The Effective Prayer of a Righteous Man

On our recent mission to Eastern Europe, when we trained through Hungary to Romania on the Orient Express, we shared our compartment with a couple of students from Poland. We discovered that they were on a mission too. The purpose of their visit to Romania was to smuggle coffee into the country to sell on the black market. Their luggage was absolutely stuffed with packages of coffee. They were hoping to get large quantities of Romanian lei to exchange later for other currencies. This kind of thing goes on all the time in Eastern Europe.

When they found out that we were from America, they became very interested in bargaining with us for some of our American dollars. American dollars have tremendous purchasing power behind the Iron Curtain, especially in Poland, where they were from. They would trade some of their Romanian lei, which they figured we needed, for some of our dollars, which they badly wanted. One young man was quite insistent that we do business with him. He began by offering us 20 lei to the dollar. Now the official rate is 9 lei to the dollar, and that’s what you have to pay at the border. Everyone entering Romania has to change a certain amount of currency into lei at the border in order to be allowed into the country. So if we could get 20 lei to the dollar, instead of 9, that would be a good deal for us. Except that we weren’t interested. We weren’t planning on spending a whole lot of lei in Romania anyway. And if you have any lei left over when you are leaving the country, you have to give it back. For nothing. So we really didn’t want to do business with these guys.

Well this young man wasn’t ready to give up yet. He raised his offer to 30 lei. He must have thought that we were quite dense, because he proceeded to spread his lei out all over the seat in the compartment, so we could see how much 30 lei was. Now this was all happening when the train was stopped at the Romanian border in the middle of the night. There were soldiers and border guards everywhere, on the train and off. If any of them had noticed what was going on in our compartment, with all this money all over the place, we could all have been arrested, because trading currency on the black market is forbidden. At any rate, we were still not interested in his offer. So he raised it again. Now it was up to 40 lei per dollar. He kept exclaiming “40 lei to one dollar!” like it was the deal of the century. Just to get this guy calmed down and to put his money away, we decided to exchange 20 American dollars. Well, after we had done that, he wanted us to change 40 dollars. This guy just wouldn’t give up. He wanted to do business. You know, I think I met more capitalists in communist Eastern Europe than I’ve met here.

We come today to an encounter between Abraham and God that almost sounds like a business deal. When you read this passage in Genesis 18, you almost get the impression that Abraham was bargaining with God. God plays the part of the reluctant traveler, who doesn’t want to exchange his currency. Abraham is like the earnest student who is trying to persuade him to do so. God has something that Abraham wants, but he doesn’t seem to want to give it to him. Abraham, on the other hand, knows what he wants, so he haggles with God to get it. He doesn’t give up. He keeps raising the ante. And finally, he gets what he wants from God. And you almost get the impression that God gives in just to get Abraham off his back.

I’d like to suggest to you that if that’s the way we think of this passage, we are dead wrong about what was really going on here. This chapter in Genesis is very important. It has a lot to teach us about prayer, about our relationship with God, and about God’s character. But if we misread this passage, we’re going to come up with some wrong ideas about all those important subjects. If our interpretation is wrong, our theology will be wrong. And if our theology is wrong, our prayers will be wrong. And if our prayers are wrong, our lives will be wrong. We’ve got to look closer at the text to see what really happened.

We know that Abraham was living up in the hill country of Judah. He was a man of faith who walked with God. He wasn’t perfect, he made many mistakes. But when all was said and done, Abraham was a man who trusted God at His word. And because he did, God considered Abraham to be a righteous man.

Abraham had a nephew whose name was Lot. Back in chapter 13, we learned that Lot chose to go down and live on the plain by the Dead Sea. (This happened so long ago that at that time, the Dead Sea wasn’t dead - it was only sick.) The place where Lot chose to live was beautiful, just like the Garden of Eden: lots of water, and lots of vegetation. Good for raising livestock. Lot chose to live there because he wanted the good life. He saw how good it looked, so he went for it.

But down on that plain there were two cities: Sodom and Gomorrah. They were wicked places. All sorts of evil things went on in those cities. But Lot didn’t care about that. He thought that it wouldn’t affect him. He started by living outside the cities, but then he moved into the city of Sodom. And pretty soon, he became one of the elders of the city of Sodom.

In Genesis 18, the time came for God to judge the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their wickedness had gone on long enough. So we read in

Genesis 18:20-21 Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

God knows the evil that goes on here on earth. Nothing escapes his view. Exactly fifty years ago this weekend, Adolf Hitler plunged the world into a war in which 50 million people were slaughtered. God saw that. And God judges the sin of man. Sometimes, in His sovereignty, He waits until the time is ripe. But we must never mistake His silence for approval or impotence.

There are several facts that I want you to observe about Abraham’s encounter with God.

The first is that Abraham’s prayer came in response to the revelation God gave him. Look at

Genesis 18:17 Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Abraham understood that His God was a holy God. He understood the implications of that holiness. He knew that a holy God does not leave the sin of man unpunished. He understood that because of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, God would judge those cities.

But the point I want to make is that, unless God revealed himself and his plans to Abraham, Abraham wouldn’t have even known what to pray for. Abraham’s prayer was rooted in God’s revelation. Abraham didn’t come to God saying “Hey, I read in the newspaper what you’re planning to do to Sodom.” He didn’t say “Look God, I heard on the grapevine that you’ve got some bad things in store for Gomorrah.” Abraham prayed because God personally told him what He was thinking. He revealed His will to Abraham.

That is fact #1 about effective prayer. Our prayers, to be effective, must be based upon God’s revelation of His will to us, which is found in the Bible. The Word of God, which expresses the will of God, is the raw material out of which our prayers must be made. Revelation is the root of prayer.

This is why God tells us that we must pray in Jesus’ name. If we understand that a person’s name, in ancient times, signified all that a person stood for and all that he was, then to pray in Jesus’ name means that our prayers must be in accordance with the character of Jesus and the will of Jesus.

Really effective prayer must be prayer about the things that God is concerned about. Someone has said that prayer is not getting our will done in heaven, it is getting God’s will done here on earth. But so often we get it the wrong way around. We pray and we pray about things that are really just the expression or our own will and not God’s will. We say that God wants us to have the desires of our heart and we use that as a carte blanche to ask God for whatever we want. But we must get that verse right:

Psalm 37:4-5 Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this

God said that you could have the desires of your heart when you delight yourself in Him. When you are walking in fellowship with Him. When you commit your way to Him. Then and only then will your will be lined up with His will. When your heart beats with God’s heart, then you can have the desires of your heart. The watchword of effective prayer will be “not my will but thine be done”.

There is a second fact about effective prayer that we must observe from this passage. It is that Abraham’s prayer was made with growing confidence in the character of God. Look at v. 25:

Genesis 18:25 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?

As Abraham prayed, he was thinking about God’s character. He knew that God was the Judge of all the earth. What’s more, he knew that God never did the wrong thing. Never made a mistake. Never acted unjustly or unfairly. He had much that he could point to in his own experience to confirm that.

What is Abraham doing in v.25? He’s thinking out loud. He’s not lecturing God. He’s not telling God how He should act in this situation. He’s not saying “Now God, remember who you are. Remember to do the right thing in this situation.” No, I believe that Abraham is reminding himself who God is.

What we are seeing here is not a process of Abraham changing God’s mind through prayer. It is God changing Abraham’s mind through prayer. As Abraham thought about the goodness and mercy of God, he became more confident to ask God for things that he originally thought were out of the question. As he was reminded of the righteousness of God, Abraham’s confidence in God’s character grew stronger, and allowed him to go on to ask God to show even more mercy.

The process that we see: from 50 to 45 to 40 to 30 to 20 to 10 is not a process of God growing more lenient. God does not change. God is just as merciful at the beginning of ch. 18 as He is at the end. This is a process of Abraham’s faith in the mercy of God growing stronger. It is Abraham that is changing as he prays, not God. Abraham’s faith grew as he prayed.

Now what are the implications for us? I think there are two.

1. In order to pray right, we have to know God right. If we are going to pray effectively, we’re going to have to be confident in the character of the God to whom we pray. How can we pray to God if we are not sure that God knows how to do the right thing? How many times do we come to God in prayer thinking that we have to persuade him to do the right thing, and that He might do the wrong thing unless He hears from us. And how many of us harbor doubts in our hearts that God hasn’t done right by us?

So our prayers become protests, or even worse, lectures where we tell God what to do. You would think, to hear some people pray, that God is like some kindly old absent-minded professor up there in heaven. He means well, but he needs some help with the details. Do we assume that God is depending upon us to tell Him what to do?

This is not how Abraham prayed in Genesis 18. His prayer was made on the basis of the revelation of God. He wouldn’t even known what to pray about unless God had shown him. And his prayer was made with growing confidence in the character of God as the God who always does what is right.

2. Don’t expect to pray and remain unchanged. I once saw a sign which said “Prayer changes things.” Prayer changes not just things, it changes people. Most of all, true biblical prayer changes the one who is doing the praying! So in that sense, prayer is dangerous business. Prayer will threaten your status quo. Don’t pray if you don’t want God to change you.

I’ve just finished reading Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng. That lady, a Christian, went through hell in prison during the Cultural Revolution in China. She spent 6 1/2 years in solitary confinement. During her imprisonment, she prayed. And she testifies in her book that prayer did not change her circumstances as much as it changed her. It gave her peace when she had no peace. It gave her hope when she was hopeless.

We often use prayer as an offensive weapon. We aim our prayers at people and circumstances that are giving us a hard time. We use prayer like a spiritual steamroller to make the road smoother for ourselves. “Lord, please change so and so, or Lord, please take away this problem. ” But when we look at what happened in Genesis 18, it seems like God used Abraham’s prayer to change Abraham’s own heart.

When the early church ran into some persecution in the book of Acts, they held a prayer meeting. It’s interesting what they prayed about. They didn’t say “Lord change the situation.” They said “Lord, change us.” They didn’t say “Lord, stop the persecution.” They said “Lord, help us to be bolder.” God wants to use prayer as an agent of change in our lives, and its us He wants to change most.

There is a third fact about prayer that we learn here in Genesis 18. It is that prayer helps us to remember who we are.

Genesis 18:27 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…

Abraham’s prayer for Sodom was made with a correct view of himself in relation to God. He knew that he was just dust and ashes, just a frail creature addressing his Creator. He came to realize this as he thought about who God was. It is only as we turn our eyes upon God that we really come to know ourselves.

We live in an age where people are trying to find themselves. They don’t know who they are. They’re looking for personal fulfilment, but they’re not sure how to get it. Robert Bellah and a group of his colleagues from the University of Southern California have written a brilliant book called Habits of the Heart. In this book, the authors discuss what makes modern Americans do the things we do. They say that Americans do the things we do because we have bought into a concept they call expressive individualism. By expressive individualism, they mean the belief of Americans that it is the duty of every individual to seek personal happiness and self-actualization. In other words, the goal in life is to find yourself. This is what our culture increasingly believes.

Anything that gets in the way of self-actualization is bad. If you are in a marriage that is getting in the way of your finding yourself, you should leave the marriage. Same thing with your career. Any commitments that you have made that hinder your true identity from coming out must be ended. Expressive individualism is the philosophy of our day. It is trumpeted in the media and in advertising. Let me give you an example.

The Army has a very catchy ad campaign to get young people to join up. The ads say “Be all that you can be… in the Army.” Notice that there is no mention of patriotism, no talk about civic duty, no talk about serving one’s country. Just “Be all that you can be”. Get what you want out of the Army and the Army will get what it wants out of you. That’s expressive individualism. People using people to get what they want. All because everyone is searching for an answer to the question “Who am I?”

It was only as Abraham stood before God in prayer that he gained a true perspective on himself. If you really want to know about life and about yourself, you have to get close to God in prayer.

We’ve learned three things about prayer in Genesis 18.

1. Prayer is rooted in God’s revelation of himself to us.

2. Prayer is effective when we have confidence in God’s character.

3. Prayer helps us to understand who we are in relation to God.