One of the things I have learned in my months here joining this church family in Snow Hill is more about farming than I ever thought I would know.
One thing I’ve learned quickly is that on a working farm, every acre has a purpose. Most fields are planted with clear expectations. You know what should grow there. You know roughly when harvest should come. Productivity is visible, measurable, and understood.
But sometimes there’s a field that looks different. To a random outsider, it might not even look like a field at all. It’s a field set aside for pine trees.
At first glance, that can be confusing. Those trees don’t produce anything right away. They take up land that could be used for crops that pay off sooner. For years, they look small, slow, and unimpressive. To someone who doesn’t know the plan, it can look like wasted ground.
But the farmer didn’t misunderstand the field.
The field was chosen for a different purpose.
It was set aside for something that takes time. Something that grows quietly. Something whose value won’t be visible for years, maybe decades. The slow growth doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It means something intentional is happening beneath the surface.
In the same way, God sometimes sets aside seasons of our lives that don’t look productive to anyone watching. Seasons that don’t make sense from the outside. Seasons where progress is hard to measure and fulfillment feels far away.
Not because God has forgotten.
Not because the promise has failed.
But because the purpose requires time.
Sarah’s life looks a lot like that kind of field.
Much of her story unfolds in seasons that don’t look fruitful—seasons where the promise seems planted but nothing appears to be growing. And yet, God had already set the field aside. God knew what would come from it, even when no one else could see it yet.
And once we start seeing life that way—once we recognize that some seasons are set aside by God for purposes that take time—it changes how we read Scripture. We stop looking only for dramatic moments and start paying attention to long stories. We begin to notice that the Bible isn’t just interested in flashes of faith, but in faith that endures quietly, faithfully, year after year, even when the outcome isn’t clear.
Most of us are comfortable talking about faith in moments.
A moment of calling.
A moment of surrender.
A moment when God shows up clearly and powerfully.
But Scripture is far more interested in faith lived over a lifetime.
That’s why the story of Sarah matters so much. Not because of one moment, but because of the long arc of her life. Sarah’s story is not a highlight reel of spiritual victories. It is a slow, honest account of what it looks like to live faithfully when God’s promises unfold over decades instead of days.
Sarah does not teach us how to wait patiently for a short season. She teaches us how to live faithfully when waiting becomes the shape of our life.
So the question we’re asking today is not simply, “How do we wait on God?”
It’s deeper than that.
What does Sarah teach us about living faithfully over a lifetime when God’s promises unfold slowly?
Because that’s where most of us live. Not in moments of clarity, but in years of trusting. Not in instant fulfillment, but in long obedience.
Faithfulness begins with obedience before clarity
When we first meet Sarah in Scripture, she is not at the beginning of her life. She is about 65 years old when God calls Abram to leave everything familiar behind. By that point, most of life’s patterns are already set. Home is established. Family is known. The future feels settled, not open and yet in some important ways she is already facing challenges that would make faithful living difficult.
Sarah begins her journey not with a promise spoken directly to her, but with a decision to follow one spoken to her husband. In Genesis 12, God calls Abram to leave everything familiar behind, and Sarah goes with him. She leaves her homeland, her extended family, and whatever sense of security she had built over decades of life.
That alone is no small thing.
But almost immediately, Sarah’s challenges begin to compound. Shortly after arriving in a new land, famine strikes. The promise of blessing leads not to abundance, but to scarcity. They are forced to leave the land God led them to and go down into Egypt just to survive.
And it’s there that Sarah faces one of the most vulnerable moments of her life.
Because of her beauty, she is asked to hide her marriage in order to protect Abram. Sarah becomes exposed to danger, objectified, and powerless in a foreign land — all while trying to live faithfully inside a promise that doesn’t yet seem to be working the way it was supposed to.
This is not a story of smooth obedience followed by immediate reward. This is faith lived under pressure.
And the greatest challenge Sarah carries doesn’t go away with time.
Year after year, she remains childless.
In the ancient world, barrenness was not just personal grief — it was social shame. It affected identity, security, and a woman’s place in the family and the future. Sarah is living inside a promise of descendants while her own body seems to contradict it.
And still, she goes on.
Scripture tells us that ten years pass after the promise is first spoken. Ten years of trusting. Ten years of hoping. Ten years of quiet questions with no visible answers. By the time we reach Genesis 16, Sarah is no longer young, and the waiting has become heavy.
Her faithfulness at this stage does not look triumphant. It looks patient. It looks persistent. It looks like staying when leaving would have been easier.
Sarah teaches us something essential here: faithful living over a lifetime often begins with obedience that is costly, confusing, and unresolved. It begins before clarity. Before fulfillment. Before the promise makes sense.
For many of us, this is where faith actually lives. Not in moments where everything lines up, but in seasons where obedience continues even when circumstances raise more questions than answers.
Sarah’s story reminds us that faithfulness is not measured by how quickly God’s promises unfold, but by the willingness to keep walking with God when they haven’t yet.
And that kind of faith, lived quietly and consistently, is where the long story begins.
Faithfulness is tested and shaped in disappointment, not just devotion
Waiting does not only test patience.
If we’re honest, waiting can tempt us to stop trusting altogether.
By the time we reach Genesis 16, Sarah has been waiting ten years. She is now about 75 years old and ten years have passed since the promise was first spoken. Ten years without a child. Ten years of watching time move forward while the promise stands still.
And this is where Scripture shows us something uncomfortable — and necessary.
Sarah does not simply grow weary. She stops trusting God to keep His promise in God’s way.
She decides to give Abram one of her servant girls, Hagar, to bear a child for him. In the culture of the day, this arrangement was legally permitted — but Scripture makes clear that what was culturally acceptable was spiritually wrong. What happens with Hagar is not creative problem-solving or a reasonable alternative. It is a failure of faith, and the consequences confirm that assessment.
Sarah takes control of what God had promised to do. She substitutes human strategy for divine faithfulness. Instead of waiting on the Lord, she attempts to manufacture the outcome.
And the results are devastating.
Hagar is used, not honored.
A child is born into conflict.
Jealousy, resentment, and cruelty follow.
The household fractures.
And Scripture is clear that the consequences do not stop there. Genesis tells us that this decision gives rise to hostility that extends across generations — a conflict between the descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac that continues to this day.
This is not a neutral episode in the story.
It is very wrong.
Genesis does not soften this moment, and neither should we. When God makes a promise, taking control away from Him is never harmless. Acting out of impatience does not merely affect us — it wounds others, often far beyond what we can see.
Sarah’s failure here teaches us something sobering: faith abandoned under pressure does not lead to freedom, but to harm.
And yet — and this matters — this is not the end of Sarah’s story.
Years later, when God speaks again in Genesis 18, Sarah laughs. That laughter is not innocent, but it is honest. It reveals a heart shaped by disappointment, regret, and the memory of what happened when she tried to force God’s hand.
God does not affirm her doubt — but He also does not abandon her.
Instead, He asks a question that cuts through everything she has learned to believe:
“Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
That question does not excuse her failure. It confronts it. It calls Sarah back to trust — not in herself, not in strategies, not in timing that feels manageable — but in God alone.
This is where Scripture speaks very clearly to us.
There are moments when waiting tempts us to take control. When obedience feels too slow. When trust feels too risky. When we convince ourselves that doing something — anything — is better than waiting on God.
Sarah teaches us the danger of that thinking.
Faithfulness over a lifetime does not mean we will never fail. But it does mean we must be honest when we do. God does not bless our attempts to replace trust with control. But He does invite us to recommit ourselves to surrender.
Waiting exposes what is really happening in our hearts. Sometimes what it exposes is fear. Sometimes impatience. Sometimes pride. And when that exposure happens, the faithful response is not rationalizing our choices — it is a recommitment to surrender.
Sarah’s story reminds us that God’s promises are never advanced by taking them out of God’s hands. This is why John Wesley once warned the church in his Sermon titled “The Means of Grace” that even our most faithful practices can become dangerous if we trust them more than we trust God. Wesley observed that some people place the whole of their faith in religious activity itself, while others believe that simply doing the right things carries power on its own. And he cautioned against both extremes. Without the Spirit of God at work, even the most faithful practices cannot produce life.
Sarah did not fail because she stopped believing in God altogether. She failed because she trusted a human solution to accomplish a divine promise. And that brings us to the heart of grace — because what humans cannot produce, God remains faithful to perform.
Faithfulness is ultimately defined by God’s faithfulness, not ours
Before we talk about the fulfillment of the promise, we need to and pay attention to how God moves through this this phase of Sarah’s life.
Because the grace in Sarah’s story is not just that the promise comes.
It’s how God carries it forward long before Sarah believes it.
In Genesis 17, God speaks again to Abraham. This time, the promise becomes more specific. God does not just promise descendants — He promises a son. And for the first time, God names him.
“You shall call his name Isaac.”
That name matters. Isaac means laughter.
Notice what has not happened yet.
Sarah has not laughed.
Sarah has not responded.
Sarah is not even present in the conversation.
Once again, God is speaking about Sarah, not to Sarah.
God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a son, that kings will come from her, that this promise will be fulfilled within a year. Abraham laughs — openly — and yet God does not rebuke him. God simply restates the promise and repeats the name.
Isaac. Laughter.
Then the story moves forward.
In Genesis 18, God returns — not to Sarah, but again to Abraham. The visitors arrive, and Abraham welcomes them. Sarah is inside the tent, doing what she has always done in this story — listening from the margins.
Her position has not changed.
- She is still not the one being addressed.
- She is still not the one receiving the promise directly.
- She is still hearing her future discussed in someone else’s conversation.
And this matters.
Sarah’s life has not suddenly improved. Her circumstances are unchanged. She is still old, she’s now 90 years old! She’s still childless, still waiting and still on the sidelines while God speaks to her husband about her body, her future, her promise.
When the visitors repeat what God has already said — that Sarah will have a son within the year — Sarah laughs.
But she does not laugh out loud.
She laughs to herself.
It is a private laugh. A quiet, internal response. Nothing in the text suggests that Abraham hears her. Nothing suggests the visitors hear her. As far as Sarah knows, no one but her knows what she is thinking.
And yet God responds.
“Why did Sarah laugh?”
This is the moment that shifts everything.
God is not just announcing power.
He is revealing intimacy.
God hears what Sarah never voices. He knows what she never shares. He responds not to her outward obedience, but to her inward disbelief. And when Sarah denies it — afraid, embarrassed, exposed — God gently but firmly tells the truth.
“Yes, you did laugh.”
This is not humiliation.
It is recognition.
God is showing Sarah — and us — that she has never been invisible. Not when she was waiting. Not when she was sidelined. Not when she was doubting in private. God has been present in the interior spaces of her life the entire time.
And still — the promise stands.
God does not rename the child.
God does not delay the timeline.
God does not revoke the word spoken in Genesis 17.
Isaac is still coming.
Laughter is still the name.
Grace is already in motion.
And then — after all of this — after the long waiting, the missteps, the sidelining, the private laughter, and the truth spoken gently but firmly; Genesis 21 tells us what God does next without any drama, rebuke, explanation or conditions.
21 The Lord kept his word and did for Sarah exactly what he had promised. 2 She became pregnant, and she gave birth to a son for Abraham in his old age. This happened at just the time God had said it would. 3 And Abraham named their son Isaac. 4 Eight days after Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him as God had commanded. 5 Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born.
That is the center of the entire story.
It says the Lord did what He had promised at just the time He said He would.
After 25 years, God keeps His word — fully, deliberately, and personally.
And notice how Scripture frames it. This is not just the fulfillment of a promise made to Abraham. It is explicitly a promise fulfilled for Sarah. The woman who waited. The woman who failed. The woman who laughed in private. The woman who thought no one heard.
God had heard her the entire time.
And when Sarah holds Isaac, the laughter finally makes sense.
The name God spoke before Sarah believed becomes the name she now understands. The laughter that once came from disbelief becomes laughter shaped by joy. Grace does not erase the past — it redeems it. God does not pretend Sarah never doubted. He transforms the very thing that once revealed her fear into testimony.
This is how grace works.
- Grace does not deny that we failed.
- Grace does not minimize the harm of our mistakes.
- Grace does not rush the process.
- Grace redeems our past!
God remains faithful long enough to finish what He began — not because we never struggled, but because He never stopped working.
Sarah’s story teaches us that faithfulness over a lifetime is not about getting every season right. It is about returning, again and again, to the God who has already named the promise and will bring it to pass in His time.
The waiting was not wasted.
The sidelining was not abandonment.
The silence was not absence.
Grace was at work the whole time.
And that is the good news for anyone who has waited longer than they hoped, trusted less perfectly than they wished, or wondered whether God was still faithful after everything that has come before.
The Lord did for Sarah what He had promised.
And He is still the same God today.
Conclusion
So what do we do with a story like Sarah’s?
We do not leave it thinking, “If I could just wait better, God would move faster.”
We do not leave it believing that doubt disqualifies us or that failure cancels God’s promises.
We leave it trusting the God who has already set the field aside.
Earlier, we talked about those pine fields on working farms — land that looks unproductive to anyone who doesn’t know the plan. Fields that don’t show visible results year after year. Fields that seem wasted to the impatient eye.
- But the farmer never forgot the field.
- The farmer never doubted its purpose.
- The farmer never stopped tending what was planted.
Sarah’s life was like that.
For decades, nothing seemed to change. She waited while God spoke to others. She listened from the margins. She carried hope, disappointment, obedience, failure, and fear — often all at the same time. And yet, God had already named the promise. God had already set the timeline. God had already decided how the story would end.
- The waiting was not abandonment.
- The silence was not absence.
- The delay was not denial.
Grace was at work the whole time.
Sarah teaches us that living faithfully over a lifetime does not mean always believing perfectly or never struggling honestly. It means staying close to the God who remains faithful even when our faith wavers. It means trusting that God hears not only our prayers, but our unspoken doubts. It means believing that the God who names promises before we understand them is strong enough to fulfill them in His time.
And when Scripture finally says, “The Lord did for Sarah what he had promised,” it is not just a statement about the past. It is a declaration about who God is.
- The same God who heard Sarah’s laughter still hears us.
- The same God who kept His promise then still keeps His promises now.
- The same grace that carried Sarah across a lifetime of waiting is the grace that carries us.
So if you find yourself waiting — longer than you hoped, quieter than you expected, unseen by others — remember this:
- God has not forgotten the field.
- God has not changed His mind.
- God is not late.
Grace is still growing — even when you cannot yet see it.
And in His time, the Lord will do what He has promised.
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