David:     The other day Karen, someone asked me this question, “Why did God pick the Jews as his chosen people? Why not the Germans or the Italians or the Irish?”

Karen:     What a great question! Did you have a satisfying answer?

David:     I believe so.

Karen:     Okay.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

Karen:     So back when God chose the Hebrews, were there Italians or Germans or Irish? Maybe we should have said, “Why didn’t he choose the Egyptians?”

David:     That probably would have been a better way for me to set up where we’re going. Anyway, my belief is that God did not choose a people as such. God chose an amazing person, an individual. And when you think back on the life of Abraham, you understand the great empathy the two had and how God saw this man as special.

But let’s review that some. This is going back into ancient scriptures. We’re in the very beginning part of Genesis. The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse. And all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. So, Abram left as the Lord had told him and Lot went with him.” Lot was his nephew. I was looking and just wondering, can you guess how old he was when he set out?

Karen:     I know he was old. I don’t know the exact age. How old was he?

David:     Okay, he was 75 years old.

Karen:     75 years when he set out.

David:     Yeah, now he’s leaving everything behind and going to a land he never been to before. But God has told him to do this. So, he is going to. It’s not an easy thing to do when you get older.

Karen:     Well, I’m 79. I think if I heard the Lord say to me, “Pick up and leave and go.” I probably say, “I think I’m hearing wrong.” It would be a little argument. Maybe a big argument.

David:     This is just the beginning. You would have said, “Are you sure you heard?” If it’s the wife, you’d say, “I think my husband has gone a little loony here.”

Karen:     If I were Abraham’s wife, I’m right.

David:     So, there on their way, now this is just the beginning of a man of faith. I would also say that the great pain that Abraham has is he has no offspring. He gets there, but he doesn’t have anyone to pass this on to. And he’s getting older all the time.

Karen:     And this promise has come to him. I mean, the classic way God tests faith, isn’t it? He doesn’t always answer.

David:     So, how do you like it if supposedly God says to us, we’re going to have a child? I’m 86 years 79.

Karen:     Well, I can see why Sarah laughed.

David:     You kind of excused her.

Karen:     What are you thinking?

David:     But God is still going to fulfill his promise. And then finally the child comes. Isaac, laughing boy. That’s kind of a way you can translate it. And it’s a wonderful time and he begins to grow older. He’s probably a young adolescent. I’m assuming he’s somewhere maybe 13, 14, 15, I don’t know.

Karen:     We don’t know for sure.

David:     And then God makes this request of Abraham. “Sometime later, God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham.’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about. Early the next morning, Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. And when he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. And he said to his servants, ‘Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.’

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac. And he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, ‘Father.’ ‘Yes, my son,’ Abraham replied. ‘The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’

And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, ‘Abraham, Abraham.’

‘Here I am,’ he replied. ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’

I can hardly read the passage.

Karen:     Yes. It’s an extraordinary story.

David:     It’s incredible, yeah. So, when you say, who was chosen by God in terms of all the people of the world? Well, it was Abraham and out of Abraham’s offspring came the Jewish nation. So, God didn’t say, “Okay, I think I’ll choose Israel.” But it was this incredible relationship he had with this man. It was almost like no other man in all of scripture.

Karen:     Some of us within religious fields trying to explain who he was. We would call Abraham a mystic, maybe. These people who have this unaccountable, unexplainable, very different relationship with God than many of the rest of us have. Because they had this capacity to hear and know God, which is an extraordinary capacity. It does not explain away his obedience to what he heard and knew. I think a lot of us have God encounters in our lives. We feeling pressed that we’re supposed to do something that…

David:     Never a verbal voice. Never something as extreme as…

Karen:     No, but we feel impressed that we’re supposed to go ahead and do something, but we don’t really know. We second guess ourselves and then if it feels unreasonable, we don’t follow through on it. So, this is an extraordinary example of a person out of church history, unadorned by all the literary. Abraham was a tall man, strength, you know, all this sort of stuff.

David:     Very simple narrative.

Karen:     It was a verbal narrative. It passed on verbally from generation to people to people to people. And so, it is simplistic in its telling, but powerful in its meaning. Maybe more powerful in its meaning because it’s simplistic in its telling.

David:     Well, I went back, and I read through the whole story of Abraham because of the question. And I want to pick up another one of the aspects of his life. This is another. He’s a man of faith in an incredible way.

“The Lord said to Abraham, the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sins so grievous, that I will go down and see what they have done. And if it’s as bad as the outcry that has reached me, if not, I will know.”

So now, you’ve had these visitors come to Abraham and he says, “I’m going to go on and look at Sodom and see if it’s bad. Because if it is, “I need to destroy it.”

And of course, Abraham knows that his nephew Lot is living there with his wife and family.

“The men turned away and went to Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached the Lord and said, ‘Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are 50 righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the 50 righteous people in it? 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?’ And the Lord said, ‘If I find 50 righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.’

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, what if the number of righteous is five less than 50? Will you destroy the whole city because of the 5 people?’ ‘If I find 45 there,’ he said, ‘I will not destroy it.’

Well, everybody knows this story.

Karen:     This is almost as funny, except its sort of one of those sad, funny stories. He’s bargaining with God.

David:     Yeah. He gets it down to 30, and he gets it down to 20. “Then the Lord says, ‘For the sake of 20, I will not destroy it.’

Then Abraham says, ‘May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just one more time. What if only 10 can be found?’”

He answered, “for the sake of 10, I will not destroy it.’ When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.”

So now, he has to say, “Okay, what is going to happen here?” He has great feeling for the city, obviously, because his brother’s son is living there. This is the last part of that chapter.

“Early the next morning, Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked down towards Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.”

Must have just cut him right to the heart.

“So, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.”

Well, the truth is, he did destroy the cities, but he did save Lot. God was very gracious in the whole thing. So, Abraham’s prayers were answered in a very real way. But I was reading that, and I thought to myself, “Golly.” You know, I look at the cities, the great cities of America, the great cities of the world, but I’m thinking at this point in time of our country itself, and I think they’re wonderful cities, but they’re also wicked cities in many ways. I don’t know how many righteous live in the greater Chicagoland area, or we do, but I think I don’t intercede on behalf of the cities here, and there’s a need to, because I feel the unease as far as the things that are going on in all of our cities. And when I say the things, I’m talking about shootings, random shootings. I’m talking about they’re not even murderers, Karen, well, they are, but they don’t even know who the people are.

Karen:     Random shootings or stabbings on the CTE, which is our public transport system on the platforms. There have been people costed and stabbed on them.

David:     And no one knows the answer to these things.

Karen:     So, the point of all of this is that David and Karen Mains need to be praying constantly in a dedicated fashion, not just in a sort of half-hearted kind of thing. Oops, forgot to pray for the cities. We need to pray for Chicago.

David:     I have a group that prays regularly for the country. We do it every week. We do it by phone. And it’s become very tender. There’s real interceding that is going on. This is a smaller target. I can’t use the same group because we all are from different cities. I’m from Chicagolan area. One of the couples from San Francisco, another one lives in Ohio, one in Michigan, and so on. We have our focus. But then I’m thinking in terms of, as I’ve prayed for the nation, I haven’t prayed for the cities, and I don’t want to impose that on the group. And I like to have a more focused group that I can meet with. So, part of where I am in my life, Karen, is I’m thinking, I need to find those people who have the same burden that I have. And probably that starts with you and say, let us begin to make this a target of our prayers. Because I think it’s not as though they can never be destroyed. Destruction is a possibility. And the whole direction of where the nation is going makes it a possibility.

Karen:     I agree with you, and I’m more than eager to enter into that prayer covenant with you. But I think one of the things we need to do as we talk about that prayer time is to pray for those churches of Chicagoland. At one time we worked with all of those pastors. You were a head of the ministerium actually, in the city of Chicago. So, our heart is very touched by our local large city. It’s a beautiful city. But it’s a city that has problems now because of the gun violence. We need to be praying for the churches, the people who are working in those communities. We need to hold this city up and ask that God will begin to move in a way that’s beyond our lifetime experience.

And as we’ve said, 79 and you’re 86. All of these decades, it would be wonderful to spend the last years of our lives in this kind of intercessory prayer and to invite other people who have a heart for Chicago or nearby city to pray with us. And then see God do a work in ways that goes beyond our comprehension and our imagining.

David:     I don’t know if people have picked this up or not, but we’re actually talking this podcast to ourselves. There will be people who will hear what we’re saying. They may be in other parts of the country and maybe the Lord will speak to their hearts the way He’s spoken to our hearts.

Karen:     Or if they have already a prayer group that exists for their cities and we’d love to hear about that.

David:     Yes, we would. There is a need somehow to say to the Lord, just like I did when I was saying, I need intercessors for the nation. Lord, show me who these people are. I don’t think I’m going to try to make a list and then go looking for them and ask them, but I’m going to be highly sensitized by His Spirit to say, that’s somebody who will pray with you, David, on a regular basis. Maybe by phone again, maybe in person.

Karen:     And I think we need to be cautious about not politicizing our prayers. Much of the evangelical churches even divided politically. You just read an article that did an analysis on that. So, prayer could be a way to join us back together again. We’re not going to pray against a certain group or for a certain group politically. We’re going to pray that God will be able to reach our cities, reach the churches, reach the communities, reach those who are needy, reach the wealthy in a way that is profound and beyond our imagining.

David:     I’m going to put it into a sentence. Okay?

Like Abraham of old, let us as God’s followers in this generation, be counted among those who actively intercede on behalf of our great but sinful cities. It’s not just the crime. There are more than enough problems as far as where the cities are. Whether it’s graft or whether it’s gambling or whether it’s immoral sexual things, you can name the sin and you’re going to find it.

I’ve become very good in our prayer group as far as not politicizing our prayers. It’s required honest talk on occasion to say, it upset me when you prayed the way you did, and people have said that to me. And we’ve avoided those areas now and we’re quite good at it. And they’re still division politically in terms of our group.

But praying for the city, it can become a matter of expressing your political feelings and you don’t want that to be the case. We want to say Lord, however you want to do it, would you spare this city because of the righteous who are in it? And they’re more righteous than we sometimes imagine.

Karen:     So, we’re going to be on the lookout, right? David and Karen Mains, first we’re going to start our prayer time. How often should we pray?

David:     I would say that we should set a specific time and we should try to do it two or three times.

Karen:     And we put it on our calendar so that we don’t keep moving it around. It’s there, it’s in concrete. And then I think that part of that prayer is, who else has a heart for this and help our paths to cross? And then we see what God does with that.

David:     I don’t mind praying for San Francisco. I don’t mind praying for Phoenix. I don’t mind praying for Houston or whatever. So, if people are not necessarily in the Chicagoland area, they can join and we say, God will give you an option, but let it spread from that place to our place as well. I think the Lord will show us who these people are.

Karen:     We’ll tell everyone what’s happening as we have other podcasts. We’ll let you know how we’re doing with this.

David:     It’s a subject that we have talked about now for the first time and we will continue to recycle as we feel the Lord would have us share.

Karen:      Sounds good.

Outro:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters. hosts@beforewego.show.

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