A Praying Faith Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. One day Abraham came out of his tent and saw three men standing there, men who were not ordinary men. With keen spiritual insight, he sensed he was in the presence of the Lord. As Hebrews 13 says, some have entertained angels without knowing it.

From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Abraham found strength for the journey God called him to undertake. Pastor Lutzer, I am sure the day Abraham met these three men was a day like no other. Dave, it almost takes my breath away to realize that Abraham entertained these men and somehow knew, as you have indicated, that he was in the presence of the Lord.

And of course, what follows is dramatic. And when you quoted that verse from the book of Hebrews that some have entertained angels unawares, I was reminded of something in my past. Many years ago, Dale Evans Rogers, who was the wife of Roy Rogers, and many of our listeners will remember that name, she wrote a book entitled Angels Unaware. And she told the story of the children that she had who died. And she indicated that she didn't realize it at the time, but God was actually giving her a gift, the gift of a child, and then God took that child home.

Here's the point. Let us always remember that in one way or another, we have the opportunity of encountering God if we see him in the dilemmas, the disappointments, and the puzzles of life. Abraham, yes, actually did see God in the flesh. What a story. So let me begin by asking you a question. How would you like to have a conversation with God?

Amen. Years ago, a book was written entitled Conversations with God. In the introduction, the author said that he took this book and it was written actually by automatic writing. A being came along and moved his hand, and that's how the book came about.

That is known in occultism as automatic writing. And that's why the book says many foolish things that only a human being and the devil would agree with, such as, quote, God says, I think whatever you think. Now, if you come across a God who thinks whatever you think and that your thoughts are his thoughts, you've come across the wrong one.

God says, my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways. That's a different God. But Abraham had a conversation with God, the real God, and what a conversation it was. It's recorded in the 18th chapter, the 18th chapter of the book of Genesis, where Abraham has this encounter with a divine being. And with your Bibles open, let me tell you the story, then read a part of the account as it is given to us in Scripture. Here's Abraham. He's sitting at the door of his tent. It's hot.

It's time for a siesta. And three men come to him. It almost appears as if Abraham realized that these were not three ordinary Bedouins, though perhaps they were dressed that way. Abraham not only bows before them and calls one of them Lord, but begins, even though he's 100 years old, to act very quickly. It says in verse 6, and Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, quick, three silas of fine flour kneaded and make cakes. Verse 7, and Abraham ran into the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a man who prepared it quickly.

He's a man in a hurry. So the three men gather under a tree, and he feeds them the very best that he possibly can. Who are these three men? Well, we learn very clearly that one is Jesus Christ. Now, if you've been with us in this series, and I believe that this is the eighth message in the series, you know that we've encountered this before. In the Old Testament, Jesus Christ, about whom it is written his goings forth have been from of old and from everlasting, was already appearing at times in the Old Testament for purposes of communication, oftentimes referred to as the angel of the Lord. Here he is simply referred to as the Lord, as we shall see in a moment.

One is Jesus Christ, and the other two are angels. Back in the book of Hebrews, it says that you should be very, very careful, very anxious to entertain strangers, because by doing that, some have entertained angels unawares, probably a reference to this particular account. So they're eating together, and one of them, that is the Lord I'm sure, is speaking and says, where is Sarah your wife? Verse 9. Wait a moment now, how does he know that her name is Sarah? And Abraham answers and says she's in the tent. And the Lord says, we're in verse 10 now, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.

And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old and advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah, so Sarah laughed to herself. Now, she was told in the previous chapter that she was going to bear a son, but Sarah does not believe it. Abraham seems to believe, but she does not. And you'll notice that even though she's laughing to herself, she is overheard by the angel of the Lord, by Jesus actually. And in verse 13, the Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh and say, shall I indeed bear a child now that I am too old? Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Is it possible for God to take a man who's a hundred and a woman who is 90 and to give them a son, is that too hard for God? Sometimes in our praying we say, now Lord, I'm just praying about something that's very little. I smile when we say that because to God everything is little. Hurricanes are little. Earthquakes are little. To God everything is little.

We're dealing with omnipotence. So the angel rebukes her and says, why are you laughing, Sarah? And she denies it, self-protection.

First thing we do when we're embarrassed is to lie what she does. She says, no. She says, I didn't laugh. He says, yes, you did.

You did. See, she laughed to herself in the tent. She didn't laugh loud enough for them to hear out there, but God knew that she was laughing. So after the meal is over, Abraham then begins to go his way, and the three men begin to go to Sodom, and two of them move off, the two angels do, and Abraham now is confronted and he stands in the presence of the Lord, and we are allowed to enter into a divine soliloquy. The Lord of glory is talking to himself, and he asks this question. He says in verse 17, shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him, for I have chosen him that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice. Could I just pause and say that the primary responsibility for spiritual instruction in the home is the Father? Whether the Father is absent or whether he is present, God holds him accountable for the spiritual instruction that he gives to his children. And then the angel says, or actually the angel of the Lord, if we may call him that, it is the second person of the Trinity, he's saying I'm going down to take a look to see how bad Sodom really is. Once again, you have to read this with some theological glasses. It's not that Jesus is on a reconnaissance mission trying to find out the state of Sodom and Gomorrah. You have to put this in the same category as God asking Adam in the garden, where are you? It's not that God doesn't know.

But God here, Jesus, is being represented as a human being. So he says, I'm going to go down and check out how bad Sodom has become. And that makes Abraham realize that judgment is coming to Sodom, and that's why we come now to this great period of intercession in Abraham's life.

We have to look at it more carefully. Verse 22, so the men turned from there and went towards Sodom, but Abraham stood still before the Lord, and he drew near and said, will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the 50 righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked so that the righteous fare as the wicked.

Far be that from you. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just? And the Lord said, if I find at Sodom 50 righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake." From here on out, and I'd love to see a video of this, from here on out, I think Abraham's knees are quaking. He now realizes that he is in the presence of God who can make the decision whether Sodom will be destroyed or not. And in his mind, what he's thinking is Lot lives there, my nephew whom I rescued, and after I rescued him, he went back to Sodom. It's amazing what it takes to change some hearts. And so what he's saying is, Lord, I'm thinking of my nephew Lot and his wife and his daughters.

Lord, I'm not sure whether or not there are 50 in the city. He began rather high. He wanted God to agree on this. And he appeals to the justice of God, not the mercy of God as we sometimes do, and that's fine. But here he appeals to the justice of God, and he says, God, you will not sweep away the wicked and the righteous together, will you, if there are 50 righteous in the city? And God says, it's a promise.

I won't. Now he begins to tremble, and he begins to intercede. And he says, Lord, what about 45? 45. If I can get God to agree with 45, maybe I can agree, get him to agree with less than that. So he goes to 45.

Will you do it if there are 45? God says, I won't do it if there are 45. Abraham is not bargaining with God. When you bargain with God, you have something to give in exchange. You're haggling over a price. He has nothing to haggle with. He brings nothing to the table except his concern for Lot and for God's righteousness.

That's all that he has. And he pleads, and he says, God, he says, what if there are 40? And from now on, I believe that in Abraham's mind, he is thinking that every advance in this prayer that I make might be my last.

God might wipe me off the face of the earth. Because you'll notice how he begins to form his prayer before God. I'm going to begin here in verse 29. Again, he spoke to him, and suppose 40 are found there. He said, for the sake of 40, I will not do it.

Then he said, oh, let the Lord not be angry, and I will speak. Suppose 30 are found there. He answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there. Abraham is speaking, behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord.

Suppose 20 are found there. He said, for the sake of 20, I will not destroy it. Then he said, oh, Lord, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again this once. He believes that the Lord may be exasperated with him.

Please don't be angry one more time. Suppose 10 are found there. And he answered and said, for the sake of 10, I will not destroy it. And the Lord went his way, and when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place. Well, what do you think Abraham told Sarah that night in the tent? I can't prove it, but I think he said, Sarah, I just talked God out of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. And I can imagine Sarah saying, oh, Abe, you just glow in the dark. You and God have got this thing going.

This is wonderful. Because think about who was in Sodom. I can imagine that Abraham was maybe thinking this way. There's Lot and his wife, his two daughters. That's four.

They're about to be married to two young men. That's six. If the parents of the two young men are believers, that's another four.

That makes 10. He goes home believing that Sodom and Gomorrah will not be destroyed. He got God down to 10. I can imagine the shock that he had the next morning. Verse 27, chapter 19 now, and Abraham went out early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley. And he looked and behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.

And he thought, my, oh, my. He thought either A, God has deceived me, or else B, I miscalculated the number of the righteous in the city. There weren't 10.

And it's true, there weren't 10. God could have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, including Lot, without breaking faith with Abraham, without breaking his promise, because there were not 10 righteous in this city. And so Abraham begins to think to himself, I didn't go low enough.

If I had said two or four, maybe the city would not have been destroyed. But God remembered Abraham, it says. So it was that the Lord, when he destroyed the cities of the valley, verse 29, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived.

The rest of the chapter, chapter 19, talks about how God rescued Lot and his wife and his two daughters. I'm going to leave the account right there as we look at three transforming lessons that should enable us to look at life differently and look at prayer differently as we look at this remarkable story. First of all, let me remind you that the closer our friendship with God, the more freely he shows his intentions with us. The closer our friendship with God, the more freely God shows us his intentions.

Sometimes we hurry over accounts like this far too quickly, don't we? Here is Jesus coming with two angels to eat at the table of Abraham sitting under a tree. That is awesome that the divine sovereign one would come from heaven and meet a Bedouin on his own terms.

Blows you away. And the Bible says that Abraham was a friend of God. That particular expression applies in Scripture only to him, and it is said three times. Abraham is a friend of God. You say, well, if I were a friend of God, God would disclose to me what his intention was. He would help me to pray. You're right.

You're completely right. The more intimate we are with God, the more intimate our friendship, the more God discloses to us, and he enables us to pray differently because we begin to discern his mind and his art. In the history of evangelicalism today and in our churches, including ours, there are hundreds of people whom I suspect do not pray regularly.

And they say to themselves, the reason I don't is because I've been burned too many times. I've come to God, and I've asked him to heal people whom he hasn't healed. I've asked him to bring my wayward son or daughter back into the faith, and he hasn't done it.

I've asked him for an end to the injustice that is being done against me, and it continues unabated. I have stopped praying because I have stopped believing, and it doesn't do any good, and so I'm glad that God is there for great emergencies. When I go for surgery, I'll call for help and for prayer, but for the normal things of life, I will not bother him because nothing changes when I pray. I think of a woman who said these exact words when they prayed for their pastor who was dying of cancer, and thousands of people prayed, and they had an all-night prayer meeting. She said, if God didn't heal them after all of that prayer, I'm never going to bother him with another request again.

What's gone wrong? What's gone wrong is that we forget that intercession is the second purpose of prayer, not the first. The first purpose of prayer is fellowship and intimacy with God.

And by the way, Jesus said, I no longer call you servants. I've called you friends because a servant doesn't know what his master's doing, but I've called you friends because everything that the Father has shown me, I've withheld nothing. I've shared with you all of my secrets, and that makes us friends.

So we are all friends. And the purpose of prayer is really to develop that friendship in such a way that we are so satisfied with friendship with God that even if he doesn't give us what we think he should, we do not give up on prayer because prayer is first and foremost fellowship with the Almighty. What an amazing example of Jesus and the two angels sitting under a tree eating with Abraham. And today Jesus says to us, behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will hear my voice and open the door, I will come into him and I will eat with him and he with me. You will become disappointed with prayer very quickly if you think its first purpose is intercession. The first purpose of prayer is for us to come before the Lord in yieldedness, in faith, and simply learn to enjoy fellowship with God in such a way that whether he gives what we ask for or whether he doesn't, it does not shake us.

It only deepens us in our desire to know him better. You live like that and you'll be at prayer meeting. Because now the second purpose of prayer is no longer the first purpose. Someday I'm going to preach a message entitled The Idolatry of Second Things. The Idolatry of Second Things. See, the gifts that God gives us, those are the second things. And when they take first place in our lives, when God doesn't give them to us, we say, why bother?

Abraham walked with God and so can we. You know, the other day I was speaking at a conference and someone came up to me and said, Pastor Lutzer, what is your favorite passage of scripture? Give me a verse. Well, instantly I was reminded of Psalm 16 11. In thy presence there is fullness of joy. At thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no privilege as great as the privilege of knowing God, experiencing his presence, and walking with the Almighty. Let that always be our first goal, our first priority. I'm so glad that we have the privilege of continuing the ministry of Running to Win and it is now being heard in many Muslim countries.

And we receive questions such as this. Who is Jesus? I cannot find the right way to reach God.

Well, that's exactly why Running to Win exists. It's to help people to reach God through Jesus Christ. Would you like to become a part of what we are doing on a regular basis? Would you consider becoming an endurance partner? That's someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts. Of course, the amount that you give is entirely your decision.

But here's the info. You can go to rtwoffer.com. When you're there, click on the endurance partner button, or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let me make it very clear that your gift is an investment to get the gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible. Go to rtwoffer.com, click on the endurance partner button, call us at 1-888-218-9337.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635, North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. God had agreed to spare Sodom if ten righteous were found. Abraham thought he had a sure deal. Then the smoke rose. So, was his prayer worth it?

Are ours when they go unanswered? Next time on Running to Win, a probing look at the real purpose of prayer. Thanks for listening. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.