2-13-2023

Good Morning All,

         Genesis 25:21; “And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren. And the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.” 

    Do you consider yourself to be patient?  How long can you wait for something?  If you go to a restaurant and there is a waiting time; how long will you wait?  10 minutes?  15 minutes?  30 minutes?  If you call a business, how long will you stay on hold before you hang up?  How many times will you press the numbers on your phone when dealing with an automated answering system before you just give up?  I must confess that I am on the low end of all these questions.  The restaurant has to be very good for me to wait even 15 minutes.  The automated phone systems have, for the most part, defeated me.  I confess that I am not very patient.

    Our verse is part of a larger passage that plays into patience.  In our verse, Isaac prayed for his wife because she was unable to have a child.  Remember that children at this time represent your social security, your heritage, your trusted labor force, and many other social structure buttresses.  A man with no children has to hope that a nephew somewhere might consider him worthwhile to take care of for the land and the livestock; the less land and fewer livestock you had the less likely this would occur.  This was also the primary task for the wife; to provide children, especially sons, so that the family would continue to thrive and survive.

    So Isaac prayed for his wife because she wasn’t getting pregnant.  So how long did this go on?  If you read the larger passage of Genesis 25: 19-28, we read where Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah.  Isaac was 60 when Jacob and Esau were born.  Isaac prayed for 20 years for his barren wife.  For those 20 years he patiently prayed for God to hear him.  He had learned from his father Abraham that it was foolish to try and take things into your own hands and “fix” God’s plan.  God had promised him descendants so he waited for God to keep that promise.

     That is the real lesson for us in this portion of Scripture, trusting in God and his promises leads to our being patient.  We wait for God.  Remember that when Scripture tells us to wait it means to have a joyful expectation that God will keep his promise.  The best example of this is when we wait for the birth of a child; it is with joyful anticipation that we wait. 

     But do we wait so patiently when we pray?  Can you imagine praying for the same thing for 20 years?  Yet Isaac had faith and so he waited patiently for God to hear his prayer and to keep his promise.  Isaac knew that his hope was in the Lord and ours is too.  God hears our prayers and has promised to answer them according to his will; sometimes that will is “not now but later”.  So we continue to pray and we wait in joyful expectation that God, who is faithful, will keep his promise.  So keep praying and be patient and wait for God to keep his promise.

Dear Father in heaven, too often we refuse to wait; we refuse to trust in your will.  Give us patience to continue to call upon you and to trust you to answer our prayers and that we may wait with the joyful expectation of your will.  In Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,      

Pastor Bret