Genesis 18 - Beginning To Partner With God
Main Idea: Realign your plans and expectations in light of God’s desire to partner with you.
Partner with God by spending time with Him. (vs. 1-8)
Partner with God by believing He can work. (vs. 9-15)
Partner with God by caring about others. (vs. 16-33)
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)
We have been walking through this story called New Beginnings. Looking at the life of Abraham, and this story, though it certainly to one extent is the story of Abraham, it's also the story of what God was doing in the world.
Specifically, that God was going to bring his Messiah, his Chosen One, into the world, the one that would crush and defeat sin and death and evil, one, if you will, that would bring humanity back into the relationship that God had created them for in
the garden, where they would experience God's goodness and blessing and his provision and a perfect existence with each other and with God himself. So God was going to bring the Messiah into the world, and this Messiah wasn't just going to be the son
of God, he would also be the son of man. He would be truly God and truly human.
And so God chose one specific family on earth that he would bring that physical descendant, the son of man, through, and he chose this man, Abraham, a man that began his existence in the city of Ur of the Chaldeans, there in that land that would
later become the Empire of Babylon, on that same location. And he took Abraham from there. He told him to go to the land of Canaan.
It would be the land where Jesus would be born, where he would have his ministry, where he would be entered into Jerusalem to the calls of, praise the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
It was there in the land of Canaan that he would be crucified for our sins, pay the price, be sacrificed on our behalf.
It would be there that he was buried and there that he rose again from the dead after three days and from there ascended into heaven and where scripture tells us one day he will return back to that spot when he comes forever to reign as King of Kings
and Lord of Lords. So God is orchestrating all of the surroundings so that his people would end up in this specific location that he had planned for them and not just that they would be there, but that they would be a little microcosm, a little
picture of what God wanted to do with the entire world. That the way in which Abraham and his family lived and the blessings that they saw would be indicative of how God wanted to interact with every single family on earth.
That they would know him, that they would worship him, and that they would experience the blessings of one in communion and walk with God. And in today's message, we're going to see that Abraham and Sarah, his wife, are beginning to partner with God.
And certainly for ourselves, we'll also have this challenge that today, you are called to partner with God. As I look across the room, I see some people that you would perhaps have done a group project with in the last 10 to 15 years.
Some of you, it might have been just a smidge longer than that since you have done a group project in school or in college. And I had the unique blessing, I don't know if you guys know this about me, I tend to be a little bit of a OCD person.
There's a couple of people that might let you know, if you see all of the rows every Sunday morning, like I'm lining it up, so it lines up perfectly with the corners and it lines up directly on all the lines on the squares.
I tend, it's a blessing and a curse. And on any given day, it can be both. So I participated in a group project in my 10th grade honors English class.
And the goal was this to do a look at the English, specifically Britain's authors, and to give kind of a summary overview of some of the best authors and their works. And I also have a little bit of a creative bug in me.
And so I was like, you know what would be perfect? This is the best way to highlight Britain's authors. I'm going to put on like a bunch of different costumes.
I'm going to record a 20 minute video called the Bad Book Battle of Big Britain. And I'm going to do probably a rap that might get me canceled for cultural appropriation in today's day and age. It just wasn't skillfully done.
I'm not like a Toby Mac or KB or any one of the other Christian hip hop artists. That is not my particular calling in life. But I put together this group project, and it's quite something.
I'm probably forbidden from ever showing it to any of you. It was quite entertaining. We got an A plus on it.
I had two individuals in the group project side of stuff that did absolutely nothing. They were asked to do maybe one thing, and none of it got done. But I tried to pick up the slack as much as I could on my end.
And when you're in a group project, you don't want to be the person that is pulling all the weight while your partners do absolutely nothing.
And for you and I today, God wants to partner with you in the work that he wants to do within your life, within the lives of those that you love and care about, within the lives of those that maybe you don't love and care about, but they are in your
life and they're around you, and God has a plan for them, and he wants to utilize you to partner with them. And what Abraham learns in Genesis 18, and what we'll learn today, is that we must realign our plans and our expectations in light of God's
desire to partner with you. When you're partnering with someone, it means that you don't just do everything in the way that you want to do it. You gotta change it up a little bit.
Was just hearing this week about my brother-in-law and his new bride, and she grew up in a Miracle Whip household, and he grew up in a real male household, and so there have been some marital spats in the past couple of months, and I'm sure many of
you have the right opinion of real mayonnaise. But as they're going through, as you're partnering with someone, you make adjustments to your life based on the partnership that you have with someone else.
And as we partner with God to accomplish His work in the world, we need to realign our plans and our expectations. When we go to the store, we're picking up a different item than we used to.
When we look at our schedule, when we look at even how we think through our own lives, we've got to realign in light of the fact that God wants to do something with and in and through us.
And because He wants to involve us, that ought to motivate us, let us live for Him in the way that He wants. Let's pray together. We're gonna dive into the passage, and I'm really excited.
This is a phenomenal portion of scripture. Dear Lord, thank you for today. God, we pray that you would speak to our hearts.
Lord, I ask that you would give me the words to say, that I would only say what you want me to.
And Lord, we pray that you would allow this truth from your word to motivate us to have purpose, that we would understand how important we are to you, how much you value and love us.
And God, may it cause an appreciation that you would even allow us to participate in your work at all. God, may we value it and may we follow you. We love you and pray all of this in your name, amen.
So we're gonna see today three specific actions that we can take this week to accomplish this goal of realigning our plans and expectations in light of God's desire to partner with us.
And the first of these that we'll see in verses one through eight of the passage are that we need to partner with God by spending time with him. Tomorrow, on Wednesday, on Saturday, you are called to partner with God by spending time with him.
We can see this beginning in verse number one. The Lord, Yahweh, appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the heat of the day.
If you remember the oaks of Mamre, this was one of those places that Abraham went back to time and time and time again. He had built an altar there where he worshiped the Lord.
And so often in Abraham's story, when he's walking with God, we find him in this place again and again and again, spending time worshiping the Lord.
And here the Lord himself is appearing to Abraham, and he appears at the entrance during the heat of the day. He looked up and he saw three men standing near him.
And when he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to meet them, bowed to the ground and said, my Lord, if I've found favor with you, please do not go on past your servant.
Let a little water be brought that you may wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree. I will bring a bit of bread so that you may strengthen yourselves. This is why you have passed your servant's way.
Later, you can continue on. Yes, they replied, do as you have said. Hospitality was a vital cultural importance thing for people in the ancient world.
You were to care for those that happened by your place. If you had food or water, you would care for them. You would protect them even with your own life, something that we'll see happen in next week's chapter.
So Abraham here does what is normal in his culture. He says, hey, there's some people, they're walking and I'll make sure that they're fed, that they receive water and they're happy to stop by. Now, I love that Abraham offers this.
And then we hit verse number six. So Abraham hurried into the tent and said to Sarah, quick, need three measures of fine flour and make bread. Okay, well, Abraham, you're the one that offered it.
Shouldn't you be the one that's making the bread? But that's neither here nor there. Verse seven, Abraham ran to the herd and got a tender choice calf.
He gave it to a young man who hurried to prepare it. This is another one where it's like, okay, well, Abraham, like you're talking a big game, but then you're just making everyone else do the work.
But then in verse number eight, he does it himself as well. Then Abraham took curds and milk as well as the calf that he had prepared and set them before the men. He served them as they ate under the tree.
So here, there's just a meal. And as we think about, you know, meals, we've had many during our time, we've perhaps shared a meal with a stranger a time or two before.
For some of you, not an experience that you want to go through again, sharing a meal with a stranger, see you introverts. And we can just pass by this and go, okay, well, that seems like a lot of details for not much.
But I want to notice in this passage, if you look in your Bible and you look at verse number one, we start to see an interesting picture that we've seen a few times as we've been walking through the story of Genesis.
We notice first that Abraham is by the oaks of Mamre, okay, so there's trees that are here, the Lord's here.
Abraham is interacting with three individuals, one of whom we know is the Lord, and the other two would be safe to assume would be angels, messengers that are accompanying him. And Abraham, he sees them, in verse two, he looks, he sees them.
And then down in verse number eight, it says Abraham took curds and milk as well as the calf that he prepared, and sent them before the men. He served them as they ate under the tree. Okay, so we've got trees, seeing, looking, taking, eating.
All of this reminds us of the Garden of Eden.
But instead of this being like one of the bad situations where Pharaoh's officials, they look, they see Sarah that she's beautiful, and they take her into Pharaoh's house, instead of it being Abraham and Sarah that they see Hagar and they go, oh,
this is the perfect solution to our lack of childhood. You just marry Hagar and have a kid through her.
And since I own Hagar, then I will own the kid and it'll basically be like we have a kid and they see her and they take her and they have Abraham marry her. Instead of it being one of those bad situations, now it's one of the ones where it's good.
Where instead of selfishness, instead of looking out for just Abraham's best interest, he's being generous and he is caring for others. And certainly here, there's no better person to be good to than the Lord himself.
But as he's going through, this is like Eden where everything for the moment is going right. You see, God created you for fellowship with him.
God created you so that you would walk and talk with him, that you would depend on him for your daily sustenance, that you would tell other people about him. And so I want to encourage us today to partner with God by spending time with him.
First, spend time in God's word, both individually and corporately. 1 Peter chapter two would tell us, like newborn babies desire the sincere milk of the word so that you can grow by it. The Bible is not just a collection of old stories.
It's not just a collection of some do's and don'ts.
The Bible is God's love letter to you, that you would know his heart for you, that you would know his character and who he is, and so that you can live in relationship with both him and other people in the way that he created you to.
Then we also see in Matthew chapter three, that as Jesus interacted with the temptations of Satan, that as Satan wanted Jesus to go outside of the will and plan of God, Jesus said, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds
out of the mouth of God. How do you live your life? Do you live it by man's word or by the word of God?
Colossians 3.16 tells us, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
The Bible says not only do you have a responsibility to read the word of God, you have a responsibility to share it with other people, to let other people know what God has been telling you.
And specifically from the New Testament, one of the ways in which you proclaim God's word is through the singing of the local church.
That as we sing out about our Savior's love for us, about Jesus taking our sins and our sorrows and making them his own, taking our burden to Calvary and suffering and dying alone so that we can have a home in heaven with the ransom, the bought back
and glory that we are preaching to each other. That is why preaching, yeah, preaching is important, sure. It's God's word. That's why the singing of the church is so important.
Singing is not just a time where we get to hear some hopefully pleasant sounds. Singing in a church is not just to like bide time for more people to get in before preaching. Singing is a vital task that God commands of us.
Because when we sing, we engage our minds in memory of tunes. We engage our reading of lyrics. We engage our body, our vocal cords.
We engage, for some of you, maybe you might raise a hand, maybe you clap, maybe you just kind of do like, I'll call it the Jimmy shimmy. I don't know if you shimmy, Jimmy, but it might be fun if you did.
But you are involving all of who you are, body, soul, and spirit in worship of your creator. So I want to encourage you.
When it comes to a Sunday morning, like, you know, I appreciate it when people listen while the word's being preached, but I find it even better when people pay attention and are fully involved while God is being praised in song.
So let us spend time in God's word, both individually and corporately. Let's spend time in prayer to him, both for ourselves and for others.
Think of what the prophet Jeremiah recorded the Lord saying, call unto me and I will answer you and show you great and marvelous things that you do not know. I don't want to just experience the life that I've always experienced.
I want to see what God has in store. I want to see the great and marvelous things that he has planned. And I'm certain sometimes it's going to be a little bit of a roller coaster.
Not every turn or not every drop is what I would want, but he has a good plan. So I want to spend time in prayer to my Lord.
Think of James 5 where it says, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect.
You see, part of us being in relationship with God is that we are able to pray for others.
Pray for others' health, pray for others' needs, pray for others' relationships, pray for their salvations, pray for them as they're navigating through our just devastatingly sin-cursed world, which is so messed up.
You can pray for others, and not only can you, God commands us to pray for one another. I do want to mention one thing that I have heard several times.
Want us to think as we pray, as we spend time with God, do we spend more time praying the saints away from heaven, or more time praying the sinners out of hell? Many times, and certainly we can pray for the physical needs that we all have.
I don't know about you guys in a church of our size, there's probably 10 to 15 people every single week that I'm praying to the Lord like, God, would you please help them as they're navigating through cancer?
Please help them as they are recovering from a surgery. Lord, I pray right now as they're dealing with illness, and we've had a whole slew of people that have not been able to be at church many times this year because of their sicknesses.
We can certainly pray for one another and for the sicknesses that we go through.
But oftentimes, I wonder if our prayer lists, if you will, are way more weighted towards just the physical needs that we have and not nearly enough to, Lord, would you please save my nephew? Lord, would you save my spouse?
God, I can't mend this relationship with this person to be able to give them the gospel, but Lord, would you bring someone into their life that is able to speak the truth of God to them, that they would know you?
So first, we ought to spend time in his word, individually and corporately. We ought to spend time in prayer to him, both for ourselves and for others.
The third way we can partner with God by spending time with him is by spending time with his body in its public and its private gatherings.
Hebrews chapter 10 verses 24 and 25 say, let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our worship meetings as some habitually do, but encouraging each other and all the more as you see the day
drawing near. 1st Corinthians 12 would tell us that the local church is the body of Christ and that together we're a thumb, we're an ear, we're a nose, and we all need each other.
And I'm certain that though some of us would be like, oh, well, you know, is it really that bad this week if the thumb goes fishing? I want to encourage you, you don't just come to church because you need something.
You come to church because someone needs you. There's someone that's going through some grieving and some hurting that God has specifically equipped you, having gone through that, to be able to speak a good word to them.
There is someone that needs the encouragement that they're wondering, you know, is this Jesus stuff really worth it? And they need someone who will come alongside and remind them again of who Jesus is.
That they see someone that is sick or, you know, in the words of King James, while stricken in years, continuing to praise the Lord, and they go, okay, well, I know I haven't gone through as much as that person has gone through.
I think I can still keep on going. So today, let's spend time in the Word, let's spend time in prayer, let's spend time with Jesus' body.
Think of Acts 2, where it says, every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple complex and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with a joyful and humble attitude, praising God and having favor with all the people.
And every day the Lord added to them those who were being saved.
I'd love to see that in our church, that every day, whether it's our corporate Sunday gathering or whether it's in your home on a Monday afternoon that you have a friend over, maybe it's a Saturday night that you're meeting with a couple other
Christians and you're inviting someone, let's see the body be the body of Christ. Let's see us involve ourselves in each other's lives so that this takes place every day the Lord adds those that are being saved.
So first, we can see we need to partner with God by spending time with him, even as Abraham spent time. Then in verses 9 through 15, we can partner with God by believing he can work. Partner with God by believing he can work.
Verse number 9, as they're sitting there, they're having the meal, they say, where's your wife Sarah? They asked him. They're in the tent, he answered.
The Lord, Yahweh, said, I will certainly come back to you in about a year's time, and your wife Sarah will have a son. It's a wonderful promise. It's a restatement of what we just heard in Genesis 17.
Now, Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent behind him. She's eavesdropping on the conversation. I'm sure many of you have done that before, where you just kind of want to be a fly on the wall a little bit.
Now, verse 11, Abraham and Sarah were old and getting on in years. Sarah had passed the age of childbearing. This has been a recurring theme.
All hope humanly is gone. Verse 12, so she laughed to herself. After I am worn out and my Lord is old, will I have delight?
This is the word Eden in scripture. She says, am I going to experience God's goodness and God's blessing and God's provision now as old as I am? But the Lord asked Abraham, why did Sarah laugh, saying, can I really have a baby when I'm old?
And then he says this in verse 14, is anything impossible for the Lord? At the appointed time, I will come back to you, and in about a year, she will have a son. I love this word impossible.
It's something that is awe inspiring. It's something marvelous or wonderful. He says, is anything too shocking for God to accomplish?
In my life, I've seen God answer miraculous prayers of healing. I've seen him save people that everyone thought they're way too far gone. There's no chance they're ever coming to know Jesus.
I've seen God provide miraculously for needs in ways that no one could have orchestrated humanly, but yet God has worked wonders. I've seen him provide direction time and time and time again for those that need it. I want to echo with the Lord here.
If God is calling you to something, if God is working in and through you, realize there is nothing that is too shocking for God to accomplish. Verse number 15, Sarah denied it. I did not laugh, she said, because she was afraid.
But he replied, no, you did laugh. She has the exact same response that Abraham did in the chapter previous. The thing I love about this, if we are, you know, if we were God, we might be like, oh, you doubters, you don't believe that I can do it.
I've been telling you this for years. Fine, I'm not going to do it. But instead, God treats him in this way.
He tells Abraham, I'm going to do this, this exact thing that I promised. It's going to happen in a year. Abraham literally falls down laughing.
So God says, OK, I'm going to call your son, laughter, Isaac. Here's Sarah. She's eavesdropping.
She laughs. And God says, no, I realized the doubt that you have. And that doesn't mean that I'm writing you off because of it.
And in fact, I'll remind you once I've worked of all of the doubts that you carried with you. And every time that you call your son's name, laughter, oh yeah, is anything too shocking for God.
For us today, we can partner with God by believing he can work. First, know what God's promised, so you can know what he will do.
If you expect that God's gonna give you a Lamborghini, if you ask for it, or God's gonna give you, you know, a $3 million house, as long as you buy, you know, one of Pastor Bryon's handkerchiefs, you're gonna be really disappointed because God has
never said that he's going to do that. If we're gonna believe that he can work, we gotta know what he says that he's going to do.
God has not promised your comfort, your financial success, any one individual person's salvation or change life or perpetual health. He has promised to give you wisdom, his peace, his joy, his love, his self-control.
He has promised to build his church and he has promised to bless our obedience. Do we believe that God will work in those ways? Or are we expecting God to do something that he's never said that he is going to do for us?
Secondly, believe that the humanly impossible is easily done by God. In Luke chapter one, the angel told Mary, with man it is impossible, but with God, nothing is impossible.
Do you believe that God is able to work and do what no one thought was possible? God is able to accomplish miracles, to be able to reverse that diagnosis in a way that no human can.
God is able to bring salvation, a restored relationship with himself to any person, even the person that right now you're like, listen, I know that person, they're terrible, they're proud, they are never going to repent of their sin and believe in
Jesus. God can bring salvation to anyone. God can change who you are.
The right now you're like, man, I just make a mess of every single interaction that I have with this person or with my siblings or with my spouse or with my kids, and I can't seem to get it on track.
God can do the humanly impossible, and he can transform you into the image of Christ. God can renew churches and nations.
It's been such a treat for me to be able to see both in our area and across our nation how God is reworking and revamping and revitalizing churches.
The college that I was a part of in California, it was started out of a little local church that was down to about 12 members. And they were meeting in a building that they had once owned, no longer owned.
And now someone else held the node and they were about to get kicked out of their own building. They were meeting in an upstairs room and weren't even able to use their sanctuary. And they called a young 22 year old pastor.
And he came in, found out the horrible situation that the church was in, and God absolutely transformed that place, so that over the following 10, 12 years, they were able to see that building sold. They didn't go into foreclosure.
They were able to purchase some land with several acres.
They were able to build an auditorium, a sanctuary, and classrooms, and nurseries, and things that fit several hundred people, quickly ran out of space, had to move to multiple services, and build something a little bit bigger.
And now every single week, over 6,000 people come and worship the Lord, hear the gospel preached, see the Bible declared and lived out for the church that I was a part of in Washington.
That church was down to about 12 people, and they closed down their doors, and they gave the building to a brand new little church planner who was 26, 27 years old named Dennis Fountain.
And Dennis and his family, they plugged away, and from that initial group of about 12 people in a dilapidated building in a church that had completely shuttered, they've seen now every week over 240 people are worshiping the Lord.
They're seeing people discipled and baptized. They're celebrating 14 or 15 years as a church next Sunday. God is in the business of renewing and changing and making what is humanly impossible reality because our God is not limited.
And then lastly on this thought, if we're partnering with God by believing he can work, I do want you to take comfort in the truth that God knows your unfounded doubts.
He's not turned off or dissuaded by the fact that you aren't totally sure if he's able to do it. Instead, as Jesus said in Matthew 11, come to me, all you who are weary and weighed down and I will give you rest.
Or as the one father of a son who was demon possessed cried out to Jesus, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We can turn to our God because he is the wonder working God. And then lastly today, we can partner with God by caring about others.
We can see this in verses 16 through 33. They've eaten. God reiterates his promise to Abraham.
Sarah laughs just like Abraham laughed. The men got up from there and looked out over Sodom. And Abraham was walking with them to see them off.
We would remember just a couple of things that have been told to us about Sodom. Sodom was a very wicked place. It was kind of one of the larger cities in the area, a place that had a king.
Abraham had, in his pursuit and rescue of his nephew Lot, who was one of the residents of the city, Abraham had had some interaction with the king of Sodom.
And as every time the city has been brought up, the author takes specific pains to tell us, this is a horribly wicked place, so that when we enter into next week's sermon, it's not just out of the blue like, oh, I could never have seen this coming.
It is something that has been brought up the entire time. So the men go, Abraham is walking with them to see them off. And then verse 17, then the Lord, Yahweh said, should I hide what I am about to do from Abraham?
Abraham is to become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him.
For I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his house after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. This is how the Lord will fulfill to Abraham what he promised him.
God says, I've chosen to partner with Abraham, and I'm going to do something in this world, and so I want to involve Abraham in what I am doing. And so today, God wants to involve you in what he is doing in your world.
God could have just chosen the angels to preach the gospel. He could have just had, you know, a giant voice boom out from the sky that would tell everyone, but instead, he chose you.
And the choice for you today is not whether or not you will partner with God. If you know Jesus, if you're saved, you are on God's team, you are on his group project. The question is, are you participating at all?
So God chooses to involve Abraham. The Lord said, The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is immense, and their sin is extremely serious. I will go down to see if what they have done justifies the cry that has come up to me.
If not, I will find out. This would call to mind a couple of things from earlier in Genesis. First, when Cain kills Abel, God describes to Cain that Abel's blood, if you will, was crying out for justice from the ground.
And here, almost every time in scripture that a city is mentioned, whether it's Babylon or here, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the future, even cities like Tyre and Sidon and Jerusalem itself, human cities, the greatest organization that humanity has to
offer is a corrupt, evil place. Our human governments are not what God intended. We were created to have one king, the one that always does what's right, the one who always does what is just.
And here there's an outcry because of the murderous acts of this city. So God says, I'm going down to find out if it is warranted. The men, verse 22, turned from there and went towards Sodom while Abraham remains standing before the Lord.
I do want to mention just one other cool Eden aspect. As all of this has been going on, if you remember all of the good characters from Eden, there's a couple, do you guys remember their names? Adam and Eve are in Eden.
Okay, the Lord's in Eden. And then do you remember, there's one other pair of good individuals in the Eden story. It's at the very, very end.
It's a couple of guards. Do you guys remember the other pair that's in that story? A couple of angels, a couple of the cherubim stand watch right outside the entrance to Eden.
So as this story is going on, you have Abraham and Sarah, opposite Adam and Eve.
You have the Lord, and you have the two cherubim, and then here you have the Lord and these two messengers, and we'll follow these two messengers, these angels, as they go into Sodom next week. Abraham decides to participate, to partner with God.
He steps forward and says, will you really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
See, Abraham knows he's been around, he's heard people talk about Sodom, and he knows that not only is the outcry justified of the evil that is taking place in the city, he knows if God goes down and there will be judgment.
And so he says, no, no, God, listen, will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? My nephew Lot and his family, they are all down there. And so Abraham, in true fashion to his culture, decides, I know what I'm going to do.
I'm gonna barter with God, and I'll see how I can get him to not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. So he says, what if there are 50 righteous people in the city?
Will you really sweep it away instead of sparing the place for the sake of the 50 righteous people who are in it? You could not possibly do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike.
You could not possibly do that. Won't the judge of the whole earth do what is just? So Abraham here, he's calling, if you will, to account God's righteousness, his holiness.
He says, no, no, there are too many holy people in this place, and because of their righteousness, you can't punish them along with the wicked.
Certainly, there's a truth in there that we can be grateful for, that though we in and of ourselves don't have our righteousness, because of the righteousness of Christ, he will never punish us like he will those that have rejected Christ.
He will not punish the righteous, those under the blood of Christ, like he will those that have rejected Christ. And he starts off with a number, 50.
Now, I don't know if you guys have ever bought or sold anything on Facebook Marketplace, on Craigslist, any place that, you know, you're interacting with a person. It's not just like a set price at, you know, Walmart or something.
You know, if the cost of the item is 200 bucks, and you might come in, if you're trying to barter, you might say, I'll give you 150 for it. And you might expect, okay, well, I said 200, you said 150, let's go, you know, 175.
And you meet somewhere in the middle. So Abraham starts off with, what I'm certain is like an impossibly low bar here at 50. And God's response is, if I find 50 righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.
I was expecting like, okay, if there's 150 righteous, then I'll spare the city. But he just says, yep, I'll do it.
Then Abraham answered, since I ventured to speak to my Lord, even though I am dust and ashes, suppose that 50 righteous lack five, you know? One family's out for the weekend, you know, they're out on the boat on the Dead Sea.
Never mind, you guys will get that next week. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five? If there's just like 45 there, will you destroy?
He says, I will not destroy it if I find 45 there. Then he spoke to him again. Suppose 40 are found there?
He answered, I will not do it on account of 40. Then he said, let my Lord not be angry. Has God been angry at any point up to this?
No, like he's just talking, he's elaborating. I will speak further. Suppose 30 are found there?
He answered, I will not do it if I find 30 there. Then he said, since I ventured to speak to my Lord, suppose 20 are found there? He replied, I will not destroy it on account of 20.
Then he said, let my Lord not be angry and I will speak one more time. Again, has God been angry? Nope.
Suppose 10 are found there? He answered, I will not destroy it on account of 10. When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he departed and Abraham returned to his place.
Now for you and I, you might think, okay, you know, there's 10 righteous, there's 10 people who are living in right relationship with God and people in this place.
And in this city, we don't know exactly the size that it was, but there are at least 50 people in the city. And I would assume a good amount more than that. No, I wonder, like, I wonder why Abraham didn't go any lower.
Like, why didn't he keep on going down? Like, Abraham's the one that said, okay, just one more time, if there's 10. And we can wonder, as many people have, what would have happened if Abraham had kept on lowering the bar?
As the Jewish rabbis in the third and second and first century BC and in the first century AD reflected back on the story, we'll see next week that Lot, he prays that one city that's nearby, Zohar, would not be destroyed in the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah, and God spares the city of Zohar because of Lot's prayer. This would prompt Peter in 2 Peter chapter 2 to label Lot as a righteous man, one righteous who will stand on behalf of the condemned and plead for God's mercy and forgiveness.
Moses does this with Israel when they sin with the golden calf, and Moses is there getting the 10 commandments while Israel is actively participating in idolatry and immorality. And God says, listen, Moses, I'm gonna start over with you.
These guys are toast. And Moses says, no, God, like, destroy me. Block my name out of your book, but keep them alive.
And God forgives and spares the people of Israel based on the intercession of the one. Okay, if you're a Christian, you got like giant alarms going off. Yes, that's Jesus.
He's the one that stands on the behalf of the condemned, and he says, Father, forgive them because they don't know what they're doing. That he died not just for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world, as 1 John 2 tells us.
He is the one that so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life. And he is the one that loves us and cares for us and gave himself in our place.
And so we might question, Abraham, what would have happened if you had gone just a little lower? But our action step for this morning is we ought to partner with God by caring about others.
That we would not want to see anyone perish, but everyone come to repentance, even as Jesus did not come to condemn the world, but so that the world through him would be saved.
If you're going to care about others, realize first that God wants to do in everyone what he has done in you. He has saved you. He has made you a part of his family.
He has given you a home in heaven. He has given you his Holy Spirit.
He has placed you within a local body of believers so that you would have a mission field of love every time that you walk into this building or every time you enter into a small group or a Bible study. God has given you all of that.
God has given you the comfort of his presence. And he wants everyone to enjoy what you are enjoying. So partner with him by sharing him, talking about him, asking people to join you for a Bible study or a small group or to come to church with you.
Pass on to other people what God has given you. Secondly, realize that there is a final judgment coming for those apart from God. Just as with Sodom and Gomorrah, there is a day coming when people will no longer have the opportunity to turn to God.
Will you have warned anyone? Will you have prayed for anyone? And will you have tried to rescue?
And then lastly, confidently stand on God's mercy as you love and evangelize others. That where Abraham thought like, okay, here's where God's mercy runs out. Oh, here's where his anger starts.
He just kept going and going and going and finding that God's love and mercy and forgiveness and his desire to not condemn but to save is far vaster than Abraham's expectations of him were.
Realize that God loves everyone you love more than you do and plead the blood of Jesus over their lives in prayer, asking for him to save them. One righteous man, Lot, prayed for a nearby little town of Zohar to be saved and it was.
Moses prayed for a whole nation and God spared them. One is enough. Will you intercede for, will you pray for others in your life?
Today, if we're going to partner with God, we need to realign our plans and our expectations in light of God's desire to partner with us. We need to partner with God by spending time with him.
We need to partner with God by believing that he can work and will accomplish what he has promised. We need to partner with God by caring about others, by sharing the gospel, by loving them in the way that he has loved us.
Today, the question goes to you. Will you choose this week to partner with God? Will you spend time with him?
Will you believe him? And will you care about others? If today you don't know Jesus as your Savior, I would love to talk with you about how you can repent from your sin and believe in Jesus and find forgiveness in life.
That is what God made you for, and he wants to save you. Today, however God's spoken to you, let's respond to him.
