“Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
“When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said…”
Genesis 16:16-17:1

Some good thoughts from Ralph Davis:

It’s only a few blank centimetres in your printed Bible, but actually it’s far more. At the end of chapter 16 Abram is eighty-six years old; in the first verse of chapter 17 he is ninety-nine.
That’s thirteen years of which we know nothing—time simply went by.
We’ll come back to this.

In the meantime all the attention falls on God’s repeated and expanded promises in verses 4-8 and 15-22. They are essentially the same promises, though sometimes expanded (e.g., vv. 4b, 16) and clarified (v. 19).
But Yahweh underscores these promises, apparently without blushing:
– Abraham will become a father of a multitude of nations (v. 5),
– he will be very, very fruitful (v. 6, though there’s not a sign of it to date),
– he will give all the land of Canaan to Abraham and his seed (v. 8, though not a scrap of it to this point).

And then Yahweh becomes stubborn about the way these promises are to pan out—the seed will come through Sarah (vv. 15-16, 19, 21) and is to be called Isaac.
Ishmael had been the fruit of Sarai and Abram’s Deity-Assistance-Plan in chapter 16; he’ll be blessed (v. 20), but he’s not on the table as far as the covenant is concerned.
The seed comes through Sarah—old, barren, disappointed Sarah. God stubbornly insists it will be that way.
It’s as if Yahweh should add, ‘That’s my story—and I’m sticking to it.’ He takes the hard way and the long way, and it simply baffles us.

Let’s go back to that chronological gap of thirteen years between 16:16 and 17:1.
Once when I was teaching Old Testament Survey in a Christian college, one of my students was a fellow from a Jewish background. He’d had some exposure to Jewish traditions but apparently had never had to read (as in my class) large chunks of Old Testament narrative text. One day he summed up his impression from the biblical accounts: ‘God is never in a hurry’

The unhurriedness of God seems strange—and unwelcome—to us. The passage of time with no noticeable moves toward promise-fulfilment poses a problem for faith; it can wear on faith.
We prefer a deity with high blood pressure who is on the move, whose promises are delivered with microwavable instructions.

There is a corollary to this unhurriedness of God and we should take the time to spell it out. It is this: much of covenant living is undramatic and quite ordinary.
Think what went on in those years between 16:16 and 17:1. Well, not much divine razzle-dazzle apparently. God wasn’t breaking into Abram and Sarai’s life with sensational spurts of drama.
I suppose they had clan-wide parties, but most of the time was spent over things like getting goat’s milk for morning cereal, doing veterinary work, brushing teeth, getting over the flu, settling disputes over water rights.
Great swatches of covenant life are like that. It consists of grocery stores and oil changes, of taking inventory and standing at copy machines, of getting allergy shots and going for music lessons and pulling casseroles out of the oven.

Which springs the question: Can you stand the ordinariness of the Christian life?

There was once a man in one of the congregations my father served who was very eager to go around and attend various ‘special meetings’ in the area, perhaps held in another church and/or by a visiting evangelist. Sometimes they called these ‘revival meetings’: In any case this man said he went round these various meetings in order to stay juiced up in his faith. He had to have that to keep him stirred up.

There is something very sad about that—that one must always have religion on steroids. So much of covenant living is ordinary stuff and if we cannot be content with routine days we will run into problems.

God seldom sends fireworks, and because the God of the covenant is a bit strange like that you have to ask yourself:

Can I be content with placing one foot in front of the other in the daily round?

(end of quote from Ralph Davis: Faith of our Father: Expositions of Genesis 12-25)

Many of God’s greatest saints have spent most of their years in ordinariness.
Moses was 40 when he took matters into his own hands to take on his perceived “Great Purpose” in life; but God made him wait another 40 years in obscurity in a very ordinary desert.
Paul had as dramatic a conversion and call to preach to the Gentiles as any, but had to wait doing “ordinary” ministry 12 to 14 years before setting out on his first missionary journey; then his known missionary labours fill only 10 years of his life – the rest of his time he lives out an “ordinary” life in a very ordinary prison.

Can you stand the ordinariness of the Christian life?
In any case, do you appreciate how extraordinary your ordinary life already is?

“Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” 1 John 3:1-2

May “the eyes of your understanding be enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.” Ephesians 1:18-21

Extraordinary!