He Waited 25 Years for a Baby — And Almost Ruined Everything by Rushing God
Abraham is the 'father of faith,' but nobody talks about the two and a half decades he spent wondering if God had forgotten him. What happened in that gap between promise and delivery will change how you think about your own waiting season.
Part 1: The Word Nobody Wants to Hear
There are exactly three words that can make a grown adult lose their composure:
“God says wait.”
Not “no.” We can grieve a “no.” Not “yes.” We can celebrate a “yes.” But “wait”? Wait sits in the space between hope and disappointment, and it refuses to tell you which direction it’s leaning.
If you’ve ever prayed a prayer that Heaven seemed to put on hold — for a job, a relationship, a healing, a breakthrough, a child, a purpose — then you already know. Waiting on God doesn’t feel spiritual. It feels like standing in an empty room, knocking on a door that doesn’t open, wondering if anyone is even on the other side.
You’re not alone in that room.
A man named Abraham stood there for twenty-five years.
The Promise That Started Everything
In Genesis 12, God speaks to a seventy-five-year-old man named Abram and makes a promise so absurd it would be funny if it weren’t Scripture:
I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing.
A great nation. From a man with no children, married to a woman who couldn’t have them, living in a culture where childlessness was considered a curse. God doesn’t just promise him a baby — He promises him a dynasty.
And then God goes quiet.
Not forever. Not completely. But in the way that matters most — the way that would answer the one question burning a hole in Abraham’s chest every single night: When?
God said what He would do. He never said when He would do it.
That gap — between the what and the when — is where most of us live our faith.
Year One Was Probably Exciting
We don’t talk about this enough, but the early days of waiting are fueled by adrenaline. Abraham packed up everything — his wife, his nephew, his livestock, his entire life — and moved to a land he’d never seen based on a voice he couldn’t prove. That takes a kind of reckless, beautiful faith.
Year one, he probably looked at Sarai every morning and thought, Any day now.
Year five, he was probably still hopeful. God had appeared to him again in Genesis 13, after the messy split with Lot, and doubled down:
Yahweh said to Abram, after Lot was separated from him, “Now, lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for I will give all the land which you see to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring may also be counted.…”
Dust of the earth. More offspring than you can count. Abraham must have gone home grinning.
But Sarai’s womb was still closed.
The Moment Faith Got Tired
By Genesis 15, Abraham is done pretending he’s okay. And here’s what I love about this man — he doesn’t dress it up in religious language. He walks straight up to God and says what he’s actually thinking:
Abram said, “Lord Yahweh, what will you give me, since I go childless, and he who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” Abram said, “Behold, you have given no children to me: and, behold, one born in my house is my heir.”
Read that again. Slowly.
This is the father of faith, the man who left everything because God said “go” — and he’s basically saying: “What’s the point of all these promises if I don’t even have a kid? My servant is going to get everything.”
That’s not a failure of faith. That’s faith being honest.
And this is where God does something remarkable. He doesn’t rebuke Abraham. He doesn’t lecture him about patience. He takes him outside, into the Middle Eastern night, and says:
Yahweh brought him outside, and said, “Look now toward the sky, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” He said to Abram, “So your offspring will be.”
God met Abraham’s exhaustion with a visual. Not an argument. Not a timeline. A sky full of uncountable stars and a promise attached to every single one.
And the next verse is one of the most important sentences in the Bible:
He believed in Yahweh, who credited it to him for righteousness.
He believed. Again. Not for the first time — for the hundredth time. Faith isn’t a one-time decision. It’s the choice you make again when the waiting gets unbearable.
When Waiting Broke Him
Here’s where the story gets painfully human.
Genesis 16. Ten years have passed since the original promise. Abraham is eighty-five. Sarai is seventy-five. And Sarai comes to Abraham with a plan:
Sarai said to Abram, “See now, Yahweh has restrained me from bearing. Please go in to my servant. It may be that I will obtain children by her.” Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
And Abraham agreed.
Let that sink in. The man who believed God under the stars — the man whose faith was counted as righteousness — looked at the closed door of waiting and said, “Maybe God needs my help opening it.”
This is what waiting does when we stop trusting the when. We start manufacturing our own answers. We take the raw materials of God’s promise and try to assemble them with our own hands, on our own timeline, using our own methods.
Ishmael was born. And the consequences of that decision echoed for generations.
Not because God abandoned Abraham. Not because the promise was cancelled. But because rushing God always produces something — it just doesn’t produce what God intended.
What Waiting Is Actually For
Here’s the part most sermons skip.
We treat waiting like dead space. Like God pressed pause on the DVR and walked away. Like nothing is happening.
But something was happening in those twenty-five years. God was building something in Abraham that a quick answer never could have produced.
Year 1-10: Abraham learned to follow God’s voice even when the path made no sense. He walked into famines, navigated conflicts, made mistakes, and kept going.
Year 10-20: Abraham learned to be honest with God. The conversation in Genesis 15 — that raw, unfiltered “what’s the point?” — became the foundation of a real relationship, not a religious performance.
Year 20-25: Abraham learned that his plans couldn’t substitute for God’s timing. Ishmael was the proof. The thing he built in his own strength became the thing that complicated everything.
By the time Isaac was born — when Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety (Genesis 21:1-5) — Abraham didn’t just have a son. He had a faith that had been tested, stretched, broken, rebuilt, and refined in the fire of two and a half decades of waiting.
The wait wasn’t the obstacle to the promise. The wait was the preparation for it.
Romans 4:20-21 puts it this way:
Yet, looking to the promise of God, he didn’t waver through unbelief, but grew strong through faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what he had promised, he was also able to perform.
“Strengthened in his faith.” Not despite the waiting — through it.
The Thing About Your Waiting Season
Whatever you’re waiting for right now — the job, the healing, the relationship, the breakthrough, the answer to the prayer you’ve prayed so many times you’ve lost count — I want you to hear two things:
First: Your frustration is not a sin. Abraham complained to God’s face, and God called it righteous. Honest wrestling with God is not the opposite of faith. It’s the proof of it. You don’t argue with someone you’ve stopped believing in.
Second: God is not idle while you wait. He’s not checking His celestial calendar trying to find an opening. The gap between promise and fulfillment is where He does His deepest work — not on your circumstances, but on you.
James 1:3-4 says it plainly:
knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let endurance have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
Not lacking anything. That’s what’s on the other side of the wait. Not just the thing you asked for — but the version of you who’s ready to carry it.
Reflect
-
What are you currently waiting on God for? Be specific. Write it down. Name it before Him the way Abraham did — honestly, without religious polish.
-
Where are you tempted to “build an Ishmael”? Is there a place where you’re trying to force God’s promise on your own timeline? What would it look like to release that back to Him?
-
What might God be building in you during this season? If the wait isn’t wasted, what is it producing? Patience? Trust? Dependence? Humility? Can you thank Him for the formation even when you can’t see the finish line?
-
Read Genesis 15:5-6 again. Abraham believed God in the dark, under the stars, with no proof except God’s word. What would it look like for you to believe again — not for the first time, but for the hundredth time?
Coming Up Next
Abraham isn’t the only one who waited. In Part 2, we’ll meet a man who waited in a place far worse than an empty nursery — he waited in a prison cell. Falsely accused, forgotten by the people he helped, abandoned by everyone who should have remembered him.
His name was Joseph. And what God did in that dungeon will change how you see the darkest seasons of your own life.
Next: “Forgotten in a Dungeon — What God Does When Nobody Remembers Your Name”