Evaluating your motives for church growth requires a rare kind of humility and selflessness many of our pastors, having failed the character test, simply do not possess. Many of our pastors have become vain and self-absorbed, and would rather keep riding their shrinking base of struggling faithful than to evaluate, in any spiritually meaningful way, the effectiveness and purpose of their ministry or question their motives for desiring church growth. So, all the fund raising, all the pamphlet printing, all the pressuring of the faithful—what’s that all about? In most cases, “church growth” really means “church money.” Don’t ask God to add to your number just so you can continue going in circles, ignoring people who live next door.
Reason 10: Disobedience
The instructions were fairly simple: (1) keep running, (2) don’t
look back. But, like so many helpless, silly women in so many
horror movies, she couldn’t resist turning away from God’s
promise to look back toward sin. And, in a flash, she was
destroyed. It’s as good a bedtime story as there is, this story
of Lot’s wife. Most of us miss the truer lessons of the story,
using this passage from Genesis 19 to justify our hatred of
gays, when this isn’t a story about homosexuality or even about
good versus righteous people. This is a story about obedience.
About being part of God’s plan or choosing not to.
The surface-level look at the story tells us Lot, Abraham’s
nephew-in-law, was a righteous man, the one decent person living
in Sodom. What it doesn’t tell us, though, is that Lot may have
been ultimately judged as righteous, but Lot was weak. In
previous scripture, we find Lot living outside the city [Genesis
3:10-12]. But, when we next see him, he’s living inside this
sinful place. Why would a righteous man take his wife and two
young daughters into such a hateful place? Why would a
prosperous farmer give up his livestock (Lot had so much
livestock, in fact, that he and Abraham could not graze their
flocks in the same place [Gen 13:6-7]) and move into an urban
hell? It makes no sense.
God
has created within each of us a free will. We are free to choose
God’s plan or to reject it. Going our own way is not, in and of
itself, sin—Lot could live wherever he wanted to live. But
diverging from God’s plan for us has consequences. Last month I
blogged about
romantic love versus God’s plan for us. Satan can and will
use our loneliness, our emotional needs, as a weapon against us.
So much so that we begin longing for someone’s touch more than
we long for the Lord’s presence in our lives, and we become
impatient with God, deciding to “help God out” by moving His
agenda forward in a quicker fashion. But, it’s not God’s agenda
we are moving, it’s ours. And we fall in love with Boo and what
have you, and next thing we know, we’re way, way off track from
where we’d been going before we got distracted. We’re wasting
time—years and decades of it—trying to make these romantic
relationships work because now we’re addicted to this person and
it’s like a coke habit, our obsession with this person to the
exclusion of our own aspirations and the vision God has given
us. We’re compromising everything—including God’s plan for our
lives—and giving time and resources that used to belong to God
to this knucklehead instead. We’re stressing and trying to
appease him or her, trying to work it out, trying to keep the
peace, struggling to hold the relationship together. And, in so
doing, we diminish the importance of God, the effectiveness of
God, the sovereignty of God, in our lives. We diminish
our own testimony, as the romantic partner you’re struggling to
hold onto sees an impotent god, a dormant god, an ineffectual
god in you, in your weak testimony, because your god takes
second place to the demands of your Boo. And, instead of
following God’s plan, you are “following your heart.”
And one day you wake up and you’re forty. Overweight. Broke.
Used up. Kids who neither know nor respect God because you’ve
made God a joke in your own life. And you look at yourself in
the mirror and wonder how your got so far off track.
That’s the truer moral of Lot’s story.
I can imagine Lot ended up in the city because he was too close
to the city in the first place. Once we start dipping and
dabbling in sin, sin begins drawing us in. [James 1:15]. So,
here’s Lot, a farmer, blessed by God, waking up one day in
Sodom. And, yet, the bible calls him righteous. Righteous, yes.
Obedient, no.
Disobedience leads to poor judgment, Lot offering his virgin
daughters (by biblical standards, where girls routinely married
at fourteen or fifteen, I’d make these girls around twelve or
thirteen) up to the unruly mob who’d come to violently rape the
angels at Lot’s house [Gen 19:8]. Where was Lot’s righteousness
in that offer? These guys weren’t going to take his daughters
out for dinner and a movie. They wanted sex. And they wanted it
violently, a gang rape. And this was the best idea Lot had, to
protect strangers by offering up two little girls to be raped
and sodomized. This was Lot’s testimony to his wife, to his
kids. This was how far off the track Lot had strayed.
Even so, when God delivered Lot from his own poor choices, Lot’s
wife, his Boo, knew so little of God, believed so little of God,
perhaps because Lot had put her first, thus diminishing his
testimony and undermining his faith in God, that—for reasons the
Bible does not enumerate—she turned back toward sin. Longingly,
sad to leave sin.
And,
this is the way sin works: it first convinces you to move away
from God’s plan, the it destroys your testimony to the point
where people around you think of your spirituality as a joke,
then it strips you of God’s blessing, of His promise, of
everything you have. Lot fled the city with nothing, the clothes
on his back. He lost everything, including his wife. And his
children, so disconnected from Lot’s God, Lot having so
destroyed his own testimony, they, too, saw God as impotent and
ineffectual. In spite of the terrible manifestation of God’s
power in destroying two cities, these two kids nonetheless
thought God needed them to help Him out, thinking, since Mom was
now a pillar of salt, it was their duty to re-populate the
destroyed cities. Lot’s two, innocent, pubescent daughters got
him drunk and had sex with him, deliberately getting themselves
knocked up by their own father in some warped attempt to help
out Lot’s impotent God.
A righteous man? Perhaps. But Lot’s behavior was much more in line with that of so many of us Church Folk. People who either knew God but strayed away, following their own path, or people who just grew up in a church environment, taking on the external behavior and traditions of Church Folk, but who do not have and likely never had a thriving personal relationship with Jesus Christ. So, we have people who have been made righteous through faith, but who nevertheless substitute our own judgment for God’s judgment, our own plan for God’s plan. It is a terribly simple formula, one of Satan’s most seductive and effective weapons against God’s church: disobedience.
