August 26, 2026

GOD’S WORD FOR TODAY:

“God also said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.‘” (Genesis 17.15-16)

REFLECTION ON GOD’S WORD:

If we remember back to when Abraham was Abram and first called by God to go where God would lead him, we would remember God’s promise, “I will bless you to be a blessing.” (Genesis 12.2) In today’s scripture for further reflection, we must hear this promise shared with Abraham concerning the same intentionality for Sarah. God was promising that Sarah would be blessed in order to be a blessing. She would be a blessing to Abraham by God’s own hand and bear a son to him who would carry on the promise to and legacy of Abraham for future generations. His name would be Isaac meaning laughter and joy. Following this divine declaration, we would hear Abraham laugh (verse 17.17 with incredulity) and Sarah laugh (verse 18.12). In truth, if we had been present at the time, we would have heard Abraham laugh as he fell face down before God. While he spoke to himself in doing so, he spoke out loud before God expressing the impossibility of such a thing because of his age and Sarah’s. In fact, he believed in it so little that he asked God to pass the blessing and promise on to Ishmael. Abraham simply could not fathom the fullness of what God had said. He did not remember the promise of God, “I will bless you to be a blessing.” In that moment, Abraham eliminated Sarah from the promise by asking God to favor Ishmael. Abraham could not “conceive,” figuratively, that Sarah would “conceive,” literally. He could not grasp that Sarah would be blessed by God through him so that she would know the joy, Isaac, of bearing a child. He could not grasp, because of the limitation of his faith imagination, that he and Sarah would become as one in such a wonderful and powerful way (as it had been their hope for years and heretofore unrealized.)

But God has no limit to His faith, imagination. Now why God waited all this time to effect the change in Sarah so that she would be able to bear a child is known only to God. We know in our own faith imagination that God’s timing is perfect (Ecclesiastes 3.1, Habakkuk 2.3, Galatians 4.4 to reference a few). God sees far more than we can even imagine. He sees the end and completion of His will and actually plans backward the best of all options to the be,ginning on how to make that end happen. I wonder if we truly stopped to consider the fullness of such “backward planning” how we would see the steps we take forward day by day. Obviously, without God’s occasional course corrections in our lives (also with a purpose to allow us to choose and thus also see how God still desires us to be a part of the whole picture) we might now see the fulness come to fruition. Actually, we will not all see it until we are gathered together in Heaven by the Great Shepherd who seeks the lost and unites them with the found on that Last Day. It will be at that time when Heaven will resound with the true spiritual laugh and joy, as in Isaac, which is our true worship. When we will see how all things fit together for good as God promised to work it, what a day of rejoicing that will be! It will be a day that will last forever because we will not know how to exhaust the joy of that revelation. It will be at that point when we will understand better how we were blessed to be a blessing. On this side of heaven, we may not fully realize that reality which God has promised to each of us. We wspanill have attempted to contrive such scenarios for our own satisfaction and validation, but nothing will compare when we see how our desire to surrender to the will of God in and for our lives was so much better than anything we could have imagined. When we see it, we, like Abraham and Sarah, will be caught up in that incredible and impossible to believe laughter. Is there anything that God cannot do to bring about the fulfillment of His promise to bless us to be a blessing? NO! Sadly, however, we can deny and cast aside such a truth and reality in pursuing our own truth as if it were the only truth that mattered. It is at that point that God will weep for “those who have eyes to see but refuse to see and ears to hear but refuse to listen.” It will be for those an eternal “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” far across a chasm that cannot be spanned even by the goodness and grace of Almighty God. Why? Because they will simply never allow themselves to believe it. Abraham and Sarah laughed because they doubted themselves. They wept for joy because they refused to doubt the God who believed in them.

TODAY’S PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING:

Father, in these days we are finding the need to believe even more than ever before. We all have known trouble, some in greater ways than others, but You are offering us the assurance that we will not be consumed by it forever. Regardless of the “time” we are in and the “time” we have been given, we ask for Your Holy Spirit which Jesus asked You to share with us, to lead and guide and direct us in the paths we should go. Teach us what we still need to learn. Empower us to put that learning into action. Bless our actions not as a works righteousness endeavor, but as righteous works of faith, hope and love in Jesus’ name. AMEN.