Welcome to Gospel and Life. The Bible teaches us that while God is infinite, he is also intimate.

In other words, it's possible for us to draw near to him. But what does it actually look like to draw near to God?

Today on Gospel and Life, Tim Keller is teaching about what it means to experience God in a way that is personal and intimate.

The passage on which the teaching is based is printed in your bulletin. Now, as usual, because we're looking at these Old Testament, mainly these Old Testament narratives, every week here in the evening service we're looking at, people who had had close encounters with God.

I noticed there's a couple of Christmas films coming out about angels, two of them. One, John Travolta is an angel, and the other one, Denzel Washington is an angel. I can understand Denzel, but what's intriguing, of course, is that in these kinds of movies, God is very remote. God is off the scenes. God is not there. He relates to intermediaries. Then you have another kind of movie. Oh, God, remember with George Burns? Went there five or six of them or something like that?

In that case, of course, God is a kindly old wisecracking, cynical man, old man. We see in the Bible that nobody outside the Bible can keep together a God of infinity and a God of intimacy together.

You see, either God is infinity and he's not a God of intimacy. You see, he's far away, and we can only know him remotely through intermediaries. Or else you have a God of intimacy, but he's not a God of infinity. He's just an old wisecracking, wise compassionate, kindly old man, Santa Claus, in a sense.

But in the scripture, we see again and again that the intimacy of the infinite, intimacy with infinity is really what's going on. And many times we have seen these various persons in the Bible having a confrontation with God, a personal confrontation.

And last week and this week we're looking at the two times that Abraham, the great patriarch of the Old Testament, met God visually. That means that he had such a relationship with God that such an encounter that God actually appeared to him physically.

Now we looked at one of them last week, we're going to look at another one this week. And unfortunately these narratives are very long, we can't print them all in the bulletin and I usually can't cover them. And what I'm going to do tonight is I'm actually going to take, though I had originally thought about, and I'll refer to it, talking about the second half of this encounter, I want to talk to you more about the first half of it.

And therefore if you take a look, I'm going to read you the first eight verses of Genesis 18, and I'm going to pick it up what you have printed in your bulletin as verses 9 to 15, and we're going to end there.

So I'm going to read Genesis 18, and I'll read all the way from 1 to 15, you don't just wait until I get to verse 9 because 9 to 15 is the heart of it.

Now the Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of memory while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.

When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. He said,

If I have found favor in your eyes, my Lord, do not pass your servant by, let a little water be brought, then you may all wash your feet and rest under his tree.

Let me get you something to eat so that you can be refreshed and then go on your way, now that you have come to your servant. Very well the answer do as you say.

So Abraham hurried into this tent to Sarah, quick he said, get three seas of fine flour and kneaded and make some bread, and then he ran to the herd and selected a choice tender calf and gave it to a servant who hurried to prepare it.

He then brought some curds and milk in the calf that had been prepared and the calf that had been prepared and he set these all before them.

And while they ate, he stood near them under a tree, verse nine.

Where is your wife Sarah, they asked him, they are in a tent, he said. Then the Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year and Sarah your wife will have a son.

Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years and Sarah was past the age of child bearing.

So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, am I worn out and my master is old and now will I have this pleasure.

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