be able to have intimacy, much less think that they’re going to become pregnant. But that’s what Sarah and Abraham did by faith not fantasy, feelings, or foolishness. That’s what they did by believing against all odds that God would do exactly what he said he would do.
In the next post in this series I’m going to write about the fruit of Sarah’s faith, but for now I want to encourage you to join me in pondering her life with Abraham, the pain she experienced in waiting on God, and the faith she expressed by obeying God despite the pain. As we ponder these things, I pray that God will minister to our hearts and teach us what it means to live by faith in the faithfulness of God.
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