Is Anything Too Hard for the LORD?
John Son
Genesis 18:9–15; 21:1–7
Introduction
What we read today in Genesis 18 is a story that has already been unfolding for many years.
Back in Genesis 12, God called Abraham out of his homeland and made an extraordinary promise to him. God promised that He would make him into a great nation, that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
Now, it was a beautiful promise. But There was only one problem - Abraham and Sarah had no children.
At first, perhaps that wasn't a major concern. Abraham and Sarah were already advanced in years, but maybe they thought God would act soon. Maybe next year. Maybe the year after that.
But the years kept passing. Ten years became fifteen. Fifteen became twenty. Twenty became twenty-five. And every birthday, every passing season, every reminder of their aging bodies seemed to make God's promise harder to believe.
You can almost imagine the questions that must have surfaced.
- "Did we hear God correctly?"
- "Did we misunderstand His promise?"
- "Has God forgotten us?"
Now, what's remarkable is that the bible doesn't hide this struggle. Throughout Abraham's journey, we see moments of faith, but we also see moments of confusion, impatience, and doubt. There were times when Abraham and Sarah tried to take matters into their own hands because waiting on God had become so difficult.
And perhaps that's what makes this story so relatable. Because most of us are not strangers to waiting.
- We know what it's like to hold on to God's promises while wondering why His timing seems so slow.
- We know what it's like to pray the same prayer for months, years, sometimes even decades.
- We know what it's like to look at our circumstances and wonder how God could possibly do what He has said.
That is exactly where Abraham and Sarah find themselves when Genesis 18 opens.
Abraham is ninety-nine years old and Sarah is nearing ninety. Humanly speaking, the story is over before it begins. The possibility of having a child has long since passed.
But then, on what seemed like an ordinary day, everything changed. Abraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the heat of the day and he saw three men standing nearby.
At first, they appeared to be ordinary travelers. So Abraham does what hospitality required in the ancient Near East. He runs to greet them, invites them to rest, washes their feet, and prepares an extravagant meal for them. Because in a desert culture, hospitality was not merely a courtesy—it was a sacred responsibility.
But from the very beginning, the narrator lets us in on something Abraham may not yet fully understand. When you look at how chapter 18 begins, it says "The LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre…" (v.1). The word LORD here is Yahweh, God's covenant name. But when Abraham first addresses the visitors in verse 3, he uses the more general title "Lord"—a respectful term that could mean "master" or "sir."
But as the conversation unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that these are not any ordinary visitors. One of them speaks with divine authority. He knows Sarah by name. He knows the promise God had made decades earlier. He knows what is happening inside the tent even when Sarah cannot be seen.
And so, after twenty-five years of waiting, God once again reaffirms His promise.
V.10a - The Lord said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.”…
What an astonishing promise! Again, let me remind you - Abraham is ninety-nine years old. Sarah is nearing ninety. The years of childbearing are long gone. Humanly speaking, what God is promising seems impossible.
And yet this promise becomes the turning point of the story. Because everything that follows hinges on a question God asks in verse 14: "Is anything too hard for the LORD?"
And the answer to that question will shape not only Abraham and Sarah's future, but also our understanding of God's grace and faithfulness.
So as we look at this passage together, I want us to focus on two truths:
1. God's promises often seem impossible from a human perspective.
2. God always proves faithful to His promises.
Let's begin with the first truth.
1. God's Promises Often Seem Impossible from a Human Perspective
Now, I want you to notice something. When God reaffirmed this promise in verse 10, the text tells us that Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. And when she heard it — v.12a tells us — “Sarah laughed to herself...”
She laughs - but not a laugh of delight. This is a laugh of disbelief. A quiet, private chuckle of someone who has heard this kind of hope before and has learned to protect herself from it.
Look at what she says to herself: v.12b -"After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?"
Now, I want us to be careful not to be too hard on Sarah here. Because the way she responds here is deeply human. Deeply understandable.
You know, she's not being cynical out of spiritual weakness. She's being realistic. She is nearing ninety years old. The text has already told us plainly in v.11b — "The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah." These weren’t words merely emphasizing the odds. This was a medical fact. Sarah had already passed the point where pregnancy was biologically possible.
And so when she hears the promise again — "This time next year, you will have a son" — she laughs. Because from where she was standing, from every human angle she could look at this from, the math simply didn't work.
But here's the thing —when we take an honest look into our lives — that laugh isn’t so different from the kinds of responses we carry in our own hearts, is it?
We might not say it out loud. But on the inside — when we're sitting in the tent of our own hearts — don’t we often laugh in doubt just like Sarah? We hear God's promises and somewhere in the quiet of our minds we think:
"That can't really happen. Not for me. Not at this point. Not given where I've been and what I've done and how much time has passed."
Maybe you've been waiting for a breakthrough with your father or mother, your son or daughter, or your spouse for so many years that hope feels almost too risky to hold onto.
Maybe you've been waiting for healing — physical, emotional, relational — and your body and your circumstances keep telling you that it's too late.
Maybe you've been trusting God to open a door, to provide, to restore something that feels irreversibly broken — and the years keep turning and nothing changes.
And sometimes the hardest part isn't the suffering itself. It's the waiting. It's living in the gap between what God has promised and what we currently see.
And when God's promises collide with our circumstances and when His timeline stretches far beyond what feels reasonable, there is a laugh that rises up from deep within us. A quiet laugh of self-protection… a laugh of guarded hope… a laugh of not wanting to be disappointed again.
But what I love and so appreciate about the Bible is that it doesn't hide this. It doesn't polish Sarah's response into something more flattering. It shows us, with complete honesty, that one of the great matriarchs of the faith — a woman who had followed Abraham faithfully for decades, who had left everything for a promise she couldn't see — even she had reached a point where God’s promise seemed laughable. And if Sarah got there, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get there too.
And yet, my brothers and sisters — this is where the story turns. Because whatever we may doubt, whatever we may laugh at in the quiet of our hearts, there is one thing that never changes: that God always proves faithful to His promises.
2. God Always Proves Faithful to His Promises
See how God responds to Sarah's laugh. He doesn't overlook it. He doesn't pretend it didn't happen. Instead, He addresses it directly — and He addresses it with a question that is not just meant for Sarah, but is meant for every one of us sitting in this room today: He says in v.14 - "Is anything too hard for the LORD?"
In the original Hebrew, the word translated "too hard" (pālāʾ) means something that is extraordinary, something beyond human capacity, or something so wonderful beyond explanation. God is literally asking: Is there anything so extraordinary, so far beyond all human limits, that it lies outside My ability to do it?
This is a rhetorical question. And the answer is no.
But the weight of that question isn't in the logic of it. It's in how it confronts our doubts. God doesn't shame Sarah for her laugh. He doesn't disqualify her from the promise because she struggled to believe. What He does instead is hold the promise steady — and He reaffirms it one more time.
V.14b - "At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son."
And then — we jump to chapter 21 — we read what has to be one of the most beautiful fulfillments in all of Scripture:
V.1 - "The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did to Sarah as he had promised."
What a stunning verse. Read it again slowly. The LORD visited Sarah as he had said. (Not approximately as he had said. Not in a modified version of what he had promised.) Exactly as he had said.
God said: this time next year Sarah will have a son. And the next year, exactly at the appointed time, a child was born.
Abraham was a hundred years old. Sarah was ninety. And they held a baby in their arms.
My brothers and sisters — this is the God we serve! A God who does not forget His promises. A God who is not stopped by impossibility. A God who turns the laugh of doubt into the laugh of joy!
And so what did they name him? They named him Isaac. Which means — laughter.
Think about that. Every time they called his name, every time they said "Isaac, come here" or "Isaac, where are you?" — they were saying the word for laughter. The name of their child was a testimony! They were confessing, over and over again, that God had turned their disbelief into delight, and their doubt into joy!
And listen to what Sarah says in v.6: "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me."
Can you feel the shift? This is not the same laugh from inside the tent. This is not the doubtful laugh of someone protecting herself from disappointment. This is the laugh of a woman who has been completely undone by the faithfulness of God. The laugh of someone who still cannot comprehend — and yet cannot deny it — because the evidence is right there in her arms.
My brothers and sisters, this is what God's grace does. It turns the laugh of doubt into the laugh of joy.
Now, I want to pause here for a moment — because it would be easy to walk away from this story thinking that God is simply in the business of changing our circumstances whenever we believe hard enough. But that is not what we are seeing in this passage. What we are seeing is something far more solid, far more secure than that. God did not give Sarah a child because her faith was strong — she laughed, remember? He gave her a child because He had made a promise. And God is always faithful to His own word.
This means that the breakthrough we seek must be grounded not in our circumstances, not in our feelings, and not even in the strength of our faith — but in the promises of God. When we anchor ourselves to what He has spoken, we are standing on ground that cannot shift. Because God's faithfulness is not dependent on our situation improving. It is dependent only on His character — and His character never changes.
And having said that - here is what I want you to take with you today, as we begin this series:
God is not bothered by your doubt. He is not intimidated by your circumstances. He is not confused by the impossibility of your situation. When He makes a promise, He doesn’t make it based on your ability to believe it perfectly, or on your track record of faithfulness, or on whether the conditions are favorable. He makes His promises out of who He is, and He keeps every one of them out of who He is.
Sarah laughed inside the tent. And God still gave her Isaac.
And He knows what you're laughing about in this very moment, in this very season. He knows the quiet voice of disbelief that lives in the corner of your heart. And He is still speaking His promise over you, asking - Is anything too hard for the LORD?
Christ-Centered Conclusion
Now let me bring this home with a final word — because the story of Isaac doesn't end with Isaac. It was never meant to.
When the angel announced to a young virgin named Mary that she would conceive and bear a son, Mary asked the only question that made sense: "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34) And the angel's answer echoes the question God asked in the tent at Mamre: "For nothing will be impossible with God." (Luke 1:37)
It's the same God who makes the same impossible promise, and yet comes through with the same pattern of grace.
Isaac was not the destination — he was a signpost. He was a preview, a foreshadowing of the One who was coming. Because what God did through Sarah's barren womb was pointing forward, across the centuries, to the moment when He would do something even greater — when He would send His own Son into the world, not through the ordinary means of human generation, but through the sheer, sovereign power of His Spirit.
You see, my brothers and sisters, Jesus is the true and better Isaac.
- Isaac was a child of promise — but Jesus is the Promise.
- Isaac was born so that a family might be preserved — but Jesus was born so that a lost world might be redeemed.
And here is the gospel in its fullest beauty: Jesus did not come for people who had it together. He did not come for those whose faith was strong and steady and never wavered. He came for people like Sarah — people who had laughed the laughter of doubt, people who had tried to take matters into their own hands, people who had wondered whether God had forgotten them.
Jesus came for the doubter. The worn-out. The waiting. The ones who in their heart says - "It's too late for me." He came for people like you and me.
And the cross is God's ultimate response to those doubtful, worn-out, hopeless hearts. Because on the cross, Jesus absorbed every consequence of our doubt, our sin, our running from God — and in His resurrection, He declared that nothing is too hard for the LORD.
My brothers and sisters! In Christ — your sin is not too hard for the LORD. Your shame is not too hard for the LORD. Your broken past is not too hard for the LORD. Death itself was not too hard for the LORD. Nothing is too hard for the One who, on the third day, walked out of that grave.
So for those of you who already know and love Jesus: let the story of Isaac’s impossible birth deepen your confidence in Him. If God kept His promise through a ninety-year-old womb — and moreover, if He kept the promise by not sparing His one and only Son for our redemption — then He will certainly keep every promise He has made to you.
Whatever you are waiting on, whatever feels irreversibly broken, whatever has caused you to laugh that laugh of fading hope — bring it to Him. His faithfulness has never failed once. It will certainly not start failing with you.
And for those of you who don't yet know this Jesus: the question God asked Sarah is a question He extends to you as well. Is your sin too great? Is your past too broken? Has too much time passed? Is the distance between you and God too wide to cross?
The gospel says: Absolutely not! Jesus lived the life you couldn't live, died the death you deserved to die, and rose again so that the laugh of doubt might become the laugh of joy — not just for Sarah, but also for you.
If you will come to Him today, He will receive you. Not because your faith is strong enough, not because you have earned it, but because He is faithful! And this faithful God has made a promise — that "Whoever comes to me I will never cast out." (John 6:37) — and He has never once broken a promise He has made.
So let us come to Him today — Not because we have it all together. Not because our faith is perfect. But because He is faithful, and His promise still stands. Just as God made laughter for Sarah — and He can do the same for us. Amen!
Reflection and Response
Let’s take moment to reflect and respond. As we think about the message today let’s ask ourselves -
1. Where are you laughing Sarah's laugh? What promise of God have you quietly stopped believing — and what circumstances have made it feel too late?
2. Am I actually trusting in God's promise or just hoping for a better circumstance? Is my faith anchored in who God is and what He has spoken — or am I only holding on as long as things might still work out in my favour?
3. If God is truly faithful, what is stopping me from fully surrendering my situation to Him? Is it fear? Is it control? Is it that I have stopped believing that He is good?
4. Where do I need the Lord to exchange the laugh of doubt for the laugh of joy? What would it look like for me to begin confessing God's faithfulness out loud — even before I see the fulfillment — knowing that the same Christ who defeated sin and death is interceding for me right now?
