FBC Morning Light – January 10, 2023

Faith Baptist Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:16

Well, good Tuesday morning. How's your week going so far? Did you get off to a good start yesterday? How are you doing with those

00:22

New Year's resolutions or goals that were established a little over a week ago?

00:28

I trust you're holding on to those things. Don't let them slip. Review them. Go back and look at that list that you created for the

00:35

New Year. Well, anyway, today we're reading in Genesis chapter 19 and 20,

00:41

Matthew 7 and the 7th Psalm, and I want to focus in on Genesis 19.

00:48

It's a very grievous story to read, this account of the angelic visitors who come to Lot in Sodom, and they are going to warn him about getting out of Sodom.

01:01

But before they get to that point, they appear as men. These angels would not be seen as anything other than men, just typical, ordinary, human men.

01:17

And so Lot sees them in the city square, and he invites them to come to his home, offers hospitality to them, and I know he does so because he's concerned about their welfare.

01:29

He tells them, look, it's not a good thing for you to stay here in the city square. That's just not going to be good for you, and it's not going to go well, so let's go to my house.

01:38

So they go to his house, and the reprobates of Sodom, they come to Lot's house, and they want to rape these men.

01:50

So remember, of course, the destruction is coming on Sodom and Gomorrah because of the rampant homosexual behavior, and the men of the city surround

02:02

Lot's home, and they want to take these visitors and abuse them, sexually abuse them.

02:11

And then what happens next is what really is very difficult for us to comprehend.

02:19

I mean, we can talk about the Middle Eastern culture and how you invite someone into your home, it's your responsibility to do everything you can to protect them and to care for them and so on.

02:33

But what Lot does, I don't care how you look at it, it's over the top. Instead of allowing the men of the city to have the visitors, the male visitors,

02:46

Lot says to them in verse 8, I have two daughters who have not known a man.

02:52

Please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish, only don't do anything to these men.

03:01

Now, honestly, I have a hard time comprehending this. I just, I can't imagine a father offering such a thing with his own daughters.

03:15

It baffles you, doesn't it? But here's the thing I want us to catch from this.

03:21

We are more prone and susceptible to being influenced by the culture and the society around us than we know.

03:32

It can have a very subtle influence upon us and distort, so distort, our way of thinking and our view, our worldview, if you will, that we would be willing to go along with things that if we were spiritually sane and really understood the

03:55

Scriptures and what God wants, what pleases God, we would just never tolerate it.

04:00

We just never tolerate it. I suspect that there are ways that even in our

04:06

Western American culture, we've been influenced by our culture to think of things as being acceptable that really would not be acceptable if we weren't in this culture.

04:20

So I think this is what's happened in Lot's case, and one of the reasons

04:25

I think that is, well, let's keep a few things in mind, all right? Number one, Lot did not have the written revelation that we have.

04:33

He didn't have the full scope of God's revealed will like we do.

04:40

The second thing we need to keep in mind is that Peter tells us and speaks of Lot as being just, as being righteous, and vexing his soul over the iniquity of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he vexed every day over what he saw, and yet here he is, offering such a thing, such a horrible, horrible thing.

05:04

How do you put those two things together? The way I put it together is that he himself abhorred the homosexuality of the city around him and the culture around him, but he had so influenced by the thinking of the culture that he thought it would be a better thing to offer his daughters to these perverts than anything else, and so there's some distorted thinking that has affected

05:34

Lot. When you get to the end of the chapter, you see how that culture, growing up in that culture, has affected

05:43

Lot's daughters. They were able to, they successfully flee, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, and Lot and his daughters, his wife has been turned to a pillar of salt because she would rather have gone back to Sodom, but anyway,

05:58

Lot and his daughters are out in the mountains in survival mode, and his daughters come to the conclusion that, you know what, we're never going to get married.

06:07

We're not going to get married, we're never going to have any kids, and you know, the family line is going to die out, so we got to do something about this, and they come up with a plan, and the plan is incest.

06:17

They commit incest with their father. Where in the world did they get an idea that that was an acceptable thing to do?

06:24

They grew up in Sodom. They were influenced by the culture around them, and so even as parents, you know, we want to do what we can to train up our children in the nurture and admonition of the

06:37

Lord. We have to be alert to what's going on in the culture, the ideas, the philosophies, the ideologies of the culture, and we need to be sharp.

06:49

We need to be astute, and we can't shelter our kids forever from the culture, but we can do our best to educate them about the culture and its destructive practices, and its contrast to what we know to be true of the revealed will of God.

07:15

And may God give us wisdom to do that, so that we can do everything in our power and by power of the

07:24

Holy Spirit and through the revealed will of God, we can do all that we can to keep ourselves and our families free from the distorted, destructive philosophies and ideas of the culture in which we are immersed.

07:43

May God give us wisdom to do just that. All right, let's pray. So Father in Heaven, we do thank you this morning for this chapter and its passage and the warnings that are there for us, and we pray that we would pray for wisdom in this world.

07:59

Give us that, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well listen, have a good rest of your