This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to Daily Drive Time Devotions, Day 20 of our Look Through Genesis,
Chapter 20. Today we're going to look at how Abraham handled a weakness in his
life. We talked at the beginning of this week about the fact that faith is how
you handle some of the defining moments of life.

One of those defining moments is your greatest dream. Another defining moment is
your greatest weakness. One of the defining moments of my life, of your life, is
how you handle your greatest weakness.

Listen to what happens as I just read through Genesis, Chapter 20. Genesis 20,
beginning in verse 1, reading all the way to 18, skipping a verse or two here
and there. Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and
lived between Kadesh and Shur.

For a while he stayed in Gerar and there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, "She is
my sister. " Then Abimelek, the king of Gerar, sent for Sarah and took her. But
God came to Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, "You are as good as
dead because of the woman you have taken.

She is a married woman. " Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, "What have
you done to us? How have I wronged you that you've brought such great guilt upon
me and my kingdom?

You have done things to me that you should not have done. " Abimelek asked
Abraham, "What was your reason for doing this? " Abraham replied, "I said to
myself, 'There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me
because of my wife.

Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father, though not of my
mother, and she became my wife. And when God had me wander from my father's
household, I said to her, 'This is how you can show your love to me. Here we go.

Say of me, 'He is my brother. '" Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male
and female slaves and gave them to Abraham and he returned Sarah, his wife, to
him. And then Abraham prayed to God and God healed Abimelek and his wife and his
slave girls so that they could have children again.

Now as I read through this experience of Abraham saying, "She is my sister,"
some of you might be thinking, "Wait, wait, wait. This sounds familiar. Haven't
I heard this before?

" Yes. Abraham has done exactly the same thing before. In chapter 12 of Genesis,
when he went down to Egypt, he said, "Let's call you my sister.

" And in this experience of Abraham, you and I learn some things about how you
and I need to handle our greatest weakness because this is his greatest
weakness. His greatest weakness is fear. He's afraid that God will not take care
of him in the difficulties of life.

What do you and I learn from Abraham's experience here about how you and I can
handle our greatest weakness? Spiritual victories don't remove weaknesses.
Abraham is soaring in faith at this point.

He's got this friendship with God. His name has been changed. He's getting it
all together.

Sarah must be at the point of him beginning to see maybe God is doing something.
And then after his name has changed, Abraham makes the same great mistake. I
don't know if Abraham could tell that Sarah was pregnant or not, but he had been
told by God that Sarah was pregnant.

And do you see, do you see that if he had allowed this to happen, that you and I
reading this today could have said, "Oh, Isaac was a child of Bimelech and not
of Abraham. " He was putting at risk the very power and promise of God being
shown to us today. He didn't realize it.

Spiritual victories do not remove our weaknesses. In fact, sometimes our
weaknesses show themselves the greatest right after a spiritual victory because
we start to trust in ourselves rather than trust in God. A second thing that I
learned from this experience of Abraham is that weaknesses are often built on
our fears.

Abraham is honest about that at least. He says, "I said to myself, 'There is no
fear of God in this place and they will kill me because of my wife. '" He
thought there was no fear of God in the place, but there certainly was fear in
Abraham.

He was afraid of what would happen to him, that he would be killed because of
his wife. Many of my weaknesses, many of your weaknesses, they are built on our
fears. Fears that God will not take care of you.

Fears that you will not be recognized for serving God. Fears that somehow God
will not be there in this circumstance of life. Fears that God will not keep his
promise.

Fears that you cannot trust him. I haven't gotten past those fears yet, but I
know that in day-to-day living that Jesus Christ can help me to deal with those
fears. I don't know if there is ever a time when any person I've ever met has
gotten past the place where they are afraid.

We are human beings. We can't see the future. We don't know what's going to
happen.

But I do know I've met so many people who have allowed God to help them with
their fears. And faith is not a life of having no fears. You're going to have
fears the rest of your life.

Faith is trusting God in spite of your fear. In fact, if you don't have any fear
and you do it anyway, that's not really faith. That's just moving ahead.

It's when you're most afraid and you choose to move ahead towards that very
thing that you feel like I'm afraid of being there, of doing that. That's when
you're having incredible faith in him. Weaknesses are often built on our fears.

And faith is a choice to trust God in spite of my fears. Third thing I learned
about our greatest weaknesses in these verses is we often get stuck on our
weaknesses because we easily excuse our weaknesses. That's the funny part of
these verses.

Abimelech asks one of the most striking questions in all the Bible, "What is
your reason for doing this? " This is the "What were you thinking, Abraham? "
question.

And Abraham, instead of saying, "Oh, I should have trusted God. I'm a man of
faith. I am so sorry," instead of saying that, Abraham gives this long-winded
answer, "Well, she really is my sister.

She's like the, you know, let me explain all this. She's the daughter of my
father, though not of my mother. She became my wife.

" And then he adds this thing about, "I said to her when we go out, 'You're
going to honor me by saying that you're my sister. '" If I could give a biblical
commentary to these words of Abraham here, "Ha! " or baloney, we can all read
through this in a moment.

He's just making excuses. I recognize it. You recognize it because we do the
same thing.

We excuse our weaknesses. We have sins in our lives and we have weaknesses.
Weaknesses are many times when I allow my weaknesses to make the decision rather
than God.

But I'm talking particularly today about weaknesses, places in my life where I
find it difficult to trust God. Not places of sin, but places where I know I
find it difficult to trust God. In Abraham's life, he allowed this place of
weakness to become a place of sin because he lies.

He says, "She's honoring me by doing this. " And we all know he did it because
she was afraid, and that often happens. We get stuck in our weaknesses because
we easily excuse our weaknesses.

And I have to ask myself, and I have to ask the people who love me, "Where am I
excusing my weaknesses? " Ask the Lord who loves you. Show me where I'm excusing
my weaknesses.

There's a fourth thing that I learned from Abraham here. First thing, spiritual
victories don't remove weaknesses. Second thing, weaknesses are often built on
our fears.

The third, we get stuck in our weaknesses because we easily excuse our
weaknesses. Number four, even in our weaknesses, God is working to protect us.
God worked to protect Sarah, and he worked to protect God's promise in her life.

And you and I, when we're tempted to do the wrong thing, the Bible tells us in 1
Corinthians 10. 13 that even there, God will provide a way of escape. There is a
lesson in the life of Abraham here.

We're seeing a repeated pattern of weakness in his life here. And often that can
become a repeated pattern of sin. A place of weakness is a place where I choose
to trust myself, and I've got a repeated pattern of sin then in my life.

Here is the lesson when that's happening in your life. When you see a repeated
pattern of weakness, a repeated pattern of sin, the lesson is this. I don't need
to be improved.

I need to be transformed. We say to ourselves when we have these repeated
patterns, when we keep saying, "She's my sister," to get out of our fears, we
say to ourselves, "It was just a glitch. It was an anomaly.

It was a bug in the program. It'll never happen again. " But then it does, and
then it happens again, and then it's happening again.

Instead of saying, "It'll never happen again," instead of saying, "It's just a
glitch," it's better to say, "It's me. It's a repeated pattern in my life, and I
don't need just to be improved. That's not going to make me into the man of God,
the woman of God that he wants me to be.

I need to be transformed. I don't need to do what I'm doing better. I need an
inner transformation only possible by the power of Christ.

" And good news, he is willing to transform us by the power of Christ. Points in
my life and points in your life where you have repeated patterns of sin or
repeated patterns of weakness are places where we need to learn it's not about
trusting me to get better. It's about trusting Christ to transform me.

Even in our weaknesses, God is working to protect us, and in working to protect
us, he is also working to transform us. He's working to grow us. What do I learn
about Abraham in these verses?

Five things. Spiritual victories don't remove weaknesses. Weaknesses are often
built on our fears.

We get stuck in our weaknesses because we excuse our weaknesses. Number four,
even in our weaknesses, God is working to protect us. And number five, most
amazing of all to me, even in our weaknesses, God still desires to use us.

Did you notice in the midst of this, as God comes to Abimelech in a dream and
says, "You are as good as dead. She's a married woman. He judges Abimelech.

" Did you notice at the end of these verses that Abraham prays for Abimelech? Do
you know why? Because God told him to.

God told Abimelech, "I'm going to have Abraham pray for you and you're going to
be healed. " And at the end of these verses, Abraham does just that. Abraham
must have felt so foolish in that prayer.

I would have. Praying for them to be healed of something that had happened
because of my own fear. Lord, I would have said, "Let Sarah pray that prayer.

" She was the innocent one in this. I'm the one who messed up in this. I feel so
unworthy, I would have said.

And I'm sure Abraham must have felt some of that. But he has Abraham pray that
prayer and God answers that prayer. And even in his weakness, God still uses
Abraham.

Listen, you may feel unworthy because you are unworthy. But that does not mean
that God does not still want to use you. When you feel weakness overwhelming
your life, instead of thinking, as many people do, "I'm going to draw back now.

I'm going to put myself in the shadows because I feel unworthy. " If you do
that, you're just going to feel more and more weak, more and more disconnected,
further and further from God. Instead of drawing back when you feel weak, you
say, "God, what step of faith do I need to take?

" Instead of saying, "There's nothing that God wants me to do. " Instead of
saying that, realize the very reason Satan is bringing temptation into your life
right now. The very reason you're being attacked right now is because there is a
step of faith that God wants you to take right now.

How does God want to use you even in your weakness? Not ignoring your weakness,
not hiding your weakness, but admitting that weakness and letting God use you
even in your weakness. When you do that, when you do that, God will use you in
ways that you could not imagine.

He doesn't use us through our strengths. He uses us through our weaknesses. Lord
Jesus, as we talk to you, none of us like to admit that we're weak.

I don't. We all like to feel like we're strong. I thank you that you use weak
people because we are weak.

I thank you that even in our weakness, Jesus, we are made strong. And I pray for
myself, I pray for every one of us as we listen to these verses of this man of
faith, that you help us instead of hiding our weaknesses or running from our
weaknesses or thinking that our weaknesses mean you can never love us again to
recognize that you're right there and that you want to work even in the weak
points of our lives, even in those points of our lives, to do something
dramatically, marvelously, transformatively good, do something that shows the
world, Jesus, what you are like, that when we are weak, you are strong. Thank
you, Jesus, for doing this.

Thank you for loving us. Thank you for your power in your name. Amen.

And join us next week. We're going to continue our look at the story of Abraham,
chapters 21 to 25. We're going to find that his greatest challenge of faith
comes when it looks like he's almost finished with his life.

We're going to start the story of Isaac and how God works in the lives of his
sons, Esau and Jacob. We'll see you next week for Genesis 21 to 25.