Paul
Praise Him (You are holy)
Make A Way
O Come, O Come Emmanuel
O Holy Night
Jon
Genesis 21:1-7
Key – 6
Made her laughter something redemptive
Gen 12
bless nations of the world
Messiah will fix it all
God gives a promise, but not a deadline
Life keeps ticking away
Abe hits 100
Gen 17:17 – God reassures him and Abe is incredulous
Scoffing laughter, sarcasm
Sarah hears, Gen 18:12, and is sarchastic
Lost belief in supernatural God
As we get older, faith gets harder
Intellectually skeptical
Afraid to hope – males us vulnerable…don’t want to get hurt…
We love control, we hate disappointment
Afraid of boredom…don’t want to wait
Start to close our hearts…get jaded
Laughter of addiction and fixation
Gen 21:8-10
Celebrations full of laughter
Cast out Hagar and son, they can’t laugh
Ishmael laughing AT Isaac?
Laughter turns to anger
Something wrong with this laughter…displaces God from the throne of our hearts, fromour center
If anything disappoints us, laughter turns to anger…
Temporary laughter, conditional laughter
Self-indulgence rooted in being buddies with your kids
Emotional death
Loving yourself through your child will fail eventually
Distortian of truth
Ways of avoiding rest, joy, rejoycing
Gen 18:9-15
God doesn’t ask questions because he lacks information…if we can answer the question, we get to the heart of the issue
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
These stories are there to encourage our faith
Take our eyes off the Isaac’s of our lives…off our past failures…they don’t define us….God wants to spin golden humility out of those past failures
Turns it into compassion and wisdom and skills…something beautiful and redemptive
In Christ you are a new creation
He who began a new work will finish it…God’s not done yet…
What is our Isaac?
What do I need to remove so I can be closer to God?
Isaiah 51:1-2
God makes Abraham sacrifice Abraham’s most precious thing
God made the far greater sacrifice with Christ
Rooted in Christ where our hope and faith will be established