When It’s Hard to Obey

Sarah and Hagar: The Missteps of Pride – Part 2

Happy New Year y’all!!!!!!!! Welcome to 2026! CONGRATULATIONS on making it this far, and all thanks and glory to God for keeping us and helping us thus far. 2025 was one very intense, very interesting year, and I know we all heaved a collective sigh of relief when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, and 2026 rolled in. I hope you’re excited for the year ahead because there’s so much goodness and awesomeness ahead. How do I know? Easy, the Bible promises so. Proverbs 4: 18 tells us that, “...the path of the just is as the shining light, That shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” In wrapping up 2025, there was a pressing need to dispatch specific letters, as we looked back at the year and our hearts were feeling all the many intense emotions at different points. But the Lord wanted to show us that He saw us, no matter where we were, or what we felt. 

Towards the end of the year, we talked about the first part of the story of Sarah and Hagar. In exploring the lives of these women, we walked together through the hidden traps of pride and how it shifts our focus away from God and who He is to us, and fixes it on ourselves, our problems or even our perceived value outside of God. Today, we’ll be finishing up with these strong,  wonderfully human women and seeing how God comes through for us all, even as we live different lives at the same time.

A brief recap of The Missteps of Pride – Part 1 (You should really check it out, if you haven’t):

Sarai was a gorgeous woman married to the man who defined wealth in those days, Abram. But they hadn’t had a child yet, and as they grew older, Sarai’s desire to see her husband get his heir drove her to offer him her maid, an Egyptian babe named Hagar. Abram accepted, Hagar got pregnant, and Sarai was miserable because Hagar began to exalt herself in pride. So she reported to Abram, took matters into her own hands, and proceeded to unleash hell and high water on Hagar, until Hagar ran for her life. All of this can be found in the book of Genesis, from chapters 12 through to 16. And that’s where we shall be picking up from today.

So in Gen. 16:6, Hagar sees new realms of shege yet unseen in the hands of Sarai, and so she packed her load, dusted her slippers and left with her child. When I used to read this, I used to imagine her packing her things in the middle of the night, softly and quietly, then opening the compound gate slowly like a thief so it doesn’t squeak and wake her fellow servants or even worse her mistress, and running down the road quickly without looking back. She ran so far that  God’s angel found her in the wilderness (vs. 7). Do you understand how scared a pregnant woman has to be to run away from all forms of civilisation, from everything she knew, including the person responsible for the pregnancy, to the wilderness? The fear of Sarah must have been a very powerful motivator indeed. Powerful enough to not even contemplate telling Abram. It’s ironic how Sarai went to report Hagar to her husband and obtained “permission” to do as she pleased, but it did not even occur to Hagar to do the same. This clearly differentiates “wife” from “mother of my child”. But yeah, the angel found her, asked where she was coming from and where she was going, and this babe told him that she was running for her life from her madam (vs. 8). No cutting corners, just simple truth. And then the angel told her to go back home. I’m pretty sure she must have thought she was hearing static after that message. Because sorry, Sir, you said I should do what? Go where? Are you not the one I just told I’m trying to save my life? Do you understand the severity of what you’re saying? But the wildest part of this thing was that he didn’t just say, “Return to your mistress…”, as wild as that is, this whole messenger from God now added, “…and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9).  Submit to someone who is after my life?As how nowwwwww? Can we actually be serious here? To be honest, if Hagar had started wondering exactly who sent this angel at that point, I would not have blamed her at all, because in the flesh, he was seriously starting to look a lot like a weapon fashioned against her peace of mind. But in obedience, she submitted. She submitted her pain, her wounded pride, and her very life to God’s will and His message. In this singular act of submission, Hagar redirected her focus from the trials she was experiencing because of her earlier actions and Sarah’s retaliation to the God who had even made it possible for her to conceive, the same God who was now reaching out to her in the midst of her trials. God, who had seen her in the middle of nowhere. The revelation of El Roi was not because God had sent his angel to ask a slave to return to her mistress; it happened because Hagar experienced God’s intentionality towards her and submitted wholly to His divine authority, even though it was not what she would have wanted for herself. She realised that in returning to Sarah and submitting to her, no matter what that entailed, she was actually submitting to that very same God. And that was enough for her.

How many times has it seemed like there was absolutely no way God could have been telling you to give when He knew what you had was all you had? Or when the instructions you received looked like they were of the devil because surely a God that loves you would not demand this much from you. Like when He says to apologise to the one who hurt you unbearably, or apologise even when you’re right. Or when He tells you to walk away from that bully instead of following them up with some brain-altering physical contact. Sometimes, as believers, we’re placed in these situations where we have to choose between what we want and what God would have us do. And it’s okay to admit that these decisions are not easy. We do not want to set aside our pride or our desires, and that’s more than okay. Because obedience is not easy. By its very definition, it involves the sacrifice of self, and that’s where our worship lies: in the total submission and denial of our flesh for God’s glory alone. And we have the perfect example of this in our Lord. I don’t think Jesus, who was fully man as He was fully God, was looking forward to the torture and pain He endured on the way to Golgotha and on the Cross. In fact, we know for a fact that He wasn’t (Matt 26:39. Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42). So if my personal Lord and Saviour knew better than I can ever understand that obedience is not easy, but He still went ahead to obey, then surely there’s hope for me. Surely, in the Perfect Example, there’s grace for me. 

The shadow and reflection of Christ is reflected in every single page of the Word. He’s literally right there, if only we’d look. Hebrews 4:15 tells us that, 

“…we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.“

Christ being fully man means experiencing the wholeness of humanity, understanding what it means to want, to feel as we do. And I understand that sometimes, we’re all ready to embrace our Lord as God, but we struggle to understand Him as man, because it is hard to imagine Jesus, the Son of God, dealing with what we deal with every day. But the deeper we get into the Word, the more we see Him modelling concepts that we see in our everyday lives, because He too, had an everyday life. In Him, we live, we move and have our being (Acts 17:28). It’s not just a cool thing we say as Believers, it’s supposed to be our reality. That we look to Jesus in the great and not-so-great circumstances, because I don’t think anybody today will suffer a tenth of the pure agony He experienced. So it just makes sense to take it to someone who would get what it means to do something difficult in obedience, abi?

There’s still so much to learn in the lives of these women, and although this part focused more on Hagar, I just realised that there’s going to be another part to this series, and I’m laughing at how limited our knowledge and understanding of the Word can be, without the Spirit of God to teach us. Because although we read the stories and we know the tales, do we really see God in His Word? Do we?

Anyways, this is where we part ways until next time. So, like an old, terrible Nollywood series would say, watch out for part 3! It’s going to be the last study on Hagar and Sarah.

Probably.

Most likely.

Loving you with the love of Christ,

Gabrielle…

Photo by Ian Chen on Unsplash