The scripture reading this morning is taken from selected passages in the book of Genesis found in the Old Testament chapters 15 and 16 These verses are printed in the order of your worship, and again it's taken from chapters 15 and 16 of Genesis After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision Fear not Abram. I am your shield your award shall be very great But Abram said oh Lord God What will you give me where I continue childless and the air of my house is Eleazar of Damascus and Abram said behold you have given me no offspring and a member of my household will be my heir and Behold the word of the Lord came to him this man shall not be your heir your very own son shall be your heir and He brought him outside and said look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able to number them Then he said to him so shall your offspring be and he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness And he said to him I am the Lord who brought you out from Er of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess But he said oh Lord God how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him bring me a heifer three years old a female goat three years old a ram three years old a turtle dove and a young pigeon And he brought all him all these and cut them in half When the sun had gone down and it was dark behold a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between these pieces On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying to your offspring I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river the river Euphrates
Now Sarah I Abram's wife was born him had born him no children She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Heygar and Sarah said to Abram Behold now the Lord has prevented me from burying children go to my servant It may be that I shall obtain children by her and Abram listen to the voice of Sarah So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan Sarah Abram's wife took Heygar the Egyptian her servant and gave her to Abram her husband as his wife And he went to Heygar and she conceived and when she saw that she had conceived she looked with contempt on her mistress And Sarah said to Abram may the wrong you've done to me beyond you I gave my servant to your embrace and when she saw that you had conceived she looked on me with contempt May the Lord judge between you and me But Abram said to Sarah behold your servant is in your power due to her as you please Then Sarah dealt harshly with her and she fled from her the word of the Lord
Well last week we started to look at At this very important chapter in the book of Genesis Genesis chapter 15 and this morning we're going to take a second glance at Genesis 15 and Bridge over into the sixteenth chapter to get at this issue of doubt because what we saw last week is that here You have this incredible patriarch Abraham This great man who struggled with doubt and the point is look all of us are going to struggle with doubt in one way or another Throughout our life. It's going to be there and what Abraham discovered is the only remedy to doubt is faith and When faith comes to bear upon doubt, it's like water upon a fire. It just puts it out Abraham had sort of that water on the fire Experience in Genesis 15 where he was you know, he's questions Lord. You said you you're going to give me all All of this you're going to get you're going to give me this land you're going to bless every nation through me and God hello. I still don't have a child my wife and I are getting pretty old How many worlds is going to work out and he sort of takes Abraham by the arm and takes him outside and shows him the expansive evening sky Thousands upon thousands of stars and says count them if you could So will your offspring be and it blew him away To the point where Abraham had his pivotal moment of faith It says that Abraham believed the Lord and it was reckoned to him as righteousness He brought nothing to the table Abraham did he brought only his fears his questions his doubts But God showed himself to be strong and righteous and able And Abraham trusted in that he believed in it He trusted in the Lord and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. All right into story nice. You boy, that's the shortest sermon I've ever heard But then you get chapter 16 In chapter 16 once again, it's a moment of disillusionment for Abram it's a moment of doubt It's a moment of compromise and disillusionment and so what you see here is you got this man of faith is going through time about The book of Galatians talks about how all of us who believe our sons or daughters of Abraham Says in chapter three verse seven now then those it that is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham So then those who are of faith are blessed along along with Abraham the man of faith Abraham is the man of faith and if he still after he became quote a Christian after he was declared riding God's sight through faith after that pivotal moment He's still struggled without some fears if that's the case with Abraham the man of faith You know that it's going to be the case with you and me as well and so he's still struggled with that and This morning what we want to do is look at both of these passages To get at this Question of dealing with doubt. How do you deal with doubt? How do you extinguish those? fears and concerns and questions to the point where your faith triumphs over them There's two things that we're going to see primarily First of all, we've got to understand out better We can't trivialize it. We can't pretend that it's just you know questions intellectually curious people have But that faith and doubt are at war throughout our life in subtle and powerful ways We've got to understand doubt better. We need an anatomy of doubt first of all But then secondly, we need an answer To the problem of how do you strengthen faith because here's the point what we've said is The only remedy to doubt is faith but here you've got the man of faith Abraham and he's still caving in to it How can we have strength in faith? You know that that phrase that The man that brought his child to Jesus and said Jesus said do you believe? He says yes Lord, I believe help me in my unbelief That's the idea that the most difficult thing about being a believer is being a believer So we need an anatomy of doubt. We need to understand it better and take it so seriously that we begin to see its ways in our own life But then we need an answer to the answer for doubt if faith is the answer to doubt How do I have an answer to the problem of faith that buckles that is weak? How do I strengthen my faith all right? That's where we're going the two points first of all an anatomy of doubt Let's understand it a little bit and we want to use chapter 16 this rather bizarre scandalous Episode in chapter 16 I mean this could make it you know this this is sort of this makes desperate housewives look pretty mild in a lot of ways But I promise I've never seen that show but nevertheless all right You've got Abraham and Sarah buckling under doubt here How in the world are we going to be able to fulfill the promises that God says are gonna? be indicative of us if we can't even have children ah Sarah comes up with a brilliant idea husband Abram there is a common practice in the culture and this is true in the ancient Near East This was not an unusual practice evidently That is that if a woman was infertile She could take her maid servant as Sarah proposed to do with Hagar and have her husband sleep with her and the fruit of that union would be able to would be a child that the wife would be able to call her own Bizarre you go no that sounds very familiar things today well, okay, but it's nevertheless in the ancient days this would have been seen as a justifiable alternative in cultures other Than the one of the true God than the culture of the one true God because early in the book of Genesis You know it makes it real clear that when the Bible talks about marriage. This is a holy and sacred thing So much so that there is a one union bond that is mysteriously forged when a man and a woman come together in marriage And no one let no man ever put a sander that is divide that Don't let anyone ever spoil that or tainted And the Bible makes very clear throughout that those two people are to remain sexually pure Alone for one another No one else is to invade that privacy so and the text itself emphasizes when it refers to Sarah It's Abrams wife and we're like we know that but literally is trying to emphasize. This is not a good thing. All right So the anatomy of doubt begins with this Compromised it may seem subtle may seem In consequential culturally but it's massive Biblically and the point here is that doubt is there like an enemy that seeks to completely undermine the plan of God if that were possible Listen, do you believe doubt? in those subtle ways is a toxic substance in your life is it a fierce enemy? That's when you got to begin to think about it I have read you probably have two that military experts as they've digested the Fallujah offensive of last fall say that this is one of the most difficult Infantry assignments anyone could have ever had because what you had was basically fighting at night In urban warfare where the enemy neither wears a uniform nor gives you any clue. Hey, I'm the bad guy. Okay, they don't obey conventional Rules of warfare is total chaos That's what you've got going on here the enemy is functionally invisible but very very present doubt is that kind of enemy in our life and you've got to see it that way Have you ever seen a movie where you know, it's one of those horror movies or you know mysteries where it's dark and it's night and and you've got the main character there and they don't see that someone's broken in They don't see that they're about to be a victim and there's a killer there But you see and you start to fidget, you know, and then you start to kind of murmur talk a little bit and you're like no watch out It's so clear to you. Why can't it be clear to them? You see the bad guy. Why can't they see it? And boy that theme runs as a current through the entire Bible right there in the beginning of The Bible in Genesis chapter 4 we learn and in the experience with Cain and Abel that sin was like a roaring lion Crouching at the door seeking to devour one See that's the idea. Do you see it as an enemy? That is very very present first of all so in the anatomy of doubt The most important thing to begin with is to just admit the presence of it And ask the Holy Spirit to give us sort of night vision goggles and targets on that enemy so we recognize it Secondly, let's look at the strategy. We're talking about the anatomy of doubt here. How does strategy how does the enemy work? What's its strategy? Well in a nutshell, it's saying okay Here's the plan of God, but this is going to be way too difficult and it's and it's not that exciting You can't really trust that this pathway is going to work out. So here is an alternative behind curtain number two This is a much more trustworthy way to go put your confidence here That's in a nutshell the strategy of doubt It works hand in hand with temptation and one of the interesting thing that Literary experts point out from this passage in Genesis 16 is that literally the clues are very obvious in the Hebrew at least That We are intended to look back to Genesis chapter three as it's point of origin You remember Genesis chapter three is when Adam and Eve are in this paradise situation, but the enemy creeps in And begins to cast what doubt upon the integrity of God's plan It's saying Eve look God's holding something back from you And boy that's very similar to what We see with Sarah because Sarah starts off in verse two by saying the Lord has prevented me But you see the subtle passing of the buck God Since you haven't followed through on your end of the bargain We're gonna take matters into our own hands We're gonna help you out a little bit here God That's exactly what the evil one was doing in the Garden of Eden You also see how in the Garden Adam became passive what a spiritual leader he was and he listened to the voice Of his wife Eve and Fell prey to the same deception and similarly in verse two we see that Abram listened to the voice of Sarah And his careless passivity sharply contrasts not only with what should have happened With what what you see in him all over the place in other situations Abraham is not a passive guy But look how subtly because of doubt it paralyzed him and he began passive and prey to the enemy Now I want you to think about patterns of sin in your own life You say oh Leo you talk about sin so much. Okay, well look at patterns of doubt Look at patterns of fear Look at areas of your life where you are Compromising oh so subtly To follow an alternative path to the path that the Lord has laid out for you Let me give you a couple of you know kind of what if for instances let's say you're dating someone And you know they're not a believer and if you're not a believer here this morning Christians are supposed to date or excuse me they're supposed to marry Someone who is also a believer in Jesus Christ not because Christians are any better than you far be it But it's simply because we were saying earlier That God has forged a union mysteriously in marriage and you are not only bound together one to another But you are mysteriously bound together In Christ and it is a holy and sacred bond And so it's a you know It's something that is never to happen for an unbeliever to be unified in that level that intimate level with an unbeliever And so you know, let's say you're a believer and you start dating and unbeliever and you say well, you know We're just friends. We're just I'm the only point of access to this person in terms of the kingdom of God So what we call missionary dating you know and You say but look if I abandon then that just be co-plotted Jesus was out. There's a friend of sinners come on All right, but you see the subtle ways we begin to compromise And and then so then you get you say but I'm never gonna marry him and then a couple of months later We catch up and of course you're married there and what happened? Well, it's just this you know the slow process of tweaking God's plan here helping God out here And then you get where you don't want to go Now that's just one example if there's a there's a million. Let's take gossip for instance Nothing any of us in this room engage in but you know what happens is You have this wonderfully exciting juicy conversation with someone where you realize that you have a common Point with this person common point of connection. You've both been burned by this person over here And so you share prayer requests with this person about that person and I mean, we know how that happens right? It's just this subtle way in which we're concerned about them and We've deviated from God's path and integrity and relationships. Maybe it's at work Yeah, the opportunity for promotion your supervisor wants you to just cut this little corner over here Never mind that the SEC says you can't do that no one will ever find out Or maybe in order to get to this position you need to pretty much Make this other person over here look like they are lazy and incompetent And you know no one's gonna ever really see that this is all at the heart motivation level. Do you see what's going on? I mean, this prevents all of life and the strategy is oh so subtle to get you to doubt what What Peter said in second Peter that everything we need Is given to us through the great and gracious promises that are ours in Christ Everything we need is found in Christ. We don't need to compromise in the slightest way But we all do it it all happens And what we need is the spirit to give us eyes to see the presence of doubt and the strategy of it working Its way into our heart because listen What Christianity is about is trusting one It is far more competent than we are His far more skilled and capable and good than we are to take care of us Now think of it this way. Let's say you go to some strange city You've never been to before and you get in a cab and you ask to go somewhere and this person starts driving You recklessly all over the city and they're not even watching where they're going because they're looking you They're trying to unfold this map, you know, and find out where this supposed to be going. You're going Okay, what am I gonna do here? I've been here before and I think I know better where I'm going and this person does See you've got someone in there that's that you've entrusted yourself to who is incompetent How often do you apply that line of reasoning at the most subtle level to God? What God has promised to us Romans chapter 12 is that He will never let us out of his sovereign care that in everything in our life Good the bad and the ugly we can be assured That he is at work to bring about his good pleasing and perfect will we do not need to compromise We never need to doubt and give way note the power of the strategy of doubt To work to undermine This thinking in us So the anatomy of doubt has to do with just admitting the presence of it there. It's a horrible enemy. All right, remember, Fallujah It's strategy is fierce And we need to keep remembering that in the most subtle of ways It's getting us to think of God as that cab driver doesn't have a clue where he's going instead of the reigning sovereign of the universe who Has everything wonderfully beautifully in control for his glory and are good. What about the outcome? Still under the anatomy of doubt here. What about the outcome of um of the way of doubt? Well, it's a powerful imagery with Hagar and Sarah because um The point that we need to see with sin with temptation with doubt is that it's always promising something It's always promising a reward and remember God told Abram in chapter 12 verse 1 Abram I am your shield and your award is going to be awesome. Just trust me But doubt works its way to say I've got a better promise. I've got a better reward come over here and believe in this And so what we fail to see and we realize later is that sin always ultimately proves disappointing. It's promises prove to be greater than the promises of God But they in a sense they always reward us But it's a reward of pain and disillusionment recklessness insecurity so and so forth and in the Hagar Sarah narrative One of the things that's driven home is this Undercurrent that you see all over the place Of Egypt remember Abram just arrived in the land. There's famine in the land And what does he do? He freaks out and does what? He goes down to Egypt. Remember that symbolism? Not that there's anything sinful in and of Egypt, but biblically in this narrative It symbolizes that wandering from the path of God A little bit later on Abram's nephew Lot is given the privilege of picking the choice land That is before him he picks this rich fertile land over here that what looks like the land of Egypt See and in both those situations it doesn't give you This great blessing. What was their yield? What was their reward? This pain disillusionment recklessness And so now you have Hagar who has mentioned several times as what one identified with Egypt Her maid servant from Egypt and even after Sarah mistreats her where does Hagar go? Down to Egypt see as never the way of blessing It's always talking about the fact that when we deviate from God's plan no matter how much we rationalize and no matter how much it feels good No matter how insecure we are about God's plan and trusting in it You know that this one is only going to bring pain and disillusionment But doubt works its way deeply into us Think of it this way I'm going to share with you. This is kind of difficult for me to do But I'm going to share with you something that he is one of my obsessions I don't like potluck suppers Okay Now it's comforted to interrupt the first service that some of you share this obsession But you know you get to pot and I recognize we have potluck suppers here and I'm very thankful for the time with you Okay But my difficulty I being a control freak that I am is that I don't know who made the different pieces that are performing They're probably wonderful But you know, I just don't know and you say well Leo that's silly that makes no sense because you go out to dinner at restaurants Don't you you don't know who's making that? Yeah, it's not logical Okay, I just distrust this but what happens? Let's say that you have the finest Recipes the best chefs in the world that have made things for that Pollock supper and I'm foregoing that because of my fear my inability to trust Now that's what doubt does it says You can't trust that and so you can't trust God's way and so I forego the reward that I would have from Partaking in the Pollock supper and contrast that now with going to the five star restaurant And I've waited my mouth is salivating. I've got the triple five nut chocolate explosion cake before me, you know oozing with heat and hogging dust spilling over and you know, I'm just I just can't believe this is going to be incredible and I take a bite of it And it's a mud pie filled with worms
That's always the way of doubt Sent temptation it looks so wonderful Eve Was being kept from some knowledge by God the evil one told her and Anyway, that fruit was sure looking good and it was sure gonna be tasty And it killed her and that's what doubt does to you. That's what it does to me. You gotta know it's there Know its presence know its strategy and Beware of its outcome Because it's always the same Sarah was so excited to give Hagar to Abram as soon As that union took place Hagar had contempt for Sarah Sarah had contempt for her. There was domestic discord and violence It always spells going down to Egypt. That's the anatomy of doubt Now what about the answer because like we've said faith is always the answer technically to doubt But we're all at the same place as well None of us feel at our moment of temptation that our faith is strong enough How do you and I grow in our faith? How do we strengthen our faith? What can we do To combat the present strategy and outcome of doubt What's the answer to it? well First of all, let's talk about the presence Not the presence of doubt, but the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is Pentecost after all And what we believe the Bible teaches is that God is not only out there, you know, wherever God is everywhere and he is in a special way In here if you believe and trust in Jesus Christ alone God the Holy Spirit is here. He is the spirit of grace love wisdom truth He's the spirit of Christ and he gifts to us faith See look you you and I can no more We can't manufacture faith we can no more spin it out of ourselves like a spot than a spider's Like a spider can spin a web out of itself Then anything else faith is not something that is part of us It has to be gifted to us. That's why Paul says look It's by grace you've been saved through fell through faith and this is not of yourself It's totally alien from you. It's the gift of God Receive it now Jesus when he Went into the wilderness to be tempted It's interesting the way mark or see me Matthew opens that passage in Matthew chapter 4 He says then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness It's a rather amazing statement that the spirit of God would lead the Son of God Into the place of wilderness into the place of temptation the place of doubt and that's exactly what the evil one did He tempted Jesus by Hoping to cause him to doubt The integrity of God the Father's plan God the Father's way Jesus, I know you're hungry. You're the Son of God. You got a big job description You're gonna be weak you better turn that stone because you can do it turn that stone into bread so you can be strengthened Jesus You are the king of all the world Why don't you just set yourself up that way you can reign Just fall down and worship me and oh by the way Avoid going to the cross because that's the way of pain and shame and discomfort You're already the king just show yourself to be that You see the subtle nuanced ways in which the evil one used doubt But Jesus persevered at every point using the sword of the spirit the word of God to extinguish the flaming darts Of the evil one to like fire like water upon a fire just completely snuff it out That he might be for us the savior who triumphs over doubt So that not only does the spirit live in you if you're a Christian listen to me now But the spirit of Christ lives in you So that the one who has already at every point resisted doubt and temptation and sin And prove to be the true son of Abraham the true righteous one he lives in you And you can overcome everything in this world Because he has overcome for you and lives in you and enables you to that in the presence of God Almighty Overthrows the presence of doubt in you That's the first answer Secondly the strategy of God In working grace deep in our hearts the rather uniquely bizarre and interesting picture at the end of chapter 15 What's going on there god tells Abraham to get all these animals slaughter them And then he makes a two rows with space in between then this deep foreboding darkness comes over the land and Abram recognizes these symbolic things passing through that pathway Where you have the animals that cut up pieces of the animals on both sides is a smoking Pot of flames and a flaming torch that passes through I don't know worlds going on These are symbolic pictures of the presence of God and what's going on here is it's an ancient ritual You know, they didn't have written contracts like you and I do today This was a visual picture of an oral contract in the ancient world called a covenant a bond of pledge between two parties And what you had here was one party saying that I am going to follow through on my word in this covenant to the point to where if I fail to do what I've said I'm going to do I can be torn to pieces you can tear me to pieces like those animals that are before me And I'm going to pass right between them symbolically to picture that And it's sort of like you know in a silly way our statement today Where we will say Cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my eye, you know, I'm willing to be In pain, you know in a terrible way if if you find me to be a liar if I don't follow through it's sort of like the You know the mafia protection policy. I'm going to give you an offer you can't refuse You know, it's an accountability here and usually in the ancient world It was the lesser party that would pass through sometimes both but if it was only one it would be the lesser party that would say I'm at risk here What is God doing? He's saying If I fail to keep my word My bond and pledge of faithful love to you To bless you beyond imagination If I fail to keep my word I will be cut to pieces But that's not all he says he's also saying that if you abrum the weaker one the lesser party If you fail to keep this pledge this bond this covenant I will be torn to pieces too And oh it pointed toward that ultimate destination to which this sign was to direct us March chapter 1533 darkness swept over the whole land once again, but not like in the Abraham experience It wasn't in in the evening. It was in noontime And it went pitch dark and that's when Jesus cried out my god my god. Why have you forsaken me Harkening back to the Old Testament and the answer of course is that the Father Was willing to turn his face for a moment from the Sun So that the Son of God could walk through that covenant cut for his people So that he would become the curse for us as Paul said in Galatians that through faith We who have broken the covenant with God time and again Might be spared and not only spared but become heirs to get their son and daughters of the blessings given To the man of faith Abraham That's the strategy of God in his covenant and it is spectacular It's the strategy that completely overthrows the strategy of doubt Like a coach who's devised a strategy to make the opponent look insanely ridiculous God's strategy of grace triumphs over the strategy of doubt In unfathomable way in our lives And then ultimately the outcome You got the outcome where you bite into the chocolate cake and you think it's going to be the delightful and it ends up being that mudpifeful of worms But God himself has said all along Abram Leo I am your shield. I Will be your reward is one of the translations put that He is our great reward He loves me and accepts me through his covenant through the gospel through Abram's greater son Jesus Christ And your doubt your fears your failures Nothing in you can get in the way of his unfathomable blessing That he has bestowed upon you and will bestow upon you Through the work of his son Jesus Christ Give you a line in closing from Shakespeare In Hamlet Doubt that the stars are fire doubt that the sun doth shine doubt that truth be a liar but never doubt That I love And it's what he says to us in the gospel Never doubt that I love you It's what's pictured to us and what we're about to receive at the Lord's supper Doubt what you may he says but never doubt That I love you because I have overcome all doubts fears sins temptations I have overcome the world and by means of the spirit of Pentecost I live in you and you will overcome all doubt because I have overcome all doubt And I have lived and died for you And will one day carry you into the land of promise where every doubt and fear and tear are forever banished from you Where no eye has seen no ear heard nor heart of man imagined What God has prepared for all of us who love him And the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Amen