LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
We think we’re so strong until we’re not—and Genesis 26 puts that uncomfortable truth right in front of us, as Isaac moves almost without pause from a mountaintop moment of God’s renewed covenant promise straight into lying about his own wife out of fear.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
And then you’re trying to get the door open, and I never think ahead and get that quite manipulated, right? And so I have all this fresh stuff here, and I’m trying to hold that and get the door open, and I’ve made it all the way over to the door. I’m almost there. The door starts to open. I get through the door. I think, ah, I’ve almost made it. And then you start to see the momentum shift on the pile. You think, uh-oh, it’s going to fall. And it’s always at that moment of triumph, that moment where it feels like I made it. I’d never make it as a waiter. Big tray of drinks, I’d do the same thing, only to end up on all the patrons, and I would get no tips at all, and I would soon have no tips to receive because I would no longer be working there. I am a klutz.
But when it comes to sin, we’re all klutzes. And a lot of times it comes at that same moment, doesn’t it? We have that big pile of achievements. We’re trying to manage things, and we’ve washed the dirty laundry of our lives, and we pile up that nice clean laundry. You can smell that fresh, clean scent straight out of the dryer. Just, ah, it’s so good. And you’re carrying it, and you come to the very first challenge after that. You open that door, and you think, ah, I made it. This time I’m actually maturing as a Christian. This time I have it down. This time I’m a good person. And you get that door open, and you walk through, and then you watch it all tip and fall right back down into the dirty laundry pile. It’s a constant struggle, isn’t it?
And as we think about the exploration of Isaac’s life and how things go for Isaac, I think one of the things we’re supposed to observe is the fact that Isaac is very much like us. Last week we were talking about Isaac’s commitment to follow the Lord in a difficult time. He’s facing a famine, and the obvious solution would be to go to Egypt, because if he goes to Egypt, he can go someplace where there’s plenty to eat. And God says, no, I have a promise for you. I’m even going to renew that promise. What you are to do is stay right here. You’re not to go to Egypt. You’re going to stay in the land that someday your descendants are going to get to claim as their own. Right now you still feel like you’re sharing with others, and in fact you are. They’re often bigger and stronger than you, but someday it will be yours. And so you’re to stay here. What does Isaac do? He stays there. He takes all that dirty laundry of sin. He’s running through the washer and dryer. It smells great. He’s holding on to it. And then we get to tonight.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at verse 7 of chapter 26 of Genesis. Isaac is in the land, as God said. It says, When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, She is my sister. For he feared to say, My wife, thinking, Lest the men of the place should kill me because of Rebekah. Because she was attractive in appearance. Isaac is showing great faith. He’s staying where God has called him to stay. And what does he do? He goes right into a big old lie. And nothing has changed since Isaac’s time. So let’s come before God and ask that he would help us to see those places where the laundry pile is getting ready to tip over for us. That he would help us. Because we can’t do it on our own. Let’s pray.
Father, we do pray that you would help us, whether we’re just trying to explore what it means to follow you, or we’ve been trying to follow you for years. The key word there is trying. Because at best, that’s what we’re doing. We fail so often. We fail to show kindness. We fail to show love. We fail to show faithfulness. Lord, would you help us to trust you? And by the power of your Holy Spirit, would you help us to follow you? And would you empower us by your love to do this? We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So what do we see to start off? We are weak. Because if the story stopped in last week’s portion of it that we looked at, we’d say, well, I’m weak. Maybe some of you are weak. But Isaac, now there was a hero of the faith. He was someone who could stand up and do what God called him to do. But no, he falls into sin. And notably, if you’re thinking, I feel like this has happened before. Well, if you’ve read through Genesis, you know it has happened before. And it’s happened before twice with Isaac’s father. Because Abraham finds himself in two different situations where he fears that someone may kill him for the sake of his wife. And so he lies and says, she is my sister. Now, it’s only a, let’s be kind to Abraham, it’s a half-truth with Abraham. Because he is a half-sibling of his wife. That’s a whole other story. We’ll get to it some other time. It is not, it’s bending the truth. It’s not the most pertinent information for the situation, but it’s not completely false either. That’s not true for Isaac, though. But he says to himself here, it seems, well, you know, when dear old dad ran into these problems, I know what he did. Let’s try it again.
Now, I believe that is the definition of insanity, right? To try the same thing when it doesn’t work again and think it might work differently. Or as my cousin likes to say, if you always did what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Well, right here, we’re not going to be surprised at how this turns out, exactly. But maybe we should be a little surprised that it happens at all. Because here’s Isaac. It’s not true at all for him. And the only redeeming thing we might say for Isaac here is he thinks so highly of his wife that he’s afraid that someone might kill him so that that person can take her. But that doesn’t go very far for our compliment for Isaac, right? Because his solution then is, well, why don’t I just make it so it seems like they can go ahead and take her without killing me? So we see here just outright lying, and we also see a profound disrespect for his wife. Because as he lies about who she is, he’s not protecting her. And he does this, as his dad often did, right at a moment where the Lord has just demonstrated his great faithfulness.
Imagine if God came to you and in some way, some unimaginable way, you essentially heard the voice of God, and what did God say to you? He said, I am going to fulfill this covenant that I promised to your father. I’m going to fulfill it through your descendants, your children and their children. I am going to fulfill this promise to you. I have not forgotten you. I am with you. Just follow me. I mean, imagine that moment. We think, I’d be up on just a mountaintop. Mountaintop, I mean, whatever the best church service you’ve ever been to, the best Christian conference you’ve ever been to, the best book you’ve ever read, the best answered prayer you’ve ever experienced. How much better would it be if God was actually saying that to you? You can even imagine. And that’s the place that Isaac is. He decides, the Lord might decide to kill me, if I lie about my wife. Oh, she’s my sister. We’re just traveling together. Do whatever you want with her. I mean, she’s my sister. Don’t look at me.
Isn’t it interesting? At the moment where we’re kind of anticipating, if we hadn’t read this before, the moment we’re anticipating that, Isaac goes and he fights the heroic fight of faith because he’s seen how God is there with him in good times and in bad. Isaac says instead, I’m going to see if I can somehow save my own skin because I don’t know what’s going to happen if I don’t. If I don’t look out for me, what could possibly happen? It’s probably bad. So he follows his dad’s example. Only he makes it worse by lying outright and mars the very picture of obedience we’ve just seen of him. Lest we start to think that Isaac is somehow far more capable of avoiding sin than we are. No, Isaac is very much a sinner like us.
We think we’re so strong until we’re not. I read a few years ago about a woman who was practicing a Lenten fast for meat. That’s not as common as it used to be. I don’t know a lot of people that go all out for Lent, but there’s some. Generally, the strongest example of that is all the fish fries in town when we get to the Lenten season. You can go ahead and… I’ve never left one of those feeling like I was fasting at all. It’s usually the opposite. But this woman had fasted every Lent. She kept her Lenten fast to avoid meat for 16 years. And she was 30 days into the 40 days of Lent for this particular year. And then she saw an ad for McDonald’s. And she was loving it. She saw that golden, perfectly toasted bun, and she saw that signature McDonald’s burger, and she saw those crispy golden fries and those chicken McNuggets. And she said to herself, I gotta have it! And so she drove to McDonald’s and ordered it and ate it. And I thought, that ad ruined my faithfulness. That ad. I was 16 years into faithful Lenten observance. That ad just ruined it. So what did she do? She didn’t repent of her weakness. No, she filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s. I never did hear what the result of that lawsuit was, but she filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s and said that it just was impossible. They had made it impossible for her to practice her faithful observance of her faith and therefore brought great mental anguish upon her.
We need to be on guard for our own weakness. We’re going to be talking more tomorrow night about this on Steadfast, but just the crux of it is that as long as we’re thinking, well, everyone else needs to keep the ads away so I don’t see the delicious golden brown french fries, we’re going to fall. As long as we congratulate ourselves in those moments where we feel like we’re walking faithfully, we’re going to drop the load of laundry that we’re carrying. We’re going to fall. We see this over and over again in Scripture with the people that we would think are those that we can hold up highest in regard, none other than the Apostle Peter, who, if not for the stories we’re told in Scripture about him that are about his weakness, we might hold up as almost perfect, right? Here is a man, he’s in the inner circle of Jesus, God in the flesh. He picks Peter as one of the inner circle, but what does Peter do? He constantly is bumbling and putting his foot in his mouth, and then at Jesus’ lowest point, what does he do? He betrays him by denying him three times. Sort of like Abraham and Isaac can’t seem to acknowledge their wives. What do we see over and over again? We see that even those that we think we should be able to hail as faithful, even those that are at the pinnacle of faithfulness in one moment, they come crashing down, and it should warn us about needing to be on guard.
And if your weakness is you’ve decided that you need to set aside McDonald’s for a while because you are going to somehow fast from that, well then, don’t allow yourself to look at those McDonald’s ads because you’re going to fall. The solution isn’t to sue McDonald’s. And I don’t know anyone personally that’s done anything maybe quite that absurd, but we do similarly absurd things because we think, well, if only this hadn’t happened, I could have been faithful to the Lord. Well, no, the only thing that isn’t happening that affects our faithfulness is the fact that we are sinful people. And when we acknowledge it and we approach the door and say, I need to set down what I’m carrying because I’m going to drop it, and I need to ask for help, that’s when we start to move away from dropping back into sin and starting to move towards where God wants us to be. It’s not about somehow proving that we can overcome it. I haven’t learned that lesson. I keep trying to carry the giant stack and think, this time it’s going to work. And, you know, occasionally it works. Occasionally we manage to spend a little time where it looks like we are really holy and we’re really following the Lord, but then we fall right back into our sin.
So what’s the wiser thing to do? What’s the wiser thing when we’re like Isaac and we’re in that moment where we’re challenged and we do the right thing like he did last week? Well, it’s to spend a lot more time with the Lord because you know what’s going to come next. And are there outside forces challenging us both in this world and outside of this world? Does Satan himself want to see us fall? Well, yes, but the real question is, are we turning to the one who can help us not fall? And as long as we’re building ourselves up, as long as we’re focused on feeling good about ourselves, we’re being teed up to just go tipping right over and fall on our faces.
It works pretty well in theory to follow God. And I think that’s part of what we see with Isaac. At first there’s a famine, but he’s still alive. And presumably while he’s thinking about what to do, there’s at least the opportunity to kind of think about it. He’s not on his last meal. And so theoretically, doing what God’s called him to do, okay. And that’s a lot of times the way it is for me. In theory, doing the right thing is pretty easy. It’s when you actually have to do it. When I have to actually do it, that’s when it gets hard because then there might be consequences. Then something bad might happen to me. Then I actually have to trust that God is with me and whatever is going to come next.
I believe that’s exactly what we see here with Isaac. God says, there isn’t the bountiful supply in this land that there was, but stay here. And Isaac looks, and yeah, the storehouse is getting a little lean, but okay, we can do this. We can do this. But then as he’s interacting with the people of the land, he looks at this foreign people that’s more powerful than his little group of people. He says, okay, so I’ve got this famine thing. I’m not going down to Egypt, but as far as if they wanted to kill me because they want to take Rebekah, God said he was going to take care of me on this famine. I don’t know what he’s going to do if people want Rebekah. All the signs are of God’s blessing with him. God himself has just renewed his covenant with them, but Isaac isn’t sure. And I can’t beat up Isaac because I know I’m in the exact same place over and over and over again. If we read his word, if we hear what he’s done for us, all the signs of blessing are there for us. And yet, how often do I act in fear? How often do I act thinking, what if God isn’t really going to do what he said? I never say it that way. I’m sure that’s not how Isaac said it either. I don’t think he said, well, you know, I can’t trust God on this. What did he do? He just forgot that he could trust God. And in those weak moments, that’s our problem. In those weak moments, an awful lot of the time, it’s simply that we forget that we can trust God, that he really is with us.
And here’s the awful thing about that. Not only does that harm us, and it harms our ability to experience what God is doing in our lives, and that’s bad. It’s not that we’re earning our salvation, and I’m talking about if we struggle and we fail, that we’ve lost our salvation. That’s not what I’m saying. But it certainly does affect our ability to really enjoy God. If we keep reverting back to, well, I have to look out for myself because no one else will. But it also harms others, and that’s the thing that we see here in this story that I think is even more disturbing than what Isaac does in itself.
Verse 8. This is when he’d been there a long time. Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebekah, his wife. So Abimelech called Isaac and said, Behold, she is your wife. How then could you say she is my sister? Isaac said to him, Because I thought lest I die because of her. Abimelech said, What is this that you have done to us? The people might have easily lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us. So Abimelech warned all the people, saying, Whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.
It’s interesting here the words chose. How has Isaac found out he’s laughing with Rebekah? And people have spent a lot of ink debating exactly why Isaac laughing with Rebekah would give away his conceit. And there are different explanations, depending on how literal the laughing was and whatever we want to do here. But I think that’s sort of missing the point. The point is really in his own nature, because Isaac’s name is referencing laughter. It’s his very name. And it’s the very story of Isaac. It comes right back to his own nature, and in that he’s exposed. In some sense, Isaac gives it away. He seems just a little too familiar. He seems just a little too closely related to Rebekah, and Abimelech puts the pieces together. She’s not your sister. She’s your wife. And in that, Isaac’s very name turns on him. Isn’t that interesting?
Now, one other interesting detail I don’t want us to miss before we dig deeper into the actual recognition that Abimelech has is that it says he was there for a long time. We don’t know how long a long time is, but isn’t it interesting that this goes on for a long time? There’s a period of time in which Isaac and Rebekah are living in this area with these people, holding up this deceitful picture of themselves. Not just for a moment. It’s not like they’re passing through customs in a different part of the land of Canaan, and Isaac says, well, I’m not sure we’re going to get through to the other side, so let’s just pretend for the afternoon, Rebekah. Let’s pretend that we’re not really husband and wife, we’re really brother and sister. No, they’re around these people for a period of time. A long time, scriptures say. And during that time, they keep this up. And you think of the damage that does at a whole bunch of different levels, the damage it does to Rebekah as Isaac is willing to keep this up over and over and over again out of fear that someone might decide to kill him. And you think about it then for the people as well, and this is where Abimelech gets really disturbed by this. You’ve been with us, and you keep lying about who Rebekah is, and do you realize what would happen? We don’t want to act wrongly. Someone could have taken her thinking that she was available to take as a wife, and taken her because you said that she was your sister. What would have come to us?
Here’s the man who represents God’s covenant. Here’s the man who is supposed to carry on the promise and carry on a promise that’s supposed to represent God’s love to the entire world, and that man is doing something that endangers all the people around him to possibly fall into sin. Because if they take a man at his word, if they actually believe he’s actually telling the truth, they might then act in a way that in the real reality is actually sinful. What a mockery you think about it in that moment. Isaac is making of everything that anyone might know, and we’re going to see later on, people know that Isaac follows the Lord, and that he said that he’s being blessed by the Lord, and they even believe that blessing is coming to Isaac. So it’s not like he’s incognito. He’s wearing the I follow the Lord t-shirt. He went before all the Christian bookstores closed in the area and bought out his size and their t-shirts, and he’s been walking around with the WWLD shirts. They can’t put Jesus on it yet because the incarnation hasn’t happened yet. So what would the Lord do? He’s walking around with that t-shirt on. Everyone knows that he follows the Lord, and he does this. What a mockery he’s making of the Lord’s faithfulness. He says he does what the Lord says he should do. He talks a good game, but he can’t even admit that his wife is his wife because he’s afraid that someone might kill him.
And who corrects him? Not another follower of the Lord. God doesn’t raise up another people of the Lord that comes over and meets Isaac and says, hey, what are you doing, buddy? You’re supposed to be representing God to these people. No, the very pagan people, the very people who don’t follow the Lord, who follow the detestable gods that we learn about later on in the land. We’re talking about the Philistines here. Ultimately, down the road, as it develops, mortal enemies of Israel. They’re not a good people. But they’re the ones that recognize what Isaac’s doing is wrong. And notably, unlike the story that Abraham goes through, where God warns the pagan person, hey, watch out. This isn’t true. You shouldn’t. Don’t do this. Abimelech puts it together for himself. He finds out the truth, and then he does the right thing about the truth. That’s two steps there, right? Because sometimes we know the truth, but we don’t act on it. Sometimes we would act on the truth, but we don’t know it. Abimelech has both pieces. He puts them together, and he does the right thing. And he goes to an extreme on it. He says, if any of you mess with this man or his wife, even though they’ve been lying to us, even though they put us in jeopardy, even though they’ve shown no regard to us, if anyone harms either of them, you are going to be put to death.
Who’s virtuous in this story? Not the follower of God. It’s the people that are watching the followers of God. He doesn’t need a miracle or a special intervention from God, like sometimes we see amongst those that don’t follow God that do something right at some point. He has enough of a moral compass in himself that he says, well, I may not know everything Isaac knows, but I know this is wrong, and I’m not going to act wrongly here. And again, very little has changed. How often is it, I’ll read people who don’t follow Jesus, but watch the things that we as God’s people often do, the things that are just clearly wrong, but we do for power or to protect ourselves or for glory? It doesn’t even make any sense. We just do things that aren’t pleasing to God. Sometimes we even justify it by saying, well, this will be more pleasing to God. Or we sin or we make a mistake and we say, well, now I’m going to cover this up and do more things that are wrong, because that way the world doesn’t think badly of us. And it’s someone who doesn’t even believe. It’s someone who, from watching from the outside, who says, well, I don’t know everything that you guys say you know from this word that you claim is from God. I don’t even know if there is a God, but I know what you’re doing is wrong. And every time that happens, we’re making a mockery of our God, just like Isaac is here.
And I believe that this is here to challenge us to think about how do we live in faithfulness? How do we set aside the fear that we build in ourselves and often use to justify the things that we do and instead chase after what’s pleasing to God? The word hypocrisy is one that we often don’t like to hear as Christians, and we have all kinds of great comebacks for it nowadays. And I have to admit, I like them. And sometimes they even fit. I think we’ve probably all heard the one someone says, well, I’m not going to join the church. It’s full of hypocrites. And the perfect rejoinder is, well, and there’s room for one more. It’s great, and you can’t help but smile a little. And sometimes there’s truth in that, right? Because there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy out in the world, and if we’re going to be realistic about who we are, we should admit that we are hypocrites a lot of times. But it also can be a great way to not fix the things that are wrong in our Christian walk, as individuals, as churches, as the overall Christian world, to say, well, you know, whenever we hear criticism from the world, what do we say? Well, they’re not any better. Do we realize what a terrible argument that is when we make that point? Because when we’re saying, you people that don’t know Jesus, that don’t have his word, that don’t know what it is that you’re actually supposed to do, you’re living by your own sinful guidance, you’re not any better than us, so who are you to criticize us? We should say, well, duh. This is what, we’re supposed to, we’re the ones that are supposed to know what God wants, and we’re supposed to be the ones with the Holy Spirit helping us. We’re the ones that are supposed to be showing what holiness is, not perfectly, because we’re sinful, but at least desiring it.
But here’s Abimelech. Someone who doesn’t follow the Lord, and he’s the one that has to point out. He’s the one that has to write Isaac and Rebekah’s marriage. He’s the one who has to protect his people from falling into sin, not Isaac. And so we see here that Isaac sinned, and initially it’s just a sin between him and the Lord, and him and Rebekah. It’s expanding now, because here’s an opportunity. Isaac could have gone into the Philistine lands and lived as a faithful follower of the Lord, someone who actually believes what God is saying in the promise that is going to be fulfilled. He could have done that. And as he did, what might have come of that testimony? But he doesn’t.
Now, to be fair, Scripture doesn’t want us to run the other extreme either, because I see an awful lot of people constantly who are still at least marginally… They would say they still believe in Jesus, but they don’t want anything to do with organized religion any longer. And I get sometimes that people have to walk through a period where they back away, but… We need to guard ourselves. If we get to that season, we need a season where we just say, I need to… I’m processing… Don’t let yourself stay there too long, because the danger is we start to delionize those outside the church and think, well, everything they say is good and right and true. And we start to assume that the very things we previously assumed about the church are true about everybody outside the church. And that’s an equal error. And Scripture here isn’t going to let us fall into either one. It wants to say, you know, people who follow the Lord, they make a lot of mistakes, and they’re wrong, and we shouldn’t do them, and we should repent, and we should turn to the Lord. And also, by the way, so do the people outside the church. And I’m not trying to go back to the quip about hypocrites here, but rather to say what we keep coming to is that we’re dealing with the fallen, sinful human world, and we’re a part of it, and we all need Jesus, and we all need his help to turn to him.
If we turn later in the chapter, say, verse 16 or so, we’re not going to actually pull that up at this moment, but if you go there, maybe you want to read that tonight. Abimelech and his people, what do they do? They come back to Isaac, and they say, we’d like to have a peace treaty with you. And Isaac says, but you chased us off. And then we see develop here in this lead up, in this story to the peace treaty, that they’re even sniffing at each other. The opponents of Isaac, what are they doing? They’re filling in the wells, the essentials of life, because they want to run Isaac and his family off. So they’re not acting virtuously across the board. And I think that’s to say the problem isn’t Isaac, per se. The problem isn’t the Philistines, per se. It’s all of them. It’s all of us.
And in Abimelech’s desire for a peace treaty, we see the only one who’s actually right and true and dependable in this story, verse 25, excuse me, 26. When Abimelech went to him from Gerrera, and with Ahuzaf, his advisor, and Philcolm, the commander of his army, Isaac said to them, why have you come to me, seeing that you hate me? You’ve sent me away from you. And they said, we see plainly that the Lord has been with you. So he said, let there be a sworn pact between us, between you and us, and let us make a covenant with you. Notice they don’t say, we see how you’re living so faithfully before the Lord, or how dependable you are. We don’t know if you’re going to tell us the truth on whether Rebecca is your wife or not. We can’t take you all that seriously. But what we can see is that for whatever reason, defying human logic, God for some reason loves you. God’s blessing you. And so we’d like to relate to you peaceably because the Lord is with you.
Now think about us today as Christians, and the fact that all that is still true of us, and is going to remain true of us until Jesus returns, doesn’t mean we don’t try. But it emphasizes all the more why we need to be really, really clear about what we’re really about. We need to be really clear that Jesus is the one that makes things right. Jesus is the one that gives us strength, gives us blessing, gives us any hope at all. And even when we mess up, that Jesus is the one that enables us to keep going. God is the one who is strong, not us. Because all we see here is human weakness over and over again in this story. Even at the moments where there should be that booster rocket from God, hey, wow, he’s just renewed his covenant with me. Well, there’s more sin.
But God keeps working. That’s the part we can’t lose. That’s the part we can’t get misdirected and let go of. When for the thousandth time we drop the pile of things that we’re carrying, the solution isn’t to say, well, somehow maybe I can get stronger. The solution is to say, God, would you carry it for me? Would you give me the tools to carry it? Would you pick me up when I fall over with it, because I keep trying to do it my own way anyway. God’s the one who is strong.
I know I’ve shared this before, but I just can’t help but share it again here. One of my favorite stories about probably the greatest theologian of the 20th century, and he had his problems, but he certainly was a brilliant mind. Karl Barth, near the time of his death, he came over to the United States, and he was giving a preaching lecture series. Someone walked up to him and said, Dr. Barth, you have all this wisdom. You’ve written thousands and thousands of pages about God and his word. What’s the most profound thing that you’ve ever learned about who God is? What’s the most profound thing you’ve written about theology? What’s the great lesson that you want to pass along to us? He said, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
I think about that, and in that moment, again, he was a flawed man. Isaac was a flawed man. Abimelech was a flawed man. We’re flawed men and women, but in that moment, what was he doing? He was coming to the source of his strength, and Barth could make a confusing theological statement like nobody’s business. He could have said something really, really impressive, even if it wasn’t really all that meaningful in its core. It would have taken decades for people to take apart and realize it wasn’t really all that impressive. What do you do instead? Instead of having people say, wow, wow, that’s such a profound phrase. I’m going to write that down. I’m going to spend my life studying it. I quoted a children’s song that sums up the truth that we find in God’s word and said this, this is the most profound.
We can focus on being faithful, but we’re going to fail. What do we need to do? We need to come back to Jesus. We need to recognize that he’s the hero. We need to take all the places where we have our hopes and our fears and it feels like we don’t know how to get there and we’re going to try and we need to come back to the fact that God is the hero. That’s what Isaac needed to do. He had these hopes and dreams. He had the fears about how they’d get interrupted. You need to come back to the Lord and say, I can’t do this, but I know that you can. God help me.
I thought right now I asked Laura and Merlene if they’d just lead us in Jesus loves me because sometimes we just need to come back to that simple truth.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong.
They are weak, but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
The Bible tells me so.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me.
The Bible tells me so.
Thanks for that. Let’s not lose that simple truth. In all the profoundness of things that we can study, we should probe the depths of God’s word and seek to understand it. In our lives as we grow in the faith and try to reach new levels of maturity, and that’s not a bad thing. We should be growing as Christians. This isn’t a story of giving up on that. We see how God works and builds in the lives of the people in his word, and we see that throughout history, and hopefully we start to see that in our own lives as well. But there are an awful lot of times we just need to pause and come back. Sometimes it’s not someone coming up and interviewing us. Most of the time it isn’t. Maybe it’s just in our head as we’re interviewing ourselves. What’s the most profound thing about my walk with Jesus? And we think, well, you know, I’ve just done this, this, and this. I’m following God’s word and we’re faithful. Let’s stop right there. What’s the most profound thing in my faith? What’s the most profound thing in your faith? We are weak, but he is strong, and therefore we need something else, and that something else is, yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so. And may we come afresh to his word every day knowing that. Indeed, Jesus loves you and Jesus loves me, and the Bible tells us so.
Will you pray with me, please? Father, there are so many times that we get caught up in fear and desperation, sometimes even in hopes, and we end up chasing after things in a way that is not pleasing to you. Would you forgive us for those times that we harm our relationship to you, we sin against you, we sin against others around us? Isaac was not the only one to sin against someone near him, as he sinned against Rebecca. We all do that. And Lord, would you help us to be stronger in the faith, not in our own strength, but in the strength of your Holy Spirit, that we might be those who are more faithful to you and to those around us. And Lord, we come before you and we ask for forgiveness for those times that in our weakness, what have we done? We’ve shown a lack of faith, and that lack of faith has harmed your witness to the world, that we as individuals, that we as the church, do not proceed with faith and confidence in you. We act in ways that are at best the same as the world, and often we’re put to shame as we watch those who don’t even know you be the ones to see what’s wrong in our lives. Lord, would you forgive us, and would you strengthen our ability to hold on to you, that we would so clearly say, I am weak, but you, Lord, are strong, that even those around us, even if they see us stumbling, even if they see us struggling, they would see more clearly that you are faithful. That just as Abimelech came back to Isaac later in life and said, I want to get along with you because I know the Lord is with you, may people see so clearly that you’re the source of our hope and our strength, that they would want to know you even when we’re horrible examples. Let me pray this in the precious name of Jesus.
Start the Conversation