When it all Looks Hopeless Get Ready for Something New

Abraham is married to Sara, an old woman.  They have no children.  God comes into that situation and says, “Perfect.  Just the way I like to work.  Everything looks hopeless, therefore everything is set up for a blessing.”

Too often we make the mistake of thinking that before God will do anything in our lives, before we can sense any work of the spirit, we need to get everything together personally; we need to earn our way to God’s favor; we need to show that we can do it on our own.  We make a similar mistake in the local church, too.  We sometimes think that we must be in total control before God can do anything in our congregation.

The biblical message is very clear though: God does not wait for us to finally show how good we have become or how skilled or even how kind or how gracious; God just comes after us and says, as Jesus did to the disciples, “Follow me.”

Or, as God said to childless Abraham, “I will bless you with more children then there are stars or grains of sand even.”  What looks empty to us is, for God, a place to do something new.

This is really the marvel of the biblical message and biblical faith.  God uses that part of you and your life that is less than perfect, and in THAT very place makes something new happen.

Notice that the word to Abraham is not given as instruction or discipline but as promise.  Walter Brueggemann calls this “a paradigm for resurrection.”

What part of you is less than perfect?  When you honestly (and I mean honestly!) look at your life, where are you the most vulnerable, where are you the most helpless, where are you in need of “resurrection?”  It is there, in that very place, where God wants to do something new.

That is not an easy thing to accept.  I don’t always want to be that honest before God but the longer I am in ministry and the more I seek to follow Jesus, the clearer it has become:  God wants to step into the most chaotic and confusing aspects of my life and in those very places, do something new. Who knows, but maybe, just maybe, in the midst of all the questions that you and I face every day, God is ready and willing, in those very places, to do something new and amazing.

Grace and peace to you,