Impatience

Order of Service

• Call to Worship — Psalm 146
• Hymn — Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah
• Prayer of Invocation
• Confession of Sin — Strasburg Liturgy
• Silent Confession
• Assurance of Pardon — Psalm 103:8-10
• Scripture Reading — Luke 10:13-24
• Hymn — Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove
• Pastoral Prayer
• Offering
• Prayer of Dedication
• Hymn — Spirit of the Living God
• Sermon
• Hymn — Lord, Thou Hast Searched Me
• Benediction — Numbers 6:24-26

Sermon Title: Impatience

Scripture: Genesis 16

I. The Societal Solution of the World in the Midst of Impatience

• A. Sarai's solution — giving Hagar to Abram as a concubine — was culturally normal in the ancient Near East, where marriage contracts often stipulated the use of a handmaid to produce an heir if the wife was barren.

• B. But Sarai is doing more than following cultural custom; she is using the culture's pragmatic solution to bring about a covenant promise that God alone can fulfill — invoking Yahweh's name (Genesis 16:2) while bypassing God's means.

• C. The contrast with Genesis 15 is deliberate: God alone passed through the severed carcasses in the covenant theophany, swearing by himself to fulfill the promise. It is not Sarai's pragmatism but God and God alone who guarantees the promise.

• D. The church today faces the same temptation: adopting the culture's solutions when God seems slow — market-driven church growth strategies, watered-down ethics, entertainment-driven worship — rather than waiting on God's ordinary means of grace.

  1. Paul confronted this directly in the Corinthian church, where Greek sophistry — style over truth, rhetoric over substance — was infiltrating and distorting the gospel.
  2. His answer in 1 Corinthians 2:1-2: I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
  3. Progressives argue Paul would adapt his message for 2026; Paul would say the same exact thing — God's promises are fulfilled by God's means, not the culture's.

• E. The call to the church: remain faithful, word-and-sacrament congregations, feeding on ordinary means of grace and waiting — even when the world calls it boring, irrelevant, or old-fashioned.

II. The Self-Sufficiency of Man in the Midst of Impatience

• A. Genesis 16:2 records that Abram listened to the voice of Sarai — a Hebrew construction used only one other time in Genesis, in Genesis 3:17, where God rebukes Adam for listening to the voice of his wife and eating the forbidden fruit.

• B. Moses deliberately echoes the original Fall throughout Genesis 16.

  1. Genesis 16:3 — Sarai took Hagar and gave her to Abram echoes Genesis 3:6 — she took of its fruit and gave some to her husband.
  2. Sarai's accusation that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children echoes the serpent's lie that God is holding Eve back from the tree.
  3. Hagar's contempt for Sarai after conceiving echoes the shame and blame that immediately follow the Fall in Genesis 3:7 and 3:12.
  4. Moses identifies Hagar specifically as Egyptian — Egypt being the nation descended from Ham's cursed line (Genesis 11), and the serpent being the chief symbol of Pharaoh and Egypt for the original Exodus-era audience.

• C. The siren call of self-sufficiency — have it your way, you are all you need — is the serpent's temptation repackaged for every generation. A biblical waiting-trust in God does not compute in a me-centered world.

• D. Contrast King Saul and King David as illustrations of impatience versus patient obedience.

  1. Saul in 1 Samuel 13 could not wait for Samuel seven days and offered the sacrifice himself — the kingdom was stripped from him.
  2. David in the cave refused to take Saul's life even when urged to do so, saying I will not put my hand on the Lord's anointed — he waited on God's means and reached the throne in God's time.
  3. From David came the seed of Abraham that God promised — God's promises are fulfilled by God's means, not our own.

III. The Searching Sight of God in the Midst of Impatience

• A. In Genesis 16:7-14, the Angel of the Lord finds Hagar fleeing in the wilderness on the way to Shur — most likely heading back to Egypt — and addresses her by name, the only instance in any ancient religious document where a deity addresses a woman by name.

• B. The Angel of the Lord is best understood as a pre-incarnate theophanic appearance of the second person of the Trinity, the Son.

• C. Hagar names God El Roi — the God of seeing — and her response echoes Exodus 33:23, where Moses sees the back of Yahweh's glory passing by: Have I really seen the back of him who sees me?

• D. Theophany is the inverse of idolatry: idolatry is man searching out and constructing God according to human imagination; theophany is God searching out and revealing himself to the creature.

  1. Hagar, an Egyptian accustomed to silent golden idols, encounters a God who personally sees, hears, and speaks to her in her affliction.
  2. This is the unique claim of the God of Abraham — he reveals himself; he is not manufactured.

• E. The theophany points forward to the Incarnation: Jesus says, If you have seen me, you have seen the Father (John 14:9); John's prologue declares we have seen his glory (John 1:14). The invisible God searches sinners out through the visible manifestation of the Son made man.

• F. Application: those crushed by the consequences of their own impatience — guilt, shame, impulsive decisions that still haunt — are tempted to flee back into the house of slavery. It is there, on the road back to Egypt, that the God who sees meets us.

  1. 1 Peter 2:25: You were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
  2. All the promises of God are yes and amen in Christ Jesus — wait on the Lord, keep pressing on, for Christ has come and Christ will come again.