Today's Passage: Genesis 16

God had made a covenant with Abraham. He promised that Abraham would have a son in his old age and through his lineage all the nations of the world would be blessed. What do you do when you think something is impossible? Well, you either lose hope or you try to find a way to make the impossible a possibility. Abraham's wife Sarah had a plan. Today this concept sounds rather extreme. If a couple has trouble having children our cultural solution is adoption. But in the days of Abraham this was a cultural solution to preserve one's lineage. So this proposal to use a slave as a surrogate was using a cultural solution to help God fulfill his promise.

When was the last time God needed human help to accomplish anything? You guessed it...NEVER.

Granted it would still be half of a miracle because of the age of Abraham but God was not interested in a half miracle. He wanted this elderly couple to conceive a child so they would know (and we would know) that the promise rested on the abilities of God and not on the cultural solutions of the day.

Today as followers of Christ there may be times when we are tempted to use cultural solutions to "help" God accomplish his will. Society has a lot of good answers for how to live a good, happy, and fulfilling life. The problem is that these solutions are insignificant compared to the abundant life supplied through Christ when we place our lives in the hands of God and live according to his principles.