The Story of Lot: The Danger of Worldliness and the Duty of Prayer

Welcome Summit Church at a bunch of different locations and campuses in the Triangle from Alamance County Campus to our North Durham Campus and Chapel Hill Campus and Blue Ridge Campus and everywhere in between coming from our Capitol Hills Campus. How much we love them. I will tell you our church is not the same without you all.

We miss you when you were gone, which now feels like about 18 months that we haven't been able to see you. But here we go. I want to begin off this weekend with a little quiz. OK, a little quiz.

It'll make more sense a little later. Here it is. OK, I'm going to get you to vote. The question is, which Avenger series is the best? OK, you have the options A WandaVision.

You have B Falcon and the Winter Soldier or you have C Loki. You can vote. You vote by uplifted hand. And if you are very passionate about your answer, then you can do Spirit Fingers and that will let me know.

If you were at home, you can just write it in the comments. OK, so if you think that WandaVision is the best of the Avenger series, would you raise your hand? All right. That's A. If you think it is the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you can raise your hand. Anybody brave enough for that one? Or if you think it is Loki, you can raise your hand.

OK, all right. The correct answer was A WandaVision. Which team here's number two has brought the most honor to the team? The triangle. Is it A Duke? Is it B UNC?

Or is it three North Carolina State University? All right. If it's A, would you raise your hand right now?

Try not to yell. If it is B UNC, raise your hand. All right. If it is C, all UNC students never following instructions right there. Just like I said, if it's C North Carolina State University, if you would raise your hand.

And I know you can't help but doing this right there. So that's OK. Why do I feel like there were wildly different reactions at some of our campuses just now? On the Blue Ridge campus, I felt like it was one way, Chapel Hill would have been another. For me, you're like, which one was your hand up on? You all know I cannot vote.

I love this church too much, and I love my job too much to get a third of the church mad at me. Some of you will try to read a subliminal message from my choice of footwear, but I promise you that is purely coincidental. I asked our team if they could make these shoes appear as different colors at different campuses. Carolina Blue on screen at the Chapel Hill campus, Deep Blue at our downtown Durham campus, and Bright Red at the Blue Ridge campus.

They said, Deep Blue maybe, but no chance of making these look bright red on camera. Question number three. You are on a road trip and you have to stop for a meal. You choose A, Wendy's, B, Hardee's, or C, Panera. If your vote is Wendy's, raise your hand. If your vote is B, Hardee's, raise your hand.

You have to choose one. If it's C, Panera, you can raise your hand. The correct answer was D, Waffle House. Judges, we'll give half credit for B, Hardee's.

The Frisco burger is a vastly underrated sandwich. The Nicolas Cage of burgers, I call it. Here's the next one. Who is the real Spider-Man? Is it A, Tobey Maguire? Is it B, Andrew Garfield? Or is it C, Tom Holland? If you think it's A, Tobey Maguire, put your hand up. If you think it is B, Andrew Garfield, you put your hand up. If you think it is C, Tom Holland, now put your hand up.

The correct answer is A, he is the only real actor out of all of them. Now, some of you are like, I didn't know there's a right and wrong answers to these questions. There always is in my book, just so you know. Some of you are like, I cannot believe that there wasn't a Nicolas Cage question out of these.

That's a great point, so here it is. Who is the greatest actor of all time? Is it A, Nicolas Cage? Is it B, Nic Cage?

Or is it C, Cage, Nicolas? Well, we know all of the above, D. We know all of the above, D. We had 71 students that made a first time decision for Christ, first time decision for Christ this year at camp. And that's not just by the way hands raised or prayers prayed, but that is a decision they took initiative with to talk to a leader about.

And we have had several more since then decisions. Some of our students, for example, on the football team at one of our local high schools got burdened for one of the guys on their team and started to pray for him. And just a few days ago, we're able to lead him to faith in Christ.

We're doing something amazing among our students and we're super excited about it. And I think the passage that we're going to look at today has as much to say to us, the church, regarding our responsibility to them as it does their response toward God. And so because God is doing so much, I wanted us to spend some time there to go to a place that many of them have already been.

Okay? Plus this passage addresses a focus that myself and some of our leaders have really sensed the Holy Spirit calling us to this fall, and that is prayer. Because we are beginning to regather in person after lockdown, we have said the fall is going to be a little bit like a relaunch. And we've sensed that the Holy Spirit is calling us as we relaunch our church, so to speak. He is calling us to lay in prayer at the foundation. Prayer has always been a building block. It's always been important at the Summit Church, but we want to lay it in at the foundation this time.

One of the distinguishing features of who we are. And so that's what we're doing, and I'm going to spend a couple of weeks on this subject. Speaking of, many of you know that I have a new book out called Just Ask. I actually showed it to you a couple of weeks ago. It's a practical book that I wrote for you, Summit Church, on how to pray and how to overcome obstacles to prayer.

These are available now at your campuses. I want to remind you, if you're new around here, that nothing we ever sell here profits me, or any other pastor. All the money from the sale of these items goes back into the ministries of the church. I always say God did not call me here to make money off of you.

No, I wanted to write this book first and foremost as a service to you and as your pastor, since I know this is one of the areas that many Christians are most unhappy with. And when I talk to people and they're like, what I need to grow in? I ask them that. That's one of the things you always mention is how to pray. And so it just coincides with the fall, and so those are available if it would be a help to you.

Okay? At any rate, this passage, Genesis 19, touches on our responsibility as a church to pray for our students, for each other, for our community, and I believe it is what the Holy Spirit is saying to our church right now. So Genesis 19, this is the story of Abraham and his young nephew Lot, Abraham's nephew Lot. Let me just catch you up on the story as we get into Genesis 19, okay? Let me catch you up on the story as we come into Genesis 19. Abraham, Abraham and his nephew Lot are having a problem, and that problem is they're trying to coexist in an area that's just too small, and their shepherds were fighting. There was just not enough space for them to all live comfortably together. They were fighting over the best watering holes and the best pasture lands, kind of like if you and your sibling tried to share a room when you were growing up. How many of you did that growing up or are doing that now?

All right? Your little brother was always leaving his stuff on your side of the room. He was always in the bathroom when you needed it.

He never flushed. He left his dirty socks on your side of the closet. It was like that, and it was clear that Abraham and Lot needed some space. So Abraham takes Lot up high on this mountain overlook, and he says, Lot, God has promised to give our family all of this land.

So you go one direction and I'll go the other. He let Lot choose first. Now, all the land was good, but the land to the east of where they were standing was incredible. Genesis 13 10 says, in fact, that it looked like the Garden of Eden itself. The pastures were green and fertile.

There were lots of places of water and shade. The problem was that it stretched out toward two notorious cities, cities notorious for their wickedness, Sodom and Gomorrah. Listen to how the writer of Genesis describes these cities. He says, and the people of this area were extremely wicked and constantly sinned against the Lord.

Right? So these were bad news, but that was not very concerning to Lot. Lot just liked the vibe, in fact, of these cities. There was just so much money and culture and activity that he wanted to be a part of. So Lot chose the land toward Sodom. And verse 12, Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom.

Turned out to be a bad choice for Lot. In fact, shortly after he got there, raiders from Sodom came and stole all of his stuff and took him and his family captive. Abraham then mounts, chapter 14, a Kevin Costner style vigilante posse to go and rescue him. And you might think that after that, Lot would have learned his lesson, but Lot just loves Sodom. So he moved back there pitching his tents even closer this time to Sodom. In fact, soon enough, Lot moved into the city itself so that when chapter 19 opens, we find that Lot was, chapter 19, verse one, sitting in the gate way of the city. Sitting in the gateway is an Old Testament way of saying that Lot had become a leader. He'd become a leader because that's where the leaders of the city sat. So as chapter 19 opens, Lot is not only living near Sodom, he is a leader in Sodom.

He is popular there. Look at verse seven, speaking to the men of Sodom, he says, I beg you, my brothers. He calls the men of Sodom his brothers.

They are his people now. Sodom is where he feels most at home. You know, you have to wonder what compromises Lot made in order to be accepted in Sodom, right? I mean, to be fair, it seems that Lot never went along with the worst wickedness inside him. In fact, it seems like he kept most of his major morals intact.

But it's also clear that he made a bunch of small compromises. And if you read chapter 19 in more detail, you'll see a lot of them. Maybe most tragically, he kept his mouth completely shut about his identity as God's servant and his faith in God. Chapter 18 opens telling us that Sodom and Gomorrah, their wickedness had gotten so bad that God decided to destroy these cities with fire. But as a favor to Abraham, God sent a couple of angels down to warn Abraham before he did it. As the angels are telling Abraham about the coming judgment, Abraham immediately begins to think about Lot. Abraham, what he's about to do, and Abraham doesn't want to see the city destroyed, so that triggers this conversation.

Chapter 18, verse 23. Abraham stepped forward and said, God, are you really going to sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are 50 righteous people in the city?

You could not possibly do such a thing. To kill the righteous with the wicked, will not the judge of all the earth do what is just? And God says, yes, Abraham, if you could find 50 righteous, then I would spare the entire city.

Abraham thinks about it for a second. He says, well, suppose the 50 righteous lack five. Just lack five. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five? Now, Abraham seems to be a pretty shrewd negotiator, for what it's worth.

God, surely we're not going to kill this deal over five people, right? So God says, okay, Abraham, if you can find 45, I will spare the city. Abraham says, how about 30? And God says, I'll spare it for the sake of 30. Verse 31, Abraham says, how about 20? Abraham's starting to sound like an auctioneer. Give me 30, give me 20.

He's just moving through it. Verse 32, how about 10? How about 10? And God answered, I would not destroy it on account of 10. But Abraham could not find even 10 righteous in the city. You've got Lot and his wife and his two daughters, that would be four, but they don't seem to have persuaded anybody else there inside of them to turn away from their wickedness, so the negotiation ends. Nevertheless, in response to Abraham's prayer for Lot, God sends angels to warn them Lot.

The whole negotiation had been about preserving Lot. So in verse 15, the angels show up at Lot's house, just two of them now, God's gone back to heaven, assumably, show up in Lot's house inside him and they say, Lot, hurry, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished. Yet even then, yet even then it says, after hearing about this coming judgment that is just moments away, verse 16 says that Lot hesitated. Even when he's heard that everybody is about to be destroyed by fire from heaven, he is so in love with the world that he can't leave it. These are his people.

These are his brothers. Finally, verse 16 says that one of the angels seized his hand and the hands of his wife and his two daughters and rushed them to safety outside the city because the Lord was merciful. The angels warned Lot and his family not to look back on the city as God rained down fire upon it, but Lot's wife, we don't know her name, but Lot's wife was just so enraptured with the city, so in love with the city that she could not keep her eyes off of it. And when she turned to look back, verse 26, God turned her immediately into a pillar of salt. Salt here serves as a symbol. Salt dries things out, right? What happens when you eat too much salt?

Makes you thirsty. Turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt is a symbol of what's happened to her and Lot and their family spiritually. They may still technically be believers, but they're so dried out spiritually, they have no life for joy left in them at all. And so in the end, Lot is saved by the skin of his teeth, but he loses everything, including his wife. What does this have to do with us? Let me give you four life-saving lessons that you can learn from Lot.

Four life-saving lessons to learn from Lot. Number one, there is a progression of sin in your life. There is a progression of sin in your life. Most Christians do not intend to become Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot certainly didn't.

He never intended to make it his home, and he certainly did not intend to be included in its judgment. But many Christians, like Lot, are so attracted to the world that they make their home as close to it as possible. And if they're honest, they end up identifying as much with the world as they do with the people of God.

So be honest. Whom do you think of most instinctively as my brothers? Who do you feel the closest kinship with? It's kind of an easy question to answer. Who do you hang out with most easily?

Who do you spend most of your time with? The lesson from Lot's life is that you have to make up your mind from the beginning. Who do you really want to be? Where do you really want to belong?

Does the world go there 100%? If it's with God, go with him 100%. I've said this many times, the most miserable person in the world is the half-committed Christian, who is just enough in the world to be miserable in God, and just enough into God that they're miserable in the world.

That's what you're seeing with Lot. Your heart is filled with salt, so to speak, and it's not in a good way. You feel dry and lifeless everywhere.

Charles Spurgeon used to say, if you're gonna be saved, be saved 100%. Because the worst thing to do is to try to straddle two opinions. You can't keep trying to walk along with your feet in both worlds. It's kind of like when you're standing on a dock. You're standing on a dock with one foot in a boat, and the boat starts to drift away. You ever been in that moment? There's this split-second decision where you gotta make up your mind. Am I in the boat, or am I on the dock?

Because you're kind of standing there in both, and you gotta go one way or the other, because if you try to stand there and straddle in both, you're gonna end up tearing yourself apart, or quote the old Chinese proverb, people split his pants. You've gotta choose one or the other. 1 John 2.15 makes it clear, love not the world. Don't love the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any person loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. In other words, it's not just about your behavior, it's about your heart.

Don't just evaluate your behavior, congratulating yourself that you're not doing all the bad things that other Sodom people do. The question is, what do you love? Where are you pitching your tents, metaphorically speaking? And what does that say about what your heart really desires? The worst place to be is to try to be in both.

Are you trying to get as close to the world as you can without becoming it? Just like with Lot, there is a progression of sin in your life that starts with loving the world and ends up with total destruction. And you likely never see it coming. Be honest with yourself, has this happened to you? High school, middle school students, I know some of you were at camp, but I'll just ask you again, at first, you were alarmed at the things that unsaved friends around you said, and it made you feel uncomfortable. Or it made you feel dirty when you saw sin depicted in movies or you heard it in music, but eventually you got okay with it.

Then you started hanging out with people who were doing those things, then you started to do those things. Or at first, you were more concerned, you were genuinely concerned with your friends who did not know Jesus. You prayed for them. It was weird trying to tell them that they needed to be saved.

I mean, who says that when they're in high school? And so you just stop bringing it up, and now you don't even pray for them. Instead of being somebody who warns them about coming judgment on Sodom or the world and calls them to escape it, you've made your home there with them, and your life now is virtually indistinguishable from theirs. They never feel the slightest bit of discomfort around you because you never warned them about it.

So explain to them in any meaningful way that they need to be saved. Years ago, I read the disturbing account of how they kill wolves out on the tundras of Siberia. The people that live up there, if there's a wolf that is harassing their settlement or killing a lot of the seals up there, it's one of the things that they raise and grow. They'll take a knife, a very sharp two-edged knife, and they will dip it in seal's blood.

It just immediately freezes. And so they do it again and again until it's several layers thick, so it's become, just think of it like a blood popsicle stick. And then they bury that knife so that it's just the handle that's under the ground and just the two-edged blade that's sticking up but coated now with all this blood. And so the wolf comes along and he gets the scent of seal's blood. Well, he just loves that smell, and so he goes over to it and he begins to lick this blade of a knife. Of course, not realizing it's a blade of a knife, just thinking it's seal's blood. And as he begins to lick this blood off of this knife blade, it numbs his tongue so that when the blade begins to be exposed, his tongue now numb from all that cold is just cutting itself into ribbons. And he doesn't realize that the blood now all over the ground is not the seal's blood, it's his blood. And so he lacerates his tongue to the point that he bleeds out to death and he goes away and he dies.

That's how they kill a wolf there. That's the nature there of how Satan destroys us. He gives us just a little taste of it and you think this is not that bad and it gradually just numbs your soul. Gradually just numbs your soul until you get to a point where you cannot feel or sense it any longer. You can't feel it or sense it any longer. And so it's where you choose to make your home.

It's where you choose to pitch your tents. That is what you become like. We shouldn't have any non-Christian friends. I mean, we're saying we should separate ourselves from the world.

I'm not even sure how that's possible in my job or how it's possible at my school. I mean, I'm surrounded by unbelievers. And didn't we just finish a series from the book of Daniel about thriving in Babylon? Isn't that the same thing as saying thriving in Sodom?

Yes, that is a very astute question. God calls us to be in the world but not to make our home there. There's a difference in living in the world and making your home there.

You say, well, how can I be around Sodom but not commit the mistake of life? It's got to do with whom you choose to make your close friends, whom you choose to make your community. The ones that you make your inner circle are where you pitch your tents. You see, Scripture says that whom you hang around with is who you become like. Proverbs 13, 20, he who walks with wise men will be wise but a companion of fools will be destroyed. A friend of mine says it this way, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Because if you hang out with wise people, you become wise but if you're a companion of fools, then you become like them and you will be destroyed. He says you will become the average of your five closest friends. Take your five closest friends right now, average them together and that's what you will be in the next few years. You show me your friends and I'll show you your future. You say, but pastor, are you saying we shouldn't have any non-Christian friends?

No, I'm not saying that. But there's a difference between core community and those that you're trying to reach. In fact, I've heard it explained like this. You should think of your friendship in three circles. The first circle right around you is what we call your circle of intimacy and that's going to be like people that speak into your life, people you're very close to, a best friend.

If you're dating, it's the person you're dating, it's the person that you're married to, you're going to marry. That's that circle of intimacy. Then you've got a layer of friends around that and we'll call that your circle of influence. Those are people that you're doing life with them.

These would be people in your small group, people that you work with, people you hang out with. You're influencing them and they're influencing you. Then you've got a circle around that that we call the circle of concern. And those are people that you're trying to reach out to and you're trying to share the gospel with. The point of the circle of concern is to reach out to them and to warn them.

You're actively, you're reaching out to them. That inner circle, what it's saying, that inner circle, that's where your Jesus loving friend are. In fact, they make up all of the people in that middle, that central circle and then the ones on the layer outside of those, the majority of those end up being believers because that's who you become like. That's who influences you. The point of that outer circle is that you are building bridges with them and sharing Christ with them. The point of that circle of concern, that's where those who are not believers, that's where you have them. You're trying to warn them.

You're trying to influence them. At the summit, we encourage you to have a one. Say, who's your one? One person outside the faith that you're building a relationship with and praying for.

That's that circle. You've got to decide. The point is you've got to decide who you want to be. You've got to decide where you want to go and then you have to pitch your tents there. You have to surround yourself with that community. Where do you want to belong and is your choice of community going to lead you there?

How long are you going to go back and forth between two worlds? Just enough in the world is the half-committed Christian. Just enough in the world that they're miserable in God and just enough in the God that they're miserable in the world. Their soul is salty. Their soul is salty, dry, famished, miserable.

You've got to choose the side of the road. And Jesus, by the way, does not look very kindly favorably on the half-committed either. He says in Revelation, I wish you were cold or hot.

You're lukewarm, tepid, makes me want to spit you out of my mouth. Listen, he loves you, but he wants you to be one way or the other. A lot of our students think that they get their high school and college years just to play around with the world and put God off until later.

That's not true. Where you pitch your tents in Sodom, when you do that, it gets harder and harder to leave. You've got to choose who you want to belong to. You've got to decide whether Jesus is worthy of the offering of your life or not and then go one way or the other. And if you decide that he is worthy, then the most practical application of that will be who you choose to make your closest friends or who you choose to date.

Because your home is going to be the most shaping influence on your kids and you. So if you're a Christian, make up your mind that you're only going to date committed Christians. Right? There's a progression of sin and it never starts in Sodom. It starts by moving along that journey. Number two, number two, Lot teaches us that the coming judgment is real. Coming judgment is real for years. For years, God had warned Sodom and Gomorrah about the coming judgment, but everybody brushed it off as unreal. But God makes no empty promises. One day it came. God tells us that he is slow in executing judgment in order to give people space to repent.

But do not confuse his slowness with his absence or his sluggishness on fulfilling a promise. Hebrews 9 27 says it is appointed unto man wants to die. And after that, the judgment. It is appointed. There's a day that has been chosen for each of us to die. And that day is coming.

It happens sometimes way premature based on our calendar. One of the defining moments in my spiritual journey happened when I was about 15. And one of the kids that I'd grown up with, whose name was Jamie, he was really popular. He was hilarious. He was smart.

He had everything going for him. He had no thought at all about God. We were at a Christian school and he just didn't. He was not somebody walking with Jesus. And right after he got his license, he was 16.

I was 15. He got in a car wreck. And it was his life just tragically taken away.

And I remember standing there at his funeral, looking at this casket. God was at work in my life and thinking he is now in eternity. He is in eternity. And the only thing that matters right now is where he stood with God.

It was appointed to him to die. And after that, the judgment. Did you know Jesus? I don't know.

But the point was, at that point, that's all that matters. Every person that you know is gonna spend eternity in one of two places. Every person you know is going to spend eternity in one of two places. Did you know? Did you know that Jesus talked more about hell than heaven?

Have you ever thought about what that must be like if it's true? If Jesus was being straight with us, you think, well, Jesus didn't talk about that. He did. Go back and read it. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century American theologian, he said this regarding Jesus' teaching on hell.

Listen to this. Imagine, he says, if you take what he says seriously, imagine yourself cast into a fiery oven, glowing with heat. Imagine that your body was going to lie there for about a quarter of an hour, full of fire, inside and out, feeling every fiber of it the whole time. What horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace, when you entered such a furnace? How long would that quarter of an hour seem to drag on?

If it was measured by an hourglass, how slowly would the time seem to go? And after you had endured it for one minute, how overbearing would it be for you to think that you had another 14 minutes left? But what if you knew that you must lie there enduring that torment in its fullness for 24 hours? How much greater even if you knew you must endure it for a whole year? How much greater still if you knew you must endure it for a thousand years? Wouldn't your heart sink if you knew you must bear it forever and ever? That there would be no end, that after millions and millions of ages, your torment would be no nearer to an end than before, and that you should never ever be rescued?

But your torment in hell will be immeasurably greater than this. If Jesus was telling the truth, how utterly inexpressible and inconceivable how your heart and soul would sink in such a case. The question you ask yourself if you believe this is how do you call somebody your friend if you believe this, but you've never warned them? What would it be to you at the judgment day if Jesus never told them?

I mean, can you imagine them looking at you and saying, what, you knew this, and you never even spoke up? I've told you before about a girl that I was sharing Christ with, or a young lady I was sharing Christ with. She'd never heard the gospel I'm walking through, and we were back and forth, she was asking all these questions, and she'd been educated at some Ivy League school, and she says, you actually believe this? I don't act like you believe it. I said, what do you mean? I'm trying to explain it to you. I'm trying to persuade you of it. She said, no, no, you act like you're trying to win a debate.

You act like there's a scorecard, and you're trying to get more points than on your side than I have on my side. She said, if I believe what you say that you believe, that there is a real heaven and a real hell, and only Jesus makes the difference, she said, I don't know how I'd make it through the day. She says, I know I would go to every person that I know, and I would plead with them, but they had to pay attention, and you're just talking about it as if it's something you're trying to win, a debate you're trying to finish. What will your friends say to you on the day of judgment?

They say, how could you call me friend and just stay silent and not speak? Lot's life shows us that coming judgment is real, and it's coming for those that are around us, and the greatest hypocrisy of all time is saying that you believe in heaven and hell, and not doing everything you can to keep those you care about from going there. Number three, Lot's life shows you that you cannot drift into godliness. You can't drift into godliness.

Again, Lot did not make a deliberate choice to make Sodom his home. He just drifted there. Listen, I need you to understand this. Living for Jesus in this world is always going to feel to you like an uphill battle, because you are going against the current of the entire world and everything in the world is going to pull you in the other direction, which means if you're not actively fighting, it means you're being pulled the wrong way. There's no such thing as drifting into the right areas. Have you ever been at the beach and gotten pulled way down shore by the current? You didn't even know what was happening. You're just out riding your raft or body surfing and jumping in the waves, and you look up and somehow you're now 15 houses down the coast.

You don't even know where your family is anymore. That's like the pull of our world. If you're not actively fighting, you're drifting away. To go with Jesus means you have to swim against the stream. Jesus said it this way in the Gospel of Matthew. He says the highway to hell is broad. Its gate is wide for the many who choose that way, but the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult and only a few ever find it. It's broad. It's easy.

It's the default. If you're not actively choosing the difficult way, you're just being pulled along the broad way. So again, I'll say it, you cannot drift into godliness. You'll never drift into spiritual maturity or into leadership. That takes daily focused effort to become what no one else is becoming. You've got to do what nobody else is doing.

You've got to be different. In student camp, I mentioned a couple of ways I see some of our teenagers that are tempted to drift. Not intending to get beside them, but just drifting. Places where they're drifting when they ought to be fighting.

I would say these apply just as much to the rest of us, especially us as parents. Drifting. Drifting is not actively seeking to know God and His word. When I look around at our students, it's not that you reject the Bible. You just give all your time to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram reels, Netflix, binging, video games, and comparatively none to spiritual growth.

You don't do a daily quiet time. You're not in the leadership cohorts we offer or take advantage of the discipleship and mission opportunities we have. You spend all your time on Snapchat staring at life in Sodom. As long as He is that way, and so many just drift along that way. Parents, your family's not gonna drift into godliness.

You know that, right? The current of the world will always take them quickly away from God. Listen, I'm always disturbed by the stats on high school students who grew up in churches like ours and then leave it behind.

And I know you're disturbed by that, too. And I know these are complex questions. We never affixed blame. God created only two humans directly and they both walked away. If you've had a kid walk away, I'm not saying it's your fault, but I will say that for many Christian teenagers, the transition out of church is not that difficult because the families they grew up in were not that much different from the world. Sure, you were regular in church, but you basically lived by the same values. You spent your money like the world spends their money.

You allocated your time like the world allocates their time. The only major difference in your life is that you added church attendance on the weekend. So when the kid goes off to college, it's pretty easy to discard that habit. They felt more at home in Sodom anyway.

That was where they built their entire community. Listen, parents, you know that church is a really difficult habit to maintain if God is not a passion for you. I mean, you gotta get up on Sunday morning and you gotta get dressed and you gotta find a parking space and sit with a bunch of strangers. They'll go ahead and tell you church is a terrible habit. If God is not a passion for you, that is an easy habit to drop.

If a child doesn't see Jesus as the center and the passion of your life, church is altogether easy to just drop out of when you get to college and beyond. Again, your family, parents, your family will not drift into godliness. To become what nobody else in our world is becoming, you gotta do what nobody's doing. I told our students at camp, we need a generation committed to go against the flow.

I challenged them to be that group that goes against the current together, to get on a text stream with their friends and say let's be the group of friends that's different. Let's check on each other about how our quiet times are. Let's pray for each other. Let's hold each other accountable on things like sexual purity or sharing Christ with our friends.

Let's pray for our friends. Hold each other accountable on reading the Bible. Let's prioritize being a small group and serving in student ministry and do it even when it's lazier and easier to stay at home. Students, why not do that? Parents, why not make the same commitment in how we lead our families?

That Jesus will come first and that he will be the living, breathing center of all that we do. See, that's one way I see Christian teenagers drifting when they oughta be fighting. Here's the other, drifting. Drifting would be not warning your friends about coming judgment. Not only like Lot, are you becoming more and more indistinguishable from Sodom. You never warn the people in your Sodom about the judgment you believe or you say you believe is coming.

You're just too embarrassed or you don't wanna be seen as too extreme or a radical. Hey, newsflash, okay? The message is radical. Judgment is coming. What's going on with Sodom and Gomorrah is not altogether different from what God says the end of time is like.

And only those he says found in Christ can be saved will be saved. How could you say you believe that and not tell somebody you say you care about? How could you call them a friend and not have your heart broken and say what is it, how it's gonna pray for you? And I can't force it on you, I know that. But I don't want you showing up on judgment day and I've never even spoken to you to warn you. How much do you have to hate somebody not to even warn them? God puts you in their lives to be a warning, to be his messenger to them, to tell them about that coming judgment and that day of salvation and Jesus that's offered to them.

How could we let an unwillingness to be seen as different or let an unwillingness to be seen as a little weird keep us from warning them? Which leads me to the last lesson from Lot here, number four, becoming Abraham to the Lot's in your life. I mentioned that when it was time for Lot to flee Sodom, when judgment was just moments away, Lot hesitated. And when he did, verse 16 tells us, the angel seized his hand and the hands of his wife and his two daughters and pulled them to safety outside the city because it says, verse 16, the Lord was merciful.

Here's a question. Why did God have the angels do this for Lot? I mean, by this point, Lot seems to be as bad as everybody else in Sodom. In fact, you could argue that he's worse because he should have known better. He'd been warned continuously about the wickedness of Sodom, but he ignored it. So in a way, he's more guilty than everybody else, right? Not less. Why do the angels grab his hands and drag him and his family and only them to safety?

Why? Verse 29 tells you the answer. But God had listened to Abraham's request and kept Lot safe, removing him from the disaster that engulfed the cities on the plain.

Friends, listen, this is a life changer. There was one reason, one, that God saved Lot and his family. Abraham had prayed for them. Lot did not deserve rescue, but somewhere back there, there was a man who loved him and prayed for him, and for his sake, Abraham's sake, God saved Lot. He sent his angels to literally pull him out of Sodom to safety. Now, eventually, Lot would come to understand this, and Lot would turn in repentance toward God. That's what the book of Jude tells us in the New Testament. But the point is, it began because God sent angels in response to Abraham's prayer and literally pulled him out. When they begin to pull him out, he hesitates. And when he hesitates, the angels pull even harder.

Why? Because Abraham prayed. You know, if Abraham hadn't prayed, it seems that Lot would have perished along with everybody else in Sodom.

Could we get a clearer picture of the power of prayer? You know, I know that I'm here. I'm here before you today because I had a mom who prayed for me. I've told you before, another one of the defining moments in my life was a car wreck that took place when I was, I actually was just in the process of becoming a Christian, my friends and I had taken an all-weekend ski trip and we were coming back, trying to make it back to church on Sunday morning. And it was about 5 a.m. And you say, why were you driving at 5 a.m.? That's a great question, we should not have been.

So, all right, I'll just go ahead and acknowledge that. But I was in the backseat of this Mustang asleep because my friend was driving and everybody in the car was asleep, including the guy that was driving, and that became the problem. And coming down Highway 421, and next thing I, I woke up and remember feeling like, man, it's really cold in here, as my friend had the window down. And for some reason, just switched my head from one side of the car to the other.

Had no reason, just felt more comfortable. And just in a few moments, I was 5'16 when that happened. At 5'18, my friend going 75 miles an hour, hit a mattress on the side of the road.

I have no idea how there was a mattress on the side of the road. Hit a mattress on the side of the road, skidded for about 200 yards, and then went off in a ravine and the car rolled, and it crushed on the side that my head had been on, just a few moments before. I remember as we got out of this car and we get up there and looking up there, I just was overwhelmed standing on this thing and how close I'd come to dying. The next morning I got to church and told my mom, I was like, hey, we were in this terrible wreck last night, and she said, what time that happened? And I said, well, it happened at 5'18.

I remember that because I'd woken up and look at the clock just a couple of moments before it happened. She said, you know, she says, it's really interesting. She said, I wasn't quite sure where you were.

I trusted you, but I didn't know where you were. She said, at five o'clock this morning, she said, I just woke up and I had this burden to pray for you. And she said, I just got up and she said, I prayed for about 30 minutes. Prayed for about 30 minutes, then I went back to sleep.

I share that for two reasons. Number one, if God ever wakes you up at like five in the morning with a burden to pray for me, I'd really appreciate it if you would do it, okay? The number two is to tell you that God uses people who pray to pull people out of safety. You see, that was part of a longer prayer journey that my mom had been on for two or three years, praying that God would open my eyes. Because she'd said everything she knew how to say to me.

They'd done everything they knew how to do. And at the end of the day, she said, I can't pull my son out of this attraction he has to the world. She prayed me into the kingdom of God. I had a mother who prayed for me and pulled me out of Sodom. And one of the books that Veronica, my wife and I, used to pray for our kids, it's called Praying for Your Children. The author tells a story of a lady in his church, a lady in his church who was named Sarah, who got a phone call one evening, listen to this. The voice in the other end of the line when she answered the phone said, Mom, the good news is I've become a Christian. Sarah, the mother, said, and what's the bad news?

The story that followed was one no parent ever hopes to hear. Sarah's son had been caught smuggling drugs in the trunk of his car across straight state lines. There was little doubt he would be found guilty and it looked like Robert, the son, would go to prison for years. Sarah had done her best to raise her son to believe in Jesus. Every Sunday of his young life found them at church, but the lure of wealth and the world pulled him into a place Sarah never imagined. Still, she placed Robert in God's hands day by day and loved him through her prayers. After he repented, after he'd been caught and sentenced, Sarah still grieved the mistakes he'd made, but she was grateful to see a sincere new faith in him and thought that would be better even if he has to go to prison.

When the case against Robert was dismissed on a technicality, nobody was more surprised than Sarah and no one was more pleased as her son continued steadfastly in following Jesus. It was four decades later, this pastor writes, that I've met Robert. Sarah was celebrating her 81st birthday and her children and grandchildren had gathered around her to reminisce. The air was full of laughter as one by one they shared their stories. When Robert stood to speak, he was doing his best to hold it together. He talked with profound tenderness about his mom, speaking of her like somebody who literally saved his life. You might've noticed from their shared glances that there was a special understanding between mom and son like two people who had returned from a long and difficult journey with a story known only to each other.

Robert wrapped up his eulogy of his mother with the words of a well-known poem. You may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, richer than I, you can never be because I had a mother who prayed for me. That's our role and I've got even more good news for you. You and I can pray for others with even more power than Abraham did. Remember Abraham's prayer? We ran through it, it was like a negotiation, Lord, spare for 50, 45, how about 30, 20? Finally Abraham gets his hand, he just gives up because he can't even find 10 righteous.

Here's the good news. You and I need look no farther than one. You and I can pray for lost friends in the name of one righteous. There is one righteous and he is so supremely righteous, so altogether perfect and lovely that God says we can pray for the lost of the lost prodigal and the lost of the lost sinner and for his sake, that one righteous man's sake. Jesus, God hears our prayers and delivers our friends or our siblings or our parents or whomever we have set our love on.

I can come say that one righteous that is so supremely righteous is enough to move God to say I'll spare him for his sake if you pray. Friend, Jesus did this for us. He prayed for us, right?

He came after us. Now it's our turn to do that for our friends. So here's the question, are you ready? Is this church ready to become an Abraham to the lots in your life? Each of you have lots and God says through your prayers you pull them out of that city.

So I'm gonna give you a three-part invitation. As I do, in fact, let me go ahead and ask our prayer counselors, I'm gonna ask our pastoral teams to come up here and get into place because I have a few questions I'm gonna present to you. Okay, three, for some of you, you need to get saved.

You've never trusted in Christ, you've never received Jesus. Let's just say get saved or get serious. You've been playing with the world and you gotta decide right now, this weekend, I'm gonna follow Jesus, that's who I'm gonna be about. I'm gonna invite you in just a minute when I stand you up, I'm gonna invite you to step out of whatever campus you're in and come up here and take the hand of one of these prayer team members.

If you're at home, you can text the word ready to 33933 and somebody will be back in touch with you. You just come up here and take one of these and say I'm ready to follow Jesus. I'm gonna invite secondly some groups of you, especially our high school students, middle school students, if you're with friends, why don't you come and just covenant, just get around this altar, or maybe turn around at your seat and turn that into an altar and covenant that we're going to, we're gonna be that group that's different and we're gonna swim upstream and we're going to be the role that God has told us to be in the Sodom that he's placed us in.

That's the second invitation. Here's the third invitation, is for all of us to think about the lot in your life that you need to be in Abraham too. We're gonna end this weekend just by turning this, every campus, into a tabernacle of prayer.

What lot in your life do you need to be in Abraham too? I'm gonna invite you to come up here and pray for them, or yes, you can stay in your seat and you can pray, but I will tell you it sometimes means more to physically move and adopt a posture that just declares your dependence on God. We've got husbands and wives that need to come up here and pray for children. You got groups of people that need to come and pray for a friend. We got wives that need to pray for husbands, husbands that need to pray for wives, people that need to pray for neighbors. I'm not as concerned as to where you pray, but I'm saying let's turn this into an altar of prayer. And so I'm gonna invite you, okay, when I stand up, I'm gonna invite you to do one of those three things.

Everybody in here should be responding in some way. If you need to come to Christ and you stand up, just come and take the hand of one of these. If you need somebody to pray with you, just come and pray with one of these. Otherwise, let's pray there at your seat, or even better, come up around the altar and let's call these names of lot out to God, okay?

I'm gonna ask all of our campuses, why don't you go ahead and stand? And right now, let's just begin to move. Right now, begin to move and let's just come up and fill these altars and let's begin to pray, all right? Just turn this place into a tabernacle of prayer as you're moving, as you're moving.

Okay, I got one more. Some of you, God's dealing with you about actually going into ministry. You're like, look, a message like this, this is what happened to me.

I got gripped when I was in high school or in college and I said, I wanna give my whole life to this. I want you to tell one of your campus pastors. Listen, as people are coming to pray, and I invite more of you, as you do that, let me just say this to all of us, we wanna be a praying church. In just a minute, your campus pastors are gonna tell you about more opportunities. We got a gathering every Monday at every campus and I wanna invite you to be a part of it. I'm here at the one at Capitol Hills campus pretty regularly they'll think about that and many other opportunities. But right now, let's just take a few moments and let's turn this into a place of prayer and then our worship teams will come and they'll lead us. You pray for the next several moments for the lots that are in your life.