<\/p>\n
Then Sarai, Abram\u2019s wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan. So he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress became despised in her eyes.\u00a0<\/strong>(Genesis 16:3-4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
God promised Abram and Sarai what they desperately wanted and long waited for: a son. After waiting\u00a0ten years<\/strong>, they decided to \u201chelp\u201d God fulfill His promise by using an Egyptian slave woman as an ancient version of a surrogate mother. In this, Abram and Sarai both acted in unbelief. Abram did not actually marry Hagar, but he acted towards her as a man should only act towards his wife. This wasn\u2019t the right path for Abram, the friend of God and the man of faith. God had a different way for him, but Abram and Sarai didn\u2019t want to take that way.<\/p>\n
Abram and Sarai were discouraged enough that they approached the problem of no children by leaving God out of the matter. It was as if they said, \u201cIf we remove God from this situation, how do we solve this?\u201d This was wrong for many reasons.<\/p>\n
\u2013 God is never removed from any circumstance.
\n\u2013 Men and women of faith must walk in faith, not in unbelief.
\n\u2013 Men and women of faith must live being mindful of the realm of the spirit, not only mindful of the material world.<\/p>\nWhen a believer impatiently tries to fulfill God\u2019s promises in their own effort, it accomplishes nothing and may even prolong the time until the promise is fulfilled. Jacob had to live as an exile for 25 years, because he thought he had to arrange the fulfillment of God\u2019s promise to get his father\u2019s blessing (Genesis 28:1-5; 33:17-20). Moses had to tend sheep for 40 years in the desert after he tried to arrange the fulfillment of God\u2019s promise by murdering an Egyptian (Exodus 2:11-15; 3:1).<\/p>\n
It is better to receive God\u2019s help than to try and help Him in our own wisdom and unbelief. When the servant woman\u00a0conceived<\/strong>, things only became worse, especially for Sarai, the wife of Abram. Hagar\u2019s pregnancy seemed to confirm that the inability to bear children was Sarai\u2019s problem, not Abram\u2019s. In a culture that so highly valued childbearing, mothering the child of a wealthy and influential man like Abram gave Hagar greater status, and made her appeared more blessed than Sarai.<\/p>\n
This is a good reminder that\u00a0results<\/em>\u00a0are not enough to justify what we do before God. It\u2019s not right to say, \u201cThey got a baby out of it. It must have been God\u2019s will.\u201d The flesh profits nothing (John 6:63), but it can\u00a0produce<\/em>something. Doing things in the flesh may get results, but they may be results that are soon regretted.<\/p>\n
Whatever a man or woman attempts to do without God will be a miserable failure \u2013 or an even more miserable success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Then Sarai, Abram\u2019s wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan. So he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress became despised in … Continue reading “Enduring Word Devotion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-prayers"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191465,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191463\/revisions\/191465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prayingpint.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}