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Sermon Summary: Learning from Lot's Failures as a Father
Overview
This sermon analyzes Genesis 19:30-38, focusing on Lot's moral failures as a father and the lessons modern parents can learn from his negative example. The pastor presents Lot as a cautionary tale of how ordinary decisions can lead to extraordinary failures when difficult circumstances arise.
Main Points
1. A Good Father Prioritizes Obedience
* Lot failed to prioritize obedience to God's messengers
* He lingered in Sodom despite warnings of destruction
* He argued with angels instead of following their instructions
* Application: Fathers must model obedience before expecting it from children
* Children learn more from what is "caught" than what is "taught"
2. A Good Father Prioritizes Healthy Influences
* Lot raised his daughters in Sodom, a city known for wickedness
* When facing hardship, his daughters reverted to the perverse values they learned
* Modern parallel: Parents must be intentional about influences on children
* Warning against two extremes:
* Complete isolation from the world
* Passive acceptance of negative influences
* Application: Consider what you're training your children to view as "normal"
3. A Good Father Prioritizes Self-Control
* The incestuous situation only happened because Lot was blackout drunk
* Self-control is emphasized throughout scripture (references from Titus)
* Self-control is necessary both to prevent negative outcomes and to perform positive duties
* Application: "The most important part of being a good father is being a good man"
What To Do If You've Failed
* Be honest about your failure rather than defensive
* Recognize that even believers like Lot (called "righteous" in the New Testament) can fail
* Trust that God works even through our failures
* Example: Ruth the Moabitess (descended from Lot's incest) became part of Jesus's lineage
Conclusion
The pastor emphasizes that while none are perfect parents, with God's grace, we can improve each year so our children "have a better father than they had the year before" - the opposite of Lot's downward trajectory.
Transcript
All right, so we are back in the book of Genesis this morning. Genesis chapter 19.
Genesis is a book that has a lot of low points in it. It's hard to pick what's the lowest point. I mean, you could start in Genesis chapter 3 where you have the original fall. Adam and Eve rebel against the Lord. That's pretty low. Genesis chapter 6, things have gotten so bad that the Lord decides to wipe out humanity apart from Noah and his family. That's pretty low. But this section here, Genesis chapter 19, verses 30 to 38, is right up there. And then there's going to be a similar story actually again in chapter 38 of Genesis. If I was picking low points in the book of Genesis, these four points all stand out. What are we supposed to learn here? That's what we're going to think about today.
The Apostle Paul tells us that all of Scripture was written down for our instruction. And 2 Timothy 3 says that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable. It's useful. And sometimes it's hard to see what the use is. But I think there is actually a lot for us to learn here from the negative example of lot.
Genesis chapter 19 verses 30 to 38: Now lot went up out of zoar and lived in the hills with his two daughters for he was afraid to live in zoar he lived in a cave with his two daughters and the firstborn said to the younger our father is old and there is not a man on earth to come into us after the manner of all the earth come. Let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him so that we may preserve offspring from our father. So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. And he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him that we may preserve offspring from our father. So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. The firstborn bore a son and called his name Moab. He is the father of the Moabites to this day. The younger also bore a son and called his name Ben-Ami. He is the father of the Ammonites to this day.
Have you ever looked at your life and asked yourself, how did I get here? How did it come to this? I'm going to imagine that some short months after this point, Lot was asking that question. How did it come to this? Surely he should have been asking that question a long time before that. But this once prosperous and wealthy man who was aligned with the Lord and his servant Abraham has now become a cave dweller. He's living, hiding out in a cave with his two daughters and who decided to get him drunk and get pregnant by him. How did it come to this point for a lot?
Well, I think it goes without saying, hopefully none of us find ourselves in quite this kind of situation. I think it's easy. One of the dangers when we see a passage like this in scripture is just to go, wow, that's disgusting. Wow. That's horrible. And don't think any more about it. Don't think about what led lot here. Because what got Lot to this point, though his circumstances are extreme, he made a number of choices that were very ordinary choices that we've talked about over the past couple of months. He made a lot of normal choices that led him to the point where when the outside circumstances got extreme, he was in a very bad place. We're never going to be ready for an extreme circumstance if we aren't making good decisions in normal times.
So this sermon is structured in a way I don't normally do things. I'm going to hold Lot as basically the opposite of a good father. I think normally what we want to do is look for positive examples and think about what Paul calls the good, the true, the beautiful, the lovely, meditate on these things. But occasionally scripture holds up a really negative example for us. And it says, here's what not to do. And if you flip it around, you're actually going to have a good example. And so I'm going to look at law, and I think we see three priorities that a good father should have, a good parent in general, but I'm going to focus on father. Ephesians 6, 4 says that fathers are to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That's the responsibility of both parents, but the ultimate responsibility falls on the father. And so I'm going to structure it that way because that's what's here in the passage is lot the father and and I think it's a biblical emphasis. We're gonna look at three priorities of a good father and a good father would have all three of these priorities. Any one of these priorities would have saved lot from this fate if he would have had just one of them. But we're gonna look at three.
The first is a good father prioritizes his obedience and a good father prioritizes his obedience. This was not the case with lot. We saw that last week earlier in chapter 19 the angels have come to him they've rescued him from his house being crashed in and then they go through the night and the next morning they say okay come on it's time to go but verse 16 of chapter 19 tells us that he lingered. Lot lingers in the city of sodom that is awaiting destruction. He waits here. He does not want to leave. He doesn't have any sense of urgency. And as you get down into verse 18, after the angels literally grab his family by force and remove them from the city, then they say, run for the hills. Then law argues with the angels instead of obeying them and fleeing to the hills as a family law instead says, how about that city over there? It's a little one. It can't be as evil because there's not as many people in it. So can we just run to that city? And the angels say, okay, you can run to that city, but get there and don't look back. Of course, his wife famously does look back and she turns to a pillar of salt.
Lot does not prioritize his own obedience. And I think this is very sobering for fathers because this is a stereotype, but... Here we go. Typically, the role that a father plays or has been seen to play in the family is of the one who brings structure and order and discipline. And you I'll be honest, like even fathers who don't do that, I see them very often become angry fathers because they haven't instilled discipline. They haven't expected obedience. And as that chaos grows, their anger grows boiling along with it. It's very often what I've observed. But one of the and this is a particular danger in religious homes is you often see fathers who expect external conformity from their children to a set of religious rules or to a set of standards, but are not holding themselves to the same standard of obedience to the word of God. And Lot here is not expecting himself to be immediately obedient to the word of the Lord. And the question I would have is, how can we as fathers expect our children to obey us and to obey God if we aren't setting that pattern, if we aren't setting that example?
All good instruction begins with modeling. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches often because they're true, right? The kids in your house, the people around you are going to learn more by what is caught than by what is taught. And what is taught is still important. You need to be teaching the right things. You need to be verbalizing the right things. But if you are not modeling the right things, that's what's going to matter. The modeling is going to matter more than the words do in the long run.
So being a good father does not start with getting the kids in line. Being a good father starts with getting yourself in line and prioritizing obedience to God. So one question that would be worth meditating on is what is one place where you are holding out where you don't want to obey the Lord? And how can you grow in that obedience?
Secondly, a good father prioritizes healthy influences for his children. This is not what's happened for Lot, right? His daughters, when they encounter this hard situation, they are up here in the wilderness, no men around. Their immediate place where they revert to is the perversion that they've seen around them in Sodom. They immediately run to a godless solution. That there is no hope and we've got to figure this out for ourselves. And we're just going to accept the whatever goes mindset of those that we were raised around.
This is what we talked about back in chapter 13. This is one of the primary problems with Lot's move to Sodom. It's not what he was seeking to gain. There's nothing wrong with him seeking to move there for the material goods and material prosperity. But the problem was the culture that he entered into that he pursued was utterly godless. And that's where he was choosing to raise and nurture a family. And the problem with that is, is that no matter how righteous you may be yourself, if what is primarily shaping your children is not that, like you're the number one influence on your kids, but the other influences matter. The other influences matter a lot.
Where did Lot raise his daughters? He raised them in Sodom, a city noted for its wickedness. Interesting thought here, though, is like how different really is our society than Sodom for the kinds of wickedness that it's known for? I don't know if anybody else watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics. But like our society celebrates things that are not that much different than sodom and our children's mindsets are being shaped by that world by the media that is pushed towards them by what their peers are talking about or valuing by especially as they get into higher levels of education by even what schools promote as normal, as acceptable.
There's a danger here. There's a ditch on one side that says, well, I've got to hide my kids from the world. I've got to protect them from everything. We've got to go full Amish here. I grew up around a lot of people who thought that they could hide their kids from the world. And the problem with that is that the sin that ultimately sends you to hell is the sin that's already inside of you, right? Like there's, you can't actually hide your children from sin. That doesn't work. But, so that's one ditch. Like you can't hide your children from sin. The other ditch is to say, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. But the book of Proverbs is full of instruction about the importance of good company and good character.
First Corinthians 15, 33, the apostle Paul says, bad company corrupts good character or good morals, I think is an older translation there. Like who you are around shapes you. You read any kind of self-help advice. One of the first things they're going to tell you is hang out with people who are like what you want to be like. That's just a basic human truth. That the influences around us shape who we are.
I think of a man I knew growing up who he was kind of all over the place. Like there were times when he was using drugs and like totally walking away from anything rational or stable in terms of how he was living his life. And there were times when he was like, really involved in church and really doing well. And the difference would be what friends was he hanging out with.
So as we're thinking about this with our children, how do you think about the influences in your kid's life? How do you think about what kind of friends do they have? How do you think about what do you give them for entertainment options? Jonathan Haidt, he's a social psychologist at NYU. He's written a lot on this. He talks about how in the past 20 years there's been this great removal of freedom from our children in terms of how much freedom they have to actually live out in the world like I don't know if you heard about the story here a couple of months ago where a lady got arrested because her nine-year-old walked to the grocery store.
OK, so like that, that's the kind of like our society has become very suspicious of children having any physical freedom, anything where they might be possibly in harm's way physically, where we're terrified of that. But at the same time that that paranoia about the physical safety of children has grown, we have also been these devices that have access to things that are going to hurt them a lot more than falling off their bicycle have a lot more long-term consequences just totally unfiltered just like passing them out and for boys like a lot of those problems center around the access to pornography for girls it's often more of the access to social media and the social anxiety that grows from that pressure.
We have a huge crisis in our culture right now of teen suicide on the rise and anxiety levels through the roof since 2008. Introduction of the iPhone. Not a coincidence. Like, we need to think as parents. Like, our kids are in this world. Like, these things are here now. It's not like we can run away from them. Again, I'm not suggesting we all become Amish for other reasons, too. But technological reason like we live in this world we have to teach our children how to engage with it but we have to be observing as parents how do these things influence our children. It's not just technology like it's very easy like we try to run a pretty low-tech house but Laurel loves to read. She's here. I'm not gonna I can pick on her since she's not here. I can't tell her just go read whatever you want at the library. The values that are so we're reading a series right now by an author. It's a great series but he's got a couple other series where it's pushing some really unhealthy agendas on the kids so it's like you can read these ones but not these ones and maybe these ones you can read but we're gonna have to talk through every book and what are you noticing and the point here is that Lot was so focused on moving to this place where he saw opportunity for himself and for growing his prosperity that he didn't think about how it was going to affect his family and his future generations.
And at first it might have seemed like it was really successful, but now he's living in a cave with two daughters who are willing to get him drunk. Like this is, again, we won't end up probably in that extreme of a circumstance, but what do you value with your time and with your life? Being an engaged parent, being an engaged father is sometimes an awful lot of work. It's going to cost you probably some hobby time. It's going to cost you things that you would rather be doing than talking with your kid about how their processing their day at school or the movie that you just watched. But if you're investing in the next generation, then that time spent has an exponential value. It has a value that goes way beyond whatever comfort you were hoping to get out of this next five minutes. It's kind of my summarizing question with this point is, what are you training your kids to view as normal lot raised his daughters in a place where what they were doing here doesn't seem that weird it's a little extreme but it's within the scope of the stuff that happened in sodom it's it's within their purview of normal what are you raising your kids to view as normal.
Three, a good father prioritizes self-control. So even with Lot's bad example, he didn't prioritize obedience. Even with his allowing awful influences, this situation still only comes about because of his colossal failure of self-control. They said, let's get him drunk. And the text says he didn't even know when they laid down or when they got up. He's blackout drunk.
If Lot had a modicum of self-control, this doesn't happen. In Soup Night, a few months ago, we were going through the book of Titus. And the book of Titus is remarkable. Paul's writing this letter to Titus, who's one of his associates, and he sent him back to the island of Crete, where they've planted a number of churches. And he sends Titus there to, or he left him in Crete, rather, to appoint elders in the churches and to give instruction for these very young Christians about what is most important. And in the book of Titus, excuse me, the very first part of the book is instructions for what kind of men you should choose as elders. One of the instructions is that elders must be men of self-control. And then when you get into chapter two of Titus and he's describing what is the kind of Christian character that should characterize all maturing Christians?
Chapter two, verse two, older men are to be sober minded, dignified, self-controlled older women. It says, uh, is, are to teach the younger women in verse five. It says to be self-controlled and pure. Down in verse 6, he says, likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. Down in verse 12, when he's talking about how everyone should be characterized in the church. We've been taught by the grace of God to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. This is a very unpopular concept in our society when we're all about self-expression and showing what's really within me, wearing my heart on my sleeve, as it were. But in the Bible, self-control is presented as absolutely vital for maturity and for growth in godliness.
It's necessary to prevent negative outcomes like Lot has here, but it's also necessary to perform positive duties. Like I think they're in Titus about the role of self-control in discipline. You know, if some fathers are afraid to discipline their children physically because, well, I don't want to be abusive and you should want to be abusive. And if you're out of control, angry, like, yeah, that's probably a potential problem here. The answer isn't that, well, we just let, correction go, the answer is you need to gain mastery over yourself. You need to have self-control. You should not be ruled by your anger. And you should look at the child not as like someone who's personally affronted you or offended you, but as someone who's been entrusted to your care who needs corrected. And you need to lovingly exercise discipline. The most important part of being a good father is being a good man. And that cannot happen without self-control.
So these three priorities, personal obedience to God, careful attention to who and what are the influences on your children, and acquiring and maintaining self-control. These are crucial to being good fathers. And again, literally, if one of these things would have been at play for Lot, this situation doesn't happen. But we need to have all three of them.
But what if you have failed? What if you've failed or are failing or failed in the past and don't feel like you can rewind? Like, what do you do? First thing, there's a quote I love. I don't remember where it originally came from. I just remember the quote. It's that God takes us from where we are, not from where we should have been. We're all not as far along the road as we should be. Every single one of us. But God takes us from where we are.
Starting with that as a basis point, here's three things. Number one, be honest about your failure. Don't be defensive about it. Number one thing that prevents people from growing is they refuse to acknowledge their failure. They'll get defensive about it. They'll say, well, this isn't really a problem. This is just the way I am. Or this is the decision I made and it was good enough. Or it was the best I could do at the time. And so maybe it wasn't perfect, but it was the best I could do at the time. And you just need to be honest, like, no, it wasn't good enough. And it honestly probably wasn't the best you could do at the time. Nobody always does the best they can do all the time. That's a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Stare cold reality in the face. Sometimes you fail. You're not Jesus. Sometimes you fail.
Number two, recognize that Lot failed like this as someone who was a genuine believer in God. Twice the new testament calls law a righteous man. Still boggles my mind. The only way to explain that is genesis 15:6. Abraham believed the lord the promises of the lord and it was counted to him as righteousness. Justification by faith is the only way to explain how lot is described as righteous. He believes god and God gives him the gift of righteousness, the gift of salvation. It wasn't anything he possessed on his own. So as someone who genuinely believed in God, Lot still failed colossally. And while as believers in the New Testament age, we do have a benefit, like we've got something over Lot in that we have the indwelling Holy Spirit. If you live after Pentecost, you've got a leg up on Old Testament saints. So we shouldn't fail quite as bad as they do. But we still fail. And it shouldn't make you think, oh, does God love me less? Now, Jesus died on the cross knowing all the sins that he was paying for. God's love for you is not less because you have at times or often failed.
Three, we should recognize that even in our failures, God is still at work. That does not excuse our failures in any way. And later on in the book of Genesis chapter 50, Joseph is speaking to his brothers who sold him into slavery, wanted to kill him and settled for beating him up and selling him into slavery. It's pretty bad, right? And they're worried that once he has power, he's going to get them back 20 years later. He says to them, you meant evil, but God meant it for good. What they did is not just that they meant evil. They did evil. They were responsible for what they did. It was wrong. And likewise for us, we do things that are wrong and it is not okay. Again, we should not ever make excuses for our sin, but we should recognize that providentially God is at work even in and through our sin. God is not thwarted by our failures. Right?
And we see this in the story of law and his daughters. His older daughter's son is named moab. Now moab becomes the father the progenitor of the moabites who become a long-term enemy for the people of israel but also the eighth book in the bible is named after a young lady named ruth who was a woman of moab, and after her husband dies she follows her mother-in-law back to israel where she marries a man named boaz and if these names start to sound a little familiar is because we just read them in matthew 1. Boaz and ruth fathered obed who fathered jesse fathered david. Ruth a moabitess is in the line of the messiah so here this horrific action, there's still a line from Jesus's physical descent back to her.
God draws straight lines with crooked sticks. And so when we see our failures, we should flee to the cross and plead for forgiveness and seek to improve, to grow. But we should not despair because no matter where we're starting from, God is at work. God is always at work. None of us are perfect parents. Brothers, none of us are perfect fathers. But my prayer for myself personally is that each year my kids will have better parents, a better father than they had the previous year. That was not the trajectory of Lot's life. Things seem to keep getting worse and worse and worse. But by God's grace, it can be the trajectory for each of us that God will give the growth. And as we seek to pursue faithfulness to him, our children can year in and year out have a better father than they had the year before.
Would you pray with me? Father, we need your help in this. You are the only perfect father. And so we thank you for your model, your example. We thank you for your forgiveness poured out to us through your son, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.
