Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan

January 19, 2026 - Genesis 16 & Psalm 16

• Josiah Smith - Compass Bible Church South Valley

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0:00 | 17:41

We trace Sarai’s plan in Genesis 16, the pain that follows, and Hagar’s encounter with the God who sees, then turn to Psalm 16 for a vision of joy that fuels trust and obedience. We end by calling our church to zeal for good works shaped by grace.

• Sarai’s impatience and the cost of control
• Hagar at the well and the God who sees
• The angel of the Lord as a Christophany
• Trinitarian hints in the Old Testament
• Psalm 16’s path of life and true joy
• Obedience as glad worship, not cold duty
• Zealous good works anchored in grace and hope
• Practical heart check for trusting God’s timing

For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compassbiblesv.org. Keep reading. Keep growing. God’s Word is a lamp to your feet, and a light to your path.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan, where we are seeking to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength with God's word lighting the way. I'm Josiah Smith, lead pastor of Compass South Valley. Today is Monday, January 19th, 2026. Listen intently to God's written word. Genesis sixteen. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Ab Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. And he went into Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, Behold, your servant is in your power, do to her as you please. Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going? She said, I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai. The angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her. The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him. He shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a god of seeing. Where she said, Truly here I have seen him who looks after me. Therefore the well was called Beer Lahi Roy. It lies between Kadesh and Bared. And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, who Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. Psalm sixteen. Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, You are my Lord. I have no good apart from you. As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight. The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. Their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out, or take their names on my lips. The Lord is my chosen portion in my cup, you hold my lot. The lines have fallen from me in pleasant places. Indeed I have a beautiful inheritance. I bless the Lord who gives me counsel. In the night also my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to shield, or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Now, as we continue to study the life of Abram, and we see God just continuing to reiterate his promise that he would make Abram a father of a great nation. This promise that his offspring would be like the stars in the sky. And we've seen there kind of be some ebbing and flowing, some waxing and waning, some faith and trust, but also some areas of doubt, both for Abram and in Genesis 16, we see it's Sarai's turn to really start to doubt how is all of this going to work out? How is God actually going to provide? And so, in some very real ways, Sarai takes things into her own hands. She makes her own plan. She seeks to essentially force the hand of God to provide according to her timeline and in ways that make sense according to her own wisdom. And this reminds me of just what we even read of in the Proverbs where it says that there's a way that seems right to a man, but its end leads to destruction. Sarai saw a way that she saw as being right and good. And she told Abram, Hey, I want you to take Hagar, my servant. I want you to uh to have a relationship with her physically. I want you to hopefully have an offspring so that I may have a children. And then ultimately she she gets what she wants, so to speak. But surprise of all surprises, it was not, in fact, what she wanted. And there was some conflict that began to be introduced in this family as a result of Sarai's unbelief. And this is a great warning for us and just a great encouragement that uh we ought to really resist trying to hurry the hand of God. Not even resist. We ought to avoid this. Don't try to hurry the hand of God. God, up until this point has been so consistent in reiterating his promise to Abram and by extension, his promise to Sarai that he was going to bless them. Remember the threefold Abrahamic covenant, land, seed, and blessing. And Sarai was growing impatient. She was seeking to hurry the hand of God. She wanted to have things her way. And what do we see? There, there's there is a sense of contempt. There is conflict. There is even you could potentially think of envy, uh, whatever the case may be. Now she's upset. She got exactly what she wanted. This was her plan, this was her thought. It happened right as she schemed it to happen. And uh she doesn't like the result, she doesn't like the outcome. That's a great warning for us in our life when we just get into this place where we want to doubt the timing of God's promise. And just even this weekend at Compass Bible Church South Valley, we were talking about that and how God's promises often are kept in a timeline that we are uncomfortable with. And that's something that we got to wrestle with. And that requires just a level of humil of humility, again, to say, God, you're you're never late, you're always on time, you know exactly what you're doing, you know what's best, and you're gonna do it when when it is absolutely best and necessary and good for you to do it and to keep your promises. And we see that again illustrated in the life of Sarah. So again, don't try to hurry the hand of God in your life. Don't don't try to say, God, you need to do this now. You need to do it on my timetable, you need to show me how all this is gonna work out. I want to be able to put it on my calendar, I want to be able to set a reminder in my phone or whatever the case may be. No, don't try to hurry the hand of God. Have a just a simple humility where you say, God, whatever you're doing, however you're doing it, however long you're gonna do it, I trust you. You're never late, you're always on time. Now, something just to point out here that's interesting in Genesis 16 is we see the appearance of the angel of the Lord. Now, I've referenced this in previous episodes, but this is what we often refer to as a Christophany, a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. And there's many reasons why we could kind of go into that and just talk about the the nitty-gritty of that. But I want to show you just one reason why we see the angel of the Lord being a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ, and even in a sense, how our Trinitarian theology is built off of things like this that we see in the Old Testament. So the angel of the Lord is talking to Sarai, or it's talking to Hagar specifically, the servant of Sarai, verse 9. The angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her. The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude, which just by the way, that really mirrors the language of the Abrahamic covenant. But now this is being said to Hagar specifically. Uh but then after all of this, behold, you are pregnant, shall bear a son, you shall call his name Ishmael. He's going to be a wild donkey of a man. Look at verse 13. This is curious. We've seen several times it's the angel of the Lord, it's the angel of the Lord, he's the one talking. But in verse 13, it says, So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God of seeing. For she said, Truly I've seen him who looks after me. So Hagar's response to this interaction and this conversation with the angel of the Lord is to say, You are a God of seeing. She called the name of the Lord. And this is a theme that you're going to see throughout the Old Testament, specifically even in the book of Genesis. You're going to see the angel of the Lord speaking. And those in response to the angel of the Lord, they're going to say, Yahweh, they're going to say, You are God. They're going to reference the angel of the Lord as being the one true God. And they're going to be used that the angel of the Lord and the name God interchangeably. And we're going to see the angel of the Lord making covenant promises that are only appropriate for God to make, specifically even with Abraham. And this is again just a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. This gets us just one of the pieces of the theological building blocks for Trinitarian theology. So I just wanted to point that out here in Genesis 16. We see the angel of the Lord whom Hagar says, You are a God of seeing. For she said, Truly here I've seen him who looks after me. So again, the warning from Genesis 16, don't try to hurry the hand of God. But then also there we see the angel of the Lord, and that that just helps us to get a clear sense of Trinitarian theology, or at least get us heading in that direction as we head towards the New Testament and see some of those things more clearly. But we also see in Psalm 16, our other reading for today, a great reminder that the pursuit of living a life in service to God, in worship of God, is not it's not boring, it's not grayscale, it's not bleak in the sense of man, we just have to do this, and uh we're obligated to worship, we're obligated to respond. Sometimes I feel like even as Christians, we can have that sort of mentality. I have to do this, I have to obey, I have to do what God tells me to do. But Psalm 16 paints a very different picture. Specifically in verse one, he says there, David, preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord in verse two, you are my Lord, I have no good apart from you. So from David's perspective, there is no good in this life if not for a relationship with God, if not for the ability to worship God and to draw near to him. And so far from being something that we just have to do, far from being something that we sort of have to clench our fists and just get through. David says, No, this is a good thing. And in fact, this is such a good thing. I have no good apart from you. So that's how he opens, but again in verse 11, it says, You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. According to David, from David's perspective, living a life in pursuit of God brings joy, brings life, the path of life at your right hand are pleasures. Listen to these words: life, joy, pleasures. These are what marked David's pursuit of the Lord. And I believe it should mark our pursuit of the Lord. We're not just cremudgeons, we're not just getting through it, we're not just trying to just put one foot in front of the other and simply obey. Of course, we need to obey, and of course we need to be faithful, uh, but we ought to be on the lookout for this kind of response to our worship of God, to our pursuit of God, to our knowledge of God. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. And I just wanted to connect that to what we talked about this past Sunday from the book of Titus. Uh, Paul is encouraging Titus to be zealous for good works, to be convictional for good works, to spend time and effort and energy to pursue good works. And I think it would be easy as a church for us to get into a mindset if we're not careful that we just we just gotta do it. We just gotta get it done. It's just another thing. It's just something we know it's the right thing to do, so we're gonna do it. And in our hearts we can grow cold and not see what David's saying here about, no, this is the path of life. This is fullness of joy, this is right hand uh pleasures that are forever more. This is exactly what we want. And so those four things that we talked about on Sunday, striving to be a servant, being motivated by the by the hope that comes from the promises of God, looking for opportunities to pass on the faith that you have been given, relying on the grace and peace that God supplies through Christ our Savior. All of these things should be done in joy and with joy, because God has made known to us the path of life. In his presence there is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. And that's so that's something I want you just to be on the lookout for in your own heart. Are you pursuing the things that God has pursued or God has commanded you to pursue with joy, with gladness, with this sense of no, this is life, this is pleasure forevermore, or is this just a sense of a cold duty or cold obligation? Scriptures have a lot to say about the way that we pursue the Lord. And joy is certainly something that is said of those who genuinely love the Lord, who genuinely desire to honor the Lord with their lives. So that's a good heart check for us today to think about that. Are we truly desiring to love the Lord and to serve the Lord? Are we being zealous for good works and we define that as living a life in service to the king? Are we doing that with joy? Are we doing that with gladness? Are we believing that in his presence there is fullness of joy and at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore? We ought to be able in our heart to say with sincerity, there is nothing better. There's no greater pursuit than to serve Christ our King. There's no greater pursuit than to pursue good works in the name of the King that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. And so being zealous for good works, that that should never be something that we heap on ourselves. That's just another thing to add to all the other spinning plates in our lives. And I guess we gotta do it because that's what we're supposed to do. That's what Christians do. No, we should have a sense of excitement, a sense of joy, a sense of expectation. That this is where true pleasure is found. Loving the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And as we grow in our love for him, I believe what we talked about from Genesis 16, not hurrying the hand of God, or at least attempting to, that's going to get easier and easier because as we love God more, we will trust God more. And so let us learn from this example and this story here in Genesis 16 of Sarai just trying to short circuit the process, not trusting fully in what God is saying to her, at least in this moment of weakness and taking things into her own hands. And let us commit to being zealous for good works, aiming for those four targets that we talked about on Sunday, and recognizing that we ought to do this with great joy because God has made known to us the path of life. In his presence there is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. Well, thanks for joining us today on the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Podcast. For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compass Bible SV.org. Keep reading, keep growing. God's word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path.