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That's connectwithskip.com. Now let's get into today's teaching from Pastor Skip Heitzig. Abraham. In chapters 11 and 12, we noticed his calling. His home was Ur of the Chaldees, Iraq would be modern-day area he was from, called from Iraq into the land of promise, the land of Canaan. So that was chapter 11, principally chapter 12.
That was his calling. Then we also noticed in chapter 12 his carnality, how he didn't trust the Lord in the land of promise, but he went down where? To Egypt, because there was a famine in the land. So the end of chapter 12 and part of chapter 13 is his carnality, going down and trusting in the arm of the flesh, Egypt, rather than the Lord. In chapter 14, we saw a different side of Abraham.
We saw his courage as he, along with 318 trained household servants, went against a coalition of four kings headed by one Kedorlaomer who subdued five cities. And Abraham went after them and delivered Lot, delivered the spoils of war back to the kings, even going as far as Sodom to take it back. Also in chapter 14, we saw Abraham's communion.
Let's call it that. That's when he met Melchizedek, who brought bread and wine, entered into a relationship with Abraham, who paid tithes to Melchizedek, who was called the king of Salem. In chapter 15, we saw Abraham's covenant. God pointed up or told Abraham to look up and said, you see all those stars?
Your descendants will be like those stars. And it says, and Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness. God establishes his covenant all the way along, but it came to a real head and a real prominence in chapter 15. In chapter 16, we saw Abraham's compromise, where his wife Sarah said, look, I've got this young Egyptian handmaid named Hagar. I'm obviously too old to have children.
She's young. Let's fulfill God's promise and help God to fulfill his promise by you going into Hagar and having a child through her. In chapter 17, Abraham's name was changed to Abraham from Abram, and we saw Abraham's circumcision. He was 99 years old when that event took place.
Enough said about that. We now come to what I'm going to call Abraham's contrast to keep all of the alliteration going, the seas going. A contrast between Abraham and Lot and what a difference there is because chapter 18 and next week, chapter 19, we see both of these lives together. Abraham versus his nephew Lot.
A remarkable contrast. One, Abraham lives the blessed life. Two, Lot lives the blighted life. Remember what it says in Psalm 1? Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of the sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. That really fits Abraham. He was a blessed person. God blessed him, and he became a blessing to others, and the promise was is that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed, but not Lot.
His life was blighted. On one hand, Abraham was blessed. He gained. On the other hand, Lot lost everything. Abraham gained God's promises. Abraham gained land.
Abraham gained descendants. Lot lost the place that he loved, Sodom. He lost his wife. He loses his children.
He loses everything. Abraham gains and keeps on gaining. Though imperfect, though faltering, fumbling, failing, he gets back up and he learns new things about God. And his life becomes like the man in Psalm 1. Even in old age, he is bearing forth fruit.
So we begin looking at the contrast between Abraham and Lot in these two chapters. C.S. Lewis once said, if you put first things first, second things will be thrown in. If you seek second things first, you will gain neither first nor second things.
Now that little statement by C.S. Lewis goes hand in hand with what Jesus said. If you seek first the kingdom of God, all these other things will be tossed in, added to you as well. The problem that we often have is that we, instead of seeking the kingdom of God, seek the other things that God said he would add, but we seek them. We get preoccupied with this world, with this life, with our agenda, with ourselves, and we find that we're not really seeking first the kingdom. We're seeking other things and really hoping that God will toss in the kingdom as well. But if we could grasp that like Abraham, I know it doesn't make sense, but I'm going to trust God even though everything seems against trusting God. I'm going to do it anyway.
You'll become blessed and everything else will be added to you. Now chapter 18, I love it. I love this chapter. It's long.
That's why we're only going to take one chapter tonight and not be as ambitious as last week. It's an unusual story. It's the story of three visitors that come to Abraham unexpectedly in the heat of the summer day. They're unusual because one of them is called Lord. In fact, so it's unmistakable, it says in verse 1, then the Lord, and the term is Yahweh, the covenant name, that tetragrammaton of the Old Testament, YHVH, Yahweh, Yahweh, the covenant name that God will introduce himself as to Moses. The Lord appeared, but the Lord shows up with two others. And we can only guess who they are because they're all three disguised as men, three human beings, three Bedouin-like visitors who are nomadic. They travel through and they visit with Abraham and then they leave toward Sodom. And we'll discuss them as we go along.
We'll try to identify at least as best as we can who that might be. But what I want to zero in on in the first several verses is the idea that was introduced at the beginning of the evening. What it means to be the friend of God. It's a beautiful title. It's one that when we hear the concept that you could be God's friend, it boggles the mind that any human being could be the friend of God who needs nothing and has no equal, no parallel.
But it delights the heart. It draws us in, especially when we consider what Jesus said in John 15. Henceforth, I no longer will call you my servants, but I call you my friends. Three times in the Bible, Abraham and Abraham alone is given the title, the friend of God. The first time it appears is 2 Chronicles chapter 20 when King Jehoshaphat of Judah refers to Abraham as the friend of God. The last time that it appears is James chapter 2 verse 23 where James quotes the famous verse in Genesis, Abraham believed God and it was accounted unto him for righteousness and he was called the friend of God. But the third time, the middle one, is the one that interests me the most because it's when God himself gives Abraham the title. That's found in Isaiah chapter 41. No need to turn there, but if you want to write it down to study it later, Isaiah 41 where God says to Israel, you are Israel, my servant, the descendants of Abraham, my friend. So what kind of attributes would there be in being God's friend? Well, let's work our way through the passage and we'll go through.
I'll give you four of them. If you want to be God's friend, here it is, number one, it will take spontaneity. Some of you may not like that.
You don't like being spontaneous. Well, if you're going to be God's friend, get used to it. God just shows up unexpected, doesn't tell you I'll be there next week at this time, won't always do that. He just shows up. Now watch, then the Lord appeared to him by the terebinth trees of Mamre as he was sitting in the tent at the door in the heat of the day. And so he lifted up his eyes and looked and behold, like, huh, look who's here from out of nowhere. Behold, check it out. Three men were standing by him.
And when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and he bowed himself to the ground. You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we return to Skip's teaching, the question of God's existence has serious implications from his presence and participation in our lives to the reality of life after death, to the basis for human morality. And in his book, Is God Real?, Lee Strobel, former atheist and legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, weaves together the latest evidence from a range of brilliant scientific and philosophical minds to answer the most consequential question of all time. This resource will equip you to address your own doubts and respond to others questions about God with confidence. We'll send you a copy of Is God Real?, along with two messages Strobel preached on this topic at Calvary Church as thanks for your gift of $50 or more to reach more people with God's love through Connect with Skip Heitzig.
Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy when you give. Now let's get back to Skip for more of today's teaching. It was the heat of the day, we're told by Moses, the author of Genesis, the human author. During the heat of the day in the summer, people who lived in tents, even still to this day, nobody travels. You do your work and you do your traveling early in the morning when it's cool and late in the afternoon toward evening when the air once again cools down. But in the heat of the day, nobody does anything. They hang out. The old siesta comes from ancient times. It's a good idea.
You just take the middle part of the day and you just relax. So Abraham was not expecting anybody to come. It was the last thing he would expect a visitor, let alone three, to just suddenly appear.
But the Lord appeared and behold, three men. If you're going to be God's friend, as I mentioned, you just need to get used to this truth that God can suddenly change directions in your life. You've got it all planned, you've got your day timer marked, you've got your agenda set, and God might just say, I've got editing rights.
And a phone call comes or an announcement comes your way and something occurs that drastically changes the direction of your life. There's a great old saying, not from the Bible, but it has a biblical truth to it. Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.
Learn to be flexible. Here the Lord shows up. Sarah had no time to vacuum the tent. Pick up Abraham and Ishmael's dirty socks if they were lying around, just, there's the Lord. Three visitors and one of them is the Lord. Now it mentions three men and because of this, the Church of England has interpreted this as the Trinity. Because there's three persons but they're addressed as one and the name the Lord, verse one, is given. And that is why every year on Trinity Sunday they read the first part of Genesis 18 because they see this as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I don't quite see it that way. I think it's best to see one of them as the Lord, let's call it a theophany, the appearance of God in some human form. Whether you want to make it more precisely a Christophany, the appearance of Christ in the Old Testament or not. It's God appearing in some human form and two of them are angels, the Lord and two angels. So a theophany and two angelic beings. I think there's more proof of that if you read down all the way to verse 22. It says, then the men turned away from there and went towards Sodom but Abraham still stood before the Lord. So if there were three and two of them leave, these two men, and Abraham's talking to the Lord. And then if you'll look at chapter 19 real briefly, verse one, notice, now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening.
So if you piece it together, it would seem like the three are the Lord, Yahweh, in some human form, and two angelic beings. Well, anyway, back to our friendship idea. A good friendship can withstand spontaneity.
You know what I mean by that? You have friends, it doesn't matter when they call. They can call anytime. You tell them, call me anytime. And we're friends. There's others that you call them your friend but you really don't want them calling you in the middle of the night. But we all have friends and we don't mind if they call us in the middle of the night. But you've got to be good friends with somebody to withstand that kind of spontaneity. Now I had a friend some years ago in California who would show up unannounced, like all the time.
He'd come anytime he wanted to and he'd knock on the door and if we weren't at home or he didn't get an answer, he'd walk around the house, look in the windows, knock on the windows, make sure that we were there. But because of the friendship, it was okay. You better be friends to have somebody around your house like that, right? Even Jesus said, suppose one of you has a friend who goes to him at midnight and says, friend, lend me three loaves of bread. Remember that little story? Well, you better be a friend with somebody to come at midnight and say, I forgot to go shopping.
Can I have a loaf of bread? So if you want to be God's friend, just know that whatever agenda you set in your life, have enough flexibility that the Lord can alter your direction, change your plans, visit you with a blessing or a trial or a testing anytime he wants to. But because you're his friend and he's your friend, that's okay. Here's the second mark of being a friend with God, humility. It says in verse 2, so he looked it up his eyes and looked and behold, three men were standing by him.
And when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and he bowed himself to the ground. The word bowed, very important word. You're going to find it a hundred times in the Old Testament. The Hebrew word shacha, shacha, to bow down, to do homage, to give reverence to.
And it is the most frequently used word in the Old Testament for the translation in our English, worship. To bow down, shacha, to worship. In the Orient, in the Middle East, especially back then, it was very typical to greet somebody who is more esteemed than you are, like royalty.
If you were in the presence of a king or a queen, you would get on your knees and you would gently and slowly incline your head till your forehead would touch the ground. And that was a sign of respect. I acknowledge that you are greater, higher, and to be revered. Okay, Abraham is 99 years old. Abraham has 318 paid, trained servants. He has lots of flocks, lots of hurt. He has made an impact already in his culture. He would be called in the Middle East today, if you were alive, a sheikh.
A sheikh, somebody who has and exerts great influence on large numbers of people. But Abraham, in God's presence, bows down. And that is a proper response to a divine friendship. If you're going to be God's friend, it's not like being each other's friend, where we go, hey dude, hey buddy, buddy. I get a little bit miffed when I hear people talk about God. Hey, my buddy in the sky, the old man upstairs. And I think, how dare you refer to God that way.
He's God, and if you're going to have a friendship as a human with God, it better include worship and humility. I've told you the story about that old minister who survived the Jonestown flood back in Pennsylvania years ago, and he always liked to tell the story of how he survived the Jonestown flood. Everybody he would meet, he would say, have you heard how I survived the Jonestown flood?
And if they heard it, they'd roll their eyes, and he'd tell it anyway. Well, the old minister died and went to heaven. One day Peter said, hey, we're going to have a big gathering together tonight, and we're going to be telling our stories and giving our testimonies.
It's testimony night in heaven. And so the old minister got really excited and wide-eyed and ran up to Peter and said, hey, Peter, have you heard how I survived the Jonestown flood? And he began to tell him the story, and he said, I'd love to share that tonight with everybody else in heaven.
Peter hesitated. He said, okay, you can tell it, but just remember, Noah will be in the audience tonight. And I love this story because it illustrates this truth. If you're going to tell about a flood and Noah is listening, it better be good because it changes the whole complexion of really good flood stories when Noah's in the audience.
He can top anybody. Well, here's Abraham, 99 years old, very influential, a sheikh by modern and ancient terms, and he bows down before the Lord realizing God is in the audience tonight. And when God is in the audience, I may be somebody important, but in God's presence, I'm not.
And he bows down. And so that's why I love worship, and that's why during times of worship we should all be engaged because we're realizing God is in the audience tonight, and this is for him. And when we truly worship God, there's going to be humility. Humility in worship comes from two things. Number one, recognizing who God is, and number two, recognizing who we are in the presence of God.
Once you get those two things straight, the inevitable result will be humility, guaranteed. Remember Isaiah chapter 6, the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up. The train of his robe filled the temple, and he heard the angel singing, and Isaiah said what? Yeah, he didn't say, wow is me. I'm Isaiah the prophet. Wow is me. He said, whoa is me. I am undone.
I am a man of unclean lips. Whatever great gift he thought he possessed, if he did, up to that point it was lost because in recognizing that he was in God's presence and recognizing who God was, Isaiah recognized who he was and it brought that sense of humility. So that second, if you're going to be a friend of God, it's going to take a level of humility where you realize God is in my audience. He's watching everything I do, and we would bow down before him.
And so when he saw these three men, he bowed down himself to the ground. And notice he said, verse three, my Lord. Adonai is the Hebrew word. Now Abraham will refer to him in this passage as your servant and call God my Lord, Adonai. Adonai, the mighty one, the almighty.
The strong one, the Lord. I think it was Max Lucado who wrote something quite clever. He said, you don't boast about your paper airplane when you're dealing with NASA. You don't brag about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Albert Einstein because you can write H2O. And you don't talk about your own goodness in the presence of the perfect one.
That's sort of the idea here. He recognizes who he's with, and he bows down, and he calls him the Lord. We're glad you joined us today. Before you go, remember that when you give $50 or more to help reach more people with the gospel through Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you Lee Strobel's book, Is God Real?, and two of his sermons on the same topic preached at Calvary Church to help you answer life's most consequential questions about God's existence. To request your copy of these resources, call 800-922-1888.
That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. For more from Skip, be sure to check out the many resources available at connectwithskip.com slash store. Come back next time for more verse-by-verse teaching of God's word here on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.
