We were on the way to town, the bucolic scenery passing us out the windows, only the soft purr of the engine penetrating the comfortable quiet in the car.

            Just before the second four-way stop Keith said, “I think you should call.”

            It came out of the clear blue, a topic we hadn’t spoken of for over an hour, but I knew exactly what he meant.  After all these years, our minds tend to run on the same wavelength.  Not always, I will admit.  Sometimes I look at him and say, “What in the world are you talking about?”  Sometimes he says that to me.  Yet most of the time our concerns are the same and our interests the same.  What worries him, worries me.  We’re both trying to solve the same problems.  We are as much “of the same mind” as it is possible to be, but it took awhile to get that way, and it took effort.

            Jesus expects the same from his disciples.  Once he looked at the apostles and said, “Beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt 16:6).

            They looked at one another and said, “Uh-oh.  We’re in trouble because we forgot to bring lunch.”

            Jesus was not pleased.  In the first place it had not been that long since he had fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish.  How could they ever worry about going hungry from then on?

            More than that, he expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms by now.  “How could you think that physical bread was any concern to me at all?” he asked, and then they got it.  He wanted them to beware of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  He expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms just as he did.

            He expects the same spirituality from us.  “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ,” Paul gives as one example in Phil 2:5.  He told the Romans we are to have “the mind of the spirit” not the flesh (8:5).  He told the Corinthians he couldn’t even talk to them because they always thought in physical terms, not spiritual (1 Cor 3:1-3).

            What is filling your mind this morning?  Perhaps more telling, what does your mind run to whenever you hear a comment, see an action, or experience an event in your life?  Do you let it frustrate you?  Do you feel insulted or get your feelings hurt?  Do you worry about the other person or yourself?  Do you chafe at the inconvenience, or do you try to find the lesson?  Is your mind so much on spiritual things that you think, speak, and behave as Jesus would, or are you still stuck in a physical world where you matter more than He does? 

            We can all predict how certain people will act and what they will say in a given situation.  We say they have a one track mind.  Having a one track mind is not necessarily bad, as long as we are on the same wavelength as the Lord.
 
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart… But that is not the way you learned Christ!-- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus… be renewed in the spirit of your minds, put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, Eph 4:17,18,20,21,23,24.
           
Dene Ward

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, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. Gen 19:15-16
 
              Here the Lord offers salvation to Lot who, by what we have previously seen, truly believes in the coming destruction and truly hates the sin in Sodom.  But what does he do?  “He lingers…”  And finally, and only because God is merciful and that probably because of Abraham (Gen 19:29), the angels grabbed them all by the hands and pulled them out of the city. 

              How many times do we linger where we have no business being, even after we know we should be gone?  Sin has a pull of its own, and if God were not pulling in the opposite direction, many of us would be gone without a fight.

              But we have talked much about sin in this short series.  How about things that are not necessarily sins?  How about those resolutions we make, not just at the New Year’s dawn, but when suddenly we realize we are not what we should be?  When a lesson suddenly slaps us in the face and we recognize our failures.  How many times have I heard things like, “I am going to start studying more.  In fact, I am going to come to your classes.”  But when reality hits, when they find out it takes work and commitment and maybe canceling a few other things that are a lot more fun, suddenly it is not a priority.

              Most of the members of my classes are older women.  Don’t tell me, “Well, they have the time.”  When we started this class almost thirty years ago, they were the young women with families, and some had jobs too.  Yet they also had their priorities in order.  It is as simple, and as damning, as that.
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              So you need to make a change of some kind, be it more study, more prayer, more service, or some other neglected virtue.  Then make it, but recognize from the get-go that you will have to leave some things behind in order to make the time.  Don’t “linger” in Sodom.  It will only make the transition more difficult. Jump in with both feet, whatever the change you want to make, and don’t look back.  Before long you will love the new you.
 
When I think on my ways, I turn my feet to your testimonies; I hasten and do not delay to keep your commandments. Ps 119:59-60
 
Dene Ward

So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, 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. Gen 19:14
 
            “And the second is like unto the first,” as the scripture says in another place.  Lot told his sons-in-law of the coming destruction and they laughed in his face.  I can just hear them saying, “Are you crazy, old man?” 

            And that is not the first time that accusation was wielded.  Noah comes to mind.  Maybe this reaction is even older than the one we discussed last time.  Peter warns against it in 2 Peter 3.  “Mockers” will come and make fun of your belief in a final judgment and the end of the world.  Any time you preach something that demands accountability of the sinner, you are a lunatic, an old fuddy-duddy, a spoilsport, a prude, or any of a dozen more rude epithets.  It is yet another universal and timeless attitude, another instance in which we are living in Sodom today.

           But we can ask the same question we did last time.  Has anyone called me those names lately?  Have I talked about God, my Lord, my salvation, my church family, and my hope of Heaven enough that it bothers them?  Have I mentioned Hell at all?

           God expects people to know who we are.  He does not want us hiding in plain sight.  What is important to us should be in our hearts and on our tongues.  Maybe that is the problem:  those things are not really that important to us.  Our faith is an embarrassment.  Remember what Jesus had to say about that?
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So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven. Matt 10:32-33.

           At least Lot acknowledged God, the reality of His authority over us, and our accountability to Him in the coming destruction to those sinful people.  Do we?
 
Dene Ward

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Eccl 1:9
 
           I was reading through Genesis 19 preparing for a class on Lot’s wife and daughters when suddenly the verse above sprang to mind.  Over and over I saw things I have seen all my life and the thought came unbidden, “We are living in Sodom.” 

            No, I was not thinking about modern issues.  None of the things that I noticed in the text that afternoon had anything to do with that, at least not specifically.  In fact, the things I noticed had been happening through my entire life, even as far back as the 1960s when everyone thinks we were still innocent and relatively godly.  Let’s see if you see what I did.
 
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…But they said, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came to sojourn, and he has become the judge!” Gen 19:6-9
 
           Whenever any moral issue comes up, if you express any sort of disapproval--even if all you do is refuse to participate—suddenly you are accused of “judging.”  Never mind that is exactly what is done to you by this accusation.  That does not matter.  It happened all those thousands of years ago and it happens now.  People have not changed.  If you behave differently than others, you are “judging.”  No one can tolerate being seen as less than righteous, even when righteousness is the last thing on their minds.

            Since it is such a universal, and timeless, reaction, maybe we should ask ourselves this:  Has anyone accused me of being judgmental lately?  If not, why not?  Is it just that I only associate with Christians, with good moral friends and neighbors?  Or is it that I have not expressed any disapproval lately, nor refused to participate, whether it be in gossip, slander, drinking, pornography, foul language, immodest dress, or any other acts a Christian needs to abhor. 
 
           Paul said:  and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even reprove them; Eph 5:11.  We do a whole lot better with the first half of that command than the last.  I think it is because we do not want even the mild persecution that comes along with it.  We want to be liked—by the world.  We don’t want to be accused of “judging.”

           Even “righteous Lot” was accused of judging.  Peter says he “was greatly distressed by the conduct of the wicked” (2 Pet 2:7).  Given the rest of his life, do we really want to be viewed as less righteous than he?
 
Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practice them. Rom 1:29-32
 
Dene Ward

I was raised that way and I bet you were too.  I imagine my boys remember that when guests were present we used different dishes, different towels, different manners, even different tones of voice.  We were more careful in our personal habits and ate not only “fancier” food, but more of it.  A meat and two sides was fine for a weeknight family meal, but when guests came Mom added more sides and a dessert, sometimes two.  Instead of the plastic pitcher, we used the glass one.  Instead of everyone’s favorite glass that didn’t match another, we got out the good set that did.  The meat was sliced neater and the mashed potatoes piled higher, and we put a tablecloth on the table.  We always treated guests as more important than ourselves. 

            It is not an un-Biblical way of thinking, not only in how guests should be treated, but especially in how God should be approached.

            Our culture has become far more casual than ever before.  Even in the days when everyone in the neighborhood was poor, they all had one pair of overalls that was saved for special occasions.  They may have been denim.  They may have been patched.  But they were cleaner and the holes were all mended.  Nowadays you buy them with the holes already in them and leave them that way.

            And in all this casualness I wonder if we haven’t lost something, especially our sense of reverence and respect.  Ezekiel said it this way of the priests who had neglected their duties:  Her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Ezek 22:26.

            Can we even comprehend the meaning of this passage?  Are there really things that are holy and things that are not?  Under our new covenant it may no longer be a matter of a holy building, but on the other hand it is a matter of a holy spiritual edifice.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Eph 2:19-22.

            So as part of that spiritual and holy building I must be aware of keeping it holy.  When God’s people profaned his physical Temple, he left it.  Do you think He won’t do the same to us if we cannot even define holiness, much less recognize it?  So how do we keep it holy, how do we make a distinction between the holy and the common?

            Peter tells us that our conduct can keep us from being holy.  As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” 1Pet 1:14-16.  That ought to be obvious.  But how about things not quite so obvious?

            Ezekiel tells us that it is possible to profane the name of God by the gifts that we offer (20:39).  In his day the people were guilty of worshipping God on the Sabbath and then worshipping the idols the rest of the time.  That made their Sabbath service “unholy.”  What do we worship?  On what do we spend far more time, money, and energy than we do serving God?  When God is neglected, the things that fill our time, even things that might not be wrong things, make our service profane.

            Here is another example:  You shall not bring the hire of a harlot, or the wages of a dog [a male prostitute], into the house of Jehovah your God for any vow: for even both these are an abomination unto Jehovah your God. Deut 23:18.  If the gift I give comes from an unholy place or method, God will not accept it.  It matters what we do for a living.  It matters where our offerings come from. 

            Consider all the things that God designates as holy—His Temple the church, the offices in that church, the commandments, the Word, the scriptures, the Law, the priesthood and nation (also the church), our greeting to one another, and I could go on and on.  Just run a search on the word “holy” with a Bible program as I did and you will find all these and more.  We are to show somehow that we understand the difference between these sacred things and the ordinary things of the world. 

            So what does that mean in daily life?  I think it might mean something different in each culture.  It might not mean that I must put on a three piece suit to bring my offering, but it certainly means I must clean up my heart before I even attempt to offer it.  Didn’t Jesus say to leave one’s gift at the altar and first make amends with a brother?  Surely the state of my heart affects my gifts in several ways. 

           As for the gifts of worship themselves, it may not mean we must sing four part harmony in straight quadruple rhythm at a constant adagio (slow and somber) pace, but maybe it means I must be careful about singing the Holy Word of God to something that sounds like it came out of a jukebox on the “Happy Days” set.  Here is what worries me the most:  can we even see that some things might be inappropriate?  If Ezekiel told us we were no longer making a distinction between the holy and the common, would we have any idea what he was talking about?  Do we make the arrogant and presumptuous mistake of saying to God, “Your thoughts are my thoughts and I’d like this gift, so surely you would?”  Did that work when you bought your wife a vacuum cleaner for your anniversary?

           When I bring my sacrifices to God, whether it is a life lived in holiness or my songs of praise or the gift of my increase, I must realize that this is something special in the eyes of God, that He expects me to bring it with holy hands and a holy heart and the seriousness that speaks of recognizing my obligations before a holy God.  Moses was told to take off his shoes because he was standing on Holy ground.  What are we willing to shed to show God the reverence He has always required of His people?
 
“There is none holy like the LORD: for there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God. 1Sam 2:2
 
Dene Ward