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Welcome back to Drive Time Devotions and chapter 19, day 19 of our look together
to the book of Genesis. This is the Sodom and Gomorrah chapter. This is one of
the darkest corners of Genesis.

Let me just list for you some of the things that happened in Genesis 19. Lies,
homosexuality, prostitution, lost reputations, broken families, fear, death,
destruction, drunkenness, incest, all in one chapter of the Bible. We usually
call this chapter the story of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah.

Actually it is the story of one man, a man by the name of Lot. You can sum up
Genesis 19 with these two words, Lot, lost. The whole chapter is the story of a
man who lost it all because of sin in his life.

The difference between the words Lot and lost is one letter, the letter S, and
that's significant. You can make that S stand for sin or you can make it stand
for Sodom, but when Lot placed those things in the middle of his life, he lost
it all. When Abraham, Lot's uncle, saw the Canaanites in the land, he became
afraid and he tried to find God's promise elsewhere.

When Lot saw the Canaanites in the land, he moved in with them into their city
and he lost. As I talk about faith, I love to emphasize the positive. What do
you get when you have faith?

Today, honestly, we're going to look at the negative side. What do you lose when
you refuse faith, when you live a life of sin, when you move into Sodom? Now,
you and I, we're not going to lose exactly the things that Lot lost in the same
way that he lost them, but his life is an example.

It is a warning. Here is a man who saw Sodom as a place of great gain, but all
he found there was loss. What did Lot lose?

I just want to go through a list with you today, reading through these verses of
what he lost. First of all, Lot lost his conscience. In Genesis 19 verse 1, let
me read down to verse 8, where we see how he lost his conscience.

The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening and Lot was sitting in the
gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and he bowed with
his face down to the ground. "My lords," he said, "please turn aside to your
servant's house.

You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go your way early in the
morning. " "No," they answered, "we will spend our night in the square. " But he
insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house.

He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. Before
they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom, both
young and old, surrounded the house. They called to Lot, "Where are the men who
have come to you tonight?

Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them. " Lot went outside to
meet them and he shut the door behind him and he said, "No, my friends, do not
do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a
man.

Let me bring them out to you. You can do what you like to them, but don't do
anything to these men, for they've come under the protection of my roof. " Now
it's sad for me to say that this is Lot's high point in the chapter and it's a
very low point in his life.

These men have come into his house and somehow he recognizes that they are
angels of God. He still has his spiritual sensitivities in some way. And he
protects them.

He doesn't want them to stay in the public square. He knew what would happen to
them there. He protects them by bringing them into his house.

The men still come and knock on his door and want to bring the men out so that
they can have sex with these men. And Lot offers his daughters instead. To
protect the men, to protect the angels, he offers his daughters.

Now he should have wanted to honor and protect his guests. He had the right
idea, but he had a lost conscience in offering the prostitution of his own
daughters. We see here a man with a lost conscience.

He has some idea of what's right. He has no idea of how to carry that out. I
mean, a lot of people like that.

That's what living in Sodom will do to you. Involvement in constant sin causes
your conscience to be dulled. You can't trust yourself anymore to distinguish
between right and wrong.

That's what sin does. Lot lost his conscience. He lost his friends in verse 9.

Here's what happens. "Get out of our way," they replied. And they said, "This
fellow came here as an alien.

Now he wants to play the judge. We'll treat him worse than them. " They kept
bringing pressure on Lot, and they moved forward to break down the door.

But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the
door. In Abraham and his uncle, Lot had had a true friend, but he chose to
separate himself from that friendship and to go live in Sodom, and he had come
to depend on those friendships in Sodom. And it seemed to be working out well.

In verse 1, we see that Lot is sitting in the gate, and that in a city was a
place of high honor. He seemed to have made good friends. Things seemed to be
going well for him in Sodom.

But in verse 9, we learn some things about those friendships. Some friendships
are built on mutual respect and love, and those friendships last through thick
and thin and disagreement. There are other friendships that are built on mutual
sin, and they last only so long as you're participating together in that sin.

And the moment Lot said, "I will not participate," he lost. He lost. That makes
me ask, that makes you ask, "What kind of friends do I have?

What am I building my friendships on? " He lost his friends. Lot lost his
conscience.

He lost his friends. He lost his reputation. In verses 12 to 14, the two men,
the angels, said to Lot, "Do you have anyone else here, sons-in-law, sons or
daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you?

Get them out of here, because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry of
the Lord against its people is so great that He has sent us to destroy it. " So
Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who were pledged to marry his
daughters, and he said, "Hurry and get out of this place, because the Lord is
about to destroy the city.

" But his sons-in-law thought he was joking. That phrase, thought he was joking,
that's the saddest phrase in this chapter to me. It's a commentary on what
living in Sodom does to your witness.

If you allow yourself as a believer in Christ to live in Sodom, to get caught up
in a place of sin, where there's no apparent difference between your life and
the life of someone who is not a believer, then you lose your reputation. And
when you talk about the things of God, people think you're just joking. Why did
they think He was just joking?

When sin becomes a joking matter, God's judgment is also a joking matter. When
your lifestyle, when your heart, who you are, doesn't proclaim the seriousness
of sin, you can't expect people to take you seriously when you speak of the
consequences of sin. Lot lost his reputation.

Lot lost his city in verses 24 and 25. "Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur
on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus He overthrew those
cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities, and also
the vegetation of the land.

" Back in Genesis chapter 13, we're in 19 now. Back in 13, the cities and the
plain had appeared so, so beautiful to Lot. They held so much promise, so much
wealth, and now all of that is gone.

Signs of that catastrophe remain even until today. Those beautiful plains are
now called the Dead Sea region. Sodom, this place of sin, can often look like it
has more to offer than the things of God.

But Lot's life is a reminder that it's a trick. You can't evaluate life by the
gleaming cities and the green plains. You have to look forward to the end
result, and the end result of God is the gleaming cities and the green plains.

Lot lost his city, everything in his life, everything he owned. Lot also lost
his wife in verses 26 to 29. In verse 26, as they're fleeing the city, most of
us know this story, Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt.

I don't know how she became a pillar of salt. I don't know if it was something
to do with how God destroyed the city, but I know that she, instead of fleeing
the city, wanted to be back in the city, and because of that, she got caught up
in the catastrophe. What an effect Sodom had on Lot's family.

His sons-in-law are now dead. His daughters are to be shamed. His wife is a
pillar of salt.

Lot's wife serves as an example all her own, especially when you compare her
with Abraham. Listen to what happens in verses 27 to 29. Early in the morning,
Abraham got up, and he returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord,
and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain,
and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.

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 lived.
Now, it's interesting. Both Lot's wife and Abraham looked at Sodom.

What's the difference? Lot's wife looked at Sodom with a long, caressing look.
That's the idea of the word that's used there when the Bible says she looked
back.

It's a long, caressing look. She wanted to be there. Abraham looked with a
concerned and distressed look.

Only someone who has looked upon the smoking ruins of his prayer before God can
understand Abraham's feeling at this point. He knew that not even ten righteous
people had been found in the city. Abraham and Lot's wife.

The look toward the city of Lot's wife turned her to salt. The look toward the
city of Abraham turned him to tears. Lot's wife looked upon sin from the
perspective of her involvement, and she got caught up in the calamity.

Abraham looked upon sin from the perspective of God's judgment, and he got
caught up in compassion. As a believer in Jesus Christ, you can't ignore sin.
It's all around you.

But are you going to look at it from the perspective of my involvement in it, or
are you going to look at it from the perspective of God's judgment of it? Are
you going to look at it from the perspective of getting caught up in it or
compassion towards those who could be rescued from it? There is a world of
difference in the two ways of looking at sin in Lot's wife and Abraham.

In Lot's wife, we get in Luke 17, 32, the verses, "Remember Lot's wife," an
example of sin. But in Abraham, we get in these verses we just read, "God
remembered Abraham," an encouragement of grace. Lot lost his wife, and then I
wish these verses weren't there.

It's been so terrible, and now Lot loses his future. In verses 30 and then
reading down through 37, Lot and his two daughters left Zohar and settled in the
mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zohar. He and his two daughters lived in
a cave.

One day the older daughter said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there's
no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. So let's
get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line
through our father. " So both of Lot's daughters became pregnant by their
father.

The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab. He is the father of the
Moabites. The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ami.

He is the father of the Ammonites of today. Lot escaped Sodom. How?

Only by the grace of God. But Sodom had so stained his life that he lost his
future. He ends up in drunkenness.

Drunkenness became for Lot a way to forget, and incest became for Lot's
daughters a way they thought they could be remembered. They were both wrong.
It's a sad end.

How do we remember Lot? We remember him here at the end as a man of drunkenness
and shame. The Moabites and the Ammonites become the greatest enemies of Israel
in the land, with descendants who became a shame also.

They were all wrong. They all saw it wrong because they lived in Sodom and they
could not see the plan of God. Sin is always a losing proposition, always.

I'm tempted to sin. You're tempted to sin. We're all tempted to sin.

We get caught up in sin. And then Satan tells us, "Oh, it's a good thing. It's
giving you good things in your life.

It's always about Sodom. It's always a losing proposition. No matter how green
the plains of Sodom seem, active involvement or silent association with sin
always results in one thing.

You lose. You lose. Present loss and eternal loss.

Here's the good news. How do we escape Sodom? The same way that Lot did, by the
grace of God.

If you feel caught up in a sin, God will take you by the hand and God will lead
you out. He probably won't be alone. There'll be other believers that are going
to help you.

You can't get out alone. That's why you're in a church. God's put you together
with other believers.

If you're not in a church, get in a church. God's not meant for you to get out
alone. We do this in fellowship with each other.

You see by Lot's example someone who depended on himself, but you also see by
his example the fact that we don't have to depend on ourselves. You can depend
on Christ to do something new, something different in your life. Let's talk to
him.

Jesus, these are difficult verses. Just the sin in Lot's life, it saddens us.
But I pray for myself, I pray for each of us listening to this today, that
instead of focusing on his sin and thinking how much worse it is than our sin,
than my sin, that God today, you would give me the spiritual wisdom to see my
own sin, to see it for what it really is, me trusting in myself and not you.

But God, give me also the spiritual wisdom to see your grace. To see that you
can lead me out. See that I don't have to live there.

Help me to see, Jesus Christ, what it means that you've died on the cross. What
it means that you've given forgiveness. What it means that you have a new plan
for my life today.

And I pray that even through this negative example of Lot, you would lead me to
the positive, gracious power of the cross. I ask this, Jesus, in your name,
amen.