Thank you for sharing in those songs of praise this morning which speak of encouraging us in our walk with the Lord, that we would seek to walk closer to Him. As we look at the book of Romans, Paul, as we said it when we first began the study, in verses 16 and 17 lays out the theme of the book, and the theme of the book is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and how you and I have been called to share that gospel, and the importance of sharing it. Part of having a desire to share it is to be drawn closer to the Lord daily, and to seek to walk with Him.
Paul is laying out the fact that we live in a world that is going the opposite way than seeking higher ground. The going down. We are going to look at the last portion of chapter 1 today, and as we look at the last portion of chapter 1, you are going to see that when man turns his back on God and the revelation that God has given to him, even the revelation that was revealed to us in Psalm 8 that we read this morning, where David said that the heavens declare the glory of God, and that around us we see His creative work, and we can’t deny it.
Yet men and women that we meet every day deny who God is, deny He is their Creator, deny accountability to Him, deny the truth that has been established that reveals why we are here, the purpose we are here, God’s intent for us when we are here, and many of them go through life seeking to find the very things that God desires they would turn to Him to find. I want us to see what Paul shares, and it is becoming very sobering as he begins to continue this letter to the Romans. The things that he is going to talk about today in this particular part of the letter have become commonplace in Rome.
Rome, during the time of Paul, had turned their back on the truth of God. They had become a perverted, evil, wicked culture. And they were going down a vortex of sin and rebellion that would ultimately destroy their own culture.
As one reads this portion from what we studied and read last week to what we are looking at today, and then you look at our culture, you see something very similar. Someone has often said that in studying the history of great cultures and empires, the average age of an empire is two to three hundred years. We celebrate our 250th anniversary as a nation.
And yet, the greatest thing that should have been celebrated was that Jesus Christ established our nation 250 years ago to give us as a people something that no other people, even the nation of Israel, never had because they had not had and seen the gospel reach its fulfillment in the cross of Christ. And yet, we as a nation had seen all of that. We can look back on history and see what God had done in fulfilling His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Fulfilling His promises to bring through the nation of Israel, not only His Word to show us who He is and reveal to us who He is, but also to bring to us His Messiah, the Lamb of God, to take away the sin of the world. And that our nation, albeit even at the beginning, had contrary views within the founding fathers’ belief systems as there were masons there, as there were deists there. But the vast majority of the founding fathers believed in this book and believed in the Bible.
It was amazing. Most people don’t even know that we had another constitution before our constitution. It was called the Articles of Confederation.
The Articles of Confederation had weak points in it. But it had one very, very strong point. In the Articles of Confederation of the Union of the Colonies, it was said that these colonies would be brought together in a confederation for the purpose of bringing glory to Jesus Christ.
And the name of Jesus was included in them. At the time that the constitution was written as we have today, they took Jesus Christ out and replaced it with God. Patrick Henry was very distressed.
He said, you do not know what you have done. By removing the name of the One who is not only our Creator, but our Redeemer, our Savior, and our King, and replaced it with the word that can mean different things to different people. The name Jesus Christ can mean but one thing, and it is the one we honor.
They chose to change it. And today you have people that do not want to acknowledge Jesus. Yet they would say, I’m a conservative American.
They would say, some of them would even say, I go to church. But they don’t want to acknowledge Jesus as Paul laid out in verses 16 and 17. The gospel message, the good news that apart from Jesus Christ, no man has hope.
And none of us can be redeemed. As we come to verse 24 through the end of the chapter, I would like to read first verses 22 and 23, which gives the summary of what Paul saw happening in the life of a non-believer when they reject Jesus Christ.
Romans 1:22-23
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
And so the vortex begins. Let’s read Romans 1:24-32.
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
Let’s just bow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Father as we look at your Word, this is very sobering. As Paul was under the inspiration of your Spirit as he wrote this to the Romans in the Roman Church, the Christians in Rome, in a culture that was very similar to ours today, a culture that was not acknowledging righteousness, truth, or any of the things that are tied to your character, but instead it becomes so wicked, evil and perverse that they could not even pursue truth, but desired that which was evil. Lord, I pray that you would just help us to see the sobering words and then look at why you have left us in this world, that we’re to attain a higher ground and we are to realize what you’ve called us to be and called us to do. Speak to us through your Word this morning, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Professing themselves to become wise, they became fools. We studied last week what it meant to be a fool. A fool is one who says in his heart there is no God.
Professing themselves to be wise, they looked at all the evidence and denied the evidence that revealed that God is who He says He is. They looked at what God had established within their own life and their own body, their own relationships and denied the very things that He had made holy and sacred. It’s interesting that as man begins to turn from God, the downward spiral is very quick.
And it’s also interesting what Satan does. John in his letter to the churches in 1 John says we have three great enemies. The world.
A world system that aligns itself with Satan and does the will and the purposes of Satan in rebellion against God to cause men to be suppressed in their knowledge of the truth and to not reveal to man who God is. That’s a world system. Our own flesh.
Our own flesh which desires to suppress our spirit’s desire to walk with God. Our own flesh which seeks to have its lusts fulfilled. Our own flesh which seeks to turn from its creator and say that I am the one that’s in charge.
I am the one that is worthy of your praise. And then the one that’s the king behind them all, the kingpin of them all, the devil. And there’s the devil who has been there and Jesus Himself outlines in His words to His disciples the character of this one which is not only our archenemy as Christ’s people, but the one who in His delusionary fit of rebellion thinks that He can overthrow the King of kings and Lord of lords.
This one who desires to enslave every man and woman and child in the earth and prevent them from going to Christ and prevent them from knowing the glory of their creator. The fool in his heart has said there is no God and instead he’s embraced the world, the flesh and the devil. And when one embraces the world, the flesh and the devil, one begins to go down this vortex, this spiral downward.
We used to live in an apartment building a number of years ago and the lady that was in the apartment above us had a little child. And that child liked to flush things down the toilet because he liked to see them go and disappear. And so things would get stuck in the toilet.
And then we got showers in our apartment. Why did the child like to see things go down and disappear? It gave him a thrill. That’s a vortex.
You had to have special equipment and special tools. The landlord had to come and he found all kinds of interesting things in the toilet. But you just couldn’t get it by watching it go again and again and again and again.
Nothing would happen except water would run all over. It was wrecked until he fixed it. The vortex of sin is the same way.
That which has use in our life, that which God gave us as gifts, that which God gave us as a reason and purpose, He created us. When we deny who He is, when we become a fool and embrace the world of flesh and Satan, and then we begin to go down the vortex of sin, that which is precious and holy and righteous and true begins to go down this vortex and disappears. And the only way to get it back is to have Jesus Christ come in and get it back for us.
I want us to just look at this, how wicked this vortex is. And I want you to understand how this is impacting our culture. Wherefore, God tells us that He’s telling us this for a reason.
And the reason is found in the two verses that we read at the beginning, which are 22 and 23, where man denies God and has changed the glory of God and that which is incorruptible into that which is corruptible. Because man has done that, something’s happened. First of all, God also gave them up to uncleanliness through the lusts of their own hearts to dishonor their own bodies between themselves.
When people say that men do not have choice, they don’t read Scripture. Why did these people end up going down this vortex of sin? Why do people in our culture today choose sin over righteousness, choose the world, the flesh and Satan over God and Jesus Christ? Because they have a willful choice to make and they choose wrong. They are driven by their own lusts and passions.
They’re driven by their own desires. And they’re driven by a desire not to yield to truth. And it results in a horrendous impact on their life.
And not only on their life, but the lives of those around them. In order to understand the depth of this impact, one needs to go back to the book of Genesis and God reveals to us, as He revealed to Adam and Eve, what the results of sin are. The consequences of sin is death.
Now a lot of people that are living a miserable life because of their choices and their sin, some of them say, well, I’d rather die. But they don’t understand death only begins when we physically stop breathing. Real death begins after that.
You see, death, by definition, refers to separation. When you die physically, an interesting thing happens. Your spirit and your soul are separated from your body.
Today you’re sitting in the pew or you’re listening to this on the radio or the recording and you’re thinking, what do you mean my soul and spirit are separated? I’m the one that’s controlling my body. Well, yeah, you are. Not your brain.
It’s you. Your soul and your spirit. And you allow other influences in to your soul and spirit which impact your body and which can lead to premature physical death but ultimately because of sin each one of us will experience physical death.
But our soul and spirit are still in existence. And God tells us that if we have been a fool we haven’t prepared for what He gave us and that’s an eternal life after we’re created. Whether you accept Christ or reject Christ you face an eternity with that decision.
And as I mentioned, if you have been the one is a fool and embraced the will of the flesh and Satan as your guide what has happened is you have just committed and there’s no turning back once you’ve gone the separate road from your physical body. There’s no second chance. I’ve heard people say when you talk to them about the gospel and giving their life to Christ why would I want to do that? I’ve got too many wild oats I want to see.
I’ve got too many things I want to do. And by that they mean I’ve got too many sins I want to commit. And maybe what I’ll do is wait until I get ready to go into the nursing home then I’ll accept Christ.
I believe this last week there was a young person that was just killed. Well, young relative to me. My daughter picked up the phone to check the weather back in Ramsey because they were getting ready to head home.
And she wanted to see how hot it was going to be. And a news alert came across her phone and it said, I believe it was a 41-year-old man died at the Anoka County Fair last night trying to beat the train as he walked across the tracks. 41, he probably thought he had a lot of time left.
Today the average life of a man in America is close to 80. A woman is over 80. And when people are in their 70s they’re considered young yet.
But he died at 41. He’d been at the fair. He was going home from the fair.
And he died. His choice had been sealed that moment for eternity. People don’t stop and think about it.
They don’t stop and think about choices and consequences in this life. And do I believe in Jesus Christ? Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanliness through the lust of their own hearts to dishonor their own bodies between themselves. God gives us over to our own lusts.
One of the things that is interesting when you read the Scriptures and you look at various people that live that are recorded in the Scriptures, one of the things is the Scriptures do not sugarcoat things. They show you choices and consequences. The nation of Israel had all the truth.
And yet you will read throughout the Old Testament from once you get to the books where the nation of Israel in Exodus begins to go into the land, they begin to make wrong choices. And one wrong choice that really comes to mind because it opened the door to a multiple of wrong choices was when they decided and they were in the land and God had been directing them by judges. And the judges would bring the truth to them.
The judges would speak to them when they began to go off track and rebel against God. He would call them back into a relationship with the Lord. But ultimately God was directing them.
Just as He had directed them through the wilderness, brought them to the promised land and He was still directing their paths through the judges, He was blessing them or He was bringing judgment or chastisement rather upon them in dealing with their choices. All of a sudden the nation of Israel, the elders of Israel looked around. They saw the nations around them and they all had kings.
And they went to Samuel who had been the judge for some time in the land and they told Samuel, we want a king like other nations. We don’t want judges. We want a king.
Samuel went to the Lord. He was very distraught. And he went to the Lord and he said, the people have rejected me.
They don’t want me to be their judge anymore. They want a king like the other nations. You know what the Lord told them? He says, they haven’t rejected you Samuel, they have rejected me.
They have rejected me. You see, I am their king. I am the one that is there to meet all of their needs.
I am the one that is there that created them as a nation. I am the one that has married them as a wife. I am the one that has been there to bless them, to discipline them, to show them righteousness and ultimately to show them the way of salvation through my Son Jesus Christ.
They haven’t rejected you Samuel, they have rejected me. And what did Samuel say? But they want a king.
He’s going to use your money and your possessions to pay for his wars and his expenses and his things that he desires to do at his whims. He’s going to take your sons and place them into his army to fight his battles. He’s going to take your daughters and make them his servants and he will be your king.
And I’m going to give you the desires of your heart. Is that what happened? Just about every king of the southern tribe of Judah to one degree or another did that except for a very handful. And every king of the northern tribe of Israel did that exact same thing.
The only king that consistently sought out the purposes and the will of God was David. And that’s why every other king was measured against David. But David wasn’t the first king of Israel.
The first king of Israel was Saul. And the people did not go to the Lord and consult, Lord, give us a king, a godly man that we can follow and that will lead us down the godly path. Instead, they took measuring sticks and began to measure the heights of the kings around them.
They looked at the muscular build and began to look for men that were muscular and could be muscular. And they began to do a handsome guy contest and see which man was handsomest, tallest, strongest in Israel. We don’t care about his character.
We just want a king like other kings. Did you know that Saul was the first king to begin to introduce the occult into the nation of Israel as a king? Saul was told by God, get rid of all the soothsayers and get rid of all the wizards and all of the witches. And Saul went and did that.
But Saul had no relationship with God. His relationship with God was through Samuel. He would constantly go to Samuel.
What has God got for me today, Samuel? I’ve got this problem. What’s got for me now? And guess what? Samuel, like every other man that’s ever lived, died. And Samuel wasn’t there.
And Saul had a problem. And he didn’t know how to handle the problem. And so Saul, who had put a law into effect, there were to be no mediums, no witches, no warlocks, no occult in the land of Israel, sought out a medium and a witch so that she could communicate with the spirit of Samuel instead of going to the Lord.
The witch of Endor conjured up the spirit of Samuel. And Samuel condemned Saul and said, what are you doing? Saul, the king they had to have, introduced the occult back into Israel. And it only went downhill, except God gave them a reprieve through David.
Well, what happened with the downhill slide? I want you to see this very similar downhill slide in our culture. We don’t want to believe the Bible when it comes to creation and who God is as our Creator. And instead, we’ll believe the vain philosophies of men.
We’ll believe things like the gap theory that’s brought by a philosophy of men into the church. Or we’ll believe some type of Christianized version of evolution that’s brought into the church. Everything that is not literal creation as laid out by God in His Word is standing against God as Creator.
And the church began to do this. Well, what happened with our culture? You had the world of flesh and Satan. They’re all out there saying, yes, bring it in.
Did you know, most people don’t know there was the trial to prove whether creation was true or not. The Scopes Trial. And most people don’t realize the Christians won the Scopes Trial.
Don’t realize it. Evolution didn’t win the Scopes Trial. Christians won the actual trial.
But it was a statement that the attorney for the Christians made that opened the door that allowed evolution and every other lie from Scripture back in. And I believe the question was, where did Cain get his wife? And the guy who was our attorney, who was supposed to be defending the Bible, says, I don’t know. And there are things you just can’t know in the Bible.
And it began to go downhill. Doubt was entering into the church. Doubt was entering into the world around us.
A culture that had a Christian foundation, albeit not all Christians. But the non-Christians began to take over and the Christians began to recede. Well, what happened after that? You take away God as Creator.
You take away God as God. You say there is no God. We can’t know.
And Satan begins to attack everything that’s precious to God. And I want you to see that if you look at every culture that has turned their back on God, you will eventually see sexual perversion. Why is that? God tells us right here.
God created us male and female. God created us one man for one woman. God created the family as the home, the means of passing faith from generation to generation.
God established those things as the first things He established in His creation. And so what does Satan do? He opens up the door, denies that God is God. Then you deny that what he said is of great significance and important.
It is true. It is the foundation for establishing His truth and working out His truth in the culture. You begin to attack that and destroy it.
And you begin to do it by the lust of the flesh. The pride of life. A world system that denies God and Satan who is behind it all.
And what do you see? Well, God gave us over for our vile affections because that is what the people wanted. And it resulted in a natural relationship. A relationship which was wicked and evil.
Woman with woman and man with man. I am not going to go into detail because you know what I am speaking of. But it is unnatural and it is driven by lust.
One looks at Sodom and Gomorrah. The men of the city weren’t there as the welcome wagon to greet those angels. They were driven by lust.
So much lust that God blinded them. And they still probe for the door handle. They still probe to find how to get in.
Such wickedness. How many lives have been ruined because they have been told there is no means to escape the bondage of lust. We have the means.
Proclaim God as God. Proclaim Jesus Christ as the means of salvation. Proclaim Jesus Christ as the means by which you can be saved and you can be delivered.
Call on the name of Jesus. But you have got a culture and a church that wants to deny the power of Jesus. And wants to deny the name of Jesus.
And instead wants to embrace the world, the flesh and Satan. And they go down this vortex of destruction. Verse 28, And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient.
It’s not normal. And today it is so abnormal. That you have leaders in our country that would never name the name of Jesus as the foundation of our land.
Never name the Bible as the basis of truth. But they are our leaders. And they are the ones interpreting our laws.
And it has gotten so bad that one of the Supreme Court Justices sits on the bench. And before she was elected and appointed by the Senate. One of the Senators asked you, give me the definition of a woman.
Know what she said? I am not a biology professor. I can’t give you that definition. And she is the one that is going to be deciding what is a proper relationship between a husband and a wife.
Between a man and a woman. What is a man? What is a woman? Are they different? And I want you to see where this has worked its way out in our culture. Today you have pastors in some of the denominations who fit this lifestyle.
And they are openly embraced. You have a nation where you have men declaring their women. And women declaring their men.
So they can heap their own lusts upon themselves. So you can have a man who is 6 foot 3 or thereabouts. And weighs about 230 pounds.
And can’t beat the other men in his swimming competition. But he sure can beat a 5 foot 11 woman. So he says, I am a woman.
And you have to let me use the women’s locker room when they are there. Because I am a woman. You have to let me swim with the women.
Because I am a woman. I get to compete against them. And when I win the trophies.
I win the trophies as a woman. Because I can’t win it as a man. And much of our country is going, this is a vortex that is going nowhere but down.
And the only way of getting out of that vortex is by the power of Jesus Christ. Just like the only way that our drain of the toilet above our apartment when we were first married could get cleaned out is the landlord had to come and act as the plumber. And pull all the junk out and make it function right again.
The only way our culture is ever going to function right or people are ever going to function right is through the power of Jesus Christ. So in closing, going back to what Patrick Henry said. Our forefathers did not realize the danger they were putting our nation in when they took Jesus Christ out of the Articles, which was in the Articles of the Confederation and did not place them into the Constitution but placed, we were created in the image of God.
But not giving a clear definition of which God. The secular humanist God? The Hindu God? The Muslim God? Or the God of the Bible? Now most of those men, if not all of them, even the ones that were Masons and Deists knew that when they signed the Constitution it was speaking of the God of the Bible. But today we don’t.
Because we’re sliding down a vortex of destruction because we denied Him and God is giving us over to lusts and desires. Let’s just close in prayer. Lord, I pray that You would help us to understand the horror of a situation in denying You.
It doesn’t go up. It goes down. Lord, we’re saying the hymn, Higher Ground.
That should be the desire of every believer in Christ is to go to higher ground. Lord, help us not to be ruled by our lusts, to be yielding to the world, the flesh and the devil. But may we yield to the power of Your Spirit and may we acknowledge that Jesus Christ is our Lord.
Go with us, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.