Start today’s devotional by reading the story of Hagar, found in Genesis 16:1-16.
It had been 10 years since God had promised Abram that he’d be the father of many nations. 10 years of Sarai waiting and waiting and waiting for a baby who just…wasn’t coming.
All that waiting can really wear on a person. If you’ve ever been in a waiting season, you know the feeling all too well.
Sarai and Abram’s lack of faith in God’s promise and their (very human) desire to take things into their own hands led them to move outside of God’s will, with awful repercussions. Maybe, they thought, our child is going to come to us in a different way than we were expecting.
Unfortunately, as their servant, Hagar didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But she wasn’t an entirely faultless victim, either. She was prideful and treated Sarai horribly. She believed her pregnancy made her better than the seemingly barren Sarai. Then in return, Sarai started treating Hagar horribly.
It was just an all-around terrible situation.
When Hagar flees, finding herself pregnant and alone in the wilderness, she probably feels completely invisible—even to God. But in the midst of these extremely complicated circumstances, God sees Hagar’s heartache and meets her in it.
“The angel of the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in the wilderness, along the road to Shur. The angel said to her, ‘Hagar, Sarai’s servant, where have you come from, and where are you going?’” – Genesis 16:7-8 NLT
I love that these are the questions God chooses to ask Hagar, because they require her to look at her situation head-on and not shy away from the mistakes she’s made. Hagar responds, “I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai” (Genesis 16:8 NLT). Then the angel of the Lord tells her to go back to Sarai and submit to her authority—in essence, to repent. Hagar still has to face the consequences of her actions. The pain she’s suffered from Sarai doesn’t justify her own poor behavior. But neither does it mean that God can’t still redeem her circumstances. He blesses Hagar with a son, and He promises her more descendants than she’ll be able to count.
Regardless of how alone Hagar may have felt before her encounter with the angel, afterward she’s convinced she’s not alone and never has been. She says, “‘You are the God who sees me [El Roi].’ She also said, ‘Have I truly seen the One who sees me?’” (Genesis 16:13 NLT).
This quality of God’s character has nothing to do with anything good or worthy we’ve done. We’re never the hero of the story; God is, every time. It’s out of His amazing faithfulness and mercy that He chooses to redeem broken situations—so that His name will be glorified.
You may feel like God’s turned His back on you because of poor decisions you’ve made. You may feel like you’ve lost His love and care, or that you’ve exhausted His patience because you just can’t seem to stop making mistakes no matter how hard you try.
Let me remind you of God’s promise to all those who believe in Him: You can’t.
Yes, sometimes His love comes in the form of gentle correction and a call to repentance. Return to your mistress, and submit to her authority. We’re going to make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes will have very real, painful consequences. But by God’s grace, we will not only learn to accept this––we’ll grow through it.
Because God’s with us through it all. There’s nothing we can do to lose His love. More than that, He doesn’t merely tolerate us; He bends down into the middle of our mess and meets us there. He reminds us that He sees us in every hard, joyous, confusing, scary, beautiful moment.
