Faith | The Shortcut - Genesis 16

What's up, Southland? As you can see, I'm coming to you not from one of our campus locations, but I'm actually coming to you from what was basically our original location on Hillandale Drive, what was once Southland Christian Church, then became Hillandale Christian Church, and now is Redeemer Church. Some of you, a few of you, this will look really familiar too, because this month we are celebrating Southland's 70th birthday. Technically, on July 8th, some services began at a little storefront on Southland Drive, just down the road from where I'm standing right now, and then it wasn't long before they built a building over here on Hillandale Drive. And so we're celebrating today, but more than that, we want to learn from the legacy of those bold people who decided that they were going to plant a church to reach lost and broken people on the south side of Lexington, and now look where we are. If you got your Bibles with you today, and I hope you do, I want you to go to Genesis 16. Our key word, again, is faith, and we're going to continue on this journey with this man named Abram and his wife named Sarai. And one of the things that we're going to see them do today is we're going to see them take shortcuts. Now, I don't know about you, I'm not actually a fan of shortcuts, and the reason I'm not a fan of shortcuts is because I have a terrible sense of direction. My wife, in God's sense of humor, has a wonderful sense of direction, and so she always wants to take shortcuts, which I think she's just trying to show off, but she's always wanting to take shortcuts, and usually with her, it goes really, really well, but with me, it goes really poorly because I just have a bad sense of direction. In fact, how many of you are like me, and you can't even remember what it was like to navigate somewhere, especially in a strange place, without our phones? Like, there was a time you would drive somewhere, and you would have to, like, get a map. There was a time you'd fly somewhere, and you'd get in a rental car, and you would just have to figure out how to get where you were going, and in fact, some of you maybe even would get those AAA trip ticks where they would, like, highlight your journey and where you were supposed to go, and you would have to follow the map. Sometimes, when we decide to take shortcuts, we end up in a place we never intended to be, suffering consequences that we never wanted to have, and that's what we're gonna see unfold today in Genesis chapter 16. Again, if you got your Bibles, let's look at this first verse. Now, Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. Now, we already know that God has promised Abram and his descendant, he's gonna have descendants as plentiful as, like, the

stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. They've got this promise that that's gonna happen, but the problem with this very idea is that a decade has gone past since that promise was made, and still, Sarai has borne no children. They're waiting on God. You ever been in a place where you're waiting on God? Anybody like me just would admit that I'm not good at waiting. What you do while you're waiting on God really matters, and it doesn't come natural to most of us. Like, I'm very impatient. If I find myself in a waiting room 30 minutes after I, my appointment was made, I get really upset. I get really anxious. I get really frustrated. It's a battle for me if someone tells me, hey, this event is gonna be over at a specific time, and I look at the time, and we're now 15 minutes later than what you told me it was gonna be. I get very angry. I get very frustrated. I'm not the biggest fan of waiting up late at night for a teenager to come home. I'm not good at that. I don't like waiting, and I bet you don't love it either, and who you listen to and what you do when you're in the waiting room will have a massive impact on your life, especially when you feel like God's not operating on your timetable. Let's just be honest today. This very topic is really painful for some of you because you've been battling infertility for perhaps over a decade, and so today's topic is like pouring salt in a wound. I just wanna acknowledge that. Some of you have been waiting for a prodigal child to come home, and, man, they're still wandering in sin. Some of you are still waiting to find a husband. Some of you are still waiting to find a wife. The reality is when you're waiting, regardless of how long it is, it's excruciating, and it can feel eternal. Like when I look back at a season of my life and my wife's life and our family's life where we were still in Colorado, but we knew that we weren't going to stay in Colorado at the same time we didn't know where we were gonna end up, that season was about seven months. It's long, and when you say that, you're like seven months is not that long. But when you're in the middle of that moment, it feels eternal and it's deeply painful. So for Abram and Sarai, they've been in the waiting room for over a decade. And what makes it even more difficult is they have this specific promise of God that they're trying to hang on to.

And it feels like God is not keeping His promise to them. And so what happens is, is the enemy leverages this moment to tempt them with what looks like and feels like a very solid shortcut. And it involves Sarai's servant, Hagar. Look at this, the next verse. And Sarai said to Abram, "'Behold, now the Lord has prevented me "'from bearing children. "'Go into my servant. "'It may be that I shall obtain children by her.'" Write this down. Bad ideas are often born out of bitterness. Have you ever noticed that? Sarai sees a shortcut, and it seems like God's not doing what He's supposed to do when He's supposed to do it. So she decides, man, I'm just gonna go off the map. I'm gonna pick a different route. I'm gonna take what looks like a better step or a better path than the one God has promised to us, even though in reality, the path that she's about to walk down, if they go down this path, is like going off the reservation, man. There's like a river with wild rapids, and there's no bridge over that thing, and you're gonna get swept away in this, but it looks like a good idea at the time because you're just like stalled out, waiting on God.

Going nowhere is what it feels like. When you're blinded by bitterness, you make bad decisions. That's a lot of our stories. And Sarai's so blinded by bitterness, she's willing to encourage her husband, let's just call this what it is, to have sex with her servant so that they can circumvent God's plan. How bitter do you have to be to pick that kind of a path? So one of the challenges today is simply this. If you have bitterness in your heart, don't just be like mindful of it, but bring it to the light so that the Holy Spirit and other trusted Christian friends can help you address this bitterness in your life because it will grow and it will only lead to chaos. In fact, let me just get to the response element to this sermon right now. Some of you, the reason you need to come talk to our prayer team and have them pray for you today is to confess the bitterness that you're harboring in your heart because it's probably already brought a tremendous amount of pain and chaos into your life. And if you harbor it any longer, it's gonna continue to do more and more of the same until it destroys you. So today, come talk to our prayer team and they will pray for you in your bitterness. Now, this is also the point at which you would hope

and pray that like cooler heads would prevail. Sarai's made this proposition and you would hope that Abram would like see the craziness involved here and be like, absolutely not, that's not what we're doing. This is where you would hope a godly man would say to his wife, hey, that's not what we're gonna do. We're not taking any shortcuts. We're gonna be faithful. We're gonna be obedient to God because God will keep his promises to us because God always keeps his promises. You would hope that he would demonstrate that faith thing we've been talking about. Faith is demonstrable trust that God is who he says he is and will do everything that he's ever promised to do. And you would hope that that belief would lead to obedience even in the face of the temptation that his wife is bringing to the table. But that's not what Abram does. Look at the very next sentence. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. Look right at me. Any voice other than God's is the wrong voice. When the voice of God has been clear, no other voice can compete. Even the voice of someone you love and trust, even if there's someone who's even been put in authority in your life and they say something that's contrary

to what God has revealed in his word, you go with God, you obey God. So young men and young women, listen to me. God has been really clear in his word. The design of God's good gift of sex is to be enjoyed in the context of one man and one woman in one marriage for one life. So even if your Christian parents encourage you to move in with your fiance, to move in with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, the response, the faithful response is no because God has made this clear. I don't know why your parents would tell you to do something that dishonors God or dishonors your body and statistically would lead you to divorce at a much higher clip. But the truth remains, God has been clear. So we obey God and leave the consequences to him. Abram, listen. the voice of Sarai, and that's the wrong voice. And honestly, it's easy enough to see why. Why would he do this? I mean, I got an answer, probably lust. Probably lust. He allows Satan to leverage the voice of his wife as an opportunity to feed his own lustful desires. And this is why, listen, husbands, wives, never, ever, ever introduce another sexual partner into your marriage, whether that's through pornography or what we call open marriages or any other perversion

that our culture will come up with or prescribe, all that will lead to is chaos and death. Let's watch what happens in their story. So after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. And he went into Hagar and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, watch this, she looked with contempt upon her mistress. The very thing Sarai proposed as a solution becomes a real problem. Have you ever noticed that? Like about our sinful shortcuts? It doesn't take long for us to realize, hey man, this was a really bad idea, and it doesn't take long before this whole thing turns on Sarai. You end up on the back of some back road and all you can hear is like that banjo music from Deliverance playing in the background, that creepy music, and you're like, I think we've made a mistake. I think we've made a huge, massive wrong turn by trying to take a shortcut. And you're totally lost and you're in clear and present danger. And I've been lost many, many times, literally and figuratively. When I was a freshman in college, I got up to Cincinnati and I moved into my dorm and the RA like came in

and introduced himself and he gave me and my roommate this like agenda for freshman orientation. And I looked at it and it was all the things I hate. It's like forced fun and team building, and you're gonna have to wear a name tag and be forced to meet a bunch of people. And I'm an introvert. And so I was like, yeah, I'm not doing any of that. So I just threw it away and I went back to my car, my 1987 Pontiac Sunbird with 245,000 miles on it, through my golf clubs in the back, drove north and found a golf course that I used to play at and just play golf by myself, which was literally like a little slice of heaven for this introvert, pun intended, if all the golfers got that. And so when I was done playing this round of golf, I was trying to get back to school. But again, I have a really bad sense of direction. And did I mention that Cincinnati Bible College back in the day was in between the two worst neighborhoods in Cincinnati? It's not like that anymore, but it was that way then. And so the sun was going down. I took a whole bunch of wrong turns and there were a whole bunch of people coming out into the streets. And here I am with my Kentucky plates and my baby blue Pontiac Sunbird lost in a rough place because I took a wrong turn

and I took matters into my own hands. I wonder when it became clear to Abram that this was a bad idea, what was his like light bulb moment that he had made a terrible mistake? This is the moment for Sarai because her servant now turns on her. She's pregnant and she's showing contempt to Sarai. She's like rubbing her nose in it. She's making fun of her. She's taking her deepest wound and just pouring salt right into it. Sarai's solution became a source of pain. I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. How many of us learned the hard way that divorce was not a solution? It only amplified the pain and created more problems. How many of us have learned the hard way that compromising our integrity to take a financial shortcut to get ahead does not provide peace. It actually provides the opposite. It gives us anxiety and worry and sleepless nights. Taking shortcuts around God's clear plan always brings pain. Always. And when it does, it's an opportunity in that moment

to recognize that reality and repent. But what we often do, me, you, all of us, is we double down in our sin. Watch what Abram and Sarai do next. And Sarai said to Abram, may the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, behold, your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please. And then Sarai dealt harshly with her. And she, Hagar, fled from her. Her Sarai. Who gets hurt as a result of this shortcut they decided to take? Here's the answer. Everyone. Literally everyone gets hurt. Sarai is hurt by Hagar. Abram's hurt by Sarai. Hagar gets hurt by Abram and his abdication and by Sarai and her abuse. Everyone gets hurt in this circle and cycle of sin because we always think, man, we always think we can control the fallout of our sin and our shortcuts and our choices, but we can't.

You have no idea how far the repercussions of your sinful choices will reach. You didn't get to control that. Students, your sinful choices, listen, they don't just hurt you. They devastate your parents. Parents, your sinful choices don't just hurt you. They destroy in a nuclear way entire family lines. We cannot control the blast radius of our sin. It always goes further than you could dream, faster than you can imagine, always. Watch what happens in their story. The angel of the Lord found her, said Hagar, by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to shore. And he said, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? And she said, I'm fleeing from my mistress, Sarai. And the angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress and submit to her. The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said to her, behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man. He shall lay his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him.

And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. This is another sermon for another day. But if you ever wonder, man, why is there always been, and seems like there always will be, conflict in the Middle East? You can thank Abram and Sarai for taking this shortcut. That's the source of it and that's the reason. This was nuclear fallout and we're still living in the wake of the radiation from it to this very day. So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her. You are a God of seeing. For she said, truly here, I have seen him who looks after me. Therefore, the well was called Bir Lahai Roy. It lies between Kadesh and Bered. And Hagar bore Abram a son. And Abram called the name of his son whom Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. So here's the question. What do we do with this? Like personally, what do we do with this? Corporately as a church, as a body of believers, what do we do with this? Well, man, if you're waiting on God, here's what I want you to remember. He sees. He sees you. He hears. And you need to hear this more than anything else. He cares for you. His intentions towards you are good.

Even while we're suffering, even while we're waiting, he has not abandoned you. He has not walked out on you. So if you've taken a shortcut, and you know, like right now, maybe you're uncomfortable going, when is this sermon gonna be over? Here's your next step. Repent, turn around, and go home. And be received into the welcoming arms of your good father. As a church, corporately, man, this should cause us to reflect on our legacy, and this should fuel our future. This is not a perfect church. We've made mistakes along the way, but we've always been a church that at our best, listen to me, took great risks. You obeyed God and left the consequences to him. It's never been, listen, about buildings, or what made sense in the eyes of the watching world. It's always been about, and should always be about, trusting God. So in reflecting on 70 years of ministry, I wanted to sit down with some people who could really help us as a body of believers to reflect on the legacy of this church as it fuels us into the future. And so I wanted to sit down with our founding pastor, Wayne Smith's daughters, Judy and Jana.

We got together at my friend Brewster's Coffee Shop, and it just felt appropriate to sit down with those three, because if anyone was like a son to Wayne, it was my friend and former youth minister, Brewster Smith. Mr. McLeod, this was our conversation. So 1956 is when Southland began. So that's why we're about to celebrate 70 years. So when Broadway decided they were gonna plant a church on this side of town, compared to where we're sitting right now, where was that first little building? It was a storefront, right? Yes. It was a storefront. All straight down. Yeah. It's amazing that it's a storefront. They would probably have planted 30, 40, maybe a dollar. So Marika's is over there now, and you can't quite tell where it was. And the Southland area was a brand new neighborhood. Right. You know, and back in the day, every neighborhood had a church. So they wanted to plant a church in the Southland neighborhood. So people really thought this was a wild idea to even come out this far. I'm sure it made some sense to go,

okay, well, there is a neighborhood and there's some people. If you fast forward, you know, to when the late 70s, early 80s rolled around, and it was time to go out to Brannon Road and Harrodsburg Road. I mean, I have memories of Harrodsburg Road being two lane. Nothing like it is now. And Brannon Road dead ending right there at the church in the corner when I was a kid. Back then, I mean, when you look at the pictures of it, I mean, it is nothing but farmland. So, I mean, I've heard the stories, but what were people thinking at the time when this little church over here at Hillandale Drive was gonna go build a new building out on Harrodsburg Road and Brannon Road? It was, I think, four lanes until about Harrod Hills, and then it went to the two, and it went two all the way out. And you were just like, and it seemed to take forever, because we would go to the Cassidy Farm across the street for church picnics. But coming from over here, that seemed like a really long way. So when you think of your dad, was he always just a visionary person that could dream and think about what was down the road that other people couldn't see? Is that your memory? The older I get, the more I realize that,

because I didn't, you know, as a kid, he was just dad. But now, at this stage of my life, looking back on what all he accomplished, not only, you know, sometimes you can speak, but you can't do other things, or sometimes you can do one thing, but you can't do another thing. He really did have quite a lot to offer, as far as, he had his fingers in everything. Oh, yeah. It was a good package. Oh, yeah. So when you all think of your earliest memories of Southland over at Hillandale Drive, what are the things that come to mind? Playing in the wind of Wales. Okay. I was gonna say, honestly, just playing up there. And then, at one time, when there were multiple services, I went to the first service, and then I went home and got on my skates, the skates that you put your shoes in, you know, that are really loud. Yeah. So I was skating up and down the parking lot beside the open windows. During church? During church. Because your house is right down the road. Yes, and Mr. Armstrong came out,

got after me and said, and later, Dad, he was upset, because he could help me, so that didn't happen anymore. Well, you know, you made a casual reference to there being two services. Yeah. That was not a normal thing back then. So that shows you the level of growth and also innovation, because there actually were people back then that were very against the idea of splitting a church into two services. You know, John told me a story, John Weiss, of when he took your dad to the Lexington campus to see it, I think right before it opened, and your dad just cried, tears of joy, because he could have never fathomed the old Lexington Mall or the multi-site world that we're in now, but in his time and in his day, he was innovating in substantial ways. So you guys get out there, the first building that was built was the auditorium, the old sanctuary building, theater 81, all the things we call it, which is where I was baptized, married, I was ordained in the chapel before we named it the Wayne B. Smoot Chapel, and then came building C, the Family Life Center. That was the second building. Then building A, where the office was in the chapel. So about the time I got there,

I think all of it was there, but I mean, that season was just unprecedented in regards to growth. On the heels of people thinking Southland was crazy to take a risk, to leave Hillandale Drive where everybody was. It was a long way to drive. You know, I bet I know. What you guys will say when I ask this question, but you may say something else. I just wanna see what you said. What would you, you know, they would title sermons back then. You know, what would you say is his most famous sermon title? Playing hard. Playing hard. Playing hard. You know, and I heard it, I don't know, five or six times at least, you know, him preach it. So he would preach it around Superbowl Sunday, typically. We did it five, six, seven years ago? A little longer, but yeah. Was it longer? He showed a clip maybe that long ago, and it was a longer clip. But I watched the whole thing in preparation for my sermon that week, and it was the first time I'd seen it since I was a kid. And what stood out to me was there's,

first of all, it's so obviously past story. I mean, the whole theme of it is you're hurt, but you gotta stay in the game. You gotta stay faithful. But he was acknowledging people's pain, but it wasn't from a 40,000 foot perspective. There's a moment, and I think this is what I showed in the sermon, where he's making eye contact with people, and he's speaking specifically about the pain that they were going through at the time. And I think that's what you guys are touching on, is that he had such a heartbeat for each and every person he came into contact with. Now, when y'all played that, and I think, I guess it was 10 years ago, but you played it, and it was played, that was the main sermon. The whole sermon. It's still relevant. Very. And you would watch little kids, like, they're into it. He's telling sports illustrations about Tommy Bell and things like that, but it was still relevant, and it wasn't like no one's giggling over his suit or his tie or anything like that. You know, when I sold the house and I cleaned out the basement, I found, I thought, oh, I found the original handwritten, but then I found another handwritten, and then another. So I think he just continued to rewrite it. I'm sure that he changed some people's stories

and illustrations, and yeah, I'm sure he did. It was an ever, it was a breathing sermon. It was evolving over time, I'm sure. So I'm gonna pass these pictures around. One is of your dad standing in front of the original location over here on South and Dry. The second one is of Hillandale, and it is packed. You know, the choir loft is packed, the pews are packed. And then the third one is out in Nicholasville, and this is my memory. Here's the table where we'd serve communion from, and one time, your dad walked in. I don't know what day of the week it was. There was a bunch of us high schoolers in there, and I was sitting on it. He was not happy with me over that one, you know? And that's where my memory picks up. And then this last one here, and I don't know which, we did this more than once, but this is Rupp Arena. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it had to have been Easter, and about half of it, you know, the lower arena and some of the upper arena is full, so that's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 or 12,000 people in Rupp Arena right there. As you guys see those pictures from 1956, you know, all the way into 1996, which is when your dad retired, and then you think of the years since, 1996 to now, 2026.

What's like a word or two that you would use to describe God and what he's done at Southland during that time? Well, that's, I mean, he's just, yeah, yeah. Grace, I mean, he just dispensed it. Yeah, I don't care who he was. The poorest. Yeah. Yeah. Faithfulness. Yeah. When you think of, you know, your ministry, Brewster, and here we are in your coffee shop, you know, among the least of these, you got so much of that from Wayne. If you had to guess how many buckets of chicken he took to people's homes, he took to people's hospital rooms, I mean, just, could you even throw, could you even guess a number? No. I don't know that we could. Yeah, a bunch. Thousands. Yeah, thousands. And you know what? They let me do it. Southland, I still, if it's a Southland death or a Southland celebration, I'll still go by them. Yeah.

I'll still go by insurance and bucket of chicken. Yeah. I mean, and Southland doesn't mind because they know that I'm. You don't take a piece out, do you, to test? I get a 16 piece, and when I got to the gnaws, there was 15. Okay. I ate one. As I was thinking about you talking about grace and the phrase that's above our baptisteries now is one more. And you see that legacy throughout his ministry and throughout. Southland's ministry. We want to see one more person be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. That's what we want to see. And you even see it just in the buildings. You go, there was once this one place over here and then this one place over here and then a few places over in Nicholasville and now Danville, Lexington, Georgetown, Richmond and who knows where we will be beyond that but only by the grace of God. For some reason God has decided that he's just gonna pour out his blessing on this place and people who've been faithfully part of it for all these years have been able to pay witness to it and grateful for all of you to sit down here and go down memory lane. So when you all think about the next 70 years of Southland, when there's some people sitting around the table talking about Southland's 140th birthday, what do you hope they say is still true about Southland? That they still have a vision, still preaching the Bible and still baptizing. Still ground is in the Word of God. The truth. You know, the absolute truth. Still growing. Yeah, growing. Giving grace. Grace, grace, God's grace. Yes. Anchor to the times. Near to the times but anchor to the rock. Well, I have to tell y'all I'm grateful. You know, I don't think of it and I know every person who's been a lead

pastor at Southland would say the same thing. It's not my church. You know, it wasn't John's church. It wasn't Mike's church and it wasn't Wayne's church. It's Jesus's church. But faithful men and women have been a part of this story from the very beginning and will continue to be. So I'm just grateful for you all and what a joy to be able to sit around here and have some table fellowship and tell some stories. Thank y'all. So Southland Christian Church has always been marked by what Eugene Peterson called a long obedience in the same direction. Consistency, y'all, wins the day. So we want to be consistent, obedient, faithful followers of Jesus who are willing to take great risks, obey God and leave the consequences to Him and we don't want to take any shortcuts. So what does this mean for us moving forward? It means a lot of things. If we need to build buildings, hey, let's build them. If we need to leave buildings behind like some faithful followers of Jesus did so many years ago, leaving this very building behind, let's leave them. If we need to knock buildings down, let's knock them down. If we need to go to new towns and new counties, let's go with a fervor and the wind of the Holy Spirit in our sails. If we need to plant more churches, y'all, let's plant them. If we need to raise millions of dollars, let's raise it. If we need to give millions of dollars away, let's give it away open-handedly. But listen to me, we can't take any shortcuts. We're not gonna shortcut God's plan for this church and when we are tempted to give up, give in and fold, we will not quit. We won't stop. So let's together, you and I keep storming the gates of hell for another 30 years together because here's my dream. I hope and pray, Lord willing, that I will get to be around on the day that we celebrate Southland's 100th birthday. And I pray that we'll be able to look back at the 30 years prior and the 70 years before that and reflect on that legacy, but I also pray that in that moment, those of us who are still around will be able to look at those next generations and say, keep going and no shortcuts. So let's pray. Father God, we come before you humbly, grateful for your faithfulness, what you've done in the life of this church and what you're doing. We pray that you will just continue to do more of that so that we can see one more lost

and broken person be found so that we can join in celebration with all of heaven every time that happens. Thank you for the legacy of this place and we stand on the shoulders of those who sacrificed so much and we want to move into the future sacrificing so that more and more people can know who your son Jesus is and what he's done and be transformed by it. In Jesus' beautiful name I pray, amen.