The Promised One: Advent Day 3

Read & Journal

Read Genesis 21:1-7. Consider using these journal prompts to help you engage more deeply with the passage:

• Take a minute to simply sit with what you’ve read. What happened in these verses? Outline it briefly in your own words.

• What do these verses teach you about God and his character?

• What does this passage teach you about God and his promises? Why is that important?

• In the New Living Translation, Genesis 21:1 begins with the phrase “The Lord kept his word.” When have you doubted that God would keep his word?

• How has God shown you that he is faithful to his promises, even if they don’t happen according to your timeline? Be specific.

Ponder

In Genesis 18, when Sarah heard God’s promise that she would have a son, she laughed. Maybe it was a laugh of incredulity, a reaction to the sheer impossibility of it all. Maybe, as Russ Ramsey writes in his Advent Narrative, Behold the Lamb of God, it was the “laugh of turning away”1 because Sarah had reached her end. After all these years, all the longing, all this time waiting for the promised son, maybe Sarah found it hard to believe that God’s promise would ever be fulfilled.

But as Genesis 21 begins, “The Lord kept his word and did for Sarah exactly what he had promised” (NLT). Sarah gave birth to the promised son “at just the time God had said” (Gen. 21:2, NLT), and Abraham named the child Isaac, which means “he laughs.” Sarah, who had laughed when she heard the news that she would soon have a baby—out of doubt or fear or distraught longing and desperation, out of a strange hope that wanted it to be true but didn’t want to get her hopes up, not again—now held a child named Laughter. Through her sorrow, doubt, fear and longing, God had brought her joy and laughter.

God had promised to bless the nations through Abraham’s lineage, and now with the birth of this child, he had set that promise in motion. Despite our doubts, fears and longing, our hope and impatience, our God is a God who always keeps his promises.

1Russ Ramsey, Behold the Lamb of God. (Nashville, Tenn: Rabbit Room Press, 2011), 33.