Year 4, Day 20: Genesis 21

Theological Commentary: Click Here 

Discipleship Focus: Invitation, Identity

• Identity: Our true identity comes from God.  Only when our identity comes from God can we be obedient in ways that satisfy our person to our core.
• Invitation: God is always inviting us into relationship with Him. He desires that we know Him and we know His desires for us.

The story of Isaac and Ishmael is a great lens through which we can look at identity.  If we look at Isaac, his identity is easy to establish.  He is the promised child of Abraham and Sarah.  He is created through God’s power in opening up Sarah’s womb.  His identity is clearly rooted in God’s handiwork.

Ishmael is a more difficult person to look at with respect to identity.  He’s the product of a human plan.  He’s the child of a union between a man and his slave.  From a worldly perspective, he doesn’t have a great hope for identity.  Yet, God gives Ishmael an identity.  God loves Ishmael in spite of his worldly origins.  For me, this is the powerful testimony in these verses.  Isaac’s identity is clearly rooted in God.  But Ishmael has an identity that is just as equally rooted in God’s love.

This happily leads us into the realm of invitation.  God desires us to be in relationship with Him.  He desires that we know Him.  He doesn’t care about our origins; He cares about our relationship with Him.  He invites us to come and know Him deeply.  He invites us to get our identity from Him, our Father.

<><