Abraham sent his faithful servant,
Eliezer, on a mission to his home country to find a wife for Isaac.
Abraham wanted a godly wife for his son and sent Eliezer back to
his relatives to bring back a wife for Isaac. And as we saw last
week they dedicated the mission to God and left it in His hands to
help them with it.
Today we will start again with the
prayer of Eliezer:
"O Lord, God of my master," he
prayed. "Give me success and show kindness to my master, Abraham.
Help me to accomplish the purpose of my journey. See, here I am,
standing beside this spring, and the young women of the village are
coming out to draw water. This is my request. I will ask one of
them for a drink. If she says, "Yes, certainly, and I will water
your camels, too!" - let her be the one You have appointed as
Isaac's wife. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to
my master." Genesis 24:12-14
At first when I read this, I
thought that the request he had was reasonable. Surely it wasn't
that hard work to water the camels too? But then I read in a note
in my Bible that it was custom in that day for
foreigners/travellers to ask the young women to draw water for them
from the well. But it wasn't custom for the young women to water
the camels too. The note says that it took a lot of water to quench
the thirst of one camel, up to 95 litres of water for one camel.
Now Eliezer had ten camels and therefore about 950 litres were
necessary to quench their thirst! Now for any young woman that is a
lot of water to draw out of the well and carry to the camels! And
then I understood that Eliezer was asking the Lord that he was
looking for someone who will be prepared to water the camels of a
stranger without any compensation. He was looking for someone with
inner beauty and a servant's heart. Someone who will be willing to
serve and help others.
We all spend a lot of money and
time on outward appearances. We follow all the latest dieting and
exercising trends and if we have enough money we will also spend it
on beauty treatments. Now there is nothing wrong with looking after
ourselves and being the best we can be, but how much time and
effort do we spend on developing our inner beauty? We have a new
person created inside of us the moment we believed in Jesus Christ
and we need to let that new person grow. We need to spend time in
growing this new person into the beautiful being God created him to
be. This new person is lovely and desirable. I have never seen an
ugly person glowing with the love, joy and peace of the Lord on the
inside. People on fire for the Lord has a certain glow about them
and a radiance that flows out to all those around them. People like
that are attractive and lure all people in and draw them closer to
God. We all need to be like that. We need to glow like Moses did
after he returned from Mount Sinai. We need to spend so much time
in God's presence that His beauty will become our beauty and His
attractive nature become our nature. Then we can truly live out our
calling here on earth, as the beautiful vessels He created us to
be.
Father, we are so sorry that we
look at the worldly model for what is beautiful and what is not.
Rather we want to look up to You, spend time with You and be like
You in this world. Then we are truly beautiful, radiating love and
peace to all around. Amen