Hi, my name is Pete Cazara. I want to welcome you to the emotionally healthy leader podcast.

And today I want to talk to you about not rushing in decision making and lessons from the life

of Abraham. So the last two weeks, I've talked about my biggest regrets, one of which was not

rushing or being impatient in making key decisions.

And I realized as I went through the 10 that this kept coming up over and over again.

It was an underlying theme of three or four of them.

And that there are a few more powerful examples than a life of Abraham, who's called

the Father of Us All, of a person who had to learn to wait and not rush. So in this podcast,

I'm going to actually invite you to listen to a message that I give on the famous text of Genesis

16, verses 1 to 4, where Abraham and his wife Sarah do rush

God's plan and decide to move God's plan along more quickly and have a child through their

servant Hagar.

Very famous story and all the consequences that are unleashed in that.

This is the core of the Christian life.

The human heart, our hearts

battle between, do I trust and wait and love God, or do I move into striving and grasping?

It's the very essence of the original rebellion in the Garden of Eden. It's a consistent theme all

through Genesis to Revelation. But in Abraham, we see it so powerfully and vividly.

When we see the kind of trouble he gets in when he grasps for his own happiness and forces his way into things.

So we're here today because of his faithful, as he learned, he's called our father, Abraham in Genesis, in Romans chapter 4. But he does

something that's acceptable in his culture, at least the standards of his day, by resolving his problem

of infertility. Actually, he's a great planner, but he runs ahead of God. He doesn't wait. He's going to have to

...