We come to the reading of God's word for our sermon this morning, which is Genesis chapter 19. We'll read verses one through 29. Page 13 of your Pew Bibles. I invite you to stand out of respect for the reading of God's word. The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth and said, My lords, please turn aside to your servants' house and spend night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way. They said, No, we will spend the night in the town square. But he pressed them strongly. So they turned aside to him and entered his house. And he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man surrounded the house and they called a lot. Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them. Lot went out to the men at the entrance, shut the door after him, and said, I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two daughters who have not known any man. Let me bring them out to you and do to them as you please. Only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof. But they said, stand back. And they said, this fellow came to sojourn. He has become the judge. Now we will deal worse with you than with them. Then they pressed hard against the man Lot and drew near to break the door down. But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out, groping for the door. Then the men said to Lot, Have you anyone else here, son-in-laws? Sons, daughters or anyone you have in the city, bring them out of this place, for we are about to destroy this place because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord and the Lord has sent us to destroy it. So Lot went out and said to his sons in laws who were to marry his daughters up. Get out of this place. For the Lord is about to destroy the city, but he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting. As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, Up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city. But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand and the Lord being merciful to them. And they brought him out and set him outside the city. And as they brought him out, one said, Escape for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley. Escape to the hills, lest you be swept away. And Lot said to them, Oh, no, my lords, behold, your servant has found favor in your sight. You have shown me great kindness in saving my life. But I cannot escape to the hills, lest the disaster overtake me, and I die. Behold, this city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there. Is it not a little one? And my life will be saved.' He said to him, Behold, I grant you this favor also, that I will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken. Escape there quickly, for I can do nothing till you arrive there. Therefore the name of the city was called Zor. The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zor. Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew the cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife behind him looked back and she became a pillar of salt. And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley. And he looked, and behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace. So it was that when God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had lived. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides. Forever, amen, you may be seated. I was inviting someone to our church the other day who never, been here to worship with us, and they said, well, I have some questions first. And one of the questions they asked was, are you a fire and brimstone kind of preacher? And I think I knew what they meant, right? I mean, I think in part they were asking, are you a kind of pastor who hollers and screams about judgment until his voice goes hoarse? And the answer to that is, you know, that's not my custom. But I also wondered, did they mean, are you the kind of pastor who preaches on judgment? Are you the kind of pastor who who preaches against sin? And the answer to that is, I sure hope I am. Before God, I must be. And there are some passages like the one right here where we just cannot escape the theme of judgment, a coming judgment. Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the tragic events of the Bible. And yes, here we hear about fire and brimstone raining down from heaven upon an entire city and not just a small city, but a big city, a large city. Some believe, some scholars believe that the remnants of this city now reside underneath the Dead Sea, which is so full of salt and so full of disaster material that you can't even sink in it. You just float on it. Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah has found its way into several sayings in the English language, like fire and brimstone. We must talk about God's judgment. And here's the important thing. We must not just look out there and say, oh God, there's the people to judge, they're there, there's the Sodom and Gomorrah today. Unless we look and really see ourselves in this text, then we haven't read it right. The main point of this text, the one thing I want you, I plead with you to hear and to act upon is this. You must escape sin city and run to refuge in Christ Jesus. We need to see Sodom's sin. We need to see Lot's compromise. And we need to see our opportunity, which is here before us in this text. And you see Sodom's sin. It's right here for us, forever penned in the scriptures. The angels arrived in the city of Sodom to investigate and to find whether the sin that was reported to them and to the Lord was indeed serious. And of course the Lord already knew what would be found there. But the angels discovered that yes, the reports were true and perhaps even worse than they'd imagined. They'd only been at Lot's house for a few hours. They arrived in the evening as the sun was going down, and before they even had time to go to bed, what happened? Well, they're eating a meal there, and they start to hear a riot outside, voices calling, and they go and look out the front door to see what? A mob of lusting men of every age, every man in the whole city, hooting and hollering for these men to come out so their desires can be satisfied. Send these men out! The men of Sodom cried, we want to know them. What was Sodom's sin? There are discussions about this today. In fact, I even saw a conversation about it on social media. Some will say that the great sin of Sodom was inhospitality, right? These men were not treating foreigners as they should. They weren't opening the door and welcoming them in. And well, I'll say that's certainly true, isn't it? At least inhospitality was at work here. But we fool ourselves if we think that that's all that's at work. No, there is a heinousness that reaches even further than inhospitality. As much of a sin that was here, you also see what? you also see the sin of homosexuality on display in the city of Sodom. And we know this because if you were to turn to Jude, later in the Bible, towards the end of the New Testament, if you were to turn to Jude, there's only one chapter in Jude, and if you were to read verse seven, you would hear this, that Sodom indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desires. You can't get around it. I would not be loving, I would not be helping, I would not be telling people what they need to hear if I somehow try to skirt around this sin, which also is at work in Sodom. That men, according to Romans chapter one, pursued unnatural desires with men. And so when they said, come out, we want to know them, you know the kind of knowledge that they're after. And it's not factual knowledge, it's sexual perversion. And so you could say that inhospitality was at work there, but also homosexuality and of a violent and rage-filled nature. But I think we also miss the point if we say that homosexuality was the great sin of Sodom, and that's all we have to say about it. Because really, when we think about sin and we know how sin works, sin always works in clusters, always tied up with other sins, other vices. And so we can say, if there really was a one great sin of Sodom, one great error that led to all this perversion, it was what? Idolatry. Idolatry. People who wanted to be God. People who said, put me in God's place. I don't want some God telling me what to do. I want to be in control of my life. I want to make decisions. I want to be with whom I want to be. I want to do with other people what I want to do. Get out of the picture, God, and let me rule my own life. And Sodom had become so wrapped up in that. That, that was its core sin. And when we see that, I think it's at that point that we realize we're more like Sodom than we care to admit. Sure, we can point at heinous acts that we see in our culture or other places and say, look at that, look at that great sin, God's gonna judge that. But if we don't see in ourselves the same lurking sins, the same basic idolatry trying to take hold, then we really haven't understood that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There's a few basic things that we must observe from the sin of Sodom. And the first is this, our sin is worse than we think. Our sin is worse than we think. We tend to tone down sin, to smooth it over, to talk about it as if it were just a mistake and to err as human. And I want you to realize that Sodom shows that that is not true. Sodom shows that people can be so deceived that they think that they have a right to do something that is actually incredibly perverse wickedness. I want you to imagine that you go over to someone's house and it is a complete pigsty. There is trash everywhere, covering every square inch. And there's leftover food rotting on the floor. There are rats running in and out of the mess. And so you tell your friend, you say, I'm worried about you. This isn't a way you should live. Can I help you clean this up? And imagine your friend says, You must think you're so great. You must think you're so holy. I'm comfortable in this. I don't need to clean anything else up. You're overthinking this. And you realize that this friend's become so comfortable in the squalor in which they live that they have no concept for what it would be like otherwise. They've deceived themselves. And this is what it is like with sin. When we take over as rebels God's creation and we fill it with every kind of perversity and trash and sin, what happens is we start to get so comfortable with what we've done with God's world that we can hardly hear when the word of God comes and calls us out on it. We say, what do you mean this is sin? This is just how I live my life. What do you mean I need to change? I like it, I'm comfortable like this. It would take so much work to change. And we fool ourselves if we think that education or basic moral reformation is going to do anything. Lot cried out to the men of Sodom, don't do this wickedness, stop. And still, what did they do? They persisted. No words, no kind of education was going to clean up Sodom. These were men who were following their lust, following their hearts, apart from the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit, and what they did is they just said, give us what we want, we wanna live with this, and we don't understand why you would tell us to do otherwise. Give us our passions. And so Sodom had become like a pigsty, and the men who lived there couldn't even see they were living in squalor. Do you realize that that is what sin is like still today? And do you realize that you are not fully immune from that? That there are things you do in your day-to-day life, in ways you live, that you think are just being human, but God puts his word squarely on it and says, it's sin, and we struggle to hear him because we're so comfortable with sin. The second lesson, the sins of Sodom, is this, that God really will judge sin. You know, I wonder if we took a poll today, if we asked people on the street, do you think that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah deserved to be struck with fire and brimstone and utterly destroyed? My guess is people would say, no. No, I don't think they should have been judged like that. And I think they would follow up and say, it's not because they didn't do anything bad, but I think if you really got down to it, most people today would look at Sodom and Gomorrah and see it as overkill, as it were, because they don't believe that evil really needs to be punished. And they don't think that sin actually needs an answer from an all-holy God. And Sodom and Gomorrah is this wake-up call when we actually see it for what it is. It reminds us that God really will judge all evil and that that judgment is coming. See, Sodom and Gomorrah wasn't the final judgment. It was just a picture of what's to come. And when we really see Sodom and Gomorrah, we really see, oh my God. I have fallen so short of the glory of God and I have deceived myself so much that I think that judgment isn't coming. And I think I can live however I want and God won't do anything about it. And Sodom and Gomorrah says, no, he will. And Sodom and Gomorrah says this to you. You must abandon your sin and run to God's mercy or else you will collide with his impending judgment. That's what Sodom and Gomorrah says. And so we see Sodom's sin, but if that's all we see, boy, that's crucially and vitally important. But we also need to see so much of what this passage spends talking about, which is Lot's compromise. You see, it is possible to be aware of our sin, it is possible to be aware of God's judgment, and it's also possible to do what? To do little to nothing about it. It is possible to sit in squalor and an inaction, and to say, yeah, this world really is messed up. Yeah, God is going to judge it, and to do what? To delay. That is the warning that comes to us in the person of Lot and his wife. You see, Lot didn't want to leave Sin City. Drives you half crazy, doesn't it, reading about it? Get out of here. They're telling you to leave. They're telling you judgment's coming. And what does he do? He spends half the night just waiting. I mean, what's he doing? Walking around his house? I don't know. He delayed and the angels basically had to drag him out of Sodom at the last moment. It's like the light is starting to come up and the angels are warning. When the light dawns, judgment comes and he is spending every second he can just twiddling his thumbs. You see, Sodom had become a part of Lot. There was that part of him that was disgusted by the perversity of Sodom, but there was another part of him that was comfortable with the pleasures of living in Sin City. Lot was a double-minded man who had gotten used to compromising. It all started back in chapter 13 when he traded fellowship with Abraham for company with Sodom, And over all those years, Lot believed that he could remain righteous, he could remain unaffected, but basically live within Sodom, live within its wickedness, spend most of his time with perversity, and he could just be unaffected by it. But guess what? Was that possible? No, no. After all those years, Lot had become comfortable with Sodom, and now if he He would just look within and admit what's there. He would see that there were tentacles wrapped around his heart. The tentacles of the world, the pleasures of the world were wrapped around him so tight that he could barely bring himself to leave it all at that moment when it mattered most. The angels say, we must leave and Lot delays. And then look at what happens. Finally, they're like, we're getting out of here now. We're leaving. You can come with us or stay. And Lot says, well, I'll come with you, but do we really have to go to the hills? Couldn't we just flee to that little city over there? It's a little city. What does he want? He wants another Sodom. Zor was just like Sodom, it was just smaller. But Lot has so wrapped up in compromises with the world that he can't leave Sodom without going to another one. And so he trades the big Sodom for this little city where he can just do the same things, just maybe on a smaller scale, and he fools himself. But God permits it. God permits Lot to follow his heart from one compromise to another, and he will reap the fruits of it. You know, friends, today, so many Christians are like Lot. We devote so little time to knowing God, and we put so much of our energy into compromising with the world, and then we don't understand why we become spiritually stagnant and unprepared for action. We don't realize why fighting basic sins that God has put his finger on is so brutally hard. Well, here's why. We refuse to distance ourselves from friends who tempt us. We refused to separate ourselves from music and movies which celebrate sin and revel in it. And then when we do flee from Sodom, we often swap it out for another. We trade one addiction for another one. We trade one sinful pleasure for another. And we fool ourselves and tell ourselves, oh, well, I'm moving in the right direction. Ephesians 5, 6 gives us a clear command, and we need to hear it. You need to hear this this morning. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness. What are those? Paul lists them in Ephesians. Things like this, sexual immorality, drunkenness, disobedience to parents, jealousy, lying, and the list could go on. Conclude homosexuality and other things like this. But when we hear this, we say, oh good, I'm not number one on that list. And we overlook what, number four, five, six on the list, which are ways to compromise before God. We say, at least I don't live in Sodom, I live in Zor. Here's why you need to hear this. Because Ephesians goes on and it says, because on account of these things, the wrath of God is coming. Flee, Christians. I've said this before from the pulpit, I've fled with you. In the words of an old preacher, he said, The Christian life has this command hanging over it. Get thee out. Get out of Sin City. Leave. Get moving and don't go back. See the danger of spiritual compromise. It became a very real and a sad one for a member of Lot's family, for his own wife. What happened? Halfway to safety, Lot's wife stopped running. You could picture it, right? There she is on the plane. You've got the city beneath. You've got the hills in the distance and you've got this little city, this little town of Zor. And halfway to safety, she stops and she turns around. She looked back longingly toward her beloved home with all the stuff she had stored there. She looked back to her friendships and the comforts of Sin City. And as she hesitated on the plains outside the city, she was in a very moment overtaken by the blast of God's judgment upon that city. Perhaps she breathed in the sulfurous gases that were coming out of the destruction poured upon that city. And then her corpse was covered with the debris raining down so that she became a pillar of salt. And what does Jesus say? Chapter 17, verse 32, he says, remember Lot's wife. Remember Lot's wife. That's Jesus' warning. What do we need to remember about Lot's wife? What do you need to remember about Lot's wife? Well, Jesus goes on to tell you, he says, if you wanna try to preserve your life, then guess what'll happen? You'll lose it. But he says, if you lose your life, then in the great upside down flip of the gospel, you will actually save your life. Christian, you must separate yourself from this world and its sin, its pride, its materialism, its sensuality. You must set your sights on the high hills of heavens. You must run for them, run towards them, and never look back, go. 1 John 2, verses 15 through 17. Do not love the world or the things in the world, For the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. So we see Sodom's sin and we see Lot's compromise, but we also need to see the beautiful thing in this passage is our opportunity. An opportunity right now, right here, There is good news here in Genesis chapter 19. Genesis chapter 19 is in the Bible in order to mercifully warn you right now before it's too late. That's why it's here. Escape for your life. Run to safety before it's too late. We don't need angels to come and beg you to do that. Why? Because they already came and their warning is here in the scriptures. You have more than angels. You have the whole word of God warning you and entreating you. Flee from sin city, run. Don't go to Zohar, go to where? To the high hills of heaven. Flee from every form of idolatry. Yes, flee from sexual immorality. Flee from homosexuality. Flee from drunkenness. Flee from disobedience to parents. Flee from the pride that keeps you from coming over and over to Christ and repenting of your sin. Don't laugh as Lot's foolish son-in-laws did. They laugh, they say, that won't happen. Don't linger like Lot's wife did. Don't trade one Sodom for another like Lot did. Run to the high hills. And you know what that means. It means run to Jesus, run to Jesus. Now is the time to flee to Christ for salvation. Flee to Christ, the only refuge for your soul. And you have the very assurance of the scriptures in Acts chapter 16, verse 30, you will be saved. Isn't that what the jailer asked? What must I do to be saved? I see my sin. I see how much I've participated in and I've compromised. I see myself in sin city. What must I do? And what does Paul say? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You will be saved, you and your household. You see, Christ took upon himself the judgment of God, the very fire and brimstone of Sodom. And he did that on the cross. So that if we seek refuge in him, we have our hope laid up in the high hills of heaven. The very wrath of God that we deserve has been poured out on Christ so that it would not have to be poured out on us. That is the refuge available in Jesus. Have you called upon him today? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the passages that come to us. Yes, even passages full of judgment. Lord, you put these kinds of warnings in the Bible in order to wake us up, to show us that if we just listen blindly and idly to culture around us, we will fool ourselves and we will find ourselves not only embarrassed, but horrified. in a moment of blinking coming judgment. We ask instead, Lord, that we would see that judgment now, and before it's too late, before the judgment comes, we would find ourselves safe in Jesus, not because we've done something that we deserve in order to be saved from the judgment, but because the grace which we do not deserve. Yes, the grace that you showed in picture form to Lot, but Lord, help us to go beyond Lot, to not run to other sins, but instead to run to Jesus without looking back. Help us to do that today, aware of our sin, but also aware of the Savior. We pray this in his name, amen. Brothers and sisters, let's sing a hymn together as we prepare for the Lord's Supper. Number 450, Jesus, lover of my soul. Let's stand and sing, 450, Jesus, lover of my soul.