Transcript and outline generated by AI. Please comment if you notice any errors.
Introduction
* Opens with a fictional story about a boy and his father’s delayed promise of a mountain bike.
* Illustrates impatience and lack of trust when promises are not fulfilled immediately.
* Draws parallel to how we often feel when God's promises seem delayed.
I. God Sees Your Faltering Faith
* Genesis 16:1–6
* Sarai, after years of infertility, suggests Abram take her servant Hagar to bear a child.
* This plan is based on cultural norms, not God's command.
* Abram passively agrees; Hagar conceives, leading to conflict.
* Sarai blames Abram; Abram abdicates responsibility.
* Hagar is mistreated and flees.
Key Point: Like the boy in the story, Sarai and Abram grow impatient and try to fulfill God’s promise their own way, resulting in sin and strife.
II. God Sees Your Suffering
* Genesis 16:7–12
* Hagar, now a pregnant runaway slave, encounters the angel of the Lord by a spring in the wilderness.
* God tells her to return and submit, promising protection and blessing.
* Hagar is to name her son Ishmael (“God hears”)—a sign that God has listened to her affliction.
Key Point: Even when people sin and cause suffering, God sees and responds with compassion and grace. Hagar, a marginalized outsider, is noticed and blessed by God.
III. God Sees You
* Genesis 16:13–16
* Hagar gives God the name: “You are the God who sees me” (El Roi).
* She names the place Beer-lahai-roi, “Well of the Living One who sees me.”
* God’s interaction with Hagar highlights that He sees not just the faithful (Abram and Sarai), but also the afflicted and marginalized.
Key Point: God’s character has not changed. He saw Hagar, and He sees us. His awareness is constant and personal.
Summary of the Message
The sermon explores Genesis 16 to show that God is a God who sees—our doubts, our pain, and our circumstances. Through the example of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar, the message emphasizes that human attempts to “help” God fulfill His promises outside His will lead to sin and suffering. Yet even then, God is compassionate and active. He intervenes to protect, restore, and reassure.
We are called to live coram Deo—before the face of God—with patience, obedience, and trust, knowing He has not forgotten or overlooked us. Just as the little boy needed to trust that his father had a plan, so too must we trust in God’s timing and care.
Transcript
If you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're going to be in the book of Genesis and chapter 16. Genesis chapter 16.
I want you to imagine with me a boy. The boy is maybe five, let's say five years old. And this boy has a dad who—this is a completely fictional story, BT dubs—but he lives here in our area and works in Colorado. So he's gone all week during the week, and then he comes home on the weekend and he hangs out with his family and loves his kids.
When he's in Colorado, though, he has a little bit of free time. So he takes up a hobby that works out there. He gets really into mountain biking and he loves the scenery as he's driving along these mountain trails and gets to cover a lot of country that he couldn't get to just on foot. He's really enjoying it. He comes back on the weekend and he's telling his sons about how much fun it is. And he tells his five-year-old son, “One of these days, I'm going to buy you a mountain bike so that when we go out there on vacation together, you can ride mountain bikes with me.” You know, when you're a five-year-old kid and you hear something like that—when are you expecting it? Like yesterday, right?
But then the kid's birthday comes—no mountain bike. Christmas comes—no mountain bike. Through the summer—maybe dad's forgotten. Another birthday—no mountain bike. Another Christmas—no mountain bike. He's seven years old now. Has his dad forgotten about him? Is dad failing to fulfill his promises to his son?
And as he comes to the next summer, what the boy decides is, “Well, dad's forgotten about this. And I love dad. I'm not going to be mad at dad. I'm just going to solve the problem myself. I'm going to try to get mom to give me some odd jobs around the house and I'm going to save my pennies and my quarters and my nickels and my dimes.” By the end of the summer, he's scraped together enough to go to the yard sale next door and buy a single speed bicycle.
His dad comes home that weekend, and do you think dad is excited when he sees that single speed bike? Probably not. Not that there's anything wrong with a single speed bike. They can do a lot of cool things—they're better for tricks than mountain bikes for the most part. They're great for riding around a flat town like Remsen. But is that actually going to do what dad wants to do on bikes with his boy? Is he going to be able to go ride those mountain trails? Probably not. It's not going to fulfill the purpose. It's not the bike of promise, if you will.
What was the boy's problem? He doesn't see. The dad hasn't forgotten. The dad just knows, “I want to share this experience with my son, but he has to be old enough to actually ride the trail, and he's going to need a bike that's fit for the task.” So dad's going to take him one of these years over to Bike Central in Le Mars and get a really fancy e-bike that's got some pedal assist so he can get up the hills. He's got something better in mind for his son.
But the son grows impatient. He has what we might describe as a lack of faith. But what that lack of faith stems from is this underlying belief that the boy has: “Dad has forgotten about me. Dad doesn't see me. He doesn't see how much hope I've tied into this promise.”
I wonder if you ever feel like that little boy. Like God has made a promise to you and he's failing to follow through on it. That, yeah, God is out there—he rules in the heavens, I don't have any doubt about that. I've looked at creation. I know it didn't just happen. I know there's a God. I know he's real. But does he see me?
That little boy didn't believe he was seen. And often we don't believe that we are seen by God. But the message of Genesis chapter 16 is that God is a God who sees. God is a God of seeing.
First of all, we see that God sees your faltering faith. God sees even when your faith stumbles.
Genesis 16, beginning in verse 1. We'll read the first six verses:
Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.
And Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!”
But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.
So what's the presenting problem in the first part of this text? The presenting problem is that Sarai continues to have no children. We're ten years now from God's initial call to Abram and Sarai to leave their home, to leave Ur of the Chaldeans and Haran where they had settled.
What we've seen in the last several chapters is that God has blessed Abram. God has poured out material blessing upon Abram, and he's also blessed those around him. He saved Lot—I mean, Lot initially moves away from Abram because so much material wealth has come to him because of his association with Abram. Then he moves down to Sodom—wrong place to go—but then when he's captured there by the kings of Mesopotamia, Abram is able to go and save him, and then save those who are associated with him. God is pouring blessing out on those around Abram. God's already beginning to fulfill his promise.
But Sarai continues to have no children.
Now, last week we looked at chapter 15. In the first part of chapter 15, Abram brings this to God as a question: “How are you going to bless the world through my family? Right now, my heir is a guy from Damascus. It's a Syrian. It's not even someone who's related to me.” And God says, “Come on outside, Abram. Look at the stars. Those will be fewer in number than your descendants. If you can count the stars, then you can count your descendants.” Abram knows he can't count the stars, but he doesn't disbelieve God's promise. He doesn't doubt God's promise. It tells us in chapter 15, verse 6, that Abram believed the Lord and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Abram hears God promise, “Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky,” and Abram believed God's promise, and God declares him righteous because of that.
But put yourself in Sarai's shoes. God has poured out his blessing on Abram’s life. God has been fulfilling all of these promises to Abram—except the promise of children. And why is that? It's because Sarai is herself barren. She's probably starting to wonder, “Am I the problem? Am I the one interfering with God’s blessing to my husband coming to full fruition? How can we solve this?”
It's a very natural thing for people to feel—I think maybe specifically women—to feel like there's something out there that your spouse wants, that you're supposed to accomplish. “Am I getting in the way of it? Well, how do I fix it?” And she comes up with an end-around. Like, here’s how we can solve this problem.
She's got a female servant—Hagar. And Hagar had probably been part of the spoil, part of the blessings of wealth that were poured out on Abram when they were in Egypt. When Abram comes up from Egypt, he comes up blessed—with camels and herds of sheep and donkeys, as well as camels—but he also comes up with male and female servants. And Hagar the Egyptian is probably one of those servants. She becomes Sarai’s handmaiden. She's the one who attends directly to Sarai.
And Sarai says, “Well, what the people around us do”—this was a common practice in the ancient Near East—“if you have a woman who's unable to conceive and to have children, her handmaiden could have children in her place.” She would become a concubine. And so Abram, if he has children with her, those children would be considered Sarai’s children.
“Maybe this is how God intends to fulfill his promise.” It seems logical to her, at least in worldly terms. And immediately, Hagar conceives. So it might seem like it works even.
But what we see over and over again in Scripture is that there are so many things that seem logical to us as human beings—like we’ve solved this problem. But if we step outside of God’s design, we have not solved any problems. We have multiplied our problems. And that is what we see in this case.
Never in Scripture, though polygamy is often presented as something that happened or taking concubines as something that happened, it’s never approved of. I think it’s ironic. There are people who will argue that, well, because in Genesis, these men who are considered righteous do these things, they must be okay with God. But all you have to do is read the text and see—how does this go? Does God actually bless them stepping outside of his plan?
A really stark example of this is Abram’s grandson, Jacob. He has two wives—bad start, like two actual wives—and they have a child-having contest. One is losing really bad, and so she has her servant start having children for her. And then, well, Leah gets behind Rachel now, and so she’s going to have her servant have children. And now Jacob is having children with four women. And then the brothers start selling each other into slavery. They start getting into fights. They initiate conflict with the surrounding country—it’s not good.
Never is the multiplication of wives—any kind of stepping outside of God’s sexual ethic, designed in the garden, one man, one woman, in a monogamous union for life—once you step outside of that, you are courting disaster. And we see that here. Because while it seems like this is working—Hagar gets pregnant immediately—the problems in the house are not solved. They are multiplied.
Hagar then looks with contempt, it says, upon Sarai. Why would Hagar have contempt for Sarai? Why wouldn’t Hagar have contempt for Sarai? There’s several levels where she could have contempt for her.
You know, Sarai and Abram have probably been married for close to 50 years at this point. It would be fair to guess that—75 and 85 years old—maybe more. Maybe they could have been married for 60 years at this point. And Sarai has been unable to conceive. And she gives Hagar to Abram, and Hagar conceives almost immediately.
Well, and in that society, your worth as a woman would largely have been tied to: Are you able to have children? Are you able to produce an heir? “Well, here’s this man whom God’s made all these blessings to, and who’s able to produce an heir for him? Not you, Sarai—I am. Why am I the servant? I’m the one who’s actually able to produce what he needs.”
Or she could be thinking through it in terms of: “Here, this is happening to my body. I’m going through the pregnancy. I’m going to go through labor and delivery, and yet this child is going to be considered yours? That’s hardly right.” That could breed feelings of contempt.
Sarai doesn’t respond very well to that. And she goes to Abram. She says, “This is on you. This is your fault.” And I read Sarai’s question, and we need to ask—we actually need to grapple with—is she right to blame Abram here?
Now, in one sense, she’s obviously missing something, in that this was her idea, right? She’s not right to overlook her own fault and responsibility in the situation. This is something men often complain about women—because it’s not an unusual... this is an extreme circumstance—but she brings up an idea, he does it, and then she’s not happy with it. And he’s going, “But I thought...?” Right? If you don’t want to admit that that happens—I don’t know what to tell you. This happens.
And she’s wrong to overlook her own responsibility there. But she is right to say that this is Abram’s responsibility. That language that’s used multiple times here of “he listened to the voice of Sarai” should hearken us back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam listened to the voice of his wife Eve. And she’s coming with a solution—she’s coming with, “Here’s how we fix this problem.” And she’s his helpmate. He needs to take what she says into consideration.
But ultimately, when he evaluates what she says, he shouldn’t just say, “Okay, honey, whatever you want.” He should say, “No. In this circumstance, your counsel is not wise.” And he should lead her back towards godliness and trust in the promises of God, rather than trying to fulfill God’s promises for him in a way that disobeys Him.
The principle here for Abram is that he should have told her no, and he is responsible for this situation and its fallout. He is at fault.
He doesn’t want to see that. Verse six: Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please.” He punts. He says, “You’re whining, but it’s your problem, so you solve it.” And Sarai decides, “Well, if he’s not going to deal with it, I’m going to deal with it my way.” And she’s harsh and hard on Hagar, to the point where Hagar feels like her best option is to flee.
Abram and Sarai had lost sight of God’s sight of the situation. They sought to keep God’s promise for Him, and disaster ensues in their household.
I wonder where you have lost sight of God’s promise-keeping power in your life—and what sins that might lead you to. Where is failing to recognize that God is here, He is present, He is at work? I can trust Him. When you forget that, where does it lead you? Where does it take you?
One thing we should never do is think that we can step outside of God’s revealed will in Scripture—in this case for them, it’s God’s prescribed sexual ethics—and think that God’s going to bless that and make it work out okay. God sees their faltering faith, and they are going to have consequences for it. He’s still at work. He’s still ruling and reigning over the situation. God’s not surprised by it. But He is not honored by us disobeying Him in order to serve Him.
Those are the kinds of mental games we play with ourselves: “Well, it’s for the greater good that I’m going to do this thing that I know is wrong.” It doesn’t work that way.
Second thing we see, though, is that God doesn’t just see your faltering faith—God sees your suffering. We see that in the circumstances of Hagar.
Verse 7: The angel of the Lord. So Sarai has dealt harshly with Hagar—verse 6—and Hagar flees. Verse 7: the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, on the way to Shur.
I’m struck by that language: “the angel of the Lord found her.” Now, God hadn’t lost track of Hagar and had to go looking for her, right? But in a physical manifestation, the angel of the Lord comes to her and finds her by this spring of water, and He speaks to her.
Do you ever feel lost by God? Like God has lost track of you, like He doesn’t know where you’re at? I’m always reminded of the words of Psalm 139. It says, “Where can I go from your presence? Where can I flee from you? If I ascend to heaven, behold, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol—in the grave—behold, you are there.” There is nowhere you can go to flee the presence of God. You can’t get away from Him.
And here, Hagar finds that out. Hagar would have had, prior to encountering Abram and Sarai, no experience of the living God. Her only knowledge of the true God—she’s coming from pagan Egypt—and she’s brought into Abram’s household where they worship the Lord. They build altars to Him. They are interacting with the living God. When she removes herself from His presence, she is in a sense fleeing from God—though in her immediate circumstances, she’s fleeing from a cruel mistress.
She is, practically speaking, fleeing from the presence of God. But God does not let her get away. He chases her down. He finds her by the well. And He speaks to her. And what He says to her is maybe surprising to us as 21st-century people.
Verse 8: He said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.”
That sounds pretty harsh to our ears today. She’s being mistreated. She’s being—maybe our language would be—abused. And God says, “Go back.”
Is God okay with how Sarai’s treating her? No. But we need to pull ourselves out of our century and drop ourselves down there. Yes, she’s being mistreated in Sarai’s household as Sarai’s servant. But that is still the safest place in the world for her in the year 2000 B.C.
If she’s separated—if she’s in Abram’s household, carrying Abram’s child—Sarai is being mean to her, but she has protection. Abram is not going to let anything happen to her that would harm his child. He’s going to protect the child as well. Abram has a vested interest in at least the physical safety of Hagar. No one else that she encounters will have that same interest or that same care for her. She is in deep physical danger to be separated from Abram’s household.
And so the angel of the Lord comes and says something to her that may well be hard for her to hear, yet nonetheless is the most important thing for her to do—for her own safety. And furthermore, for her to be blessed, which is what we see in the verses following.
Verse 10: The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael”—Ishmael means “God hears”—“because the Lord has listened to your affliction.”
God comes to her and He says, “Go back. And I am going to bless you.” He gives her a modified version of the promise that’s come to Abram multiple times. God told Abram, “I’m going to make your descendants so numerous that you cannot count them.” And here God says to Hagar, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” God promises that through Ishmael will come nations and peoples that cannot be numbered for multitude.
He is not the child of promise, but God gives him promises anyway. And He tells her to name him Ishmael because God has listened to her. He’s listened to her pain. He’s listened to her affliction. God hears her prayer.
Last week we read in our Scripture reading, Ecclesiastes 8, and we read it again last night, and I was thinking about it in connection with this. Chapter 8, verse 2 says, “Do not be hasty to leave the presence of the king. And do not take your stand in an evil cause, for who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?’” In Ecclesiastes 8, I think what Solomon’s saying is, you don’t want to be quick to leave the presence of the one who has power. Because if you leave his presence—his place where he is ruling, and where he is executing with kindness, with good intention toward those around him—and you set yourself against him, things might not go well for you.
And while we know Abram is the most powerful man in this region at the time, and he’s the only one to whom God has promised to pour out blessing on his family, what God seems to be reminding Hagar of in these verses is that if you remove yourself from Abram, you remove yourself from my blessing. But if you go back in obedience to my word, I will pour out blessing not only on you, but on your son and his descendants as well.
Now, the promise of verse 12 doesn’t sound quite as encouraging: “He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.” She is told the character of Ishmael is not going to be necessarily always upright and good. He’s going to be in conflict with those around him—and by implication, his descendants will be as well.
That doesn’t faze her, though. She still looks to God and recognizes that God has heard her cry, that God has seen her in her pain, seen her in her affliction.
Verse 13: “So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing.’” That could also be translated, “You are the God who sees me.” I think that’s one of the most profound names of God in the Old Testament: “You are a God of seeing. You are the God who sees me.”
So often—I know personally—I have felt as if no one sees. No one knows. Proverbs says, “The heart knows its own bitterness.” Like, no one gets it. God does. God sees. God knows. God gets everything that you are going through.
“For she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’” That’s the translators trying to help you get the thrust underneath. The literal translation would be: “Truly, I have seen him who sees me.” The angel of the Lord appears to her, and she says, “I have seen the God who sees me.”
Therefore, the name of the place was called Beer-lahai-roi. It lies between Kadesh and Bered. That name means “well of the Living One who sees me.” She names the place after the fact that there she encountered the living God who sees her.
And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son whom Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
The final thing we need to see as we think about this text is that God sees you. He didn’t just see Abram and Sarai. He didn’t just see Hagar. He didn’t just see these people 4,000 years ago. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so God sees you.
Do you recognize that? Do you recognize—in your pain, God sees you? In your doubts, God sees you?
This truth should provoke trust. There’s never a time when we’ve escaped the notice of God. He hasn’t forgotten about us. It also should give us a determination to make every decision and live every moment—the Latin phrase is coram Deo—before the face of God. That is how we should strive to live.
Abram and Sarai walked into sin because they failed to recognize that God was at work. He had not forgotten His promises. And so they start making sinful choices in order to help God out.
Whereas if they had recognized, “No, God is here, and He is at work, and I need to make each choice with reference to—Is this pleasing to Him? Is this right in His eyes? Or does it just seem smart to me?”
It’s very, very easy for us to quit thinking about what is most important to God and instead try to figure things out for ourselves. But if we are living moment by moment before the face of God—we are literally before the face of God at all times—but recognizing that fact, it will shape how we live.
So humble yourself before Him and before His ways. Submit to His word, no matter how hard it might seem at the time, and no matter how veiled the outcome.
Because in that story, what that little boy doesn’t know is that on his 10th birthday, dad is giving him that mountain bike, and they are going on a trip to the mountains. He is going to see the things that his father wants him to see. But he has to have the patience to do it right. He has to have the patience to know—to trust—that his father knows more than he does.
Do we have that patience? Do we have that trust—that God knows more than we do?
Let’s pray.
Father, you do know more than we do. It’s so easy for me to go day in and day out not recognizing that you are at work, and that my role is simply to trust you. And so I presume. I presume that’s probably true for most of us, Lord. And we ask that you would change that. Shape our hearts so that we are vertically oriented—that we are living before your face, seeking to honor you moment by moment, day by day, with the confidence that you do know and see everything that we’re going through.
I pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
