Sarah: The Power of Faith, Part 1

There are people here still waiting on God to come through.

He's already got the things set up. He's just waiting for you to take faith seriously. Dr. Tony Evans talks about what happens when we keep the Lord waiting too long. So if God sees you don't have the faith, He'll put the promise on hold until you get the faith. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of The Urban Alternative. For some of us, it takes all the faith we can muster to trust God to do something unlikely. So what happens when the answer we need is downright impossible? We'll find out today as Dr. Evans talks to us about the power of faith.

Let's join him. A lady lived in the boondocks, and they were finally running electricity to the area in which she lived so that she could get power. But the electric company noticed after a few months that hardly one unit of electricity had been used by this lady.

So they didn't know whether it was a problem or not, so they went out and checked, knocked on the door. The lady answered. She said, he said, ma'am, is your electricity okay? She said, well, yes. She said, because we see you haven't been using it hardly. Oh, she says, well, yeah, I use it every day.

What I do is I turn on the light till I light my kerosene lamp, and then I turn off the electricity. I'm sure you would agree she didn't know how to use the power that had been made available to her. She had the power, but because she didn't know how to use the power, she lived a kerosene life in an electric location. It's easy for us as Christians to live a powerless life even though we've been connected to the power because we don't know how to use it. Many—far too many— Christians are settling for the ordinary when you were redeemed for the extraordinary. We're settling, and at the heart of this settling is the lack of faith.

Now let's review. Faith is acting like God is telling the truth. It's acting like it is so even when it's not so in order that it might be so simply because God said so, and you measure faith by the movement of your feet, not your feelings, not your intellect. Many people talk about faith who refuse to walk in faith, and faith discussions will never link you to God's power like talking about electricity won't turn the lights on. There has to be movement for faith to be activated. Today I want to talk to you about the power of faith.

I want you to plug in the cord so that you can see how powerful faith can be. Hebrews chapter 11, verses 11 and 12. By faith, even Sarah herself received the ability to conceive even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore, there was born even of one man and him as good as dead at that, as many descendants as the stars of heaven in number and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.

We're introduced to a lady named Sarah, the wife of Abraham. God had made a promise that he repeated five times in the book of Genesis, from chapters 12 through chapters 21, that Abraham and Sarah were going to have a baby that would lead to the birth of a nation. That's what God said.

That was the word that came out of his mouth. That was the promise. But the promise had a problem. The problem was number one, Sarah was barren. Her womb was not producing any eggs, and so she couldn't get pregnant. But the promise was, you gonna have a baby. But the problem was the ability to have a baby she didn't have. So the promise didn't match the problem, and the problem didn't match the promise. Not only are we told she was barren, we're told that she was old—90 years old.

She's way past menopause. I mean, the timing is not right. There's a promise, but there are problems that contradict the promise. I can't conceive. I'm too old, so I have to question the promise. Now, there are some folks here who are barren. Life's not working for you. What you thought life should produce, what you hope life would produce, is not being produced, and you're in a barren season of no life. And that's after Jesus promised, I have come to give you life and to give it to you more abundantly. When a woman is pregnant, she has life. When she has twins, that's abundant life. That's life on top of life. Jesus says, I have come to give you life, to give it to you more abundantly. But right now, you're in a season of barrenness.

You're not getting pregnant. That is, there is nothing being birthed in you. Your passion is gone. Your purpose is gone.

Your destiny seems dim. Your get up and go spiritually has gotten up and gone, and you're barren. There are other people here who have been waiting for God to do something for a long time, and you're past the age. You've been waiting for a long time, and nothing has happened, and you're past menopause, so to speak.

You're past the time this could have happened and should have happened. There's some ladies here who feel like, I should have been married by now. I'm getting older, and nobody's in sight, and by now, I should have a mate. There's some men here who are saying, my career is not producing what it should be producing by now. I'm stuck in this same old job, and I thought God had something better for me, and by this age, at this time, I ought to be further along. So your career is barren, and you are past the age of something working out, and we could go on and on and on and on and on and on, but the reality is there is nothing happening.

No life, no future, no—you're frustrated, you're barren, and the clock is tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. You're running out of time. That was her situation. Don't ever let the facts cancel out the faith.

Let me say it again. Don't ever let the facts cancel the faith. Don't deny the facts. We told the facts. Sarah is barren. That's a fact.

She's getting older. That's a fact. The facts are not hidden, and we don't pretend that the eggs are flowing and that she's a, you know, spring chicken. That's just not a fact.

But verse 11 says, by faith, she got the ability to conceive. So even though—stay with me—the facts are not in your favor. The facts, in fact, look contradictory to the faith. The problem looks bigger than the promise.

That's the reality. While not denying the fact, don't let the fact cancel the faith. She is caught in a situation of a major promise.

I'm gonna build a whole nation from this one couple. So she decides God has obviously made a mistake. So in Genesis chapter 16, in order to help God out—because obviously God missed this one— chapter 16 said, Now Sarai, Abraham's wife, had borne him no children, and she had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. So Sarai said to Abram, Now behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Please go in to my maid. Perhaps I will obtain children through her. And Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah—stay with me on that, I'm coming back to that—and Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan. Abram's wife Sarah took Hagar the Egyptian, her maid, gave her to her husband Abram as his wife.

He went into Hagar, and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. The temptation, when you've been trusting God for something and God hasn't come through, is to retreat to the flesh. The flesh is a human approach to solve a problem different than the way God wants it done. Sarah was trying to help God out. She says, Perhaps God's promise is going to come through me giving you to our maid. So she goes to the flesh to accomplish a work of the Spirit. She goes to human opinion to bring about a divine result. She's not a pagan because she says, The Lord has not let me conceive. So she has some religion.

She's still going to church. So she's talking God, but on the next day she says, Now Abe, God's not doing this through me. It's evident because the problems mean it can't come through me.

I'm old and I'm barren, so it can't come through me. So let's contrive our human way of making this happen, because there's no way God can make it happen, because the problems are too big. Dr. Evans will be back in a moment with more about the dangers of trying to engineer our own deliverance.

Stay with us. There are so many ways that God has demonstrated His faithfulness to me and to this ministry over these 40 years. You know, there were times when we just weren't sure we were gonna make it.

We got down to our last paycheck for our staff. After that, there was no money to pay anyone, and I remember us having a special prayer time and asking God to intervene. And then, out of nowhere, a donor's heart was touched, and they wrote us a note and said, God placed it on my heart to send you this gift, and it was able to sustain us a while longer until we were able to rebuild.

I praise God for 40 years of His favor on us. One of the goals of this ministry has always been to provide the tools and resources to help listeners like you dig deep into the subject matter that Dr. Evans presents in these daily broadcasts. And right now, I wanted to let you know about Tony's brand-new book that goes hand in hand with the message we've been hearing today.

It's called Kingdom Heroes. It's a look at the Bible's Faith Hall of Fame, full of ordinary people who did extraordinary things by taking God at His Word. This new book from Dr. Evans teaches us that spiritual reality is about much more than we can see or touch, and that by believing God, there's nothing He can't do through us. To help you dig deeper into this important subject, we are offering the book, its companion Bible study workbook, and the complete two-volume, 13-message audio series as our gift to anyone who comes alongside Tony's ministry and makes a contribution to help continue this important work. We completely rely on your support to keep this program on the air, and this is one way that we can show our appreciation for your faithfulness.

Get all the details and make your request online at TonyEvans.org, or give us a call at 1-800-800-3222 before this special offer runs out. I'll repeat that information for you later in the program, and Dr. Evans will be back with the second part of today's lesson right after this. Well, the first time I went to the Holy Land, it made the reality of the Bible jump off the page and become an experiential event. Dr. Tony Evans says that same experience can be yours thanks to a big-screen event coming to theaters near you, Journey with Jesus. You'll see the actual places where Bible history happened, but it's far more than just a travel film.

We've taken the site, we've surrounded with Scripture, we've surrounded with practical applications for your life, because we wanted this not just to be a sightseeing event, but to be a spiritual experience. Watch the Bible come alive in ways you've never felt before. Join Tony on a Journey with Jesus, coming to a theater near you November 15th, 16th, and 17th. It is our prayer and our hope and our expectation that having seen the movie, you will be reignited. Your fire for the Lord will be relit. Visit TonyEvans.org today for theaters, showtimes, and more info.

That's TonyEvans.org. What many of us do, we've all been guilty of it at one level or another, is to retreat to human understanding to bring about supernatural results. Whenever you jump from God to man, that is, you go outside of God in order to bring about something you want from God, you are getting in the way of God, thus delaying God from doing what He has promised to do based on His Word. You have limited God because without faith, it's impossible to please God.

So if your faith lasts, you're not pleasing God, and if you're not pleasing God, you cannot expect the intervention of God. So Abraham goes into Hagar. She has a baby named Ishmael, and them two brothers have been fighting ever since. Hear me now.

There are some facts. She's barren, and I can understand. How can a barren woman have a baby? She's old now.

How can this be? She did what the Bible says don't do, and that's be double-minded. Double-minded means I'm living on God's point of view and man's point of view, and I'm going between the two. Sometimes I stay with God. Sometimes I go with human opinion. Sometimes I go with spirit. Sometimes I go with the flesh. So I'm on a seesaw.

I'm back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes I'm holy God, and the next time I'm holy man. So when you go back and forth like that, you are double-minded, and James says, let a double-minded man or woman know they shall receive nothing from the Lord, that if you're on the seesaw of flesh and spirit, human opinion and divine revelation, if you're going on the seesaw, don't expect when you're on the spirit seesaw, God's gonna do something. He says, let that man not think he will receive anything from the Lord. So God had made a promise.

This principle of flesh and spirit based on Hagar is brought up in the New Testament, by the way, in the book of Galatians chapter 4, because in Galatians chapter 4, Paul the Apostle writes in verse 21, Tell me, you who are under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bond woman, Hagar, and one by the free woman, Sarah. But the son of the bond woman was born according to the flesh, human approach, and the son of the free woman through the promise. He goes on to say, verse 27, For it is written, rejoice, barren woman who doth not bear, break forth and shout, you who are not in labor.

For more numerous are the children of the desolate than the one who has a husband. And you, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it now is also. But what does the Scripture say? Cast out the bond woman and her son, for the son of the bond woman shall not be an heir to the son of the free woman.

So then, brethren, you are not the children of the bond woman, but of the free woman. So he takes Abraham and he talks to the Galatian Christians, you and me, and he says, Don't be a bond woman's baby. Don't operate according to the flesh, because the flesh and the Spirit can never operate together.

One of those kids and their mama had to leave. Hagar was put out, and he uses that to talk about law and grace, and he uses that to talk about how we ought to live our Christian life according to the Spirit, God's point of view, God's promise, not according to the bondservant, the flesh approach. So if you and I want to experience the promises of God, the decision you have to make in order to experience that power is to not go to the flesh to help out the Spirit, even when it looks like there's no way the Spirit approach can ever work, because guess what?

The problem is to be. But in Genesis 17, God comes back to Sarah and Abraham and says, I told you what we gonna do, verse 15. Then God said to Abraham, Genesis 15, 17, As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and indeed I will give you a son by her. Then I will bless her, and you shall be a mother of nations.

Kings of people will come from her. Some good news is, even after they messed up, God came back with His Word. So the good news is, even though they messed up, God didn't give up on them.

He came back and said, I told you what the promise was. So that's good news for folks who've messed up yesterday, and you're still hearing God's Word today. But the problem is, even though they messed up, they had not grown up in faith, because when God repeats His Word, Abraham says, You got to be kidding me. She can't have a baby. She's old, and he laughs in God's face. Will a child, verse 17, be born to a man 100 years old? And will Sarah, who is 90 years old, bear a child? All that Ishmael, he says, might live before you.

It's about Ishmael. Now I just told you that this is gonna happen through Sarah, and you keep going back to the flesh. You started with the flesh, and now you're staying with the flesh, and the reason why you started with the flesh and you're staying with the flesh is that the problem looks too big to be resolved. And so here we are. But when we started our sermon today, we started the sermon in verse 11 of the book of Hebrews, which says, By faith, Sarah gained the ability to conceive. Didn't we read that? But I don't think we've seen any faith yet.

We've seen the flesh, okay? We've seen her laughing at God, not believing His Word, because His Word sounds too ridiculous to come true. But in Hebrews 11, she gets pregnant by faith.

That means something has happened between the time she's laughing and from the time Hagar has given birth to Ishmael and the time Isaac is born in chapter 21. Something has happened in these chapters to spark faith in Sarah that she did not have. The gap between God's Word and His promises and its fulfillment in your life is always tied to your development in faith. So if God sees you don't have the faith, He'll put the promise on hold until you get the faith. There are people here still waiting on God to come through.

He's already got the thing set up. He's just waiting for you to take faith seriously. And He will not move until He sees faith. Dr. Tony Evans, taking a look at Sarah and the power of faith.

And there's more to this story. I'll tell you about that in just a moment. In the meantime, today's lesson is just a small part of Tony's current series called Heroes of the Faith. As I mentioned earlier, we're offering the full-length version of all 13 lessons in this two-volume series on CD and digital download, along with Tony's brand-new book and Bible study guide, Kingdom Heroes.

They are yours as our thank-you gift when you make a donation to help us continue this ministry to a world desperately in need of the good news of Jesus Christ. Call us right away at 1-800-800-3222. Our Resource Center never closes, so don't wait.

1-800-800-3222. Or visit TonyEvans.org to make the arrangements. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for Tony's free weekly email devotional. Again, TonyEvans.org. It is pretty crazy to think that we can do anything better than God, but Dr. Evans says many of us act as if we can, especially when we're up against a challenge. Tomorrow he'll explain what we risk and what we miss when we do that as he continues this lesson of faith from the life of Sarah. I hope you'll be with us. The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by The Urban Alternative, celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.