You worship a God who sees you.

This is not just ancient history.

This is our identity.

And when we really get that, it changes how we see ourselves and the world around us.

And when we are in our moments of despair, God can open our eyes and help us see what we cannot see. The God who saw Hagar, the God who heard Ishmael,

is the God who sees you. I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you.

If you remember our big picture overview of the Old Testament from our first class, you probably

noticed that so far in our course, we've been focused on the early history events.

But now we're going to zoom in for the next several class periods on the patriarchs and matriarchs, Abraham and Sarah,

and their descendants. And as our course picks up the pace, it can become easy to get lost

in the storyline. And so I want to start out with a recommendation that if you haven't already done

it, I highly recommend the church's Old Testament Stories book.

There's a free version of it available online.

You can buy a hard copy.

It's not just for kids.

It is really helpful, I think even for adults, to just get an understanding of the storyline.

So I've linked to it on the course website, and again, I just want to recommend that you read through

this entire book. It would probably only take 45 minutes or so, but it's so helpful because there's

lots of details in the Old Testament, and when we get lost in the storyline, it's easy to get

discouraged and just say, oh, I'm going to give up on it. But the storyline is fascinating. So get

the big picture, and that will help you

with some of the smaller details along the way.

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