Sarah: Faith When the Outlook is Barren

Hebrews 11:11-12

Tony Campolo told the story of a time when he was a counselor at a junior high camp. He said he had never met meaner kids in his life. They focused much of their meanness on an kid named Billy who had cerebral palsy. His brain was unable to exercise proper control over his body or speech. The kids called him “spastic.” Billy would walk across the grounds of the camp in his disjointed manner, and the others would line up behind him, imitating his every movement. One day Billy asked one of the boys, “Which way is the craft shop?” And it took him quite a while just to get that short sentence out. The other boy twisted their bodies, mimicking him, and each one pointed in a different direction and said, “That way!” How could these kids  be so cruel?

The meanness reached its lowest point when Billy’s cabin had been assigned the morning devotions for the 150 kids at junior high camp that week. The boys voted for Billy to be the speaker. They knew he couldn’t do it. They just wanted to get him up there so that they could make fun of him and laugh.

Little Billy got up out of his seat and limped his way to the platform. You could hear the titters of mocking laughter. But that didn’t stop the little guy. He took his place behind the podium and started to speak. It took him almost ten tortured minutes to say, “Je-sus loves meee! Je-Je-Je-sus loves meee! And I love Je-Je-Jesus.” He stuttered on the Jesus and drew out the meeee. When he finished there was dead silence. Tony Campolo said, “I looked, and there were boys trembling and crying all over the place. A revival broke out in that camp and kids turned their lives over to Jesus. A host of boys committed their lives to Christian service.”

Campolo later said he wished he had kept count of how many ministers he had met as he traveled across the US who told him how they gave their lives to Jesus because of the witness of a “spastic” kid named Billy. “If God could use him with all of his limitations, what makes you think that God can’t use you to touch the lives other people? If God can transform the lives of people through the likes of little Billy, don’t you dare tell me He can’t do great things through you.”[i]

There are times when what God asks of us brings us to the end of ourselves. Not because God wants to laugh at us as we fail, or because God relishes our discomfort. No, it’s because when we are brought to the end of ourselves, HIS power and majesty, and the beauty of his love and grace come shining through. As St. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12:10, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Turn with me to Hebrews 11:11-12.

Abraham had received a magnificent promise from God. God had promised to make Abraham’s name great and to bless him personally. He’d promised to give Abraham and his wife Sarah descendants too numerous to count. That the number of them would be greater than the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Have you ever gone to the beach and tried to count the sand? We can’t even count the grains of sand stuck to our feet when we get back to the car, and that’s just a miniscule portion of the number of grains of sand that make up the whole beach.

God had also promised Abraham that all the peoples of the earth – all people in every time and every place – would be blessed through one of his descendants. That was the promise of a Messiah who would be one of his own descendants. And then God promised to give the people of Abraham a home. A land in which they could live and thrive. In fact, that land is often called the “Promised Land.” Personal blessing and protection. Descendants too numerous to count, one of which would be the greatest of all of the greats ever born. And a home. That’s quite a promise.

The thing is, Abraham and Sarah were, from a purely human perspective, very poor candidates to receive a promise like this. They were both already quite old. Abraham was 99 and Sarah was 90. And Sarah was barren. Throughout her marriage to Abraham, she had been completely unable to conceive. When God made this promise to them, they were already old and they had no children. Throughout their long marriage, they had tried again and again and again to have children, and were unsuccessful. When God made this promise to Abraham, his “heir” was someone else’s son, Eleazer from Damascus. His heir was a distant relative.

And Sarah’s inability to conceive was magnified when she tried to bring God’s promise to fruition in her own strength and gave her servant Hagar to Abraham to be his wife, so that he could conceive through her. And he did. With Hagar, Abraham finally had a son. Whatever the physical problem was … whatever kept them from being able to have children … was a problem with Sarah, not with Abraham.

In that day, a barren woman dealt with a powerful social stigma and shame. And that led to a lot of emotional anguish. Her barrenness threatened the family’s survival, their economic security, and in Abraham’s case, the promised lineage. Barrenness was at best viewed as a lack of God’s blessing, at worst as a curse from God. Women like Sarah were often forced to share their husbands with more fertile women.

In Sarah’s case, she was the driving force behind Abraham’s marriage to Hagar, her servant. Sarah was barren. And on top of that, she was old. She’d long ago gone through menopause. She could no longer get pregnant. Hagar was younger. She would do. God would certainly have to fulfill his promise through her. Sarah had the double whammy … she had long ago gone through menopause and could no longer bear children. And even when she was in her fertile years, she had borne no children. There was no way God would be able to fulfill his promise through her. No way at all.

But God said, “No, I told you that it would be through SARAH that your descendants would be too numerous to count. Not Hagar.” Now, God in his love and grace blessed Hagar too. The honored the promise of numerous descendants to her too. She was powerless in all of this. She was Sarah’s personal servant. She couldn’t say no. When Sarah told her to marry her husband too and bear him a child, she had no choice but to obey. And God took care of her and her son. Abraham eventually turned his back on her and her son and sent them away. He hung them out to dry. But God did not.

Sarah saw no way toward the fulfillment of God’s promise through her directly, so she tried to use a surrogate. But God said no. This is going to come through you. Sarah made the same mistake we all make. She thought it was HER job to bring GOD’S promise to fruition. Instead of trusting God’s power and faithfulness, she took matters into her own hands and made a mess of things.

God’s promise brought Sarah to the end of herself. She’d already spent her life filled with shame and anguish. She felt like a failure. It’s clear that Abraham cherished her. But others talked. They gossiped. Abraham and Sarah were wealthy. They were successful. They had everything. Everything BUT an heir. And then along came God who told them he’d make their descendants too numerous to count. Really God? Okay … how? How are you going to do this? It isn’t possible. But it’s when we come to the end of ourselves that we’re forced to say, “God’s going to have to do this, because I can’t. We can’t.”

In the late 1800s, Leopold II, the King of Belgium, started colonizing the Congo, which was a land rich with natural resources, especially rubber. At the same time, the demand for bicycle and car rubber was starting to spike. Within a few years’ time, Leopold was enslaving millions of men, women, and children through brutal armed force to do the labor-intensive work of harvesting the rubber.

The pressure to fulfill the impossible rubber quotas fell on a brutal police force working for King Leopold in the Congo. To prove that the bullets Leopold provided were being used to kill unproductive slave workers, Leopold required a severed hand or foot for every victim. So the soldiers stockpiled baskets of hands and feet to account for the bullets used.

It was a barbaric situation, but no one dared to rebel, except a mild-mannered British missionary couple named John and Alice. Both felt a divine calling to this place to bring the love of Christ. But they also could not ignore the violence against people they loved. So Alice had a brilliant idea – she grabbed her Kodak Brownie camera and started taking pictures, documenting the atrocities. She captured images of right hands cut off by police force sentries. She documented mass graves. She filmed tribesmen shackled together.

John and Alice weren’t political elites. They weren’t powerful people. They were two nobodies called by God to the Congo to share the love of Christ, which always includes working for justice. Alice didn’t even have training as a photographer, and not much skill either. How were these two untrained nobodies going to take on the Belgian king? Butt she started collecting images. Alice and John had no plan, no strategy, no certainty, and no guarantee of success. In fact, her actions increased their  chances of dying in the Congo. But news about the atrocities started to reach Europe.

This was the late 1800s. There was no internet. No social media to share the photos on. They had to be shared physically. In churches. Town halls. University lecture halls. Parlors. Halls of government. There wasn’t a room that Alice wasn’t willing to bring her photo show to. The people who came to see her images and hear her stories were moved by this fearless woman.

Her story spread quickly, making its way into the writings of Mark Twain. Political and social pressure started to build against the mad king’s maniacal exploits. King Leopold II would ultimately be responsible for the deaths of close to ten million people, but his stranglehold on the people of Congo came to an end. And it all started with an unknown missionary and her cheap camera and a lot of courage.[ii]

What can I possibly do here? Not much. But that’s the wrong question. What will God do here? What is God asking of me? That’s all I have to worry about. The rest of up to God.

So how do I know whether the cockamamie thought in my head is from God, or the result of my own selfish ambition? My own fallen, sinful brain which is perfectly capable of making up stuff. Oh, God speaks. But I often hear what I want to hear. I’ve seen parents steal money from their children’s estates before they come of age “because God told me to do it.” And then they squander it and their children are left with nothing.

How do we know it’s something God really is asking us to do, and not just selfish desire? The first is to ask ourselves whether the step God is asking us to take goes against the clear teaching of Scripture in any way. And then we take advantage of the community of faith God has placed us in. Every community of faith has people with the gifts of wisdom and discernment.

Sit down with some of those people and share with them what you sense God asking you to do. Run it by your pastor, or an elder. And by elder I mean both someone in the office of elder in the church … here at Christ church right now that is Ed and Randy and Jamie and Janet, and also me. But also those who have been walking with Christ for a long time. People like Pat, or Don and Debbie, or Michelle, or Lynn, or Margianne. Talk to your pastor. Go through the process of discernment.

Often your parents or children aren’t great candidates for discernment, because they’re often too emotionally vested in your life to encourage you to do something that might involve real emotional or financial or physical risk. But when you’ve determined that this really is what God is asking. Go for it, and watch what God does.

You see, faith doesn’t abandon reason. Sarah could have acknowledged that she had no idea how God was going to do this and wasn’t sure she wanted to be pregnant at 90, and then enjoyed loving her husband and let God do what God was going to do. Faith doesn’t abandon reason. But it is willing to look beyond JUST reason. Faith is not belief without reason. Belief separated from reason. But it also isn’t reason without belief and trust in God. Faith is belief and reason together. Faith acknowledges the risks, counts the cost, and moves forward trusting God.

Look at how Hebrews emphasizes Abraham and Sarah’s unsuitability for the task apart from God. It’s almost like the writer is telling a joke. “By FAITH Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she WAS PAST THE AGE … therefore from one man (Abraham), AND HIM AS GOOD AS DEAD (he was an old fart), were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the unnumberable grains of sand by the seashore.” I love that. Sarah had been barren throughout her life, AND had gone through menopause. And Abraham was even older than she was. Pregnancy wasn’t an option.

That’s reason counting the cost. Yeah there’s no way this is going to happen unless God does something really unusual. Sarah would need to be sustained throughout. No 90 year old body can handle pregnancy, I don’t care how well you’ve aged. But for Sarah, eventually, the impossibility of God breaking his word was greater than the impossibility of her getting pregnant.

As you walk this life with Christ, he IS going to bring you to the end of yourself. Not to humiliate you, or to make you great, but to build your trust in him. To build your faith.

Think about the unsuitability of most of the people God used in the Bible.

Noah was a drunk.

Abraham and Sarah were too old.

Isaac was a daydreamer.

Jacob was a liar.

Leah was ugly.

Joseph was abused.

Moses had a stuttering problem.

Gideon was afraid.

Samson had long hair and was a womanizer.

Rahab was a prostitute.

Jeremiah and Timothy were too young.

Jeremiah was depressed and suicidal.

David had an affair and was a murderer.

Elijah was burned out and suicidal.

Isaiah preached naked.

Jonah ran from God. Naomi was a widow.

Job went bankrupt.

Hosea’s wife was a prostitute.

Amos’ only training was in the school of fig-tree pruning.

Mark was a quitter.

Peter denied Christ (3 times!).

The disciples fell asleep while praying.

Martha worried about everything.

Mary Magdalene was promiscuous.

The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once.

Zaccheus was too small.

Paul was too religious, and had a temper.

Timothy had ulcers.

Lazarus was dead.

John the Baptist was a loudmouth.

Satan says, “You’re not worthy.” Maybe even more significantly, he says, “God can’t.” Or “God won’t. Not for you.”

Jesus says, “So what?” Satan looks back and sees our mistakes. God looks back and sees the cross. He doesn’t calculate what you did last year. Sure. There are lots of reasons why God shouldn’t have called us. But if we are in love with Him, if we hunger for Him more than our next breath, He’ll use us in spite of who we are, where we’ve been, or what we look like. He’ll use us in spite of the fact that we might just be the most unqualified person, or people, or church, to do what he wants done. But he’ll do it anyway. Not because we are qualified, but because HE IS FAITHFUL. Let’s pray.

[i] Tony Campolo, You Can Make A Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2003), p. 40

[ii] Adapted from, Justin Dillon, A Selfish Plan to Change the World (Thomas Nelson, 2017), pages 166-170