And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. (Fil 1,9-11)

God's goal with us is not for us to remain childish, naive, blinded, as one might think of the way of following God, in the sense of "thinking teaches one to doubt, and therefore it must be limited in order to believe." But true faith does not limit, but liberates; the problem is not whether or not to think, but how. Paul, on the other hand, wants the Philippians to grow in their knowledge and deep discernment.

"To discern what matters". To recognize what matters is one of the most important things we should learn in our lives. Lot couldn't do it, and he didn't even know he was missing it. His life, until the arrival of God's messengers, had been on a track that, despite some negatives, more or less matched his expectations, and therefore he would not change on his own. He would not have left Sodom and would have eventually shared its fate.

But at the same time, this lack of knowledge of what mattered determined his life far more than he thought. It took him away from Abram, away from the community worshipping the only God, into a vibrant modern city, into a system that, while he had not entirely fallen into, he had not had the strength to leave. Gradually there was more and more things around him that he was not winning over, where it was not he who held the reins, in short, much that was "dragging" him somewhere. It's a nice term, often used for chaff driven by the wind. What is not valuable, pure, is easily carried away by the various currents.

"That ye may discern what matters, and be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, full of the fruits of righteousness..." Lot did not discern, and therefore lacked the fullness of the fruit at the moment of reckoning. On the contrary, in the cave he found himself in utter poverty in every sense of the word - despite (or because of) the fact that he had chosen prosperity for himself in the first place. He may have retained personal righteousness, but if Sodom had not burned at that time and he had lived a long life there, the fullness of eternal fruit would have been lacking in his life anyway. He would not have had it, because in the depths of his life he did not draw from God.