Our scripture reading today is Genesis 19 verses 12 to 17 and
23 to 26. This is our last Sunday on the,
the theme and the events surrounding the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah. And we're going to take a look
at this now from kind of Lot's perspective and follow Lot more
specifically through this. And so the, the verses that I've
chosen are really just a sampling of, of verses I'm going
to reference here today. But I, I, it's kind of the heart
of it and will get us moving in the right direction here this
morning. So verses in Genesis 19, the two
men said to Lot. Do you have anyone else here,
sons in The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great
that he has sent us to destroy it.
So Lot went out and spoke to his sons in law who were pledged to
marry his daughters. He said, hurry and get out of
this place, because the Lord is about to destroy the city.
But his sons in law thought he was joking.
With the coming of dawn the angels urged Lot, saying, Hurry,
take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you
will be swept away when the city is punished.
When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand in the hands of
his wife and his two daughters and LED them safely out of the
city, for the Lord was merciful to them.
As soon as they had as He, they had brought them out.
One of them said, Flee for your lives, Don't look back, and
don't stop anywhere in the plain.
Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away.
By the time Lot reached Zohar, the sun had risen over the land.
Then the Lord rained down, burning sulphur on Sodom and
Gomorrah from the Lord out of the heavens.
Thus He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying
all those living in the cities and also the vegetation in the
land. But Lot's wife looked back and
she became a pillar of salt. May the Lord add His blessing to
the reading and hearing of His word.
There is a whole new profession in the world that didn't exist
when no one asked me when I was graduating from high school or
when I was in college, Hey, what do you want to be when you what
they did ask me, what do you want to be when you grow up?
None of them ever said. Have you ever thought about
being an influencer? It's a thing now.
It's been a thing for a little while.
I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around the
fact that that some people's jobs, I'm an influencer and I do
it on social media. People do it, they make lots of
money and sometimes they have a lot of influence too.
But I think this is a good question because this question
of influence is an important question.
And it's an important question for the church, for followers of
Jesus, for us to always be asking ourselves, are you an
influencer or are you just influenced?
Are you having an impact and making a difference in the lives
and the culture and the atmosphere around you?
Or are you just taking on the characteristics of the culture
in which you live? This is an incredibly important
question. And I think it's a question
that's at the heart of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah and that whole region. Let's take a look.
And we again, we remember this from several chapters ago and
several months ago, that Abraham lived in the land of Canaan
while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his
tents near Sodom. How they got there was again,
Abraham gave Lot. Abraham gave Lot the choice.
We got to divide up. There's too many of us.
We got too many flocks. We got to divide up.
Do you want the lowlands in the Jordan River Valley or do you
want the Highlands, kind of rockier, Hillier area up here
for you to settle? And Lot looked down and said, I
want the low ones in the Jordan Valley.
And he pitched his tent. He set up his household near the
city of Sodom. And at that point, Lot could
have said, I want to have an impact and Sodom and Gomorrah.
I want to influence Sodom and Gomorrah.
I've heard Abram tell me all about what God told him that God
told him, You know, leave this land of your ancestors.
Follow me to your place. Well, where are we going, God?
I'll let you know when we get there.
Will it be good? You'll see when we get there.
And we got here and this is it. This is it.
And God brought the Abraham, Abram, through all of these
difficulties, he's blessed him, made him a wealthy man, and has
promised him that through him all the nations of the world
will be blessed. And I want to start that now.
I want to be a blessing to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I want to be a blessing. And I want to help them see and
know how good it is to follow the Lord and the Lord's ways.
That could have been what Lot did, but it wasn't.
It wasn't whether it was in his mind at any level.
We do not. We do not really know it all,
but it's certainly not what he did.
It's certainly not Lot after having spent, we don't know
exactly, probably 15-10, fifteen years or more in Sodom and
Gomorrah. And he went from living near
Sodom to living in the city. He went from being the total
stranger and newcomer to being one of the judges, one of the
leaders of the city. That's why he was at the city
gate when the angelic visitors came.
That's where the judges went. The leaders hung out and they
listened to people and talked to people and greeted people and
made decisions and those kinds of things became a leader in the
city of Sodom. But in all of that time, he had
zero impact. He had zero influence.
Remember, Abraham said there's 10 righteous people there.
God, will you save Sodom and Gomorrah?
Will you spare them for the sake of 10 righteous people?
And after all of those years of Lot being there, a lot who knew
the promises God had made a Brahm, who knew the blessings
that God had given a Brahm, who knew the blessing of following
God's ways and living God's ways, who knew all of those
things first hand. Eyewitness experience.
Part of it. Part was saved by a Brahm
through the power of God when Lot and his family had been
taken as political captives. With all of that background, Lot
had zero influence in that city. Zero influence for good anyway.
Instead, Lot and his family simply became like the culture
in which they left. They were influenced rather than
being influencers. Lot failed to influence his
community and his family failed to influence his community.
So his family, Here's what family we know of.
We had Lot added Lot's wife. Lot and his wife had two
daughters. That's four.
Each of their daughters was engaged.
That's 6. They were 60% of the way to the
10 people they needed for God to have mercy on an entire
civilization. 10 people away. 4, Four people away.
There were six of them. I've got trouble with my
fingers. There were six of them.
They were four people away and they didn't have it.
In fact, I, I, I kind of think they were 10 people away to be
honest. The the chapter 19 finishes
saying God saying he spared Lot for Abraham's sake, not for
Lot's own righteousness. Instead of influencing the
community, they were just influenced by it.
Instead of helping people around them put their faith in God,
they were putting their faith in the culture of that community.
Instead of helping those folks live the way of God, they were
living the way of that community.
He had zero influence. He had zero influence on his
family, his sons and his future sons in law.
They called him sons in law. It's kind of like when when
you're engaged in those cultures, it was a much more
serious commitment than being engaged in in our culture.
So that's why even though they weren't married yet, they could
still be called sons in law. There was that much of A
commitment. These, these men, his daughters
were going to marry. When Lot tells them we got to
go, we got to go. They thought it was a joke.
They thought it was just that Lot was someone to be laughed at
and all of that. No influence, no impact on them.
I mean, this was the God that had saved Lot and his family
when they were taking his political prisoners and they had
so little impact. His own family just thought he
was nuts, thought he was a joke when he said that.
His own wife, his own wife who had come to love the culture and
the city of Sodom so much that as they were miles away on the
edges of the mountain and and the city was being destroyed,
Lot's wife was longing to return to that place.
It wasn't just she glanced back over her shoulder.
It's that she wanted to go back to that way of life.
She wanted to return to that culture.
She wanted to return to that way of doing things.
And so she died, too. And then they get up in the
mountains and now it's just Lot and his daughters.
And they do unspeakable things to their father so that they can
carry on their own families. No impact.
No impact on his sons in law, no impact on his wife, no impact on
his daughters. They had completely absorbed the
corrupt culture in which they lived.
Lot failed to influence. Lot failed to influence his
community and his family. Why?
Why was he such a failure? I think it's because he focused
on the wrong thing. Lot lost his focus, or maybe he
never had the right focus, but Lot focused on the wrong things.
When Abraham was giving him the choice, Abraham could have made
the choice himself. But Abraham said to Lot, you
pick where you want to live, I'll take what's left.
And Lot picked the Jordan Valley.
Why? Let's go back and look at it
again. Lot looked around and he saw
that the whole plain of the Jordan towards Zohar was well
watered, like the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.
So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and
set out toward the east. Lot said.
I can make money there. That that like the land of Eden
and like like Egypt meant there's prosperity to be had
there. That's good fertile land.
I can raise lots of flocks. I can grow food.
I can. I can make a lot.
This was a financially motivated decision, a prosperity motivated
decision. This was this was, I want to go
there because I can get good stuff from there.
Remember, though, why God had called Abram to leave his
homeland and come to this promised land.
Not so Abram could get in. His family could get good stuff
from there. Although God did give them good
stuff, but he brought them there so they could be a blessing and
eventually a blessing to every nation.
Alert. But Lot wasn't looking at the
Jordan Valley, thinking, how can I go down there and be a
blessing there? When Abraham gave him that
decision, his thought wasn't, you know what, let me choose the
place where I can have the greatest impact to help people
live in God's way. It was, I can make a lot of
money there. I can get good stuff there.
I can get good things for me and for my family.
Lot lost his focus, if he ever had it.
His focus was not on how to be a blessing.
His focus was not on how to serve God.
His focus was not on how can I help other people live in God's
ways. His focus was how can I maximize
benefits for me and my family. And the way to maximize benefits
for him and his family was to go along and get along.
Man, their digs are doing great here.
Lot of money, people living an ease and and they know how to do
it. I'll do it like they do it.
And he did it like they did it. And his family got what they
got. No influence, no impact.
I want to put someone out here by way of comparison.
Anyone know the name Eric Little?
Is that a name you're familiar with?
I knew you would. I knew you'd know that.
Anyone who you? You and I watch a lot of the
same movies. I think Chariots of Fire is an
old movie. My opinion, my humble opinion,
this is not thus saith the Lord. I think it's best sports movie
ever made. True story and it focus.
One of the main characters is Eric Little.
It's kind of a mirror image of Lot.
Eric Little had his focus. He was in school and university
in Edinburgh in Scotland, training to be a missionary.
He was going to go to China and be a missionary.
This was in the 1920s, but Eric Little was also very gifted in
athletics. He played rugby for Scotland's
national team and was very good at it and he was very fast.
He was a very fast runner. And so as the 1924 Olympics that
were to be held in Paris, as those approached Eric Little,
much to the chagrin of his sister and some of his others,
close friends and people that are around him, he he put a
pause on his missionary training to go to the Olympics and
compete in the Olympics. And he qualified, he qualified
in the 100 meter dash to go to the Olympics in Paris in 1924.
And his sister and friend came to him and said, we think you've
lost your focus, Eric. You need to be focused on the
mission field, not distracted by sports and glory and competition
and cameras and fame. You're losing your focus.
And Eric said, I'm not losing my focus.
I'm not losing my focus. I love what you said in the
movie. I don't know if it's a direct
quote or not. I hope it is.
He said God made me. I know God made me for a
purpose. God made me for mission.
God made me for China. But God also made me fast.
And when I run I feel his glory. My favorite lines ever,
anywhere. It's good.
He was focused and he went to compete in the Olympics and on
the way there he was tested right off the bat because part
of his Christian tradition was a very, very, very high level
honoring of the Sabbath. You did not work on the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was God's day, and all you did on the Sabbath day
was honor God. You went to worship, you went to
church. You didn't do anything else
except the qualifying heats for the 100 meter dash were on a
Sunday. And so Eric announced to his
team mates and to the leaders of the British Olympic team, I
can't run on Sunday. I'm not going to run on Sunday.
He was their only person, as far as I know, he was their only
chance at meddling in the 100 meters.
And he backed out. He said I'm not going to do it.
And all of this pressure came on him to compete.
And they sat him down in a room surrounded by very wealthy, very
powerful, very influential people, including the Crown
Prince of the Prince of Wales, the Crown Prince of England
himself, his future king, to persuade him to compete on the
Sabbath. I've got a video clip of that.
I might need you to turn the volume up on this, Don.
And we'll see that it's, it's all dialogue and it's fairly
quiet. Let's see how it goes.
Lord Birkenhead has advised us as to your attitude towards your
participation in the 100 meters heats little Or would your non
participation be more accurate? It would say yes.
We were also consulted as to the correct manner in which to
approach the French. Something we just can't allow to
happen. Going cabin hand to the frogs of
all people, simply out of the question.
Simple matter of national dignity.
Little being a patriot, I'm sure you understand.
Well, I must say so I felt it was an impractical suggestion
from the start. Why did you say so, ma'am?
As an athlete, you value economy of effort.
I wanted to run. I was desperate not to try
anything. Well, all that being understood,
we decided to invite you in for a little chat to see if there's
any way that we can help resolve the situation.
There's only one way to resolve the situation, that's for this
man to change his mind and run. Don't state the obvious,
Gadagan. We have to explore ways in which
we can help this young man to reach that decision.
I'm afraid there are no ways, Sir.
I won't run on the Sabbath, and that's final.
I intended to confirm this with Lord Birkenhead tonight, even
before you called me up in front of this inquisition of yours.
Don't be impertinent little. The impertinence lies so with
those who seek to influence our mind to deny his beliefs.
Our country, little. We're appealing to your beliefs
in your country. No King.
Your loyalty to them. Yeah, Here.
In my day it was King first, God after.
Yes, and the war to end was bitterly proved your point.
God made countries, God makes kings, and the rules by which
they govern, and those rules say that the Sabbath is his, and I
for one intend to keep it. That way, Mr. Liddle, you're a
child of your race, as I am. We share a common heritage,
common bond, a common loyalty. There are times when we're asked
to make sacrifices in the name of that loyalty.
Without the my allegiance is worthless.
As I see it. For you this is such a time.
So God knows I love my country, but I can't make that sacrifice
little. It's like a mirror image of a
lot. He was focused, and his focus
was not on what's good for me, what can I get, what can it add
to my wealth, my privilege, my position, my status, None of
that. His focus was on God.
What does God want? What does God want from me?
And I will do that no matter what the cost, no matter what
the cost. And I will trust that God will
bless me in whatever way God sees fit and God sees
appropriate. Now, if you know the story, you
know that Little eventually did run in the Olympics.
Not because he was willing to violate his conscience and run
on the Sabbath, but because one of his team mates decided to
give up his spot in the 400 meter dash.
And there was no heat on Sunday. And so instead of running in the
100 meters, Eric ran in the 400 meters.
And Eric won gold medal in the 400 meters.
And God blessed him in the eyes of the whole world.
And then the next year, in 1925, Eric went to China as a
missionary. Eric had a long and significant
career in ministry, not significant in the sense of
drawing huge crowds. The significant in the sense of
the impact on the lives of people who said he made a
tremendous was a tremendous influence and their faith and
their growth and their following of God.
And he was in China when World War 2 started.
He was in China when Japan invaded, and he was sent to a
Japanese prison camp. Not a good place to be.
And that's where he died, in a prison camp in China held by the
Japanese. And you know what he did while
he was there? He preached sermons and he led
Bible studies, and when someone was hungry, he gave up his food.
And when someone needed medicine, he gave them his
medicine. All the way through, Eric Little
kept his focus right where it needed to be, on God.
On what does God want me to be doing to be a blessing to
others? And he had an impact.
He had an impact. I would love to know.
I don't know if there's any way of finding out.
Maybe it'll be in the Kingdom of heaven, meeting some sisters and
brothers from China who were followers of Jesus Christ in my
lifetime because of what Eric did in his lifetime.
That's the kind of impact we can have, what it means to be an
influencer rather than just being influenced.
But Lot failed and his failure had massive implications.
When we fail to focus on God, when we fail to be an influencer
and instead are just influenced by the culture around us, those
those that failure has implications that are both
horizontal and vertical. Horizontal meaning in our own
time period, in our lifetime. I've already talked about the
horizontal implications. Lot's wife, Lot's sons in law,
Lots daughters, and every single person the Lot ever had lunch
with went to their house for dinner, shared in business
associations with on the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, lost
their lives, or their lives were otherwise destroyed by Lot's
failure of influence. But it also had vertical that
impact goes over time. And we don't know exactly, or at
least you know, hard to find out in the United States right now,
the vertical, the, the influence over time that Eric Little had.
But we know the influence over time that Lot's failure had the
daughters, his lot, Lot's daughters who had children by
him. Those children, their
descendants became nations that stayed in the land of Canaan.
And when Abraham's descendants left Egypt and we're on their
way back to the Promised Land, lots descendants stood in their
way and fought them to keep them from coming back.
Our failure to have an impact doesn't just affect us and the
people around us right now. It can affect people for
generations and generations and generations to come.
So what does this mean for us? What are the practical
applications for us here? Just a couple of things that I
wanted to take note of. 1 is we need to be aware of our own
limits, including our capacity to influence.
See, it's easy to throw stones at lot.
I'm, I don't and I'm not doing this to throw stones at Lot, but
to see the possibilities of, to see what happened a lot so we
can avoid it in our own life if we can.
Because Lot could have avoided this for his family and himself
at least if perhaps he had set back and said, you know what,
what's going to happen to me and my family if we go there?
Can I really be an influence there?
Oh well, I really become like them.
And will my family just become like them and face the same, you
know, adopting the same destructive mindsets, the same
destructive lifestyles, and facing the same destructive
future that they face? Beware of our own capacity to
influence, particularly at times, our lack of capacity,
because there's some places we can be an influence and some
places we can't. And the decision on that is a
decision that has to be made by prayer, not simply by rule.
There's some churches and church groups that make it by rule and
they isolate themselves and insulate themselves and, and
they insist on having a separate kind of subculture.
And we won't even interact with people outside of that culture
if we can avoid it. And, and we'll never go to a
restaurant that sells alcohol or never buy from a grocery store
that sells alcohol. We'll never hang out with me.
My mom was, you know, she tasted a little bit of that.
Her family was, was very strict in some ways.
She never, you know, there was never a deca playing guards in
her house growing up and and individual, you know, personal
policies like that are not the issue.
But God does not call us to cut ourselves off from the culture
that's around us. Otherwise we can't be an
influence. We can't have an impact.
So Jesus said, well, we're told of Jesus that he was a friend of
sinners. Jesus went to the houses of
people that were known to be sinful people.
He ate with them, He became friends with them, He invited
them to follow him. And he calls us to do the same.
To cross cultural lines, to cross cultural barriers.
Not to live in silos. Not to wrap ourselves, our
families or our churches and bubble wrap and try to keep all
the bad people out and away at arm's distance.
But to embrace folks in the culture, folks that are
righteous people and folks that are sinful people and love them
and welcome them and be in relationship with them, to seek
them out. But there's a tension between
that and Lot pitching his tent near Sodom, in which we have to
ask ourselves on an ongoing basis, is this a relationship in
which I can be an influence or which I will simply be
influenced? There's some easy examples.
I don't want to spend too much time on this.
We're going to give you 2 easy examples to kind of get a sense
of it. If Europe, if there's a person
who is 2 years sober recovering from, you know, decades of
alcohol addiction, the local bar is probably not your mission
field, right? That's don't go there if you're
if you're just, you know, if you're too, you're some folks
that are 10 or 15 years sober won't go there.
They say I can go there, but I know that they will influence
me. I won't influence them.
I'll simply go back to being what I was being what folks
there are. I won't influence them.
They'll influence me. That's wisdom.
That's wisdom is you find someplace else to be an
influence there. The nice thing about the world
is there sinners everywhere, all over the place.
We can make friends of sinners anywhere.
You know, by the other place where I saw this over and over
again was when I was working with kids in the juvenile
detention center up in Seneca County.
And they would come, they'd be there for a while.
They're sure never going to change.
They're going to change, never going to come back here again.
And six months, nine months, 12 months later, they're back. 9
times out of 10, as they told me their stories, it went something
like that and things were going great.
I decided when I left, I wasn't going to go hang out with my old
friends anymore. But you know, they're my friends
and I, I want to hang out. So I was hanging out with them
at school. I was like, well, I'll just hang
out with them at school, but I won't go to their house.
Well, I went to their house. I was like, well, I'll go there
and I, but I'm just not when they, when they're passing the
pot around, I'm not going to take any of the pot.
They took the pot and then then they're smoking the pot and
they're doing all the same stuff they were doing before because
they put themselves back into an environment where they had no
chance of having a meaningful influence on the people around
them. Then every chance that those
people around them would simply pull them right back to what
they didn't want to be. We have to be discerning.
And that's it's not a matter of rulemaking.
It's a matter of prayer. It's a matter of talking with
God about it and people around us that are wise enough to say,
yeah, yeah, don't go there. You go hang out.
And it could be whether it's, you know, it could be any, it
could be relationships. It could be a group of it could
be a, a single relationship. Yeah.
Every time you get it with that person, you become this other
person that is, just don't do it.
You know, we've got to make those kind of decisions.
We've got to be discerning enough to see how relationships
affect us so that we can see this is a place where I can be
of influence, but this is a place where I will simply be
dragged down. I will be influenced.
Those are hard decisions to make, and those are best made in
prayer with wise people around us who know us and love us well,
so we can ask them and ourselves, to what degree can I
keep my focus on Jesus and his call in any given situation?
That's the thing. Because Lot, maybe Lot, was
never going to influence Sodom. Maybe Lot's best decision would
have been, you know what, I can make a lot of money down in the
Jordan Valley. But if I go hang out down there,
yeah, I'm just going to want to join right in.
I think I'll stay up here in the hills.
I'll let Uncle Abram go down there.
He's better at that than I am. But not getting caught up in
that stuff. That could have been Lot's
decision. He might never have had an
influence. It might have been no chance
that he was ever going to have any meaningful influence on
Sodom and Gomorrah. But think how different his
family would have been. Think how different his
descendants would have been if Lot had made that kind of
decision. One last person I want to talk
about as a as another actual current example of someone who's
not like Lot, and that is Maria Carina Machado.
You've heard that name. I suspect if you follow the news
at all or social media much you've heard of Maria Carina
Machado. She is currently living and
hiding in Venezuela. She is by birth.
Her family was wealthy business folks in Venezuela.
That's what she wanted to be. Well, she wanted to be an
engineer and she became an engineer.
She went to school to become an industrial engineer.
I don't know exactly what industrial engineers do, but I,
I just, the name tells me I could.
I'm not smart enough for that job.
And she was good at it. And that's what she wanted to
do. That's what she wanted to be.
Life was going on great, but politics in her country was
going bad and had been bad and was getting worse.
And people kept saying you should step in, you should step
in, you should do something. And she did.
She eventually became a politician pushing for
democracy, pushing for freedom, pushing for free enterprise in
her country and and the leaders of her government and the other,
the main person, Maduro, tyrannical dictator who trumped
up a bunch of charges against her.
She's been accused of every crime you can think of.
When the election time rolled around in 2024, she wanted to
run for president of Venezuela, but that but Maduro and his his
regime said that she could not run.
She was not allowed to appear on the ballot.
She could not run for election. She was a criminal.
She could not be president. And so she convinced a friend,
an old guy, to run in her name as a proxy.
His name would be on the ballot, but everyone would know that a
vote for him was really a vote for Maria Machado.
Anyone know what percentage of the vote she got?
90%, Ninety. I mean, I can't even imagine
that. I've never even heard of a
school board election getting 90% much less president of a
country 90% of a vote when she wasn't even legally allowed to
run and Maduro was done with her and declared her an outlaw and a
traitor. And she lives in hiding, and
most of her supporters don't even know where she is right
now. But she continues to post on
social media. She continues to assert that
Maduro's government is failing and will fall, that democracy
and freedom will prevail in Venezuela, and that good things
will come to her people there. Now, here's the thing.
Machado is she's not a pastor. She's not a missionary like Eric
Little, and she's not a nomad like Abraham, following God from
place to place. She's a engineer and a
businesswoman and a politician. But she is a staunch Christian.
Her version of her her the tradition she grew up in happens
to be Catholic, because that's the the dominant Christian
tradition in Venezuela. But she prays throughout her
country. She prays for her people.
One of the ways her people primarily show their support for
her is whenever she goes someplace, they'll give her
rosaries. And rosaries, A, it's a tool
that Catholics use for prayer. You use that I'm not sure exact,
but each bead reminds you to pray for a different thing.
And she's collected these rosaries all over and she
praised them, and she prays for her people.
And she sees her struggle and has openly said it's not just
political, it's not just business.
This is a spiritual struggle that God has given her and she's
put herself at risk. She's put her family at risk.
Her children have had to flee the country.
Well, I don't know whether they fled, but they're not in the
country. I don't know whether it's, I
suspect part of it is fleeing, but her, her children are at
risk. She's at risk.
She has to live in hiding. She's had such an influence and
such an impact on so many people because she kept her focus.
She kept her focus on the mission and the ministry and the
calling. For her, it was freedom and
democracy to lead her country back into that.
And, and instead of going along to get along, instead of seeking
the good that came from participating with the regime,
she stood against it. And it's cost her a lot that
she's being an influencer rather than being influenced.
This is the question that we all have.
Not all of us are going to have a chance to win a Nobel Prize.
I can virtually guarantee you I'm not going to win a Nobel
Prize. It would be startlingly
surprising. That's all right.
Leave that to other folks. I just want to have an influence
on my family and my friends and my community.
I want people to feel like they've been blessed rather than
that I've just gotten something from them that, that, that, that
somehow, in small ways or large, they know that God loves them
because of what I do or what I say, that they're built up and
encouraged. And we all have this
opportunity. We all have this choice.
We're not. I'm not, you know, maybe we
might have some future social media influencers in here.
I don't know. I, I suspect it would be the two
youngest people here that are the most likely to become social
media. And you want to be a social
media influencer? No.
OK, All right. You want to be a social.
No. All right.
No social media influencers. That's all right.
That's it. But we're all, we all have the
choice whether we're on social media or not, whether we'll be
an influencer or whether we'll just be influenced.
Let's follow Eric Little, let's follow Machado and influence
those around us in Jesus name, Amen.