Strings Attached

Scripture: Genesis 13; Mark 10.35-45; Luke 9.24

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in the notorious Shawshank prison. Red saw the best years of his life slowly fade away behind prison walls. Every five or ten years he would come up for parole. The parole board would ask him if he was rehabilitated and he would answer, “Oh yes, without a doubt. I am fully rehabilitated and no threat to society.” And every time they would deny his parole and send him back to his cell.

After maybe thirty years in Shawshank, Red comes up before the parole board again. This time, he has no hope or care that they will listen to him or believe him. So he tells the truth:

“What is it that you want to hear, that I’m sorry?” Red asks them.

“Well, are you?”

“ Not a day goes by that I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was, a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime.

I wanna talk to him, talk some sense to him; tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I gotta live with that.”

Bad decisions we gotta live with. Now that’s a topic.

What if we were all time travelers? What if we could go back in time and change any moment that we wanted. What would you go back and change?

I can think of so many. They are so obvious now. I’m not talking about things like, you would go back to 1980 and buy Wal Mart stock. I’m talking about situations in your life where you made a choice and you wish you would have chosen other; decisions and moments that would shape your life for years to come, maybe forever.

As I said, they are so obvious now. But they weren’t all that obvious then were they? Maybe a few. But it’s amazing how huge decisions and events in our lives come unannounced and unpredicted. Life-changing moments often come wrapped in the mundane. While you are taking out the trash or picking your kids up from soccer, the earth moves.

“You rarely know up front the eternal significance of a moment,” Erwin McManus writes.

Abram and Lot were family. Lot was Abram’s nephew. They had all come to Canaan with Terah, Abram’s father. The book of Genesis tells us that Abram went to Canaan because God told him to. God made big promises to Abram – “you will be the father of a nation, in fact many nations will be blessed because of you.”

Abram wanted to go with Terah his father to Canaan; but Abram also had a divine mandate to do so. God so much said, “This is a moment that will change your life.”

Lot had no such call like Abram had, at least that we know of. God didn’t speak to him or tell him that his life, too, would change. The Scripture simply says, “and Lot went with him.”

Lot went along for the ride.

After some years of trouble and hardship in Egypt Abram and Lot and their families are back in Canaan and they are doing fairly well. They have flocks and herds (the staple of wealth in that nomad culture), they have silver and gold. But they also have a problem. Their caravans have grown so large that the land cannot sustain them both at once. There’s not enough graze and not enough water for them all. So Abram suggests to his nephew that they split up. He doesn’t want there to be any animosity or trouble between their families, because they are family. Abram makes this offer – you pick whichever direction to want to go, to whatever part of this country you want to go and I will go the opposite direction. And Lot agrees to this sound proposal.

Now. If we could, we might want to go back in time and stand beside Lot. Why? Because this is one of those life-changing decisions. In this moment, Lot’s future is going to be shaped for good or ill. We might want to stand beside him and make a suggestion. We might even want to blow a horn or wave a banner or something. This moment is that important.

“So Lot looked about him, and saw that the plain of Jordan was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord. . .so Lot chose for himself all the plain of Jordan, and Lot journeyed eastward.” Genesis 13:10-11


At first glance, it sounds like Lot made a good decision. Get the well-watered, fertile valley. That’s good land. That’s a good decision. But I left out one part of the scripture that is mentioned sort of parenthetically –
“this was before the Lord had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.”

You’ve heard of these places right? From the Hebrew, Sodom and Gomorrah might be translated, “Sin City”, “Hell town”, “Las Vegas.”

What the scripture is hinting at is that by choosing the land that he did, Lot put himself on a collision course for these twin temptresses. And there are just certain places that you shouldn’t go; certain things you shouldn’t do.

Somebody should stick a sign up along the way for Lot, like the sign in the Wizard Oz in the forest on the way to the witches castle, “I would go back if I were you.”

I’m no believer in a rigid predestination. I believe that we always have a choice, even in the most dire of circumstances. Lot and his family would probably suffer needlessly because of Lot’s simple choice of direction. But that’s not the whole story. Lot had choices. Even when he got into big trouble, God rescued him more than once.

But Lot strikes me as someone who doesn’t easily learn a lesson. Lot is a follower, which is good if he is really committed to following the right person. His problem is the commitment part. He follows as long as it seems good to him. As long as it doesn’t cost too much.

Lot is like the two men in the parable of the sons that Jesus tells in Matthew 21. A man had two sons. He went to the first son and told him to get to work in the field, but the boy said no I don’t want to. But later on, the boy changed his mind and went to work. The father went to the second son and told him to get to work in field and that son said, sure, I’ll go. But then he never went. Lot is that second son. He says he will follow and obey, but he lacks the follow through.

How many of us are the second son? We want to listen to the Father. But other things come up. It gets late in the day and we don’t feel like obeying anymore.

Or, we tell ourselves (and tell God) that we will live a godly life if certain things fall into place. If we get the job we want, the lifestyle we want, or the relationship we want. We want to pick and choose our moments to follow God. We put strings on our relationship with God – like the disciples telling Jesus, “We want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

The other day I was looking at some pictures of my kids and I marveled once again, I can’t believe they are this beautiful. Are they really this beautiful? I often don’t notice because they’re always moving. Life is always moving. Life is not really like a snapshot. Life is blurry home-movie.

That’s the thing about choosing your moments. Time doesn’t wait for you. The time you are about to choose your moment, the moment is gone. So what’s the answer? What’s the difference between someone like Lot and someone like Abram?

Abram moved with God. Abram trusted God to care for him and fulfill his promises. Abram knew that as long as he walked with God, the moments of life-changing impact would take care of themselves, because after all, God was in charge of those moments. Great athletes talk about “letting the game come to them.” Abram believed God and let the moments come to him. Abram believed God knew what he was doing.

That level of trust in an invisible deity is really quite something. Are you ready to trust that God knows what he wants to do with your life? Are you ready to give over control?

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” Luke 9.24

Are you moving in the right direction? Are you moving with God?