Is Anything Too Difficult for God
Sermon by Mark Johnson of Steiger Minneapolis
Now, the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, while he was sitting at the tent door in the heat of the day. When he lifted up his eyes and looked, behold, three men were standing opposite him; and when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth, and said, “My lord, if now I have found favor in your sight, please do not pass your servant by. Please let a little water be brought and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree; and I will bring a piece of bread that you may refresh yourselves; after that, you may go on, since you have visited your servant.”
And they said, “So do, as you have said.”
So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah and said, “Quickly, prepare three measures of fine flour, knead it and make bread cakes.”
Abraham also ran to the herd, and took a tender and choice calf and gave it to the servant, and he hurried to prepare it. He took curds and milk and the calf which he had prepared, and placed it before them; and he was standing by them under the tree as they ate.
Then they said to him, “Where is Sarah your wife?”
And he said, “There, in the tent.”
He said, “I will surely return to you at this time next year; and behold, Sarah your wife shall have a son.”
And Sarah was listening at the tent door, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; Sarah was past childbearing. Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?”
And the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, when I am so old?’ Is anything too difficult for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.”
Sarah denied it however, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid.
And he said, “No, but you did laugh.”
Genesis 18:1-15
I have been thinking recently about how the assumptions we have about life and reality affect the way we live. And I wonder if part of the reason Christians so often don’t seem different from other people is that we have the same assumptions about reality. I want to use this story to discuss one of the main things that I think is vital for us to hold as basic assumption about reality.
First, let’s just look at the story itself. Abraham is now 99 years old, and he has been waiting twenty-four years since God first gave him the promise of a son. On this particular day, he is sitting by his tent, probably trying to escape some of the summer heat by sitting in the shade of the tent flaps. And suddenly, God appears. The author of the story makes it very clear what is happening, so the reader has no question, but the interesting thing is that Abraham also seems to realize what is going on, even though he apparently just sees three men. Now, Abraham has met God before, but this is different. Yet his excited response shows that either he never gets visitors, or he realizes that something divine is happening. He is a 99-year-old man, yet he runs to the men and begs them to come visit him. He runs around like a little kid at Christmas, preparing a huge amount of food (way more than they would have needed), and even killing a calf for the guests, which was a rare thing to do. There is a sense of haste in his behavior, as if he felt a call to action when he saw the men.
While the men eat, Abraham waits on them; he doesn’t eat like a host would do, but rather stands alongside them like a servant. While Sarah listens from the tent, the men begin talking about the promise God made to Abraham 24 years ago, and they say that it will be fulfilled in one more year. Sarah hears that and laughs. Now, when Abraham had originally received the promise, he had fallen down laughing, so he has done the same thing as Sarah. But I think there are different types of laughter in cases like this. For example, you know how sometimes you laugh on the outside but are actually hopeful on the inside? I don’t think that is the kind of laugh Sarah is laughing here. She had been waiting for a child her whole life, and she lived in a culture where your very identity was wrapped up in having a child. And by now, she has gone through menopause and has no chance of conceiving; she is past hope. So her laugh seems to be one of cynicism, ridicule, and total hopelessness.
God’s response to Sarah’s laughter highlights one of the key assumptions about reality that I think we need to have. He says, “Is anything too difficult for the Lord?”
I think that this is a key teaching throughout Scripture - from the Exodus, to the nativity stories, to Jesus’ teaching. But here, Sarah is saying, “Yes, this is too difficult for the Lord.” And I think we need to answer this for ourselves - whether we will say yes or no.
See, Sarah had gotten used to being childless. It was her life. And the thought of being anything other than what she was, made her laugh. Sometimes we are the same, when deep down, we believe that we can’t be free of whatever is hanging onto us, and we laugh when people suggest otherwise. Now, some of our dreams are about ourselves and building our own kingdom, and when it comes down to it, they are immature and selfish. Those kinds of dreams need to die. But some of our dreams are from God and are about his Kingdom. And when they don’t happen, sometimes we give up and resign ourselves to this being “just the way life is.” Maybe you have dreams about making a difference in the world, or even just of having one prayer answered, and you feel like there is no evidence of those things happening. Or maybe you love God and have really made an effort to tell friends and family about Jesus, but nothing has changed, so you have resigned yourself to that. It is easy to give up, to get cynical and stop believing that miracles - or anything impressive or dramatic at all - ever happen. If we’re honest, who among us could really fault Sarah for laughing?
Well, I want to issue an invitation to have hope again - to hope in the fact that nothing is impossible for God.
When God gives a promise, the whole weight of his character, his glory, and his holiness is behind it, and you know, God keeps his promises. Sometimes we get hung up because we think that God has promised something that he hasn’t. But if he has actually made us a promise, we need to hang onto hope. Sometimes it takes a long time, but God is a God of promises, and my prayer is that God would awaken hope in us. Because those things that we have given up on and forgotten, he hasn’t forgotten.
And more than that, I want to look for impossible things to happen. I want to see someone come to know Jesus every week at our church. I want our congregation to be experts in knowing how to seek God. I want the church to have the power of God demonstrated in signs and wonders. Maybe those things are already happening where you are, but I want to challenge you to seek God for impossible things and hope in the fact that nothing is too difficult for the Lord.
One other thing - I have written before about how God uses the ordinary things of the universe to speak, to bring blessing, and to bring judgment. This happens again here. Abraham sees three men. Just men. They could have easily just passed by without him making a fuss. But Abraham ran after them because he recognized that he was being visited by God.
Centuries later, Jesus said that Jerusalem didn’t recognize the time of his visitation. So I have to ask, "Are we aware of God in our life?" Are our eyes open to see him? Is it possible that God has spoken many times to us, and we have missed it, because it seemed too ordinary? On the day of judgment, Jesus will separate the sheep from the goats based on how we have treated the least among us. Is it possible that we go by the very presence of God in our neighborhoods or see him on TV screens, and just walk by? Our response to the lowly, ordinary things will be how Jesus judges us, because it either shows that our heart is fully alive to God or that we ignore his presence.
So if we see the presence of God, let’s run, hurry; respond quickly! Invite his presence, whether he appears in an impressive form or in the most ordinary, lowly way.
And if you have lost hope, cry out to Jesus. If God is reminding you of something that you had forgotten, pray into that. Perhaps his answer to your prayers has come in such an ordinary way that you have not noticed it. Or perhaps the promise is still to come. But one thing I know is that nothing is too difficult for the Lord.
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