"You ran well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth?"  -Galatians 5:7

 The Bible tells the story of the great patriarch, Abraham, who was called by the Lord to leave his homeland and his family.  God would lead him to a land where he had never been.  Abraham wanted to take everyone along, but the problem was that many of his family members were unbelievers.  They were dragging Abraham down spiritually.  Most notable among them was his nephew, Lot.  God told Abraham to part company with Lot, but it took him awhile to obey.  As long as Lot was hanging around, God's blessing was not upon Abraham in the way it could have been.  Finally, Abraham obeyed the Lord, and he and Lot parted ways.  Then, God's blessing came upon Abraham once again.

As you are running your race as a Christian, you may find yourself being hindered by someone.  Is there someone in your life like Lot who is slowing you down?  After spending time with certain people, do you feel spiritually drained?  Perhaps you've thought, "That person brought out the worst in me.  They didn't help me in any way."  While we want to minister to people and reach them with the gospel, we must be careful not to do so at the expense of our own spiritual lives.  There might be someone who is slowing you down in the race of life.

Is someone dragging you down spiritually?  Is someone hindering you from doing what God has called you to do?  You need to ask yourself, "Is this person a wing or a weight?  Is he or she speeding me on my way or slowing me down?"  Running the race is not just running toward what is right.  It is also running away from what is wrong.

In my preparation for the sermon on Isaac as a part of the Playmakers sermon series, I spent time reexamining his life. I discovered a wonderful attribute of life that we can all learn from. What do I speak about? It’s the patience of Isaac.

Think about this for a moment. Do you ever get tired of waiting on God to answer your prayers? I can honestly say there were moments in life where the answer to the question was a resounding…Yes!

Tired of saying the same old prayer day after day, month after month, year after year. Tired of telling God about the same old problems still going on. Tired of hearing myself pray about the same old problems, leading me to wonder if God was as tired of hearing my prayer requests as I was of praying them.

A reexamination of Isaac’s life opened my eyes to this matter of patience. I began reading about when Isaac's wife Rebekah gave birth to twin sons. One particular sentence caught my eye and I read it again and again. My heart leapt as I realized God was using this one little sentence to speak hope into my spirit.

Genesis 25:26 tells us that Isaac was sixty years old when his twins were born; a simple Bible fact, yet profoundly meaningful. You see, Isaac had been patient for the Lord to provide the perfect wife; he was forty years old when he married Rebekah. If you do the math you realize Isaac waited twenty years for Rebekah to bear him children! He could have chosen a concubine to bear him a son. But he was a man of great patience who waited on God. Eventually his patient faith was rewarded.

Isaac never gave up hope that his Lord could make the impossible, possible. He had learned that his Lord would provide. So he continued to pray the same desperate prayer for a son, day after day, month after month, year after year. In fact, we learn in Genesis 25:21 that "Isaac pleaded with the Lord" (NLT), meaning he earnestly and strongly prayed about his problem. He did not half-heartedly ask God for a son, he pleaded! He begged. He poured his heart out.

I can envision Isaac passionately pleading to God throughout those twenty years, with out-stretched arms and a tear-stained face pressed against the hot, dirty soil, begging God to answer his prayer.

Isaac was surely tired of the wait, but he never stopped praying or believing that his dreams could come true. And in God's perfect timing, they did.

If you are tired of the wait, you may be pleading to God just like Isaac. It may take twenty years for God to answer our prayers, or it may only take twenty minutes. But today, let us find comfort in remembering Isaac's patient faith and take hope in believing that God is not tired of hearing our prayers. Instead, He is simply waiting for the perfect time to answer.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

-Hebrews 11:8

Abraham stands apart from everyone else in human history. His faith stands as an incredible example to us even today.

Think about how deeply he trusted God. When God revealed Himself to Abraham, Abraham was living a life of ease and comfort in Ur, an ancient center of commerce and idolatrous religion. But when the true God called him, Abraham left that life to go to a land that he didn’t even know!

Abraham is such a great example of true faith…putting actions behind our words. Demonstrating true faith is one of the most difficult things a person can do, but Abraham did it.

And even though Abraham stands alone in the pages of history, we are like him in that we, too, are called to step out from the world in a dark and faithless time.

While God doesn’t speak to us as He spoke to Abraham, He is still calling us to follow Him and demonstrate the reality of true faith to the world.

Because Abraham was faithful, and openly demonstrated his faith in God, thousands of lives have been influenced over the centuries to follow his example. I challenge you today to let your faith shine brightly, so that others may see it and be encouraged to trust God.  

Abraham faced one of the greatest tests of obedience recorded in the Bible: God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac. It’s hard to imagine the confusion and pain this request must have caused. However, Abraham obeyed willingly and promptly. His response teaches important lessons about yielding to God. 

• Obedience often collides with reason. God had promised Abraham descendants too numerous to count, but He then asked for the father of those descendants to be sacrificed. In spite of the strangeness of the command, Abraham trusted God to keep His promise and so he set out to obey (Hebrews 11:18-19).

• Obedience means leaving the consequences to God. Abraham had no idea how the promise could be fulfilled if Isaac was dead. But his words and actions indicate he believed in divine sovereignty. When Abraham took the boy to Mount Moriah, he told his servants, “…I and the lad will go over there; and we will worship and return to you” (Genesis 22:5). He didn’t say, “I will return” but expressed that both would come back. Abraham went to the holy place, determined to obey. At the same time, he fully expected that the Lord would somehow preserve Isaac in order to keep His pledge. God did this by providing a ram in the boy’s place (vv. 13-14). 

The Lord already knows how His children will respond to tests of obedience. He challenges people because He wants them to know the truth about how well they submit. A believer’s willingness to obey (or disobey) reveals the state of his or her commitment to God.