Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, March 27th. Have you ever heard someone say God helps those who help themselves? Be careful against believing this subtle deception, as we're challenged to thoroughly trust God and follow His instructions exactly. When you come to the Lord in prayer and asking Him to answer a particular petition you have, when do you usually ask Him to do it? Most of the time it's right now. And probably all of us could say at times, we've said, well, Lord, let's get with the plan now. I mean, we're waiting a little bit too long here because we want to do what we want to do when we want to do it.
Well, there's nothing wrong with that to some degree, except when it comes to God, it's a whole different picture. And I think all of us would admit that the more intense our desire is for what we want, the more we're prompted to look for somewhere to take a shortcut. That is, how do we get this done quickly? Because there must be a better way to do it. There are areas in life in which we can save time and money by taking shortcuts.
We learn different ways to do things. But there's one area in which there's no such thing as a profitable shortcut. And that is our relationship to God.
You just can't have shortcuts with Him. And so what I want to talk about in this message is shortcuts to the will of God. And the passage I want to use is a very important passage because it is such a perfect example. Now, not the example itself, but all the things that are contained in this example are perfect demonstrations of how we respond when we want something and we want it now on our schedule.
And we think maybe we know a better way to do it than maybe the way God has planned it. So I want you to turn, if you will, to the sixteenth chapter of the book of Genesis. And I want us to read just a certain passage here and then I'll come to many passages. But look, if you will, at this sixteenth chapter and give you an idea of what's going on. God is working in the life of Abraham and Sarah.
And He had said to him when he was seventy-five years of age, He had told him that he wanted to leave his country and to go into a new country. And so God's been working in their life. And so look at this sixteenth chapter beginning in verse one. Now, I'm going to call him Abraham because that is the name by which we know Abraham. But God changed his name.
So for somebody out there who maybe doesn't know who Abraham is, I'll make it clear. Now, Sarah, Abraham's wife, had borne him no children and she had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. So Sarah said to Abraham, Now behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
Please go into my maid. Perhaps I will obtain children through her. And Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah. So after Abraham had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, so he's about seventy-five, eighty-five now, Abraham's wife Sarah took Hagar, the Egyptian, her maid, and gave her to her husband Abraham as his wife. And he went into Hagar and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her sight. And Sarah said to Abraham, May the wrong done me be upon you.
I gave my maid into your arms, but when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her sight. May the Lord judge between you and me. Now, this is a very interesting passage of Scripture. So let me remind you that God has a plan and a will and purpose for every single one of our lives. So when somebody says God has a will for your life, what does that mean? It means that God has a plan for your life. That is, when you were born, God planned your life.
He planned it before you were born. He knew His purpose. He knew what He wanted to accomplish and achieve. For you, in you, through you, and for others as a result of you.
And so when you think about that plan, you have to think about it in this light. First of all, it was motivated by God's wisdom, which means that all the gifts and the skills and the talents and the abilities that He knew you and I would have, and the personality and the disposition we would have, He knew all about that. And so when He planned our life, He planned that with all of that in mind so that when somebody says, Well, God just left me out.
No, He didn't. In His wisdom, He created you the way you are, and you have been building on that disposition, building on that personality, building on those skills and abilities and talents all these years. And so He created you and is planning your life with wisdom. He also created you and planned your life motivated by love. That is, God has planned your life and my life to mature us and to bring about certain aspects of His plan at certain times in our life. So therefore, with God, time is very important.
His plan is important. His time is important because He loves us. Now, if you'll think about the timing, there are times in our life when we think it's right to do this and do that or do the other, and so we sort of think in terms of that.
Sometimes we forget the fact that those time segments are extremely important because there are those time segments in our life when we are very, very vulnerable to making mistakes, vulnerable to making wrong choices, vulnerable to insist on our own time rather than on God's time. And so as you think about God's plan for your life and His purpose, have you ever stopped to ask Him what He wants to accomplish in your life, how He wants to do it? Have you ever thought about the fact that He has not only a plan but a path? In His plan, He has paths that He wants us to walk in, paths that He has already chosen, laid out for us, marked out for us because He knows at the end of that path is exactly what He's desired for us, what He's planned for us, what He wishes for us. That is, He wishes the best and then we come along and make decisions as to whether we will or whether we will not. Now one of the mistakes we make is this. One of those mistakes is the fact that we're not always happy with His schedule or with His plan.
We'd sort of like to move it on. And all of us, if we would be honest, would have to say that times when we prayed and asked God for certain things in our life and it didn't come to pass for a season of time and we begin to say, well, maybe I just thought He promised that. Maybe I just thought that was His will. And sometimes we have given up on the wonderful promise of God because it didn't take place when we thought it ought to. Or we've taken another avenue and we've said, well, God helps those who helps themselves. And you hear people say that as if they're quoting Scripture. God helps those who helps themselves. That is not in the Bible. What is in the Bible is the Holy Spirit has been sent to be our Helper and to enable us to achieve and to accomplish whatever the will of God has planned for our life. So we do have a Helper.
His name is the Holy Spirit. God does not necessarily help those who help themselves. And what they mean by that is I've got to get up and get my part of this done because I can't expect God to do it. Now without kind of thinking, sometimes that gets us in trouble because it tempts us to take shortcuts. And what I want to talk about in this message is simply this. What motivates us, for example, to take these shortcuts?
Why do we do it? Well, God certainly had a plan for Abraham and Sarah's life. If you'll go back to the twelfth chapter of Genesis for a moment and God makes it very clear.
Here He lives in a very pagan society. God in His Spirit steps down and begins to speak to Abraham. And here's what He said to him. He said, now, go forth from your country, from your relatives, from your father's house to the land which I will show you. And I will do the following things. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you, make your name great, make you a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you. And in all the families of the earth will be blessed.
That is, I'm going to use you in such a way that all the families of the earth are going to be blessed. So that was a very specific promise He made. And if you'll notice, so Abraham went forth as the Lord had spoken to him and Lot went with him. Now Abraham was seventy-five years old when he departed from Herod. So he's seventy-five years old.
Now some years have gone by. But what I want you to notice also, he made him this promise. And then in the fifteenth chapter, if you'll notice there for a moment, God speaks to him. And He tells him, He says in this first verse, He says, Do not fear, Abraham, I'm a shield to you.
Your reward shall be very great. Abraham said, O Lord God, what shall you give me since I'm childless? And the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus, that is, a servant. Abraham said, Since you have given no offspring to me, one born in my house is my heir. Then behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, This man will not be your heir, but one who will come forth from your body, he shall be your heir. And then he takes him outside and shows him to heavens and so forth. And so God makes it very clear of what He's going to do in his life.
So the plan's very simple. But if you'll move over to the twenty-first chapter, because a lot of things take place between that time. Twenty-first chapter, the first verse says, Then the Lord took note of Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did force Sarah as He had promised. So Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the appointed time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore to him, Isaac. Now you'll recall that Isaac was the father of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom was named Judah. And if you trace the genealogical line of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, you trace Him all the way back in the books of Matthew and Luke, other genealogical lines tracing Jesus, goes all the way back through that tribe of Judah, and you find that in this genealogical line, the Messiah is born.
So, very important what's going on here. And so, time has gone by now. And what's happened is, he was seventy-five when God told him that. And now he's lived ten years in the land of Canaan, if you'll notice that sixteenth chapter in the third verse, and nothing's happened. Ten years have gone by and God said to him, I'm going to give you a son.
And this son is going to be your heir. Well, ten years have gone by, nothing's happened. And so, what would you do if you knew that God had made you a promise, a very specific promise, and yet, in spite of that, ten years had gone by and nothing had happened. Would you be one of those persons who would say, well, you know, after all, it's been ten years, God helps those who help themselves, so I better get busy.
So, I've got to find out somehow how to bring this to pass because ten long years have gone by and nothing has happened. God, where are you? Well, let's think about what motivates us when we have to wait, what do we usually do? We begin to look for ways to achieve it, to accomplish it, to get it, oftentimes looking for some shortcut, some way to make it happen. When you think about taking a shortcut and you want to get what you believe is for you out there, for example, you say, well, yeah, that's right, I'm thirty-five years of age and I'm still waiting for God to give me a husband.
Or, I've been working, so, and I'm waiting for this promotion, I'm waiting for this thing financially, that is, whatever it might be. Oftentimes, God doesn't act as quickly as we think He ought to and so we get ahead of Him. And we begin to manipulate situations and circumstances and we begin to move ahead. And so what we ask is, what is it that motivates us? Well, one of the things that motivates us to get ahead of God is the fact of the intensity of our desire. Now, Sarah, for example, wanted to give Abraham a son. That was the desire of her heart.
Any Hebrew woman would have wanted to. That was what she desired to do and more than likely had tried to do it. And yet, in spite of that, these years had gone by and now she is up in years and she's getting desperate. And so being desperate, she's beginning to think, well, you know, how can we arrange this?
What can I do? Seventy-five years and she's barren and here's her husband and he's getting it aged. And human reason simply says, we have to do something here because we want the will of God to transpire. We want the mission of God taken care of.
We want to see the nations of the earth blessed. All of these things, in other words, the desire is right and yet the motivation, the intensity of it, it needs to happen now. And sometimes one of those things that motivates us is the feeling of need that we have.
We feel needy. For example, she certainly had that feeling and here's the reason. In her day, in the days of Abraham and Sarah, if a woman could not bear her husband a son, she was looked down upon. She was dishonored. She was less than a woman and she lived in remorse and probably her whole sense of self-esteem and self-worth was dragging on the ground because she would go to the well. All these women at the well were their sons and their children, their daughters and talking about their families and so forth and they're happy with their families and here is Sarah, no children. And so as a result of that, she begins to think wrongly. And here's what she says. She says, for example, and if you'll notice in the sixteenth chapter, now Sarah Abraham's wife had born no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. So Sarah said to Abraham, Now behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.
Now watch that. She began to think wrongly. In other words, it wasn't happening so therefore God has closed my womb. That is, He's not going to let me bear a child. Because what?
Because ten long years have gone by and nothing has happened. We've tried and tried and tried and nothing has happened so therefore I have to conclude that God has certainly closed my womb. That is, I'm not going to have a child. And so not on that, she blames it on God. She says God's the one who's done it.
Now wait a minute. Abraham, God promised you a son. I'm your wife and now God has closed it so that I cannot. He has made you a promise. God did it.
We tried. It's not working and I want God's plan. I want His will. I want what pleases Him.
I want to please you as my husband. And yet it's not working and therefore something is wrong. We've got to do something about this. Now that's just human, plain reasoning. After all, I've waited so long.
Surely there must be something we can do. So she begins to think wrongly. And as a result of her beginning to think wrongly, she thinks that God has not included her, that she's excluded from the whole promise. And God's whole plan didn't include her. Now what that leads is this. That leads to simply this, putting yourself in a position to begin to listen to the pressure of other people.
So she looked around her and saw what was going on. And so she comes to Abraham who likewise more than likely was thinking a lot of the same thing. God didn't say now, Abraham, twenty-five years from now you're going to bear a son through Sarah. He didn't say that. He didn't even say ten years, five years, two years. He said it's going to be a son from you.
That is, he's coming out of your loins. And so all these years have gone by and nothing has happened. And so they're both beginning to think, all right, now wait a minute, what's going on here? So here's what happened. She began to ask herself the question, what are we going to do? And she began to think about a possibility. And she decided, well, what I'll do, I'll just give you Hagar to be your second wife. Then you can go in and have sex relations with Hagar and there you'll have a son and we'll complete God's plan. Well, that sounded probably rather confusing at first to Abraham who was certainly an obedient servant of God. And I'm sure that his response probably was, now, now, honey, you know you don't want me to do that. Well, deep down inside she probably says, that's right, I don't want you to do it, but we have to complete the plan. We need a son.
You need a son. God's promised it, so this must be the way it's going to happen because. So we don't know how long that conversation must have gone on, but it must have gone on a pretty good while until she finally persuaded Abraham to take Hagar, this Egyptian maid, as his wife and go into her, with her, and she certainly wasn't thinking about the aftermath of all this because she was giving her husband to another woman who was living in the household. Now you say, well, how did Abraham respond to that? Well, I think probably at first, knowing he was a godly man, he must have objected to the whole idea. But if she kept putting pressure on him and here is Hagar, and Hagar could have been a rather good-looking maid. And so when she keeps issuing this insistence on him doing so, he probably said, all right, knowing that it was not right, knowing that God had made him a promise, and yet maybe this could possibly be it. And so he makes a decision. And see, he went in with her and they had a son, Ishmael.
And that son was his only son for fourteen years before Isaac was born. And so now what we have to ask is this. What really and truly motivates us to take shortcuts? Is it because some of intense desire we have? Some need we have? Some wrong thinking on our part?
Or is it pressure from some other people? And you'll hear people say, well, you know, here's what I think. Now, look, after all, you've been telling me that God promised you this.
Well, look, you know what? God helps those who helps themselves. Get with the plan, man. Make something happen.
Oh, that sounds rather good. The only problem is we have to decide, well, are we going to wait upon God's direction, God's signal that this is the time, God's method, or are we going to take things in our own hands? Any time you and I choose to step out of His plan, His timing, we're out of the will of God.
And we make deliberate choices, and these choices are going to cost us sooner or later. Thank you for listening to Short Cutting the Will of God. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
