Hey God, I'M WAITING!!!!

This is my sermon text from a couple weeks ago (February 27-28) as part of our "Faith Examples" part of Hebrews 11, specifically Hebrews 11.1; 8-22, the story of Abraham.

Do you remember lay-aways?

When I was growing up, I thought you bought everything, except groceries, by lay-away. For those of you who don’t recall this concept, which is coming back, you would go to a department store, (ours was K-mart, and once in a while, Sears) find the stuff you wanted to buy, and take it to the back of the store. There, the clerk would ring up what you brought back there, and you would pay a portion of the total. They would take your stuff, and put it on a shelf or in its own bin. Then, every week or two, you would come in and make a payment. When you paid off the total, the stuff was yours.

Those of you new to this concept may be asking, why didn’t you just pay for it with a credit card? Good question. Credit cards back in the time of rotary phones weren’t as easy to get, nor as prominent. Plus, there was no interest or service charge made on lay-aways.

Lay-aways were great for Christmas shopping, or buying birthday presents, as long as you got a good head start on shopping. But it stunk if your age was in the single digits, and you picked out the toy, like the Evel Knievel stunt cycle and jump van, for example, to be a present and you had to wait week after week as you went with your mom to the back of Kmart to see your Evel Knievel stunt cycle and jump van sitting on the shelf. By the time you got it, you were excited, but not as excited as you were a month earlier.

While lay-away is a good method for making purchases, it is the opposite of the instant gratification that we have come to expect. And that kids in their single digits always want.

Lay-aways take the reality of what we want, and make us hope and wait for it.

Delayed gratification takes some maturity to understand and deal with. It takes faith.

Abraham and Sarah were promised by God to receive an inheritance of land. But they had to go to it in order to claim it. After a long trip, they eventually arrived there and lived in the land God promised them.

But they didn’t build a home their, they lived there in tents. They lived in tents, as did their son, Isaac, and their grandson, Jacob. This was the start of fulfilling another promise that God made to Abraham and Sarah; their descendants would be a mighty nation, and their descendants would be as numerous as stars in the sky.

The promises God made to Abraham and Sarah made were fulfilled. However, Abraham and Sarah weren’t around to see them.

These people died in faith without receiving the promises, but they saw the promises from a distance and welcomed them

Abraham and Sarah trusted God would do what God said, even if they wouldn’t see the end results. Even when you are making payments on something, you know you will get it, eventually, even though it seems like it takes forever.

But Abraham and Sarah only got a glimpse of the promise, a taste of what was to come. They kept trusting, even though they had other opportunities.

They are looking for a homeland. If they had been thinking about the country that they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return to it. But at this point in time, they are longing for a better country, that is, a heavenly one.

Abraham and Sarah persevered because they trusted God would fulfill what was promised to them, even if they wouldn’t see all of the results. They had faith in God, even when it seemed like those promises would take forever to be fulfilled.

They had faith, even when God asked other things of them, such as when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the son he and Sarah had waited so long for. And God was faithful to Abraham when he provided a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice instead.

Because of his father’s example, Isaac was faithful in sharing his blessing with his sons, Jacob & Esau. Jacob likewise blessed his sons, and the sons of his favorite son, Joseph. Joseph trusted in the promises that God had made to his great-grandfather, Abraham, and told his sons, and their descendants, to take his bones with them when they would return to the Promised Land.

Lay-aways went away because it wasn’t quick enough for us. Now, we can go to stores and walk out with what we want, even if we can’t afford it. We can finance it, put it on the plastic or do other things that allow us to fulfill our wants. We don’t even have to go to the store. We can shop over the internet and have these things delivered to us.

The concept of a promise to us not being fulfilled beyond our lifetime is strange to us. But this is God’s world, not ours. And God’s promises are fulfilled on God’s time, not ours. We wonder if we can trust God to fulfill what God has promised.

Let me give you an example of a promise God has fulfilled. When we pray the prayer that Jesus taught, we say (using the wording we will use in a moment) Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.

We pray that God’s kingdom will come, and God’s will to be done here on earth. We wait for God’s kingdom to arrive.

In 17^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees ask Jesus when God’s kingdom would come. He answered, God’s kingdom is already among you.

We don’t have to go to the back of the store to wait for installments of God’s promises. They are here. God’s kingdom is here. It is up to us to do God’s work so that through us, all of God’s promises may be fulfilled.

P    Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

C   and the conviction of things not seen.