You Can’t Rush God
You can’t rush God.
Are you trying to rush God? Have you ever longed for something so bad that it burdened you daily?
Are you in a season of waiting and holding onto a promise of God? But it’s just taking too long that you feel you are going crazy? You aren’t alone.
If you are struggling with control issues, if you are trying to do things on your own, if you are trying to manipulate your way into a solution that God never gave you, then this one is for you.
This has been a issue for women from the very beginning, from Eve to Sarah to us today. We aren’t alone. It’s a real problem and Satan knows it.
He has used the same tricks on women throughout history that he uses on us right now.
To try to control our life. To try to control our destiny. To try to manipulate situations to create our own outcomes. But God says no.
We are to wait for Him. He is in control.
But back to Sarah. An assumption that I have always had about Abraham and Sarah is that they loved the Lord from the beginning.
I assumed that he was chosen because of his passionate devotion to God. I assumed that God came down to Abraham and said ‘because of your faithfulness, I am going to pull you from this land and bless you, and let you be the father of many generations.’
I thought it was a reward for his holy living. Wrong.
He might have been a good guy, but he didn’t follow in the ways of the Lord. As a matter of fact, the Bible tells us that Terah, his father, worshiped pagan gods. So naturally, Abraham grew up in that lifestyle, worshipping and living a false religion.
And obviously, when Sarah married into the family, she did as well because she submitted to the religion of her husband.
Now, Sarah could not bear children. She was disappointed month after month, year after year, watching everyone else around her continue the family line.
She felt purposelessness, devastation, and gut-wrenching heartache.
Every single year, there was no avail, there were no children. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. And the whole time, as she walked through that, she had nothing to hold onto for hope, no promise to set her sights on, no calm in her storm.
Why? Because they were worshipping a false religion that could only temporarily distract her from what her heart desired.
Years later, like decades later, when she was 60 years old and Abraham was 70, God called Abraham and told him that he was going to leave the land of his father and go to the place that God lead him.
He told him that He was going to make Him the father of many generations.
They wanted to rush God.
Suddenly, they met this God that promised them these blessings, this genealogy that was going to be more numerous than the stars. What if Sarah, in all of her agonizing for decades to be a mother, thought that this was it.
This was her big break. This God that she was supposed to believe, who had this interaction with her husband, promised him that he would be the father of many generations.
Since she is his wife, we would all assume that those plans would involve her, right? So she probably had a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of fear, and a whole lot of excitement.
She likely moved on to the next stage of her life thinking that she was finally going to have her hopes and dreams of becoming a mother. But what happened?
She waited, and waited, and she waited some more.
Fourteen years and no babies later, she was probably thinking that this was ridiculous. They were supposed to have all these babies. They were supposed to have these generations of people.
Where was this God that her husband had told her about? Was He going to come through?? And then an angel of the Lord came to Abraham and said that it wouldn’t be his servant that would be the heir, it would be his child.
But that was all the detail that he got. So Sarah, being a woman, thought maybe she could read between the lines and help this God out.
Since He only said that Abraham would be the father of this heir, maybe it wasn’t supposed to involve her.
That was really heartbreaking, but maybe they were supposed to manipulate things and help God follow through with His promise.
So she decided to tell Abraham to sleep with her servant, Hagar, and have the baby with her. That way they could raise the child and have a son that could receive his inheritance. Problem solved!
It was convincing enough for Abraham to believe that it must be what God intended, so they moved forward with their plan.
You would think that was the end of the baby saga. False. It was only the beginning. This is worse than a Jerry Springer show.
What happened is Sarah became jealous, and she was mean and awful to Hagar. She abused her so much that Hagar ran away.
But then an angel of the Lord brought her back and told her that she would have a son named Ishmael. Life was going to be hard, but God was there for her.
You think that’s it? No. Ten years later, Sarah had been waiting and waiting, she had tried to control the situation. Up until that point, she thought that having her servant bear her husband’s child was the solution.
She just wanted to be a mother and raise the child even though it wasn’t her own. Abraham was going to have an heir for the generations that were supposed to come from him.
But it did not create peace, it was not in God’s plan. They had manipulated the situation to rush the outcome. Did you catch that?
They manipulated the situation to rush the outcome that God had promised.
God told Abraham that he would be a father, but they added pieces to the puzzle that God did not intend, and they fabricated something that convoluted the entire situation.
Sarah was bitter and angry, she blamed her husband, because that is what we do, right? Hagar was damaged and traumatized.
Ishmael wanted to be the chosen son and had this relationship with his father that wasn’t a healthy situation.
And then the angel of the Lord comes back to Abraham and tells him that within a year Sarah would have a baby.
Do you know what Sarah did after all of her years of agony and waiting for this promise?
She laughed.
She laughed at God’s plan. And really, can you blame her? She had been waiting since she was 60 to have this promised child, and there had been no baby.
She even took it upon herself to create a solution, and that whole idea had crashed and burned. There were broken relationships, lots of hurt feelings, I imagine she was done with the whole thing. So she laughed.
And then she got pregnant with Isaac. She was 90 years old. Abraham was 100. She had laughed at God.
God made it happen.
Are you in a hurry? Once again, you can’t rush God.
I don’t know what you might be waiting on. Maybe you are waiting for a really intense prayer to be answered or you’re waiting on a career decision. Maybe you are waiting on starting a family of your own.
Whatever it is, I want to share this verse from Psalms 37:
“Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act.” Psalms 37:7
I don’t know your story, but God does. And He won’t always say yes to every desire of your heart.
But I’ll tell you this, hurry is the death of prayer. If you are rushing God to come through with something, you will not have peace in your heart.
Wait patiently for Him to act.
Now with the situation of Sarah, yes, all things did fall into place. God is a good God, and He had grace and mercy for them. He blessed Sarah and Abraham with Isaac. Who then, with Rebekah, had Jacob and Esau.
And then Jacob became the father of the twelve, who became the nation of Israel. I mean the whole story of the Old Testament is so beautiful and rich.
I love it. But it all started with her doubting that God was going to come through. She thought she needed to put her nose where it didn’t belong in an attempt to fix things, because she believed God needed her to follow through on His promises.
God came through on His promise on His time. On His time.
Be patient. Be still in the presence of the Lord and wait on God to act. It’s not going to be in our timing. The answer to our prayer, the desires of our heart, the dreams that we’re chasing, they’re timing is not up to us.
Take it 24 hours at a time. Wait on the Lord. Trust Him and His timing.
The peace and the calm and the outcome will be far better than if we manipulate things and create an outcome that is outside of God’s will.
There are tons of stories in the Bible that do not have good outcomes because people tried to become God. Let’s wait on the Lord. Let’s not try to do things our own way.
Let’s let Him do what He does best.
