Latest / The Woman at the Well Ministries Podcast / 581 | God Sees You and Hears You

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581 | God Sees You and Hears You · The Woman at the Well Ministries Podcast

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Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Woman at the Well Ministries podcast.
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With Kimberly Miller, where we believe that every man, woman,
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boy, and girl must come to Jesus just like the woman at the well in John chapter 4.
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Our highest priority is helping you experience the reality of God in your everyday life.
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Whether you're listening in our app, on your favorite podcast platform,
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are on our website at watwm.org.
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We invite you to sit down with us as we open the scriptures to learn more about
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who God is and to strengthen your daily walk.
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Hello, and thank you for joining us in this podcast of Woman at the Well Ministries
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entitled God Sees You and Hears You.
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I know that so often in our lives, we feel like we're not seen.
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People try to make us small. They try to make us feel ashamed sometimes.
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Sometimes they try to make us feel unworthy.
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Sometimes it's just that we want to shrink and not be seen.
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But even at times when we want to be heard and we want to be valued,
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when we want our contributions to be at least considered,
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we will find ourselves in the
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company of those who won't
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allow that to be the case and sometimes
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for some of us we find ourselves in a
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situation where that is the norm and today
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we're going to talk about the truth
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and the truth is God sees
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you and God hears you God created you in his image and he has great plans for
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you in fact as we continue this message out of Genesis chapter 16, verses 11 through 13,
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I want you to use Jeremiah 29, 11 as your lens at which you filter everything
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that's said from this moment on.
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I want you to use this lens, this truth as a foundational piece for you to allow
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God to speak to your heart, for you to allow God to infiltrate your mind.
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And for him to reveal to you what he has for you today.
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If someone in your life is trying to make you feel small, if the world hasn't
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smiled upon you, and it seems like you're overlooked,
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undervalued, ignored, or taken for granted,
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this message today will bring you hope through the scriptures of God's word
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out of Genesis chapter 16 and the life of Hagar. Let's pray.
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Our kind and most gracious to Heavenly Father, Lord, I thank you.
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I thank you for who you are and I thank you for whose we are.
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And Lord, I would just ask that you would just remove me as far as the east
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is from the west in this message, that you would prepare our hearts and our
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minds to hear what you have to say for us.
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Lord, that you would help us to grasp to the truth that we matter to you.
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And if it matters to us, it matters to the master.
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Lord, we pray for your guidance and direction and for your presence to permeate this message.
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And in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
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That lens that I was talking about is Jeremiah chapter 29 and verse 11.
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That's a very familiar passage for many people. lots of greeting cards,
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lots of just conversations are often started or often they end up with this verse in it.
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And it says this, For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,
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saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
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There's great comfort in knowing that the Lord is thinking about you.
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And there needs to be great comfort in knowing that He has a plan for you.
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He has a promise for your calling. And yes, you have a calling in Jesus Christ.
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You have a purpose in this world, and it's going to entail something that enables
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you to spread the gospel and to enlarge the kingdom.
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He didn't save you for you to sit on the bench.
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He didn't create you with no intent.
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You were perfectly created in his image.
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To do the work that only you could perfectly do in the time and the way that you can do it.
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Let's read today's scripture out of Genesis chapter 16, beginning in verse 11.
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I want you to know as we read this scripture, kind of the background behind
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it, but let's read it first.
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And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child,
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and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath
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heard thy affliction, and he will be a wild man.
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His hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him,
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and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
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And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me,
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for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?
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Now, when Hagar is telling us this account, she is in the desert by some water,
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and she has fled from Sarah.
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Sarah had taken in her own hands to create a strategy to make God's promise to her happen.
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She wasn't going to wait on the Lord. She had waited been 10 years,
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and God had promised them a son, and yet she didn't have one.
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So she's running out of patience. She really wants that son.
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She wanted that son before she received the promise.
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And so she begins to devise a way that she can figure out how to have this son as soon as possible.
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And so she gets ahead of the Lord.
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And she goes to Abraham and she says to Abraham,
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listen, I have this handmaiden and her name is Hagar and I want to give her
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to you as a wife so that you can have a child with her and that child will be
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our child and that will be our child of promise.
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And Abraham says, yes.
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Now, there's so many things with this particular account that we need to think
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about before we move forward that I just want us to park here for a moment.
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What we are seeing is something that if we are honest with ourselves happens in all of our lives.
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Sarah has gotten tired of waiting on the Lord. And so she's not going to say that.
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She's going to say to herself and convince herself she's just helping Jesus
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along. She's just helping God along.
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She's just going to do what she thinks would be right.
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I mean, after all, God has promised her a son, and she's figured out how to do it.
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Now, I don't think that in her mind she was attempting to do something wrong.
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I think she probably thought i'm tired of waiting god said he was going to give
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it to me hey this will work.
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I think too often in our plans, they are just that, they're our plans.
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We haven't checked them at the door of the Word of God.
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We haven't sifted them through nail-scarred hands at the foot of the cross and
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prayed to ask what God had for us.
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No, we just decide, hey, this will work. How bad is it? it can't be that bad.
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Well, when we step ahead of God, it never works. When we take God's plans and
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we modify them, it never ends well.
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And Sarah's decision to give Hagar over to her husband, Abraham,
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was not a good decision, and the results did not end up as she had hoped or intended.
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And my friend if we could learn that as children of God God has a plan and it's
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perfect he does not need our suggestions he does not need us to move it along
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more quickly he doesn't need our help,
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What he needs is our obedience and our complete trust.
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Sarah wasn't willing to give that.
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What I also want you to see is that Sarah's bad plan became a problem for those around her.
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Sarah's bad plan became a problem for Abraham.
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Abraham could have said at any moment to Sarah, this is a bad idea.
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You can't get ahead of God.
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God knows exactly how he wants this to be done, and he promised you a son.
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He's not going to go round about and get it.
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He's going to give you a son through means that he has prepared by you.
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But that's not what Abraham does. for whatever reason, whether he just wanted
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to appease Sarah, or maybe he just thought that Hagar was appealing,
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or maybe he too was getting tired of waiting on a son.
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But for whatever reason, this idea and plan that was outside of God's will for
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both Sarah and Abraham's life, and no doubt Hagar's.
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They do it. And then there's a problem.
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Abraham is given to Hagar. Hagar bears the son.
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Hagar realizes that she's now elevated to Abraham's wife, and she's no longer
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willing to be the maidservant to Sarah.
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And there's division among Hagar and Sarah.
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Sarah becomes very mean and hateful and harsh because she sees that this child
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that Hagar has isn't what she thought it was going to be.
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That Hagar giving birth to this son for her to raise isn't what she wanted.
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But now Hagar is also a wife of Abraham.
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I also feel that Hagar realized that the child of promise was now in her,
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because I'm sure Sarah had convinced her of that as well.
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The truth of the matter is, this was never the child of promise.
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God was not going to use those means to give them their child of promise,
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but they had stepped outside the bounds of God's will, the plans that God had for them.
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They had taken it all in their own hands, and when we do that,
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it never ends well so now
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we have sarah with a bad plan who's
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gotten abraham caught into the
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same mess willingly who now has hagar into the mess and she is also now living
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outside of what she was before then and there is now trouble between abraham
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and sarah and so abraham says look this is your maidservant.
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You tell her to do whatever.
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You have your way with her. And as a result of that, Hagar is mistreated, and she doesn't like it.
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So she runs to the desert.
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And here's what I want you to know. That's where we're picking up.
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In Genesis chapter 16, verses 11 through 13, there is hope in the wilderness.
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God cares for you personally.
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God sends to Hagar in this state of isolation when she's all alone,
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when she's in the desert,
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when she's feeling horrible, when things are not going the way she thought it
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would, when she feels small and alone,
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God sends a pre-incarnate Jesus to her, and he calls her by name,
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and he tells her what to do.
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He sees her, because he opens up with, and the angel of the Lord said unto her,
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Behold thou art with child, and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Ishmael,
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because the Lord hath heard thy affliction.
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Hagar has been heard.
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Sam may have not cared about it. Abraham may have not cared about it.
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But God saw and heard Hagar, where Hagar had gone.
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And I want to let you in on something that's not so quick to see,
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but Hagar is fleeing back to what she knows.
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She's an Egyptian. She's going back to what she knows.
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So often when things happen in our lives that we don't like or they don't work
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the way we want them to, instead of doubling down on our prayers,
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instead of getting our head in the word of God, instead of seeking earnestly.
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And with everything we have, God in his presence and his intervention into the
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situation, we run back to the world.
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We ask the world for their opinion. We do things the way we used to do them.
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We have one foot in an idea of who Jesus is, and the rest of our life sunk into the world of sin.
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And so as Hagar leaves Sarah and Abraham, she goes back from where she came.
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Scripture tells us in 2 Corinthians 5, 17, that old things are passed away,
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and behold, all things are become new, and that we're new creatures in Christ Jesus.
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Friend, now is the time for you to absolutely stop in your tracks and turn one
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step toward Jesus, and he will take care of all the rest. Because if you draw
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nigh to him, he will draw nigh to you.
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And Jesus wants a personal relationship with you that is in good standing.
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He wishes that none should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
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Hagar has gone away from God in her worst time.
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But I want you to know, she may have moved in an opposite direction,
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but God was still seeing her.
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And he sends to her.
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The pre-incarnate Jesus. He's the God who sees you in the wilderness.
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She was an outcast, a servant in a foreign land, fleeing abuse and feeling all alone.
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We feel like that sometimes. We feel like we're in a place of isolation, confusion, and loss.
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Sometimes we may feel overlooked by the world, like everyone else is carrying
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on as usual and everything's going great, but whatever's gone wrong in your
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life has got you stopped in your tracks.
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The pre-incarnate appearance of Christ found Hagar where she was,
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and she was brokenhearted. She was hurt, and she wasn't going towards him.
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She was going away from him. And this shows each and every one of us that God
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seeks out the brokenhearted.
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God hears you. He's the God who knows your pain.
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In verse 11, God tells Hagar, You've conceived a son, and I've heard your affliction.
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All those prayers that you have prayed with an earnest heart,
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without iniquity in it, God has heard.
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He's heard your cry. In Jeremiah 33, 3, he says, Call unto me,
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and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not.
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He says, Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek, and ye shall find.
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Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. God hears you.
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God hears your prayer.
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He is the God who sees you. He is El Roy.
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Hagar calls him that. That means the God who sees me.
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She realizes that despite her lowest status as a handmaiden,
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despite her being outcast by Abraham and Sarah,
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she's known and she's valued and she's loved by God.
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God knows us by name and he has never left us.
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Regardless of how you find yourself in this place, in the wilderness,
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in the desert, in a barren land, in a place of sadness, in a place of non-productivity,
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in a place where everything is negative around you, regardless of how you've gotten there.
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You've not gone beyond the reach of God's saving hand.
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You've not been lost on his radar. You've not been overlooked just as he sent
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the pre-incarnate Jesus to Hagar in the wilderness.
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I promise you, Jesus is standing in the midst of your situation with nail-scarred
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hands open wide, asking you to reach out to him, to believe in him,
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to receive his grace, his mercy,
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his love, and his forgiveness.
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You can't out-give God, and you can't out-sin His grace and mercy and love.
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There is nothing that you can do that will separate you from the love of God.
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Just as God saw Hagar, He sees you.
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He has seen you, and He will continue to see you.
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He is in the midst of your situation right now. God has walked every step with you.
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He's seen every good deed, every ounce of love you poured out.
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He's seen your tears. He's seen your struggles, and he's seen your frustrations.
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And he proves that in Genesis chapter 16, in these few verses of 11 through 13.
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You've not been overlooked.
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You've not been forgotten or ignored or discarded.
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God is with you every step of the way, and he will continue to be.
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And when he's with you, that's all you need.
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Friends, you need to check who it is that's making you feel small.
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You need to check whose voice you're listening to. It matters who you listen to.
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Abraham listened to bad advice from a woman he loved, Sarah.
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And it caused a whole host of problems. Who are you listening to?
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Just because they have a position in your life doesn't mean they should have
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a position in your heart and mind.
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Just because they play a role in your life doesn't mean they can rule your life.
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The only one that has the ability, the capacity, and the authority to rule your
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life is the one and only King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ himself,
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the Son of God, who gave his life that you might have life and have it more abundantly.
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There is hope in the light of Jesus.
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Hagar's encounter brought hope in a hopeless situation.
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When Jesus is on the scene, everything changes.
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If it matters to you, it matters to the Master.
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I want you to know that because of his resurrection, the wilderness that you're
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living in doesn't bind you or hold you.
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He is more powerful than any force on earth.
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He is the one who dictates all forces on earth.
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He has no foe and he has no enemy.
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He is Lord of all and King of kings.
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And he is right there with you in the midst of your wilderness.
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He sees you, and he hears you.
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And as our filter verse said, he has a plan for you to prosper you and to give you a hope.
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And his name is Jesus.
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If you possess a personal relationship
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with Jesus Christ, then you need to place him as Lord of your life.
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And you'll begin to hear those around you say things, and God will begin to trim your circle.
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He will begin to help you know who it is that can speak life into you and who
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it is that has no right to be in your circle.
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Oh, you need to love all people.
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You need to help all people. But everybody isn't meant to have a significant
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say-so and what you think, what you do, and what you believe.
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Check those in your circle. Be careful who your accountability buddies are.
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Check them at the door of the cross.
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Refer to the cross as a door because that is where we receive salvation from
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the blood of Jesus Christ that was sinless and perfect.
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And it is, he is the door at which we enter in to the heaven of heavens.
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The holy of holies and eternal life with Jesus Christ in the wilderness.
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He's there, but I've got great news. He's not there to dig a pit,
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to cast you in it, and to cover you up and keep you there.
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No, he comes to you in your wilderness to bring you out to the light,
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to bless you, to forgive you, to cleanse you.
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If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to
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cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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Jesus loves me this I know because the
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Bible tells me so as we look at
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Genesis chapter 16 verses 11 through 13 and we study this account of the pre-incarnate
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Jesus coming to Hagar and listening to her cries of affliction and seeing her
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where she is and bringing her back he's telling her come back.
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When we see this, we realize that he really doesn't ever leave us or forsake us.
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We understand fully that nothing will separate us from the love of God.
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And there are four important themes I want to discuss in your hearing that God
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revealed to my heart out of Genesis 16, verses 11 through 13.
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This truth that God sees us and hears us gives us some incredible truths.
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The first one is no one is invisible.
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She wasn't a person of high esteem. The people in the land would not have come to see her or hear her.
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She didn't have any wealth to speak of. She was a handmaiden to wealthy people.
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She didn't have any claim to fame.
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Her master, Sarah, was being mean and rude and horrible to her.
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She'd gotten caught up in the
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same bad plan and had her own ideas that now she was elevating herself.
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And that's something we have to understand.
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We're not invisible to God. God wants to elevate you.
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He says to humble yourself under the mighty hand of God,
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and in due time he will exalt you to submit yourself under his mighty hand to
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allow him to have his perfect way in you and to allow him to do it in his time
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because he has a plan for you and it's a good one.
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And we need to allow him to let his plan unfold exactly the way he planned it.
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But he's a God that's a gentleman.
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He's a good, great God. And he will not force himself on you.
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You've been given free will. He will give you the Holy Spirit to live inside
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of you, to lead you, to direct you, to guide you, to help you,
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to teach you, to comfort you.
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But if you choose not to follow that, you can step out of the will of God.
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You can step out of his perfect plan for you, but you can't step out of his
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love, and you can't go so far that he can't reach you.
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And regardless of what you have done or what you have not done.
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He sees and hears you. No one is invisible.
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God hears your cries of affliction.
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As we look at this passage of scripture, by most accounts, Hagar could have
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been someone one forgotten, left alone and ignored.
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But I want to bring to your remembrance you matter to God.
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Nothing is wasted, nothing is discarded, and nothing is left.
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How do I know that? Because with just a few fish and a couple of loaves,
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Jesus fed greater than 5,000 people.
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And when meal was over, he went and he collected the fragments.
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He didn't need them. He just fed thousands of people with nothing, a little boy's lunch.
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What he did once he could do again. He changes not. He's the same today,
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yesterday, and forever.
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He wasn't picking up these fragments so that he could take them along with him
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and give it to the other people because they might get Get Hungry,
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He picked the fragments up so
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that you and I would know that absolutely everything is important to God.
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God heard the cries of Hagar, and Hagar wasn't perfect.
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In fact, when he hears her and meets her in the desert, in the wilderness.
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She's gone in the wrong direction.
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God hears our cries of affliction. He's attentive to them and not as a distant
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spectator, but as a close and personal caregiver.
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Jesus is waiting to perform a miracle in your life right now because he loves
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you. This I know the Bible tells me so.
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God gives personalized care to everyone.
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God knows your name and he knows your situation intimately. and he is standing
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right there, arms open wide, asking you to reach out to him.
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The wilderness isn't a place you have to stay, but it is a place you have to repent and return from.
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See, the angel tells her to get back, go back.
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I'm sure at that point she was thinking, I want to go back to her.
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We can't get ahead of God's plan in our life, people, and we can't alter it.
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If you want the blessings that God has intended for you, you're going to have
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to be under the spout where the glory comes out.
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You're going to have to be in the place designated to receive those that were intended.
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You don't get to tell God what your life is and then say, bless me.
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That's not submission, and God requires that.
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I also want you to know as the fourth and final thing that we learn from Hagar's
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experience in the wilderness is that God is the God of the unexpected.
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I don't think she expected to see a pre-incarnate Jesus listening to her and
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having an answer for her and coming to where she was to take him where he was
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was and to help her be who he wanted her to be.
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Just as he cared for Hagar in the desert, he brings comfort to us in the unexpected,
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barren places of our lives.
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And sometimes we have to go in the desert. Sometimes we are led to the desert.
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It's not that we ran to the desert, but we've led to the desert so that God
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can get us alone and isolated.
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To burn off the things that don't have a place in our life.
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Sometimes we've got to be removed because the circles we have created are the
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ones that are causing us to move further from God. and he's got to get us to
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ourselves and sit down with us and explain who we are in him.
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Sometimes we're in barren places so we can be filled with what God would have us to be.
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Sometimes we are stripped of our pride.
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We're stripped of all of our comfort. We're stripped of ourselves so that we can be filled with him.
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His glory, his goodness, his grace, his mercy.
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Sometimes there's a waiting period. And perhaps when you expect at least,
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here comes God with his grace, his mercy, his blessings.
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See, when we wait upon the Lord, he will raise us as eagles,
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and we will rise above the problems and the issues.
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Noah waited before he opened the window to send out the raven and the dove.
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150 days, and he's on Mount Ararat, and he has to know he's not sloshing back
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and forth, but he waits 40 days for God to tell him, open the window, send the raven out.
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Curiosity would have been just so much. Being tired of being cooped up in one
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place would have been, for sure, the smell, I don't even, kind of sick of the same people.
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But Noah waits because God is the God of the unexpected, and he was prepared
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for that in the almost hundred years that he built the ark.
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There are consequences for what we do, and Hagar had to come back out of the wilderness.
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But she didn't come back alone. He loved her, and he was with her,
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and he dusts her off and cleans her up, and she gets with the plan.
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The son she bears is a wild man. There are consequences to disobedience.
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But true repentance will guarantee you that disobedience doesn't leave you on
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the outside of God's blessings.
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He forgives as far as the east is from the west and he will save you to the
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uttermost from the guttermost.
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We serve a God who sees and a God who hears.
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What do you need to give him today? What are you holding on to that is keeping
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you from the center of his will?
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What's your wilderness that you won't return from?
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What's your issue you won't submit or hand to him?
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What's your burden? You're clinging so desperately to.
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We are told in Scripture in Matthew 11, verses 28 through 29,
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these words, Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
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Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart,
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and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
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Serve a God who hears and a God who sees and a God who will walk you back from the wilderness.
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Trust him today.
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Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Remember you are loved.
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Jesus loves you.
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Thank you for joining us for today's podcast. You can find quotes and scripture
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references from this episode in the show notes.
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We pray today's message has been a blessing.
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If it has, please consider leaving a rating or review on your podcast platform.
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Your feedback helps others discover the truth of God's Word.
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You can connect with Woman at the Well Ministries through our app at watwm.org
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and on Facebook and Instagram.
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While you're there, learn more about Bible Bits, Kim's daily devotional delivered
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Monday through Friday by text message and the Bible Bit Podcast.
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Thank you for your prayers and support.
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Remember, Jesus loves you. You are loved.