Where we find deep relationship with God

Good morning! My name is Becca Eastvold and I'm the lead pastor here at the Duluth Vineyard. And here we are — the week after Easter.

Easter is kind of like the Super Bowl of the church calendar. It's one of those two times a year, the other one being Christmas, where churches feel like we need to pull out all the stops, invite the people we love, and hope something connects. And that's great! I hope some of you brought someone last week, or maybe you were that someone — you came for Easter and you're back this week wondering what this place is like on a regular Sunday when we don't have balloons flying around. Maybe we should bring the balloons back… Either way, welcome, we're really glad you're here.

Easter is very much worth celebrating. The resurrection is the culminating point in all of history — the moment where everything changed, where our relationship with God shifted from broken to friendship. It's a mountaintop experience.

The thing is… we don't actually live on the mountaintops. We visit sometimes, maybe rent an Airbnb for the week. But most of life isn't Easter Sunday. Mathematically speaking, Easter is .003% of the days of the whole year. Most of life is a boring Wednesday. And one of the things that most shapes what our boring Wednesdays look like — something that determines whether our faith is just a mountaintop memory or somewhere we actually live — is prayer. That's what we're looking at in this new series. And I want to be honest with you about something before we go any further. On the whole, I've not been someone who's had a consistent prayer life.

I know. A pastor can't say that. But it's true. I've tried journaling. I've tried walking and praying. I've done reading plans on the Bible app, a Bible in a year podcast, daily devotionals — I have tried a lot of things to force myself to pray more. And what happens, honestly? I get bored. My mind wanders. I fall asleep. I close the app. And for a long time I carried this low-key guilt and anxiety about it, this sense that everyone else had something figured out that I was missing.

Where I think I've gotten it wrong is how much time I spent focused on the what and the how — the technique. I was missing the picture, the why. I've had a version of prayer in my head that was so focused on doing it right — finding the right posture, the right times of day, the right amount of time — that I hadn't really stopped to ask what it was actually for.

German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say something to couples when he married them. He'd tell them: you think your love will sustain your marriage. It won't. Your marriage will sustain your love. The commitment carries the relationship when feelings don't.

It's not super tough to feel close to God on Easter. It's not hard to draw near to him in the valleys either — when things fall apart, we reach for something bigger than ourselves pretty instinctively. What about the long, slow, ordinary time in between? What happens to our friendship with God there, in that place where we spend most of our lives?

Over the next several weeks we're going to spend time with real people in the Bible — the ones who argued with God and doubted and wandered and came back. People who, from the struggle, doubt, and wandering, learned something about prayer that can really help us too.

The series is called Drawing Near: Learning to Pray from the Stories of Scripture. This isn't a crash course in technique or a guilt trip about your quiet time. It's an invitation to something bigger — a vision of what a rich, honest, alive relationship with God could actually look like. As a preaching team, one phrase kept coming up as we prayed about this season: we want to become a people of prayer. Not people who pray. People so connected to God that prayer is just how we move through the world. Inhaling and exhaling.

Today we're gonna start with Abraham.

Abraham was chosen by God — not because he had things figured out. He maybe took God's covenant, God's promise of making him a great nation, into his own hands by sleeping with his concubine. And still, God decided to call him a friend. In the story we're looking at today, out of Genesis 18, we find Abraham doing something that might surprise us: he pushes back on what God says he's gonna do. He questions him. He wrestles with something he doesn't understand about who God is.

And God doesn't shut it down. He leans in.

This story will show us that prayer is what happens when we get honest about who we think God is — and the gap between that and who he actually is. And we'll get to see that that is where faith grows.

We're gonna take a look at this story from Genesis 18 starting in verse 9. We'll go through verse 33. Genesis is the first book of the Bible — you can find this story on page XX in the orange Bibles under the chairs. I'm gonna summarize a lot of it but feel free to read through it on your own or take a look back at it sometime this week.

Let's pray.

## GOD DRAWS NEAR FIRST

If you grew up in church, you know Abraham as one of the heroes of the faith. What sometimes gets forgotten is how messy he actually was — he lied to protect himself, he got impatient with God's promises and tried to make them happen on his own terms. He's less hero, more very-human human trying to figure out how to trust a God he's still getting to know.

In Genesis 18, Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. Three randos show up. Abraham runs out to meet them, invites them in, gets them some water, encourages them to put up their feet and makes them food. Classic Middle Eastern hospitality.

While they're eating, maybe making small talk, Abraham is standing nearby under a tree. Then one of them is like: "Where's your wife Sarah?"

Abraham never mentioned a wife. And ok, he did run into his tent and ask Sarah to help him prepare a meal, so maybe they assumed he had a wife. But he definitely didn't tell them her name.

Before Abraham can even make sense of that, one of them says this in verse 10: "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son." This is a reminder of God's covenant promise to Abraham, made back in chapter 14. And now it has a time stamp.

Abraham's 100 years old. Sarah's 90. They've been waiting for a kid their whole lives — a promise God made decades ago that still hasn't happened. And now one of these guys who they've just met and should know nothing about their lives is saying it'll happen next year.

Sarah is listening from inside the tent. And she laughs. The text says she laughed to herself. Quietly. A private, internal, maybe even bitter laugh, thinking: after all this time? Now?

Then the stranger — now identified as the Lord — turns and asks: "Why did Sarah laugh?"

He heard a laugh that made no sound, from inside a tent, from a woman he couldn't see.

This kind of thing happens more often than we might realize — not the supernatural version necessarily, but the experience of someone seeing something in us that we thought was invisible. I'll walk into a conversation thinking I'm fine, thinking I have it together — and somehow the person across from me will name the thing I didn't even know was there. It might be a therapist or a close friend, someone who's known you long enough to read the silences. They see what I thought I was hiding. They hear the laugh I thought was silent.

Where does that come from? It can't just be human intuition. That's the God who hears silent laughter through tent walls, still showing up in the middle of ordinary life.

This is where prayer starts — not with us reaching for God, but with the recognition that he was already here. These visitors came to them. God's already closer than we thought. He's already more aware of what's going on inside us than we could've imagined.

Abraham wasn't unique. God approaches all of us this way — he's always the one who initiates. Which means prayer isn't us trying to get God's attention. It's us learning to pay attention to a God who is already speaking. That's actually what the practice on your card is for — but we'll get to that.

In this moment, Sarah's not seeking God. She's not praying. She's not even in the conversation — she's in the tent doing what she does every day. And God heard her anyway. He was already in her ordinary moment even though she hadn't invited him into it.

That's actually the pattern. Not the burning bush, not the audible voice — those happen, we can read about them in the Bible. But they're the exception, not the rule. Most of the time God is present and speaking in regular life, and the question is whether we're paying attention.

The word "hear" in the New Testament doesn't usually refer to an audible voice. It more often means something closer to pay heed. To notice. To pay attention. There's an old saying that John White, who wrote Daring to Draw Near, grew up with in the north of England — "there's none so deaf as them as won't hear."

I can't speak for everyone's experience with this. There are real seasons of silence — where you're searching and not finding, waiting and not hearing — and I don't want to gloss over that. Those times are real and can be painful. But for me, a lot of what I called God's silence turned out to be my own distracting noise. I was moving too fast. Filling every quiet moment with something. Missing the quiet, persistent whisper that was already there.

Where in your ordinary life — your commute, your morning, a conversation you almost rushed past — might God already be present and speaking? Not where you've been looking for him. Where you haven't thought to look.

*(pause)*

Next, in verse 16, the men get up to leave, they look toward Sodom, and God says: "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?"

God doesn't have to tell Abraham anything. He's God. He can do whatever he wants, he can just go. But he pauses and basically says: this guy is my friend. Friends don't keep things from each other.

Jesus says something similar to his disciples in John 15:15: "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you."

If God calls you friend, two things are true. First, he will share his thoughts and plans with you. And second, he will actually be interested in your perspective on those plans. God invites us to deliberate with him on things that really matter.

That changes what prayer is. Prayer isn't just about bringing God a list of your needs and hopes, as real and valid as those are. It's about being drawn into his concerns. His heart. What he's paying attention to. And then bringing ourselves — our questions, our perspective, our honest reactions — into that conversation.

If we were to go back and read Genesis up to this point, we see Abraham's track record. He lied about Sarah being his wife — not once, but twice — to protect himself. He and Sarah got so impatient waiting for God's promise of a son that they took matters into their own hands. This isn't a guy with an impressive spiritual resume.

And yet… God stops outside his tent and says: shall I hide from my friend what I'm about to do?

That's grace. God looked at Abraham — messy, impatient, sometimes faithless Abraham — and decided: this guy, he's my friend.

The friendship God offers us isn't contingent on our track record either. It's not because of what we've done or how messed up, put together, or non-existent our prayer life is. It's because God looked at each of us and made the same call he made with Abraham.

And some of us might be thinking: okay, but God chose Abraham. That was Abraham. How do I know that's true for me?

We can sometimes think this kind of friendship — the kind where God shows up uninvited, where he lets us in on what he's doing, where he stays in the hard conversation — that's for people like Abraham. People who are further along. People who have their spiritual life more together than we do.

What Jesus said in John 15:15 — the I no longer call you servants, I call you friends thing — he said that to a room full of people who were about to abandon him. One of them had already agreed to hand him over to the people who would kill him. Jesus looked at that room full of ordinary humans and said: you are my friends. Right there, in that moment, fully knowing what was coming.

God initiates friendship with people who don't deserve it, can't earn it, and will sometimes spectacularly fail to honor it.

Which means the question isn't really am I chosen. The question is whether we're willing to receive what's already being offered.

In Abraham's story, he got visits. Moments. God showing up at the tent, sharing something, and then leaving — when the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left.

Jesus's death and resurrection — the Super Bowl that is Easter Sunday — means God doesn't leave anymore. The resurrection is when the friendship God always wanted with us became permanent. And making it even more permanent, even more accessible, he sent his Holy Spirit to be with us, inside us, all the time. Every boring Wednesday. Every silent morning. Every time we thought we were alone, out of hearing range, in the tent.

Abraham had a friend who showed up. We have a friend who never leaves.

Let's sit with a question for a minute. Maybe write it down, take it with you this week: when you think about talking to God — what do you actually believe about whether he wants to hear from you?

Not the answer you think you're supposed to give. Not the churchy answer. What do you actually feel, in your gut, when you imagine bringing your real life — your mess, your doubts, your ordinary boring week — to God?

A.W. Tozer once said that what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

For a lot of us, if we're honest, that picture looks something like this: a God who is constantly disappointed in us. A God who has bigger things to consider. A God who shows up in the dramatic moments but isn't really interested in the lame ones. If that's how we imagine God — even somewhere in the back of our minds — it's going to shape everything about how we pray. Or whether we pray at all.

God interacts with Abraham really specifically here. He knows his wife's name. He hears her quiet laugh from inside a tent. He considers Abraham close enough to be let in on what he's about to do.

This isn't a distant God waiting to be impressed. This is a God who is already paying closer attention to our lives than we are.

GOD WELCOMES THE WRESTLE

God just told Abraham what he's about to do. He's gonna destroy Sodom.

This is devastating news for Abraham because this isn't some distant city he's read about. He's been there. He knows the king — he met him back in Genesis 14. And his nephew Lot, his family, they live there. So when God says Sodom, that's personal.

The other men turn and start walking toward Sodom. And verse 22 says Abraham remained standing before the Lord. He doesn't move. He just stays there.

And then he does something that is either incredibly brave or slightly crazy — he steps forward and starts pushing back on God.

Verse 23: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?"

While this might sound like Abraham is making a polite request, what he's actually doing is questioning God's character. He's saying: this doesn't seem like you. This doesn't seem right. How could the Judge of all the earth not do what's right?

And God's response? "If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom, I will spare the whole place."

So Abraham goes again. What if there are only forty-five?

God says yes. What if there are forty? Yes. Thirty? Yes. Twenty? Yes.

And then Abraham says: "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more."

He knows he's pushing it. He can feel the audacity of what he's doing. And he asks: "What if only ten can be found there?" And God says: "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."

Many of us have been taught that this kind of prayer is somehow not okay. That we should add "if it's your will" to everything.

I've done this. I've prayed those safe, arm's-length prayers where I technically talked to God and also didn't actually say what was honest. Where the prayer was more about checking a box than having an actual conversation.

But the season that broke that open for me looked nothing like prayer is supposed to look. I was a new mom, dealing with postpartum depression, driving to work in tears every morning because we couldn't afford for me to stay home — which is what I thought I wanted, what I thought God owed me after we'd had a kid. I was furious. Not just sad — furious. At the circumstances, at myself, at God. Because I had prayed for things to look different, and they didn't, and it felt like his fault.

I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot of our daycare, engine running, knowing I had to leave. And I didn't pray beautiful prayers in that season. I said things to God I wouldn't repeat up here. And honestly — for a long time I wasn't sure he was listening. Or if he was, whether he cared.

And slowly, over time, not all at once, not with a thunderclap — something shifted. Through people I trust, through moments I didn't go looking for, through a persistent gentle presence that kept showing up while I was still mid-wrestle.

What I found is that God wasn't put off by my resistance. He didn't need me to have it together before he'd show up. He stayed in the conversation even when I was barely holding up my end of it.

Abraham doesn't come to this moment with certainty. He comes with questions. And he stays. That's the invitation.

Also, look at how Abraham holds himself in this moment. He says I am nothing but dust and ashes — and then he keeps going. That's not false humility. He genuinely knows his place. He's in awe of who he's standing in front of. And that's what gives him the freedom to be bold. He's not demanding anything. He's not throwing a tantrum. He's a friend, bringing something honest to a friend, from a posture of respect.

Boldness and humility at the same time. That's a beautiful picture of prayer.

If you're in a place where something about God doesn't make sense — something you've read in Scripture, something that happened in your life, something you thought you knew about him that doesn't seem to hold up — you don't have to pretend. You don't have to perform a faith you don't currently feel. You don't have to dress it up in careful religious language before you bring it to him.

You can say: God, I don't understand this about you. This doesn't look like what I thought you were like. How could you be like that?

That's not lack of faith. That's vulnerable, honest, raw faith.

God's not afraid of your questions. He's not fragile. He's not going to be thrown off by your confusion or your anger or your I don't understand this about you.

He stayed in the conversation with Abraham all the way down to ten. He'll stay in it with you too.

## WE GET SOMETHING BETTER THAN WE WANT

The chapter ends like this in verse 33: "When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home."

That's it. God leaves, Abraham goes home, and the next chapter opens with the destruction of Sodom.

Lot and his family barely escape. The city is gone.

Which means if you're measuring this story by outcomes, Abraham lost. He bargained. He pushed. He brought his most honest, vulnerable, bold prayer to God — and the thing he was afraid of happened anyway.

If you came here today hoping that honest, vulnerable prayer is a playbook to get you what you want — that's not it. God's not a vending machine. Prayer isn't a way of twisting God's arm until he gives you the outcome you were hoping for.

So what is it? Look at what actually happened in this conversation. Abraham walked into it with a picture of God that didn't quite fit what he was hearing. A God who would sweep away the righteous with the wicked — that didn't sound like the God he thought he knew. So he brought that gap, that confusion, that honest question, right to the source.

And God stayed. He was engaged. God let Abraham push all the way down to ten.

In that conversation — in the wrestling, in the back and forth, in the boldness and the I am nothing but dust and ashes but I'm going to ask anyway — Abraham's picture of God grew. It became more honest, more alive.

He walked away from that conversation knowing something about God he didn't know before.

Abraham didn't get what he asked for. He got something better. Not the outcome — something underneath the outcome. A bigger, truer, more alive picture of who God is. And a self that had been changed by the encounter — more honest, more bold, more anchored in the real God rather than the comfortable version.

What we want is usually the outcome. What God is after is us. Not a fixed version of us — a more honest one. One that knows him better than before. That's not a consolation prize. That's the whole thing. And in my experience, slowly and not all at once, it's what we get too.

There's a 16th century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, who wrote about the interior life of prayer. He said the deepest things in our relationship with God happen beneath the surface — in ways we can't feel or measure in the moment.

Ronald Rolheiser picks up that idea with a simple image: think about the difference between a daughter who visits her mother once a week versus the one who lives with her, day in and day out. The weekly visits might have more memorable conversations, more emotionally charged moments. But the deeper knowing — the being truly known — that happens in the long ordinary hours. In the same room, not saying much. Just present.

For me, I didn't get out of that hard season all at once. There was no "ah-ha" moment, no beautiful holy experience I can point to and say — that's when it changed.

What I can tell you is that slowly, over time, something shifted. The white-knuckle grip I had on how I thought things were supposed to look — it loosened. Not because I decided to let go. I'm not sure I'm capable of that on my own. But somewhere in the middle of all that frustration and fear and tear-soaked drives, a quiet work was happening underneath the surface that I wasn't even aware of.

I came out the other side with something I didn't go in with: a kind of peaceful acceptance of my life as it actually was. Not the life I'd prayed for. The one I actually had.

I didn't do that. There's no version of that story where I produced that in myself. Something — someone — was working in me even when I couldn't feel it. Even when I was too angry to invite him in.

Showing up matters even when nothing seems to be happening. When we're bored. When we fall asleep — and by the way, if you're a parent, think about how you feel watching your kid sleep. That's rest in the presence of someone safe. That's not failure, that's beautiful.

Transformation from proximity to God is real. And it's rarely dramatic. It's more like the way a long marriage changes you — not in any single conversation, but in the accumulation of ten thousand ordinary moments of choosing to show up, to stay, to keep the relationship alive even when it feels dead.

That's what Abraham found on the other side of his wrestle with God. It wasn't the outcome he wanted. What Abraham got was a bigger, truer, more alive picture of who God is. And a self that had been changed by the encounter — more honest, more bold, more anchored in the real God rather than the comfortable version.

The destruction of Sodom is hard. If you're sitting there thinking but God, how could you — that's a great question.

And I don't have a simple answer for you today. This is one of those passages that scholars have wrestled with for a long time. We don't have as clear a picture as we might think of why Sodom was destroyed — the text is vague, and the Bible's own commentary on it points more toward injustice and indifference to the vulnerable than anything else. What we know is God considered it serious. And Abraham considered it serious enough to push back on.

The Bible has a whole category for this kind of prayer — for bringing our how could you moments directly to God. It's called lament. It's all over the Psalms. Raw, unfiltered, sometimes angry conversations with God that didn't get edited out of Scripture.

Sitting with an unresolved question about God, without walking away from him — that's actually what mature faith looks like.

Before you leave, I want to give you something to take with you — not just an idea, but an actual practice. Because intention without structure usually just stays intention.

So we made a card. Three prompts, maybe five minutes, any time of day. A small, daily, honest act of drawing near to a God who is already drawing near to you.

**Notice** — where did God show up today, even faintly?

**Name** — what's the honest thing you haven't said yet?

**Rest** — one minute. Just present. That's enough.

Every week we'll add a strip on the back with that week's story and one question to carry into your week. This week's question is: *What's one thing about God you don't fully understand — and haven't said out loud yet?*

Let's try it together right now, before you go.

*(pause — move through all three slowly)*

Notice. Where did you sense God this past week — even faintly?

*(15 seconds)*

Name. What's the honest thing you haven't said yet?

*(15 seconds)*

Rest. Just present. That's enough.

*(30–45 seconds of silence)*

Now we're going to transition into ministry time…