Sermon For Single Mothers

God Sees You Here

How do you keep going when you feel invisible? When you wake up before anyone else in the house, when you carry decisions that were never meant to be carried alone, when you sit in a pew on Sunday morning and wonder whether anyone in this room truly understands what your week looked like? And how does the church speak honestly to that kind of weight without offering empty comfort or reducing a whole life to a single category?

These are real questions. They deserve a real answer from the Word of God. And this morning, the Word of God gives us one.

I want to take you to two passages that belong together, though they are separated by centuries. The first is Genesis 16, and the second is Psalm 68. Together they form a portrait of a God who does not look away from hard situations, who does not wait until things are tidy before he draws near, and who has something to say to every person in this room who has ever felt unseen.

Before we read, let me tell you about Hagar. She was an Egyptian slave woman in the household of Abram and Sarai. She had no legal standing, no advocate, no choice in what happened to her. When Sarai gave her to Abram as a surrogate, Hagar had no voice in that arrangement. When she became pregnant and tension rose in the household, she was treated harshly. And then she ran. She ran into the wilderness alone and pregnant, with nothing ahead of her but desert.

That is where God found her.

Genesis 16, beginning at verse 7, in the Christian Standard Bible.

The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the road to Shur. He said, "Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?" She replied, "I'm running away from my mistress Sarai." The angel of the Lord said to her, "Go back to your mistress and submit to her authority." The angel of the Lord said to her, "I will greatly multiply your offspring, and they will be too many to count." The angel of the Lord said to her, "You have conceived and will have a son. You will name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your cry of affliction." Then she called the Lord who spoke to her, "You are El-roi," for she said, "In this place, have I actually seen the one who sees me?"

El-roi. The God who sees.

That name is not a theological abstraction. It was spoken by a woman alone in the wilderness, a woman with no resources and no plan, a woman whose situation was not of her own making. And the first thing she did when God met her was give him a name that described what he had done. He had seen her. Not just observed her from a distance. He had found her. He had called her by name. He had spoken into her specific circumstances.

Now turn to Psalm 68, verses 5 and 6.

"God in his holy dwelling is a father of the fatherless and a champion of widows. God provides homes for those who are deserted; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious live in a scorched land."

A father of the fatherless. A champion of widows. A provider of homes for those who are deserted. This is not a promise invented to make people feel better. This is a declaration about the character of God embedded in the poetry of ancient Israel. The God of Scripture consistently positions himself on the side of those who have been left without a covering, without a defender, without adequate support.

These two texts together give us the governing truth of this message. The God who sees is also the God who acts. He sees Hagar in the wilderness, and he does not simply observe. He speaks. He names. He promises. He sends her back with a word she can carry. And the God who sees has not changed.

So let us think carefully about what this means for us this morning.

The first thing I want you to see is that God's sight is not conditional on your situation being resolved.

Hagar was not in a good situation when God found her. She was a runaway. She was in the wilderness. Her circumstances were complicated and painful and not entirely of her own making. And God did not wait until she had sorted herself out before he came to her. He came to her in the middle of it.

There is a pastoral word here that the church sometimes gets wrong. We can communicate, without meaning to, that God's presence and favor are available once things improve, once you have made better decisions, once your household looks more like what we expect a Christian household to look like. That is not what Genesis 16 teaches. God found Hagar in the wilderness. God found her in the mess. God found her before anything was resolved.

If you are in a season of life where you are carrying more than you expected to carry, where the structure of your daily life looks different from what you planned, where you are parenting without the partnership you hoped for, the Word of God says that El-roi, the God who sees, sees you here. Not there, when things are better. Here. Now. In this.

That is not a promise that your circumstances will change on a schedule you can predict. The Bible does not make that promise, and neither will I. What the Bible does promise is the presence and attention of a God who does not look away.

The second thing I want you to see is that God's care is expressed through community, and the church has a responsibility in that.

Psalm 68:5 and 6 are not simply a description of what God does in a private, invisible way. They are a declaration of what God's people are called to embody. The Old Testament law was filled with specific, practical provisions for widows, orphans, and those without a male provider. These were not suggestions. They were covenant obligations. The community of God's people was meant to be the visible expression of God's care for the vulnerable.

The New Testament does not walk away from this. James 1:27 tells us that pure and undefiled religion before God the Father includes looking after orphans and widows in their distress. The early church in Acts organized practical care for those who were being overlooked. The apostle Paul gave specific instructions about how the church should support women who were genuinely alone and without resources.

This means that when a congregation reads Psalm 68 and hears that God is a father of the fatherless and a champion of widows, the right response is not only to feel moved. The right response is to ask what that looks like in this congregation, in this community, this week.

What does it look like for a church to be a place where someone who is raising children alone does not have to pretend that everything is fine? Where practical needs are met without shame? Where children who are growing up without a father in the home encounter men and women of faith who invest in them? Where the weight of a single income and a full household does not have to be carried in silence?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that Psalm 68 puts on the table for every congregation that claims to worship the God who champions the vulnerable.

I want to be honest with you about something. The church has not always done this well. Sometimes the church has been a place where certain family structures are quietly marginalized, where people feel they must hide their reality in order to belong. If that has been your experience, I am not going to explain it away. That is a failure, and it is worth naming. But the answer to that failure is not to abandon the community of faith. The answer is to call the community of faith back to what God actually says about who he is and what his people are supposed to look like.

The third thing I want you to see is that God gives you something to carry forward.

When the angel of the Lord spoke to Hagar, he gave her a word. He told her to name her son Ishmael, which means God hears. Every time she called that child's name, she would be reminded that the Lord had heard her cry of affliction. God gave her a living, daily reminder of his attention to her pain.

This is how God works. He does not only comfort in the moment. He gives us something that travels with us. He gives us his Word, which does not change. He gives us his Spirit, who does not leave. He gives us a community of faith that, when it is functioning as it should, carries one another's burdens. He gives us the Lord's Table, where we are reminded regularly that Jesus Christ gave his body and blood for people whose situations were desperate and whose needs were beyond their own ability to meet.

If you are in a season where you feel like you are holding everything together by yourself, I want you to hear this clearly. You were not designed to hold everything together by yourself. That is not a statement about your weakness. That is a statement about how God made human beings. We are made for community. We are made for the covenant. We are made to need one another, and the God who sees you in the wilderness is also the God who places the solitary in families, as Psalm 68:6 says.

So let me close with this.

El-roi sees you. Not a version of you that has everything figured out. Not a future version of you when the hard season is over. He sees you now, in the specific details of your specific life, and he does not look away.

And to this congregation, let me say plainly: the person sitting near you may be carrying something you cannot see. The call of Psalm 68 is not only to believe that God cares for the vulnerable. It is to be the community through which that care becomes visible and real.

If you have never trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, I want you to know that the same God who found Hagar in the wilderness is the God who sent his Son to seek and to save the lost. That is not a transaction. That is a rescue. And it is available to you today, not when you have sorted yourself out, but now, as you are.

Let us pray.

Father, you are El-roi. You see every person in this room, every burden that has not been spoken aloud, every season of exhaustion and loneliness and quiet courage. We thank you that you do not wait for us to have everything together before you draw near. We ask you to be, for every person here who is carrying more than they expected, the God who sees and the God who acts. And make this congregation a community where your care for the vulnerable becomes visible and practical and real. In the name of Jesus Christ, who saw us in our need and gave himself for us. Amen.

Sources Consulted

Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 and Genesis 16-50, Word Biblical Commentary (Word Books, 1987 and 1994).

Derek Kidner, Psalms 1-72, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (InterVarsity Press, 1973).

John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press, 2000).

Karen H. Jobes, ed., Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament, Volume 1 (Zondervan, 2009).

Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Baker Academic, 2008).

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible (Holman Bible Publishers, 2017).