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Thrive: In God’s Perfect Timing
Lead Pastor: Rollan Fisher
Has the last year and a half been a waste, simply a bust?
Have we lost a sense of the call of God?
Is there a way to get back on track to once again thrive in the life and purposes of God?
We’re going to answer these questions today as we look at the life of Abraham on the verge of receiving his son Isaac, digging into a few words that Jesus expressed about his Kingdom and the understanding it gave the Apostle Paul in regards to this Kingdom.
Focus: We will thrive in every season when we embrace the perfect timing of God.
Lost Time
You Have Not Missed It
The Perfect Timing of God
Lost Time
We will begin to thrive when we realize that time we thought lost was actually useful to God.
Abraham had a promise from God that he received at the age of seventy-five.
Yet in between that promise being given and where we pick up in the story today, Abraham could have had moments of questioning God’s sovereignty.
Despite his many detours, Abraham would come to find that God’s Word remained true that:
Romans 11:29
“…the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
Genesis 21:1-7
The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.
Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.
Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. And Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.” And she said, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”
Preparing to thrive begins with thanking God for what he has already given you rather than what you do not have.
Abraham was blessed financially and societally, but still lacked one of the deepest needs for the human soul to be fulfilled - the need to build a family.
*God was letting Abraham know that to truly thrive God would give Abraham and Sarah a family that the Lord himself would build.
This same blessing continues today as God builds his spiritual household in Christ.
You are never wasting time when you are building God’s family in Christ.
Everyone who belongs to Jesus is a part of that family and a lineage that far proceeds and will far exceed them.
It is not that you can not survive without a strong attachment to family.
It is that you will not thrive as Christ intends bereft of the fundamental need that God has given you for family (both naturally and spiritually) to define you, shape you, strengthen you and bring you into the multi-generational purposes of God.
Family is God given - both naturally and spiritually.
What you feel like you are missing naturally, God will always exceedingly provide with spiritual family in Christ (Psalm 27:9,10 ; Matthew 19:27-30).
The first (natural family) is your base and has all the benefits and potential failings of Adam.
The second (which should include the first) should be an expression of the second man, Christ, and be intentionally reflective of his redemptive gospel purposes.
Isaac is the bridge between Abraham and Jacob - the link between hearing the promise of God and seeing its first-fruits (Christ).
Isaac would represent the stage between taking the first steps of faith towards God’s promise and seeing the manifest momentum of that promise.
For years, Abraham and Sarah were marked by the cultural stigma regarding what they did not have, rather than what they did.
God made them a promise with it’s foundation in his purposes to bring salvation to the world through Jesus Christ.
Abraham received the promise to have Isaac at seventy-five years old (Genesis 12:4).
Sarah, his wife, conceived at age ninety (Genesis 17:15-17) by the supernatural intervention of God.
Isaac was finally born when Abraham was one hundred years old (Genesis 21:5).
What this tells us is that whether a child of destiny like Isaac or feeling past your prime like Abraham and Sarah, you have a call in God to fulfill today!
What you are doing now matters.
You are where you are, at the stage of life you are, doing what you are doing with whom you are doing it for God to demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit through you!
Just as Isaac’s birth was a miraculous testimony to everyone who surrounded Abraham and Sarah, you are where you are in the stage of life you are to reach the people who surround you with the good news of Jesus Christ.
As Isaac was born, we see that God’s promise to make Abraham a mighty nation through which all nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12) was evidence to Abraham that though many years of unfulfilled longing had passed, he had not missed the purposes of God.
With twenty-twenty hindsight, how can you see that God has been using time that you thought lost?
You Have Not Missed It
We will begin to thrive when we begin to recognize what God is doing in our period of waiting.
As you love Jesus and obey his commands, God is with you in the waiting.
What did Abraham and Sarah learn during their time of waiting?
The call of God on their lives was more than just about their personal comfort, fulfillment or dreams.
The promise of God in their lives was to reveal their son, and by lineage, God’s Son, Jesus Christ, to the nations.
The purpose of God’s delay in their lives was to demonstrate his miraculous power.
In our modern cultures, we are often too self-focused.
Abraham’s life was lived in humble devotion as he worked his business, led his family and sought the face of God.
Don’t miss the will of God because of a romanticized picture of your destiny.
As Abraham intentionally walked with God, he did not miss the purposes of God for his life or family, though nothing visibly ostentatious came from it for seventy-five recorded years.
And you are not missing it where you are if you are faithfully seeking Jesus, loving your family, church and community, making disciples with the opportunities where you find yourself today.
God used all of that time to prepare for the nation of Israel, the coming of the Messiah and eventually the birth of the church of Jesus Christ.
God uses our waiting to develop the character, perseverance and strength of Christ in us.
If you are looking at what you don’t have, you will miss God’s program for utilizing what you do have.
***What you have the opportunity to do TODAY is the will of God.
****You are not missing life or your destiny if you are faithful to live a godly life, seek the Lord and make disciples today.
The opportunity that you have right now IS the place, will and call of God for you.
***How faithful you are with these daily opportunities determines the measure to which God opens up others for you.
Do not forsake your future harvest by despising what God has given you to cultivate today.
Proverbs 28:19
Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.
God here is referring to the land that you have today, not that which you hope to inherit at some point in the future.
The internet, boasting of social media and our entertainment fill us with fantasies, devoid of the posture of devotion to God, hard work and perseverance required to attain such things.
That is what some of you feel like after this past year.
Whether it be in regards to marriage, parenting, your career or ministry calling, you have not missed anything God intended for you if you remain in step with him.
What God is doing in the waiting is building perseverance and strength to fulfill the call in his people.
“Behind every strong person is a story that gave them no other choice.”
-Anonymous
Jesus as the Son of God would not begin his ministry until after thirty years of obscurity working faithfully in a tiny town of Nazareth in the small nation of Israel.
It is from this place and in the perfect timing of the Father, at a time that the world had been connected in new and significant ways through the Roman Empire, that Jesus would begin his worldwide discipleship campaign to save the nations.
Every fulfilled work of God begins with a seed.
After years of barrenness, Abraham had to continue to sow seeds of faith with his wife Sarah for Isaac to be born.
That is where many of you are today - needing to learn to sow seeds of faith to see the first-fruits of the promises of God manifest.
The priorities and focus of your life need to be that seed offered in sacrifice to God.
John 12:20-33
Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
25 Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
26 If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.
27 “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour.
28 Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine.
31 Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.
32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.
Many times God is teaching us through circumstance that we need to die to ourselves and our selfishness before we can truly live.
Jesus clearly expressed over and over again that the Kingdom of God is the only thing that truly endures.
We begin to truly thrive when we anchor ourselves in eternal rather than temporary things.
*Many of us need to rehabilitate from the social anxiety produced over this past year to relate in healthy manners with the world again.
Yet even as we do, we must acknowledge that what is constant is that circumstances change.
Life is finite.
Loves will be lost as people inevitably age and pass away.
What God is trying to give you is eternal, that which can not be shaken, stolen or faded.
When we embrace the fact that God will lovingly use all things to press us into a healthy dependence on him and a focus on his eternal Kingdom, we will interpret our times correctly and continue to thrive.
The Perfect Timing of God
We will thrive in our lives when we acknowledge that God’s perfect timing is meant to reveal and form Christ in us.
Galatians 4:1-7
I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
God is always perfect in his timing to accomplish his Kingdom purposes.
“God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.”
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine
Just as Abraham and Sarah had to the reach the limits of their physical capacities’ to truly enter into the miracle life of God, so let us meet Jesus at the cross today, so that by repentance and faith in his God’s perfect timing, we might thrive as we submit to God’s greater Kingdom purposes in Christ.
Second City Church - Pastor Rollan Fisher 2021