The Difficulty of Faith

Use these Series Materials to go deeper into this message on your own, or with your small group.

Full Service | Sermon Audio

Good morning Chapel family. One of my favorite authors, Andy Crouch, wrote a book called The Life We’re Looking For. It’s about how to hold on to our humanity in world that’s being taken over by technology. He starts the book by explaining what happened at the very beginning of your life—listen:

After an ordinary delivery, after the first few startled cries, newborn infants typically spend an hour or so in the stage doctors call “quiet alert.” Though they can only focus their vision roughly eight to twelve inches away, their eyes are wide open. They are searching... They are looking for a face, and when they find one—especially a face that gazes back at them—they fix their eyes on it, having found what they were most urgently looking for. Recognition is the primary task of infancy. Feeding, crying, and even sleeping are just the support system for this most essential work of figuring out who we are, and where we are, by making contact with other people, seeing them seeing us, gradually beginning to build our sense of self through their eyes.

I know this happened for you, as it happened for me, because if it had not, you would almost certainly not be reading these words. The developmental psychologist Edward Tronick demonstrated this in a widely replicated experiment called “still face,” in which infants and toddlers sit across from their caregivers, who have been told to avoid all facial expressions and responses to their children. The videos of these experiments, which last only a few minutes, are wrenching to watch, as the adults feign indifference to the children’s presence while the children exhibit greater and greater degrees of dysregulation, writhing in frustration and ultimately collapsing in distress. That is the result of just a few moments of deprivation. When children are deprived of this kind of recognition and mutual attention for months or years, they may possibly survive—but they do not thrive.

You and I have been designed by God to be seen and recognized and known. Technology can try to mimic that, right? When I pick up my iPhone, I don’t have to type in a password because my phone recognizes my…what? My face. It sees me! But does it really?

We’re taking this fall to walk the life of Abraham. Abraham didn’t have perfect faith, but he had enough faith to follow God on a journey to an unknown place. And we’ve been saying that God is calling all of us on a journey of faith—as a church and as individuals. If our hearts are open, we’ll hear God calling us to take our next step. But here’s the thing: your journey will fail—it will not succeed—unless you know that you are seen by the most important pair of eyes.

Let’s look at today’s Scripture—we’re in Genesis 16. This is God’s Word for us today…

1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”

“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.

9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”

11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
“You are now pregnant
  and you will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
  for the Lord has heard of your misery.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
  his hand will be against everyone
  and everyone’s hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
  toward all his brothers.”

13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.

15 So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael. This is the Word of the Lord.

Let’s talk first about Forgetting the God who Sees. It has now been ten years since Abram and Sarai packed up and moved to this new land. God had promised they would have children, but it still hasn’t happened. And at 75 years old, Sarai’s biological clock is screaming at her. So she gets this thought: “Maybe I’m thinking too narrow. Maybe the way God is going to fulfill his promise isn’t through me; maybe Abram is supposed to father his first child with a slave woman who lives in our house.” Which sounds crazy to us. But in that culture, it was a fairly common practice. So she makes the proposal to her husband: Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” And Abram says, “Okay.”

Now let’s be clear: even though there are examples of Old Testament characters who had multiple wives, it is never encouraged or approved by God. In fact, just a few chapters earlier, in Genesis 2, it says That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. So from the start, God defined marriage as one man and one woman. But culture creeps in, and people make compromises. And it almost always leads to trouble.

So Abram sleeps with Hagar the Egyptian slave; she quickly become pregnant, which must have been hard for Sarai to see. And then Hagar, when she knows she’s pregnant, starts to get an attitude. It says she started to despise Sarai. Maybe it’s because she realizes that after she carries this baby for nine months, she’s going to have to hand the child over to Sarai—much like a surrogate mother today who becomes attached to the child in her womb, and she feels like she can’t give it up. Or maybe it’s just immature rivalry between two women living in the same house. Whatever it is, Abram realizes he has a problem on his hands.

So Sarai comes to him and says, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” And once again, Abram is completely passive; he says, “You do whatever you want with her.” Sarai takes that as license to begin treating Hagar harshly, and Hagar runs away, carrying Abram’s child. What a mess.

What happened? Well, Abram and Sarai had forgotten something that’s so important. The Christian Reformers, back in the 16th Century, had this phrase, Coram Deo. It’s a Latin phrase that means “before the face of God.” The idea was that God is not only present in the religious parts of our lives—when we’re in church or when we’re praying. All of life is lived before the face of God—in God’s presence. It reminds us that everything we do matters, and God is always with us. Coram Deo. And Abram and Sarai forgot they were living coram Deo. They forgot about the God who sees. They allowed their disappointment about Sarai not getting pregnant to weaken their faith and push God to the periphery of their lives. And the result was chaos.

One of the reasons I’m concerned about our culture right now is that technology is isolating people from human connection, so people have fewer and fewer other people who truly see them. But even more troubling, secularism is isolating people from the God who sees them. That is not producing good results in our culture.

Let’s continue the story. Point number two: Pursued by the God who Sees. Try to imagine Hagar: all alone, rejected, pregnant, a foreigner, walking through the desert. It says she winds up by a spring that’s along the road to Shur—which is in the direction of Egypt. So apparently she’s trying to get back to her home country. And I think it’s a safe guess that she probably feels invisible—like she is seen by absolutely no one.

Verse 7 says The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. Notice, it doesn’t say an angel of the Lord; it’s the angel of the Lord. When that phrase is used in the Old Testament, it means this God himself, showing up in a human body. Theologians call this a “pre-incarnate appearance of Christ.” So this isn’t just one of many angels; this is God in the flesh who’s come with a message for Hagar.

First, he asks her a question—verse 8: “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” Hagar says, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.” Notice, she only answers the first part of God’s question, right? She says where’s she’s coming from, but she has no idea where she’s going. Her future is so unclear, and so hopeless.

Then the angel tells Hagar to go back to Sarai, and he makes her a promise: “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” He goes on to say that the child in her womb will be a son, and his name will be Ishmael, “for the Lord has heard of your misery.” The name “Ishmael” means “the Lord hears.” And he says this child will be very unlike his mother the slave, because he will be wild and free like a donkey. And he’s going to live in hostility toward his brothers. It’s a mysterious prophecy, and we’ll talk more about the role of Ishmael in a few weeks. But for now, here’s the important thing: God comes to this hopeless woman, and he gives her hope. Her child might not be the son through whom God’s covenant with Abram is kept, but he’ll have an important role to play in God’s plan.

And then Hagar does an amazing thing—verse 13: 13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” (the Hebrew is El Roi—the God who sees me) for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi (which means “the well of the living One who sees me”); it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. It turns out Hagar wasn’t invisible after all. Through all her mistreatment and rejection and fear and aloneness, God was with her. And he saw her. And he cared.

Years later, when the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, God comes to Moses and says, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.” God saw, God was concerned, and he was about to act. The God who sees.

In Psalm 139:16, David writes,
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
  all the days ordained for me were written in your book
  before one of them came to be.
And then in verse 7 of that same Psalm, he says,
Where can I go from your Spirit?
  Where can I flee from your presence?

It’s a Psalm of incredible comfort: Lord, you see me, and you’re always with me. In other words, there is literally nowhere I can go where I become invisible to God.

So all through the Old Testament, we get reminders that our God is the God who sees us. And then…Jesus shows up. And all through the Gospels, Jesus sees the people that everybody else overlooks.

Matthew 9:36—When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Other people saw those crowds, but they didn’t see them like Jesus did.

In Luke chapter seven, there’s a widow who has lost her only son. Verse 13: When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.” Jesus saw her.

Just like the angel of the Lord met Hagar by the side of a well, in John chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by a well. Somehow he already knows her story, because he has—what?—seen her. The woman runs back to town and tells everyone, “Come and see a man who told me all that I ever did.” In other words, “I just met someone who truly sees me.”

Our God is a God who sees us. He sees you. Which doesn’t just mean he knows you exist; it means he knows you and cares about you and values you and has plans for you. For Hagar, that realization was the pivot point of her life. Her whole story turns on that moment when she sees the God who sees her. And from then on, she knows she has a future that’s worth living for.

When you realize that you’re seen by a good and loving God, who loves you so much that he gave his life for you, you cannot stay the same. Because not only do you receive something that changes you; you are now equipped to give something that changes others.

So let’s talk about Joining the God who Sees. Do you remember the first blessing that God pronounced over Abram? Back in Genesis 12:2, he says

“I will make you into a great nation,
  and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
  and you will be a blessing.”

So the blessing of God was never intended to stop with Abram; from the very start it was intended to flow through Abram to others. “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing.”

And now God says to us, “I have seen you, and you will be a seer.” Are you following me? Because we’ve been seen by God, we are now equipped to go out and see others. Especially people who feel invisible. People that the world looks right past.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a man gets robbed; beat up; left for dead on the side of the road. Remember what happens? A priest comes down that road and sees him, but doesn’t really see. He walks right past. A Levite comes down that road and sees him, but doesn’t really see. He walks right past. Finally a Samaritan, who’s supposed to despise Jewish people, comes down the road…and sees. He stops and nurses the guy back to life. And at the end of the parable, Jesus says to everyone who’s listening: “Now go and do likewise.” In other words, go out and open your eyes and see the ones that the world walks right past.

Because we’ve been seen, we are sent out to see those who desperately need to be seen.
For many years, Norma Jean and I have been blessed with the friendship of a couple from The Chapel named Gina and Eric Harriz. Gina once shared a story with us from her childhood that I never forgot; it’s the perfect example of what we’re talking about today, and Gina has agreed to share that story with all of us today. So would you give a warm welcome to Gina Harriz.

- GINA’S STORY -

Thank you, Gina. What a powerful story
, isn’t it?

From the moment we enter this world, we are searching for eyes that are looking back at us, seeing us, telling us what we matter.

I wonder how many people God has placed around you, who have no idea that they are seen and valued by a God who loves them? And all it would take is for you to open up your eyes and see them.