We are currently studying the book of Genesis in our women’s bible study. Last week we covered chapters 17-20 and as you can imagine that’s a lot to digest in one week. The longer I looked over the passages, the text became a refresh to my heart loaded with personal application. Some lessons were familiar but others caught my eye as never before. We can never exhaust God’s word no matter how many times we’ve studied it. As we looked at the lives of Abraham and Sarah and God’s continued confirmation of His covenant promises, something dawned on me the morning following the study. What God spoke to my heart was so subtle and yet sublime. His words came and went in a matter of moments. But I hope to carry them with me for the rest of my journey to keep me in check whenever I find myself scrambling or striving over what God is doing.
When Abram was seventy-five (Gen 12:1–3), God had promised to make him into a great nation, and to bless all the families of the earth through his descendants. After ten childless years in Canaan, Sarai followed the customary Mesopotamian strategy of giving Hagar to Abram as his concubine in order to have a child. Hagar bore a son, Ishmael (Gen 16:1-16). In no uncertain terms God told Abraham the He would make a great nation of the childless couple and assured him that his son would be his heir. Ishmael was born in Abraham and Sarah’s attempt to bring about God’s promise by human means. No matter how much Abraham and Sarah may have wanted to justify their actions Ishmael was not the promised son-the covenant would be established with Isaac. As a result, human ingenuity made for a very dysfunctional home.
When chapter 17 opens, Abraham is ninety-nine years old and has almost nothing to show for all the promises God had made—only a thirteen-year-old illegitimate son. Why was God’s promise seeming to stretch this couple beyond human capacity? Why didn’t God just give them the promised son when He originally declared the blessing? In the span of twenty-four years we learn from scripture that before God would birth His promise, there had to be a kind of death to Abraham and Sarah. God was working in this couple to prepare them for the arrival of the promise and He was taking decades to do it. What they thought they knew about themselves and God Almighty would prove to be a rather slow and steady in- working and outworking of the making of the man and woman of God.
So what was it that God spoke to my heart after this lesson? This covenant was God’s idea. Not Abraham and Sarah. God – not the arm of flesh- was the One who would be glorified in His way and in His time. No one and no other alternative method was going to be credited for what God Himself had promised and was going to miraculously bring about. Abraham and Sarah were merely instruments to carry out God’s purpose for His chosen people. It took a lifetime of lessons to come to terms with this reality.
What a comfort to know that when God chose us in Christ the plan for our lives was already in place. I think of 2 Tim 1:9 that says, “who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.” There is a holy calling on our lives as Christ’s followers. But here’s the caveat, it is God’s holy calling! His plan and His purposes that He ordered and ordained for us before this world ever was. If we have truly placed our lives in Christ’s hands as Savior and Redeemer, then we take our hands off when it comes to the process of God fulfilling His good and acceptable and perfect will for our lives. This is not to say that we simply just let life happen in the name of “God’s got this.” Obedience and surrender to His word are essential and the fruit of genuine faith! But what is often the case with so many in the life of faith (myself included) is that once we lay it all down at the altar, we take it back when we don’t understand the the “why’s” and the “what about’s” of God’s plan.
I’ve shared with my grown daughters and many dear sisters in Christ, trust the process. This is after forty-three years of Jesus walking faithfully with me! How many times I’ve had to seek forgiveness for leaning on my own understanding. I don’t deserve His patience but He has certainly proved that His plan His way is what I long for more than anything my own flesh might want to bring about.
Trusting the process is nothing more and nothing else than beholding God Almighty in all of my affairs this side of heaven, and in the tears and triumphs and laying hold of His right to be God.