Real Prayers for Real LifePart 1 of 9
Abraham – Negotiation (Genesis 18)
Transcript
Skip the transcript0:01 Morning everybody. Apparently this is the bit that Jeff referred to, that is the boring bit. I will do my best to make sure that doesn't happen. I need to ask for your prayer though, for a specific reason, because last night I sat on my iPad. and I need your prayer that it will actually keep going. Otherwise, of course, you could pray the other way, and if it doesn't keep going, there's going to be no talk, and it'll be extremely short. This summer, over these Sunday mornings, we're going to be looking at the topic of prayer. And we're going to be doing it by looking at examples in the Bible of different people speaking with God in a whole variety of different situations.
0:54 Now prayer simply defined is talking with God. And the very thought of being invited to talk with the God of heaven and earth should, at least in theory, fill our imaginations with excitement and anticipation and awe and wonder. And yet the reality is that we tend to find prayer hard, difficult to sustain, even unreal. And talks on prayer can land in a very difficult way because they tend to engender more guilt than encouragement. I hope that doesn't happen. Of course, if the Lord needs to say some things to you individually about it and to me, that's a different matter. But that's not my objective, to make everybody feel, oh, I am terrible, I'm no good at this, and why bother even trying? Rather, it's as an invitation, an encouragement, because we're all people in process.
2:01 We all struggle with many things. And nobody is a perfect prayer. So with that encouragement, let's dive in. As a child, I was taught to, as they put it, say my prayers. Each night, my parents taught me to ask God to bless the members of my family, even though with some of them I wasn't too sure I wanted God to bless them. But And then at the end of the prayer was this famous phrase, and make me a good boy. Now some of you are old enough to will remember prayers like that, and I'll leave it to you to judge whether it actually happened or not. At school, I went to a school where every morning there was a school assembly.
2:51 I don't know if schools still do this. And at that assembly, we said what's known as the Lord's Prayer. Now this is, we're going back now to the 1960s. Yes, I am that old. And I was once painfully punished for engaging in a competition with a school friend for who could say the Lord's Prayer the fastest. disrupting everybody around us. And of course you will know what I mean by painful punishment because this was back in the 60s when the cane or the strap was still used. It did me a lot of harm, good, who knows.
3:34 It was only as I grew up that I discovered that saying my prayers and praying were not necessarily the same. I also discovered that I wasn't particularly good at either. I'm also a person in process when it comes to this. So in this series we're looking at different individuals praying. And we're beginning with Abraham. It's back in Genesis 18, if you want to hunt that up. Genesis 18. And if you read this, I suspect you would think this isn't really a prayer, is it?
4:13 But the great and the good tell us that this is an example of prayer. So that is where we're beginning. I think they're right, but it's prayer with a difference. So let's read Genesis 18 from verse 17. Then the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I'm about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him. Then the Lord said, the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah, the two cities, is so great and their sin is so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me.
5:20 If not, I will know. The men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said, Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked. This is a prayer that begins with a question. What if there are 50 righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the 50 righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing. To kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike, far be it from you will not the judge of all the earth do right.
6:13 The Lord said, if I find 50 righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake. Then Abraham spoke up again. Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is 5 less than 50? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people? I love the way he puts that, five less than 50, not 45, but five less than 50. If I find 45 there, the Lord said, I will not destroy it. Once again, Hebron spoke to him, what if only 40 are found there? For the sake of 40, I will not do it.
6:57 Then he said, May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only 30 can be found there? And he answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there. Abraham said, Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only 20 can be found there? And he said, For the sake of 20, I will not destroy it. Then Abraham said, May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only 10 can be found there? He answered, for the sake of 10, I will not destroy it.
7:27 And when the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home. Now, this is an intriguing prayer, if that's the right term for it. It's more like a negotiation. It's almost like haggling in the marketplace, isn't it? I mean, you think, what's the price? Could we, what about 45? Well, yes, I'll take 45, or what about 40? What about 30?
7:56 Well, of course it isn't that, but it does strike us as being odd, at least, strange. And in fact, this has no parallel that I can find anywhere else in the Bible. So before we jump into making this a pattern for all our praying, which is not what any of these prayers is meant to be, by the way, but before we would be tempted to do that, let's think a bit about it, because it doesn't occur randomly in the Bible. It's not in a book of prayers, and here's the first one. It comes in a particular context, a specific setting which leads to this remarkable conversation, and we need to understand the setting in order to understand what's going on here. So let me tell you the story. Abraham was sitting near the entrance to his tent home. The temperatures, I think, must have been closer to they are in France at the moment than to what they are here, sheltering from the baking heat of the day when he noticed 3 strangers suddenly standing close by him.
9:15 Now, in Middle Eastern fashion, you see strangers, he rushed to offer them hospitality. And in the course of providing the very best he had, you can read the story, he discovered that these strangers were no ordinary visitors. Two were senior figures in the civil service of heaven. And the third was the Lord himself coming to have fellowship with Abraham. Now this is very, very, very rare in scripture and in life. The veil between this world and the eternal world is normally kept in place. But Abraham was no ordinary individual. He had been chosen by God to play a unique and massively significant role in God's purposes for the world, as in fact we read.
10:35 So this extraordinary experience was given to Abraham as part of his preparation for that role, as part of his training for that role. And the context then of Abraham's discussion with God is that of hospitality, of friendship. And it highlights a remarkable thing about God that is totally unimaginable to those who either don't believe in him or who think that God is somehow so remote that we cannot know Him, that God seeks friendship with human beings. It is startling that God seeks friendship with human beings. This was essential to the role that Abraham was going to play. Having intimate, personal relationship, fellowship, friendship with God was an essential provision to enable him to face the challenges of his life in this world and of the role that he was going to play.
12:22 Now of course, I'm not Abraham, neither are you. The roles and tasks given to us are not at the same level as Abraham's. And yet, the basic principle I think is the same. That if we're going to face the tasks and challenges of life of this world, the essential underpinning reality that will help us to survive is a depth of relationship with the living God. It's very easy to forget in the busyness and pressures of life that the Lord seeks fellowship with us. That's the thing we forget. We put the onus on ourselves, but actually the initiative lies with the Lord himself.
13:23 That famous statement in the book of Revelation, chapter 3, verse 20, where the risen Lord Jesus says, here I am, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me. You think about those words, they're just remarkable. This is the risen Lord Jesus speaking to a church in the city of Laodicea, and he pictures himself. It's not the writers picturing him, but the Lord Jesus pictures himself as standing outside the door of the church, knocking that door, longing to come in and have fellowship with them. It's a remarkable picture. The Lord seeking fellowship. And what's even more remarkable is that he will not force his way in.
14:19 He stands and knocks. The strangers turn up waiting outside to see how Abraham would respond. The risen Lord stands and knocks. And the problem is that this particular church has largely forgotten what lies at the heart of its very reason for being. Fellowship with the Lord Himself. They had become lukewarm in everything, complacent, self-sufficient, self-satisfied, spiritually blind, impoverished. And yet despite their spiritual condition, the Lord offers the opportunity to open up the door to fellowship with Him. And notice what He says, if anyone, anyone, Is there anybody here in this crowd
15:16 who hears my voice and is willing to open up the door of their life to fellowship with me, then I will come in and have fellowship with them. Startling. Many people have become converted through this very verse. But it wasn't actually written to non-believers. It was written to a church. It was written to professing Christians. It was written to people who got lukewarm and stagnant and spiritually bind and arrogant to them to say, listen, if you can still hear my voice, I'm waiting.
15:57 You need to let me in to have fellowship. If anyone, you know, sometimes in a group of friends in a peer group, in a small group, in a home group, in a church. It actually takes courage for one person to do this. Maybe scared of being called a holy Joe or whatever. Sometimes it requires, I hope that's not the case here, but it certainly was the case in Lydia, just if anyone. This is the foundation for prayer, for conversation with God.
16:45 It's the foundation it's placed in Genesis, and it's the foundation that's placed in the Testament. And it raises a question. I wonder if I went home today and there were three visitors standing outside my door. and they turned out to be divine visitors. What would I have to offer? What kind of food does the Lord look for? Well, we have some chicken in the freezer and with sausages and beans. I'm not sure that that's actually what he's looking for.
17:31 He's looking for fellowship, for sharing. We share eternal life with him. He's looking for things that arise out of the richness of that shared life that we would come to him and say, look at what I've discovered about you this week. Isn't this amazing? This is what I found out when I spent time listening to your words as Mary did at the feet of Jesus. In the midst of all the busyness, she chose the most valuable thing. And she has something then to offer This is the basis of it.
18:09 How easy it is to make our life, our spiritual life, depend on what we get from our fellowship with others, when in fact it needs to depend on what we give and receive in our fellowship with God, because if we make it depend on others, one of the downsides of that is that A, it'll quickly run dry, and B, we will never be satisfied. We'll be constantly looking for the perfect church, the perfect group of Christian friends, who will give me all the things that I want, and when they don't, we'll move on to another group that'll give me all the things I want, when in fact, it should be the other way around, that our fellowship with one another is actually dependent on our fellowship with the living God. Now when the fellowship was breaking up, Genesis carefully records that the guests looked down towards Sodom in verse 16 that we didn't read. But they looked towards Sodom. Sodom and Gomorrah, they are watchwords for evil and corruption, both in the ancient world and of course still today they've entered our vocabulary. And this is the context for this prayer. fellowship with God and the reality of evil and corruption in the world.
19:35 Sound familiar? Because it's precisely the context in which we all live. Genesis draws our focus to God's mind. What does he think about all of this? We knew what Sodom and Gomorrah thought of the way they were living. They thought it was great. This is life. This is wonderful.
19:59 Indulge themselves and all the rest of it. This is fantastic. They thought it was great. What did God think? And he reveals his mind. Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? That's an intriguing question. It's put in very human terms.
20:22 Will I tell him or not? I mean, these things are going to be huge. They're deep. Dealing with evil and the issues of judgment and justice. Will I tell him or not? But of course he's going to tell him because Abraham is known as the friend of God. And as Jesus later said to his disciples, he said, no longer do I call you servants, I call you friends, because the servants don't really know what the boss is up to. He gives them instructions, but they're not really inside his mind.
21:01 I'm calling you friends, because I want you to know, I want this to be in partnership and fellowship with you. Abraham, the friend of God, the Lord shares his thinking, his purposes, his plans with his friends. One of the marks of a person in communion with God, therefore, is that he or she gets to know the mind and purposes of God. Or if I put it the other way, as Paul prays for the church at Colossae, that they will be filled with the knowledge of his will, because that's what God wants to do. He wants to share with us his plans, not just for our individual life, but for the world, for eternity. But he's waiting for us to hear the voice and open the door and let him in to have that fellowship. He had a huge purpose for Abraham and his children. As we read in verses 18 and 19.
22:19 And it's put in a very, it's almost a homespun way. It's almost as if God saying to Abraham, I've got this huge purpose to bless the whole world through you. It begins at home. And it begins at home with issues of righteousness and justice. Because that's where these things are learned, or not learned, as the case may be. It's at home. And that was God's design. As a parent, that sacred task, which isn't just about now.
23:10 It's about the future. And it's not just about health and education and good jobs. It's about right and wrong. It's about fairness and justice. It's about judgment of evil. And these things are complex and difficult. I know that as a parent, they're difficult. And many of us around here know that.
23:40 This is not easy. And how do we respond when our child gets involved in evil? What happens to truth and justice and righteousness? Or does sentiment get in the way? of those things. Do they work together or do they work against each other? And this is a complex thing.
24:11 There's no simple matrix to work this out. But that's where it's worked out because if Abraham's going to be a blessing to the whole world, he needs to work this out at home and develop it at home. And unless as an individual, as a parent, as a church leader, As a school teacher, as a person involved in politics, as a businessman, whatever our role in life is, unless we understand what God thinks about evil and justice, we will not be able to carry that role. out in our own life. Our struggle against evil will be at best half-hearted. At worst, we will give up and give in.
25:15 It's so easy to replace righteousness with mere sentimentality. Lot is an immediate case in point. He was in Sodom. He hadn't intended to be in Sodom, but he now was there. And even in Sodom, we read that he preached to the people about morality, but mere talk about morality is completely ineffective. And in his own life, he got caught up in business and made compromises and cut himself off from fellowship with Abraham. And when Abraham was learning his lessons of faith and of the power of God and having no confidence in the flesh, Lot wasn't there. He wasn't participating in the divine friendship.
26:02 He was a genuine believer and God saved him, but he lost everything else. And it is a massive warning in the New Testament that if we sow to the flesh, we will reap corruption from the flesh. So God reveals his mind, his thinking to Abraham and Abraham's response is to talk to God about it. another mark of the man or woman in fellowship with God. The first is getting to know the mind and purposes of God. The second is responding by talking through with God the implications. Prayer is that, talking with God, taking up what God has revealed and working it through, doing it with humility. He's feeling his way, there's no arrogance, there's no demanding.
26:43 He's trying to understand, trying to work through the implications, praying intelligently for the city on the basis of this central conviction that God as the judge of the whole earth will do what is right. And his big concern is this, that the righteous will be swept away with the wicked. In other words, that God's judgment is indiscriminate. And it doesn't make any difference if you believe in God or not, because if that is true, then there is no such thing as justice. So with great humility he dares to suggest an alternative to what he thinks God is going to do. He got it wrong. Because God wasn't going to do what he thought God was going to do, not entirely. But he was doing his best and he's working with God and it's amazingly gracious on the part of God to work with Abraham, to bring him to the point where he's satisfied at the end that no, God is not unjust.
27:48 God looks at the picture fully and wholly and the judge of all the earth will do right. But what Abraham doesn't appear to have thought of is what God eventually did. God had the ability, you see, to save those who are righteous and bring judgment down on those who weren't. Abraham hadn't worked that out. His approach raises questions, doesn't it? Would it have been just in the end for God to save the entire city if there had been 10. Would that approach work?
28:28 To let everybody off scot-free. Of course, it wasn't the final judgment. This is a temporary judgment in life. But it raises all these complicated questions of justice, of evil, of what God is going to do about it. And I'm there. You're there. You cannot listen to the news. You cannot look at the press for more than two minutes without being made aware of the corruption and the evil in our world.
29:15 And I know that my temptation very often is just to switch the machine off because you suffer from overload. And it's so much more tempting just to go and watch the football instead, but even there, there's corruption and injustice. How do we cope? How do we talk to God on the basis of this? How do you pray for Belfast on the basis of this? Has God Lost control? Has he got it wrong?
29:52 Is the whole thing just one big mess? And what about all those who don't believe in the God we believe in? All the billions who follow a different God? Are none? How God's going to sort all of that out? Do you not have those questions? I have them. Think if you're human, you have those questions.
30:17 Because we are hotwired to think about fairness from the earliest age. One of my daughter's first sentence was, it's not fair. That's just the way it is. Well brought up by our mother. Justice, evil. How do we approach God in that? Abraham was feeling his way. But he had this central conviction, which is the thing we need to take away as we pray for our world.
30:54 That the judge, and he is the judge, judgment will happen, make no mistake about it. But the judge will do everything right. both with the world and with us. And it's on that conviction we pray. We don't always know what to say.
31:30 We are comforted in the New Testament by hearing that the Holy Spirit prays for us. We're also encouraged the fact that the Lord Jesus prays for us also, like He prayed for Peter, that our faith doesn't fail. And He encourages us to come and talk. You have a question. This is a prayer begins with a question. Growing in our fellowship with Him, understanding that we are people in process, the issue of evil and corruption, including the sin and corruption and evil, dare I say it, within our own families, is so deeply troubling. Do not leave God out of the picture.
32:23 Come to Him. Talk to Him. The Lord's justice will be perfect and will be recognized to be perfect. And as Abraham discovered. The Lord knows how to rescue those who through faith in him are considered righteous. Our task then is to get on with keeping the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just in our own lives, training our family and those in our sphere of influence to do the same. and then to help to share in this purpose given to Abraham and calling to bring blessing to all the nations.
33:17 He stands at the door and knocks. In our turmoil, in our busyness, in our concerns for our friends, for our family, he stands at the door and knocks. If anyone hears my voice, he says, I will come in. and have fellowship with them. Let's pray together. Thank you for the massive encouragement. That even though we are, as Abraham said, dust, even though we do not know how to pray as we ought,
33:57 even though we have no right in ourselves to come before Almighty God and ask questions, That it is he who guarantees us the right of relationship where we can come to you and talk and ask questions. But not only that, to come and listen. Thank you for giving us your words, including a story like this. that teaches us, that reveals your mind, your character, your glory, that gives us a little window into understanding some other things about God that perhaps we hadn't really realized before. We can't grasp everything, but we can grasp some things. And may those some things that we grasp encourage us this day to take the opportunity to have fellowship with you for the glory of Jesus.
35:01 Amen.
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About this talk
This talk explores the topic of prayer through the example of Abraham's prayer in Genesis 18. It highlights prayer as a conversation with God, emphasising God's desire for fellowship with humanity. The speaker discusses the context of Abraham's encounter with divine visitors and the nature of his prayer, which involves negotiation and seeking understanding of God's justice. The talk addresses the challenges of evil and corruption in the world and encourages trusting in God's perfect judgment. It concludes with an invitation to engage in prayer as a process of relationship and trust in God's will.
Bible passages
- Genesis 18:17–33 (main passage)
