The Right Way and the Wrong Way Genesis 18: 1-15

As we look over our lives, we can all think of people who made a big impact on our lives and those who damaged us in some way.

You may have had a teacher in your life that had a positive effect on you and another teacher who had a negative one.

You may have had a family member who impacted you for the better or another family member who impacted you for the worse.

I had a roommate who my brother and I lived with when I was 23. Our friend and roommate was an encourager who we had lots of great times with.

He said something one time that has stuck with me. We were talking about family and he started to talk about his dad.

He told me that he did not have a good father, but he said something very wise.

He said, what I have learned from my father is not what to do, but what not to do. This is true.

Sometimes we are blessed to be able to follow someone who sets a godly example, but other times we see someone who lives a sinful lifestyle and we learn what not to do.

In our sermon today, we are going to see an encounter between three angels and Abraham and his wife, Sarah.

What we will see is how they respond to these visitors. One is an example we should emulate and the other is an example we should not follow, but go in a different direction.

This sermon is titled, The Right Way and The Wrong Way. If you have a Bible, I encourage you to turn with me to Genesis 18, verses 1 -15.

If you are using a red Bible, in the pews, it is on pages 14 and 15. The big idea of this sermon, our proposition, is this divine encounter with ordinary people shows us the way of godliness.

This divine encounter with ordinary people shows us the way of godliness. We have two examples how to learn in this text.

The first example is through Abraham's demonstration of hospitality. Through Abraham's demonstration of hospitality, and we will see this in verses 1 -8, but before we get to that,

I am going to give you a little recap of last week's sermon. Last week we saw the precision of God in his conversation with Abraham.

The Lord told him that his son would come through him and Sarah. Abraham did not believe God could do it because he was almost 100 and Sarah was 90.

So Abraham told the Lord to accomplish his promise through Ishmael. But we know that is not how the

Lord works. God is able to do the humanly impossible. The Lord said, I am going to cause your wife

Sarah to give birth to a child. The elect line that we have seen trace all the way through Genesis will go through him, as the

Lord said from the beginning. We saw the negative of Abraham's unbelief here, but we also saw a positive in his life of faith last week, where he demonstrated trust in the

Lord. Once the conversation ended between him and God, Abraham followed the Lord's instructions and was circumcised himself and also circumcised his household.

He followed the Lord's command precisely and he followed the Lord's command quickly. So we saw that the quickness with which he responded showed the joy that he had in following the

Lord. The application for us is to follow what the Lord has commanded and we need to follow what the

Lord has commanded fully and joyfully. Today we are going to see a new conversation between Abraham and the

Lord. But this time he had more than just the Lord appearing to him, he had three men in all come to him.

We'll see this in verses 1 and 2 to begin. And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.

He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.

The Lord had appeared to Abraham at a time not too long before this. We know this because of the repeated phrase that Sarah will bear a child this time next year that shows up in verses 21 of chapter 17 and verses 10 and 14 of our text today.

So the Lord appears to Abraham at his home at the oaks of Mamre at Hebron. And we know that Abraham was a wealthy man, but what we learn here is that he lived in a tent.

This was the way of life 4 ,000 years ago, even the wealthy lived in tents. And as Abraham is hanging out at his tent, he looks up and sees three men standing in front of him.

Now Abraham did not notice these men walking toward him, but all of a sudden they appeared to him. He looks up and the response that he has shows that these were not ordinary men.

These were angels. He gets up immediately, runs toward them, and bows to them. You don't typically bow to mere men.

Abraham knew well a divine encounter from a human encounter. The Lord had already appeared to him as the angel of the

Lord on several occasions. This was a divine encounter. And a little side note here is that you might have an encounter with someone who is an angel, and you don't even know it because they look like a human.

In fact, the Scripture says that we, 1 Peter says, that we entertain angels without knowing it, unaware.

Now we know that one of these angels is God appearing as an angel, and we know this because verse 1 says the Lord appeared to Abraham.

But who are these other two angels? These would be ordinary angels.

By the way, Abraham saw these angels as men. Angels are spirit beings who do not have a body.

So God and these two angels are taken on human form to have this conversation with Abraham.

Abraham's response to having God appear before him is the right one. He bows down to him.

He also says the right thing in verse 3. He says, You can tell by Abraham's response in verse 3 that he knows one of these visitors is the

Lord. The word for Lord in Hebrew is Adonai. The word Lord can be used to show respect to another, or in some cases, like this, it is used as a title for God himself.

We know this because of the Hebrew spelling of the word. And that spelling is used for the Lord in other places in scripture.

A good example is Psalm 8 verse 1. By the way, the word Lord in all caps in your

Bible is the name for God, which is Yahweh. In your Bible, when it's capitalized, this is a translation for the

Hebrew name for God, Yahweh. The lowercase title here for the Lord is not Yahweh, but it is still a title for the

Lord. It is used as an honor to a superior. To show honor.

What we notice in verse 3 is that Abraham does not want these visitors to leave. It makes you think, what would you do if royalty came to your door?

Or if someone important, a high up official, came to your door? Imagine if Governor Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, came to your door while you were going through your daily routine.

Would you be ready to host him? In Abraham's situation, this is not a high up official in his region.

This is God himself, the creator of the heavens and the earth. He has the opportunity to host the greatest being there is and two visitors who accompany him.

Abraham is ambitious to start making preparations. In verses 4 and 5, it says here,

Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves.

And after that you may pass on, since you have come to your servants. So they said, Do as you have said.

He tells his visitors to relax, to wash their feet while he gets some food for them. His plan is to feed them in order to send them off in comfort.

He does not want them just to appear and go. He wants them to stay a while to enjoy fellowship with them.

What we see at the end of verse 5 is that they grant his request. They plan to stay and eat the food that is provided to them.

The Lord is not going to turn down this act of hospitality by Abraham, because this act of hospitality is an act of godliness.

The Lord approves of what he is doing and they gladly stay to let Abraham host them. You may wonder, does

God eat and do angels eat since they are spirits? A little question to ask here. Well, they took on a human body, so at this point they could eat.

But the point here is that Abraham is taking care of his royal guests. He is treating them with honor.

As all this is happening outside, Abraham's wife Sarah is inside the tent. He gives her urgent instructions to help prepare the meal for these enormously important guests.

Verse 6, And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, Quick, three says of fine flour, knead it and make cakes.

As Sarah gathers the flour to make these cakes, Abraham takes care of the meat portion of the meal and a few other items.

Verses 7 and 8, And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man who prepared it quickly.

Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set it before them, and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

Abraham takes a calf from a young man to slaughter it for food. And it's nice, as I speak to you here, it's nice that I don't have to explain to you what a calf is.

Where I'm from, you would have to explain it because a lot of people wouldn't know what a calf is. But here, you do.

I'm grateful for that. In fact, you could actually explain to me what a calf is. Now you will notice in verse 8 that Abraham does not eat the meal with them.

Why is this? In verse 3, he referred to himself as their servant. He is intentionally putting himself below them by not eating, but rather waiting on them.

He's feeding God here. And we know that Abraham is indeed below him.

We learn from the life of Abraham that he is a very generous man. Do you remember earlier in Genesis 13 when

Abraham offered land to Lot and his herdsmen? The Lord promised Abraham the land of Canaan, and Abraham said that Lot could take the north or the south.

Now we see his generosity in showing hospitality to these three visitors, one of them being the Lord. There is a very obvious application in this for us, and that of course is hospitality.

The Lord gives us lots of commands in the pages of Scripture. Did you know that he commands us to be hospitable?

What is hospitality? According to dictionary .com, hospitality is the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

As a church, we need to ask ourselves this question. How are we doing with hospitality?

I ask myself this as I ask you. When was the last time we invited someone from Eureka Baptist or our community over for fellowship or a meal or to play games?

You might say, don't we do that stuff already for church events? Yes, we do.

But that's not what this is talking about. That's organized church community fellowship. The hospitality that this is talking about is doing this on your own initiative.

We should be inviting one another over and inviting people from our community over. Not just those we are comfortable with, but also those of you, also those who you don't know that well.

And this is an opportunity to know them better. Hospitality should be regularly happening here at Eureka.

1 Peter 4 and 9 says, show hospitality to one another without grumbling. About 6 or 7 weeks ago,

Brianne and I were going on a walk. This was a rare, nice day. This horrible weather spring we just had.

It was about 50 degrees, which of course isn't that great, but we decided we were going to go on a walk. So we walked down to the pond, down 210th

Avenue, east of here of course. And we walked down to the four -way stop and we looked out in the distance and we saw

Bob and Debbie's house. And then we thought, well, Mark and Lori live even further past that. So I decided to give

Mark a call to see if he and Lori were home. So I gave him a call and Mark answered and I said, Mark, can we come over?

And he said, yeah, come on over. And so we invited ourselves over and we took the walk the rest of the way there and we got there.

Mark and Lori greeted us and welcomed us into their home. Lori asked us if we wanted lemonade. We said yes and she made us some lemonade.

And we had a really good conversation for about close to an hour probably. And after we drank and had the conversation, we left the house and we were on our way.

We were very grateful that Mark and Lori, on the fly, were willing to show us hospitality.

And this is what we need to do at our church. This is what we need to do in our community. The Lord and these two angels were pleased to see

Abraham show them hospitality. That's why they let him do it. He showed godly character and when

Abraham offered this meal to them, they did not turn him down. They let him carry out this godly act.

Another important piece of application is that we should not just invite over the higher up in society. We should also invite even the lowest.

The Lord Jesus says this in Luke 14, 12 -14. Think of those people in your life who may never get invited to someone's house.

We have some friends back at home who are very important at the church that I came from.

They're very influential in the church. There's another gentleman who is disabled and probably doesn't get invited to people's houses ever.

But I heard recently that they invited him over and they had dinner and they made him dessert. I'm so grateful to hear that.

What a great example. The Lord is so pleased to see that when it happens. To show hospitality is something that God calls us to do.

Abraham modeled this well here and we should follow his example where his behavior is godly. It's important to stress that.

Remember what the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 11 -1. He said, follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.

In other words, what Paul is saying is as long as I follow Jesus, follow me. When I don't follow

Jesus, don't follow me. The goal is, right, we want to follow Jesus. We want to follow the

Lord. The same goes for Abraham here. As long as he does something godly, we can follow that example.

In our journey through the life of Abraham, we have seen many ways not to emulate him.

But here we should follow his godly example of hospitality. Examine your life and I will examine mine.

Let's aim to follow the Lord's instruction to be hospitable to the people in our church and the people in our community.

This is the first example of how this text shows us the way of godliness. Through Abraham's example of hospitality.

The second example and final example in this text of how to pursue the way of godliness is through Sarah's disbelief in the

Lord's promise. What we'll see here is what not to do. We learn what to do by seeing what not to do, like I mentioned in the introduction.

So in our first point, we were shown how to be godly by following Abraham's example of hospitality. Now we're going to see what not to do.

We know that the Lord has appeared to Abraham on numerous occasions to tell him of these promises that he is going to bless him with.

In all of those, the Lord spoke to Abraham. Now the Lord desires for Sarah to hear the promise from his mouth.

The promise, of course, is that Sarah will conceive in her old age. And this child will be the child of blessing.

Let's see the Lord's focus shift from Abraham to Sarah in verses 9 and 10. They said to him, the angels,

Where is Sarah your wife? And he said, she is in the tent. The Lord said,

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. In verse 9, the subject is plural.

As it says, they, not he. Presumably the angel that is speaking here is the Lord, and he is speaking on behalf of all three of them.

Verse 13 gives us this indication that the Lord is speaking. They ask, where is

Sarah? And Abraham tells them that she is in the tent. The Lord tells Abraham that this time next year,

Sarah will give birth to a son. While all this conversation is happening between the

Lord, the two angels, and Abraham, Sarah is in the tent listening in. Maybe you've listened in to a conversation.

Maybe you weren't supposed to listen in to. But here, the Lord wants Sarah to hear this.

So it's actually good that Sarah is listening. What we have to remember is the purpose of these messengers coming in the first place is to communicate this promise to Sarah.

She is the one who is going to give birth to this child. The promised child will come through her body.

As they are talking to Abraham, they know that Sarah is listening. In the following verse, the author, who

I believe to be Moses, reminds the reader of the reality of Abraham and Sarah's old age. Verse 11.

Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah.

This verse says in three different ways the same thing. Abraham and Sarah are past the age when one can biologically have a child.

This is why Sarah responds the way she does in verse 12. This is what

Sarah says in response. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, After I am worn out and my

Lord is old, shall I have pleasure? So she says she's worn out and old.

She uses the word Lord here, but this time it's not a reference to God. It's actually a reference to Abraham.

She's showing respect to him. Sarah asked the question, shall

I go through the pleasure of having a child with my husband? If you look closely at verse 12, you will notice that Sarah did not say this audibly.

She said this to herself. And we do this all the time. We speak without uttering an audible word.

What we will see in verse 13 is that the Lord is able to do things that no one else can do. One of the many things

He can do that we can't do, or anyone else, is know someone's thoughts. It's an incredible knowledge the

Lord has. Verse 13, the Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, shall

I indeed bear a child now that I am old? Isn't that incredible? The Lord knew exactly what she was thinking, and He called her out on it.

She sinfully did not believe the Lord could cause her to get pregnant and give birth at her old age.

We saw Abraham's unbelief last week, and now we see Sarah's. Last summer we did a sermon series on the attributes of God.

One of the attributes that we looked at is the Lord's omniscience. And what this means is that the Lord knows everything.

Everything there is to know, He knows. His knowledge is unlimited. What unlimited means is that His knowledge is infinite.

This includes our thoughts. He knows all of our thoughts. Every thought we've ever had, He knows. And this ought to be unnerving to us, since every thought we've ever had, even the sinful thoughts, the

Lord knows about. And every one of those evil thoughts must be paid for. And this is where the gospel comes in.

Jesus not only paid for our sinful actions at the cross, He also paid for our sinful thoughts.

And let us thank the Lord for Jesus. And if you're here today and you never trusted in Christ, realize that the

Lord will not only pay for your sinful actions, He'll pay for your sinful thoughts. He'll pay for all of your sins. So you must believe in Him, believe in the

Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. Now the Lord responds to Sarah's thought of unbelief in verse 14.

Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

Your Bible says the word hard. Is anything too hard for the Lord? A better word, a better Hebrew word here is wonderful.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? Which means, is anything too extraordinary for the Lord to accomplish? This is a rhetorical question and the answer is obvious.

No, nothing is too difficult for the Lord to accomplish. That which is humanly impossible is a piece of cake for God.

At the end of verse 14 we get the timetable. Once again about when this miraculous birth is going to happen.

The Lord says at the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.

The Lord tells her specifically that He will return to her. He will cause the miraculous conception and the

Lord's presence will be felt when the baby is born, about a year from this conversation. After the

Lord says all of this, in verse 15, Sarah responds to God in a foolish way. Remember, we are seeing the example not to follow here.

Learning what to do by learning what not to do. Verse 15a and b.

But Sarah denied it, saying, I did not laugh, for she was afraid. She should have known.

She can't hide anything from the Lord. The Lord knows exactly what she was thinking. And she denied it.

Sarah is startled by this knowledge that this angel has, who we know to be the Lord. And wouldn't you be afraid of someone in your presence through your thoughts?

You'd be very careful what you thought. Sarah experienced this. And the truth is, we all experience this all the time, because even though we can't see the

Lord, He's in our presence. And He knows all of our thoughts. Now, the

Lord responds to Sarah's denial at the end of verse 15. He says,

No, but you did laugh. God's response to Sarah is,

Oh, yes, you did. That ends the conversation, because God is always right. And Sarah knows that He is right.

Just as we learned from Abraham's hospitality, we can learn from Sarah's sin here. Sarah did not believe that God was going to fulfill

His promise, that she would bear this promised child. We need to believe that the

Lord's promises will be fulfilled. He's going to do it. He's going to fulfill what

He said. And let me give you a few ways you should believe God's promises to you. As you go through the journey of the life of faith, sometimes you may feel like the

Lord is not close to you, like He's not with you. But the truth is, if you belong to Jesus, He's always with you.

The Lord says in Joshua 1 .5, I will not fail you or forsake you. Isaiah 41 .10

says, Fear not, for I am with you. I will help you. I will strengthen you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Matthew 28 .20, Jesus said, after saying the Great Commission, Go and make disciples of all nations. Then He said,

I am with you always, to the end of the age. Do you believe that the Lord is with you always?

Let me give you another promise that everyone here who belongs to Jesus Christ should hold on to. Everyone in this room will die, unless Christ returns first.

And our hope will be entirely on God to take care of us. Do you believe that the

Lord will take you safely to be with Him forever? Philippians 1 .21 says, To live is Christ and to die is gain.

Because you get to be with Christ when you die. 2 Corinthians 5 .8 says, To be away from the body is to be at home with the

Lord. Do you believe this? The Christians should not fear death.

The world does, because they don't know what's going to happen to them. Believers should not, because you know that you will be with the

Lord when you die. And after walking with Christ throughout your life, 2 Peter 1 .11 says this about your future,

There will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is a promise that you can hold on to.

These are yours because you belong to Jesus. When we have a lapse of faith, we can doubt these promises.

We can doubt that the Lord is going to do what He promised, just like Sarah did. But let's not follow her example of unbelief, as we have seen in this narrative.

To believe in the Lord's promises is the way of godliness. Not to disbelieve that He is going to do what

He... So do not disbelieve, but believe what the

Lord is going to do. That was the second point. To summarize in our sermon here, to close here, this divine encounter with ordinary people shows us the way of godliness.

We have seen two examples how to learn godliness in this text. The first is through Abraham's demonstration of hospitality.

We should follow his example, as it is godly. The example we should not follow is

Sarah's disbelief in the Lord's promise. Instead, we should believe the Lord's promise as we go through our journey of the life of faith.

We saw a holy example, and we saw an unholy example. The Bible is big on imitating people as long as their life is in line with the will of God.

But even when someone walks out of step with God's will, we can still learn from it. We can look at the situation and say, that is what not to do.

But what does God's word say about this, and then do that instead? We must aim to conform ourselves, our lives, to the will of God, through the power of the

Holy Spirit, little by little and day by day. We need to grow gradually in holiness.

That's what we need to realize. That's what we need to do in our lives. That's what God's plan is for us.

Pursue the path of holiness. So that is our sermon today in the text,

Genesis 18, 1 -15. Next week, we will see that the Lord and these two angels change their focus from Abraham's home to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And we know the doom that is coming there for their wickedness. Father, I thank you for your word.

I thank you that, as Isaiah 55 says, that it accomplishes the purpose for which it was sent out.

And I pray, Lord, that you would open the eyes of the blind, open the eyes of the blind so that they could see the beauty of your word, the beauty of who you are as it points to you, as it points to Jesus.

And, Lord, may we live this out. May we follow these examples to follow hospitality, as Abraham did so well here.

And that we would do not what Sarah did, but that we would believe and not disbelieve.

May we live this out, Lord, in this community. May we be a light in this community by living this out. And may people be drawn to Christ through our hospitality.

May believers be encouraged through the hospitality that we demonstrate. And may we hold tightly to your promises,