“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14)
Abram and Sarai desperately wanted a child. Abram wanted an heir. Sarai wanted a baby to hold in her arms.
The Lord had promised Abram that he would have many offspring (Gen. 12:7) and that his descendants would be “as numerous as the stars” (Gen. 15:5).
So Abram and Sarai waited for the fulfillment of God’s promise.
And they waited, and waited, and waited.
God’s promise of an heir was given to Abram when he was 75 years old, but the child, Isaac, didn’t arrive until Abram had turned 100 (Gen. 21:1-3). That’s a span of twenty-five years. For twenty-five years they waited for God to fulfill His promise. And by the time God fulfilled His promise, Abram and Sarai had new names! Abram became “Abraham” (Gen. 17:5) and Sarai became “Sarah” (Gen. 17:15).
Ten years into their time of waiting Sarai grew impatient. So she came up with a plan to sort of hurry things along. She asked Abram to sleep with her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. Abram agreed, and the Bible says, “He slept with Hagar, and she conceived” (Gen. 16:4).
From there, Sarai’s plan unraveled.
First, once she discovered Hagar was pregnant, Sarai became bitterly jealous of her (Gen. 16:4).
Then she began to blame Abram for the ill feelings that had sprung up between her and her maidservant (Gen. 16:5).
Finally, her horrible solution to the problem — to mistreat Hagar so badly that she runs away (Gen. 16:6) — backfired when an angel of the Lord intervened and promised Hagar protection if she would return to Abram and Sarai (Gen. 16:9ff). Which she did. Nine months later the child was born and Abram named him “Ishmael” (Gen. 16:16).
The world continues to reap the consequences of Sarai’s actions. The descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac never got along (Gen. 16:12). Still don’t.
But here’s the thing I want you to understand: Ishmael was Sarah's way of bringing about the will of God in her own way, in her own time. I know she must have been tired of waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. And I know that, as the years rolled by, it got harder and harder to wait, but her efforts to “speed things up” only made things worse.
That’s a lesson for us.
Maybe you are where Sarai was — waiting.
Waiting for an answer to prayer.
Waiting for God to intervene in a situation.
Waiting for things to change.
Waiting for your suffering to end.
And maybe you’ve been waiting for a long while.
The psalmist’s advice to all those who find themselves waiting on the Lord is pretty simple: “Hang in there. Keep waiting!” He says, “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14)
I know that waiting is hard, but please understand something: waiting time is not wasted time. It’s a part of being faithful. It is the practical way in which we demonstrate our faith and trust in God.
Charles Spurgeon said:
“If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.”
Amen.
So hang in there! And while you wait, keep working, keep praying, and remain faithful. One day God will surprise you with an answer to your prayer that you never could have imagined (cf. Eph. 3:20).
Let the final word be that of the Psalmist who said: “Wait for the LORD and keep His way, and He will exalt you.” (Psalm 37:34)