The Dark Exchange

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Don Filcek; Romans 1:18-32 The Dark Exchange

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,
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Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm glad to be here this morning.
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I'm also glad that you're here, so I'm not preaching to empty seats. Glad that you showed up. I always look forward to Sundays, a chance for us to gather together in the name of Christ, to hear from his word, to sing praises together to our great
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God, and we get to listen to his word that has the power to transform our lives. And today is a special day because, of course, it's
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Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody's gonna get together for parties and watch a game and all that stuff, but my wife and I are kind of pretending that it's really everybody getting together to celebrate her birthday today.
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So if you see my wife, Linda, say happy birthday to her today. She did not want me to say that, so I said it. But yeah, that's just the way it is.
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This morning, we're gonna be working our way through what I call, I borrowed this phrase from another pastor,
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Matt Chandler, at the Village Church in Texas. He, every once in a while, preaches a message he calls a spacemaker message.
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What he says is he says, look to your left and look to your right, because some of you might not be comfortable enough to be here again next week as a result of the content of this message.
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Now, I say that tongue -in -cheek because I hope that everybody hangs in there and sees that what I'm saying this morning comes from God's word.
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But the reality is, it is a potentially offensive and maybe the hot -button topic of our culture and our day and age here in America.
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There is no topic quite as controversial as the topic of homosexuality. But those of you who have been around Recast for a while know that I pick books.
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I walk through books. I try to make clear what God is saying through the books of the
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Bible. And I take them verse by verse, thought by thought, paragraph by paragraph. And so you cannot accuse me of selecting this as one of my top 10 passages to preach on because I'm just going through the book of Romans and we knew it was coming, but here it is anyways.
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And so, like I said, this is not one of my top 10 topics to discuss, but I do believe it's extremely valuable that we take this message on as God telling us how he views things, how he looks at things.
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And it is exactly the text that he desires for us, Recast Church, to be talking about and thinking through this morning.
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My goal, by the way, each and every week as I approach my study, I start on Monday morning and I read the text and I seek to understand how to explain the text.
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I try my best to avoid my opinions and my feelings. Certainly those are part of the process.
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I'm not a completely unbiased individual, but I seek as much as possible to make the word that God has revealed so that we know what he says about subjects and not that you walk away going, wow, that's
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Don's opinion or that's Don's thoughts. That's why I want you to have the Bible in front of you as we talk through these things.
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So let me state clearly at the start of this text that this passage is not first and foremost about homosexuality.
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The fact that it references homosexual practices arrests our attention so much that we might easily miss the larger argument that Paul is making here.
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So I'm gonna be driving for the main point of what Paul is driving for here. And he's building off of a statement last week that the gospel, here's the good news, the gospel brings a righteousness from God to everyone who believes it.
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That there is a righteousness that is available for any and all who would believe and trust that. And in our text this morning, he's starting a long explanation that we all need to grasp, and that is why did we need a righteousness from God?
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Why not work for it? Why not earn it? Why can't we be good enough? Why can't we make ourselves righteous?
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And that's what the text is getting at. You see, I mean, we have to ask ourselves why the atonement for sin?
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Why did Jesus have to come? Why couldn't we just say we're sorry to God and have him forgive us? Why couldn't Adam and Eve in the garden say, oops, our bad,
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I'm sorry, and everything be okay? Why the cross? Why redemption? Why the son of God bleeding and dying for us?
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And in this text then, Paul explains God's wrath towards unrighteousness and towards ungodliness.
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He explains that all have the knowledge of God in our text, and how we've exchanged the glory of God for the created thing.
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We've exchanged the truth of God for lies and served the creature, the created things versus the almighty
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God. And then finally, he's gonna talk about the final exchange. We've exchanged the God -ordained order of things for our own man -made order, for ruling and reigning over ourselves.
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It's a dark text because it's here to clarify just how terrible our rebellion really has been against our gracious and awesome creator,
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God. And so buckle up, and let's turn over to Romans 1, 18 through 32.
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Again, Romans 1, 18 through 32. Turn over there in a
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Bible app or in the Bible you brought with you or grab the Bible under the seat in front of you, but I'd love everybody to see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's very word this morning.
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You can follow along as I read this recast again. The very word of God, what he desires to communicate to us this morning.
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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
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For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
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For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.
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So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.
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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
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Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lion, worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen.
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For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.
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And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
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And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
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They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.
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They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
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Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
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Let's pray. Father, it's a heavy word that we read this morning.
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And I just pray that you would just superintend in our hearts as we've taken on this text to just in humility approach a realization that each one of us have exchanged your glory for lies.
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We've all exchanged the truth for lies. We do that every time we sin. And so Father, I pray that you would deal with each and every person individually this morning in our hearts, not looking and casting our eyes outside of ourselves to those sinners out there, but Father, that you would, in your spirit and in the quiet of our own hearts, deal with us.
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Father, I thank you for a righteousness that comes from you as I read that list of sins there in the end and I see the spiral that you inspired through the
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Apostle Paul that's clarified there, the exchange, the exchange, the exchange, the exchange for what is good, for what is our own self -direction, our own ways, which are sinful rebellion against you.
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Father, I thank you that there is a righteousness that you grant to anyone who would put their faith and trust in you, a calling to a righteous life, a calling to power, a calling to give up our own ways in exchange for the glory and the beauty of Christ.
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And so Father, I pray that it's from that place, not from just the heaviness of this text, but also from the glory, taking into account the context and remembering that we have a righteousness that is from you and that that is our hope that the slide into depravity can be stopped by encountering you and yielding our lives to you.
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And for those of us who that's already taken place in our lives, I pray that our voices would mesh together in glorious singing before you this morning because we are the redeemed, we are those who have believed in you and have been granted righteousness, not that we deserve, but because of your goodness and your kindness to us in Jesus' name, amen.
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You can go ahead and be seated and get comfortable, at least as comfortable as possible considering the subject matter and keep your
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Bibles open to chapter one, verses 18 through 32 so that you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word, very vital that we do that this morning.
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If at any time during the message you need to get up and stretch out, you need more coffee or juice, I think,
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I don't know if there's more donuts back there or not, but if there are, those are available too. Restrooms are out the double doors and down the hallway on the left if you need those.
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But what our goal is, is over the next, you know, the remainder of our time to keep our focus on God's word and really see what he has for us.
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James Montgomery Boyce, who was the pastor for 32 years at 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, compiled his sermons on the book of Romans into a five -volume series and he took seven sermons to preach this text.
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I'm gonna try to do it in one. So I say this to make it clear that it's going to be a survey.
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By nature, I'm always, I always do more study and research than I have time to present to you on a
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Sunday morning. And the reality is, how many of you have been a student of the word for at least a little while? You've been around the Bible, you've been around the church for a while.
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How many of you know that there's a lot of depth and richness to God's word that can't, it doesn't come at you at face value.
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A lot of times you have to dig a little bit deeper and you have to get into it. And so I would encourage you to dig deeper, especially if anything that I say this morning is confusing or unclear, come and grab me and we can talk about this.
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I'm not gonna be able to go over every single phrase that's in this text, but we're gonna see that hopefully
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I'm faithful to the flow of the text and you get it. Paul begins our text by giving us the reason God had to give us righteousness.
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Why did he have to give it? Why couldn't we earn it? Why couldn't, why are we just not good enough in and of ourselves?
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And he begins by stating a word that might already bristle us. It might rub us the wrong way.
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It's the word wrath. Now how many of you like the word wrath? Like that's a really good, that's one of your favorite words, you use it every day.
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Probably not so much, right? But the text says that the wrath of God is already being revealed against ungodliness and unrighteousness.
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So it's important for us to understand that if God's wrath is towards these two categories of things, how many of you wanna know what those categories mean?
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Like isn't that helpful? Like I mean if his wrath is expressed towards unrighteousness and towards ungodliness, how many of you wanna know what ungodliness and unrighteousness are so that we can maybe avoid those things, right?
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Like you might think in those terms, I hope you do anyways, you don't necessarily, go ahead and raise your hand if you do not want to be under the wrath of God.
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Go ahead and raise your hand if that describes you. Okay, so it's helpful for us to define these things. And these two words, ungodliness and unrighteousness that you see in verse 18 are different aspects of sin.
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Ungodliness is a broad category that includes all sins that are oriented against the reverence and honor of God Almighty, the
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Almighty God. Think in terms of things like taking the Lord's name in vain, idolatry, blasphemy, or even just not giving him the praise that is due his name would be ungodliness.
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And so that's the word ungodliness. Unrighteousness is also a broad category that includes more of the sins that are against each other.
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This is kind of the human -based sin, the things that we do that are wrong towards each other, murder, theft, envy, lying, cheating, all of those kinds of things that really impact human relationships with one another.
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And I wanna just suggest to you that Paul isn't giving us those two categories for your benefit so that you can categorize sin.
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Well, that was ungodliness, that was unrighteousness, all of that. And actually, those of you that are in the room that are more analytical, you're already trying to figure out these two categories and recognizing significant overlap between ungodliness and unrighteousness.
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Maybe even that makes you uncomfortable. You're like, well, why would he even give us the categories if they're not that locked down and that clear?
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But that's not what Paul is driving at. He's driving us toward a comprehensive view of God's wrath toward all sin.
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God's wrath is against all sin. Nobody can squeeze out from underneath these two categories.
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There's not a sin that you've ever committed in your life that doesn't fall under one of those categories of ungodliness and unrighteousness.
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He is saying that all sin is worthy of the very wrath of the
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Almighty God. And the reality is that is the human condition. There's not a person that you've ever met that was born, aside from Jesus Christ, that did not arrive in the condition of being categorized as ungodly and unrighteous.
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That is our status before God since the human fall in the Garden of Eden. All of us bear sin.
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Paul is gonna go through details to express that in clarity that here, coming up in Romans, that death came through the one man,
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Adam, and that our condition is fallen as a result. So verse one simply sets the table for us.
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It's kind of setting the table and we're not gonna like what's for dinner. The wrath of God against all sin is on the table.
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And a quick word about this. I just think it's important for us to understand the idea of wrath before I move on. There's a distinction between God's wrath and human anger.
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You see, we can easily take God's attributes or take things that God expresses and try to humanize them to such a degree that we misunderstand
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Him because we think He is like us. And so most translations have preserved the somewhat archaic word wrath to set it apart from our modern concept of anger.
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You see, God doesn't get ticked off and lose control. His wrath is not a byproduct of a quick temper or you ruffling
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His style. He's not like, okay, you're really bothering me, people. It's kind of loud down there and I'm trying to read the newspaper.
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Could you just shut up for a minute? It's not like that. Rather, His wrath is a byproduct of true holiness, a concept that is foreign to us, a concept that we have never fully grasped and we cannot.
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We will not be able to comprehend in its entirety what the righteous holiness of God truly is like.
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The very nature of God sets Himself against all ungodliness and righteousness.
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It is part of who He is that sin is judged. And verse 18 ends by declaring that men have suppressed the truth then in their unrighteousness.
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In our unrighteousness, we like to think that we're okay. We like to think that we can earn our way. We like to think that we're better than all that or we're better at least than those people or whatever and so the unrighteous person,
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He goes on to say, suppresses truth. And then verses 19 through 21 are gonna clarify that all of humanity, really what that truth is that is suppressed by the ungodly and the unrighteous.
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And that's really verses 19 through 21 clarify that all of humanity is held accountable based on the knowledge that is given to each and every one of us.
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Now, it would be unfair if God held us all accountable to an invisible standard that we didn't know and that we didn't see and that we didn't understand.
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But according to verse 19, this is all fundamentally building an argument towards why He had to give us righteousness, why we are actually fallen and broken people.
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And so according to verse 19, God Himself has revealed something of Himself to all mankind.
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As a matter of fact, He goes on to say that everybody, to all of humanity, to every single one of us, what
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He has revealed of Himself is plain to them, the text says.
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And I want you to be careful as you might be tempted over the next few minutes to set your mind as judge over Scripture.
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I think we all have a tendency to do this at times. And so we might be thinking of exceptions to this right off the bat.
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You might be setting up some of your examples and some things in your mind where you're going, well, that person doesn't believe in God. And Scripture here is saying that some revelation of God is made to all mankind.
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As a matter of fact, all humanity has some revelation that is plain to them about God. But maybe you have a friend who doesn't believe
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God exists. Or you have an aunt who calls herself an agnostic and just says, I don't know.
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I really don't know if there's a God and I don't know if anybody believes that there's a God. I don't know if you can really know. But if we believe what
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God is telling us here in Scripture is true, if we actually believe this text, then He is saying that everyone you have ever met and ever will meet knows something about Him.
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Everyone you've ever met knows something about Him. He says over these three verses that it is plain to them.
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Listen to the terminology He uses. It's plain to them. God has shown them. Some of God's attributes have been,
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He says, quote, clearly perceived. And in verse 21, even the unrighteous and ungodly,
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He says, knew God, knew God. What they know, however, you gotta be clear about this and careful about this.
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What they know is quite limited and has a very limited value in their lives. They come to see
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His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature. It says in the text, according to the things or in the things that have been made.
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In nature, in the world around us, something of God is revealed in the world and in the things that we take in with our eyes.
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In other words, everyone has enough evidence in the created world to clearly perceive the boundless power of the
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Almighty Creator God. And further, they can determine that He indeed must be divine.
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He must be of deity. He must be God to have organized this world that we can see with our eyes.
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Let me take a quick application here because what He's saying is that by nature, by the world out there, by the things that you take in, by the sunset and the sunrise and the organization of the ecosystems and all of those things, that you can know something about His divinity and His authority and His power and His organization.
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I would encourage everyone here just maybe to think this through and maybe this is an application point you could take on is spend more time reflecting on the world that He has made.
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I believe it's a pathway to deeper respect for who He is and how He rolls. Maybe seek to make 2019 a year of more wonder in His created world that might require you going outside sometime.
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It might require slowing down and taking a moment to smell the roses. It might require putting down a device and getting our face out of our screens.
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But I'm convinced that there's a correlation between the connection with the created world and connection with our
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Creator that those two things go hand in hand. You see, we don't worship the creation.
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He's gonna go on to make that clear. We don't worship that which is created, but we can indeed know more about the power and divinity of our
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God through the created world. How many of you have experienced that before? How many of you experienced the grandeur and the wonder and awe of creation that's led you to be grateful to God, that's led you to honor
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Him, that's led you to say, wow, thank you. You've created an amazing world here and you know
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Him a little bit better through that work. Now certainly the way that you know Him best and most clear is through the
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Word of God, through what He's revealed, right? But He certainly revealed something of Himself through the created world as well.
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But for the unrighteous and the ungodly, this doesn't help them. What they can perceive of God through the world out there gives the main result of just removing any excuse for ignorance from them.
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That's the main result of seeing God's attributes in nature for the ungodly and the unrighteous is, well, now you don't have an excuse because you've actually seen
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His creation. You have an ability to take in something about Him. So nobody has the excuse that there wasn't, in other words, nobody can say to God on that day, there was not enough evidence.
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You did not give me enough evidence. As a matter of fact, Scripture here is openly declaring that anyone who tells you that they do not believe in God or that He exists is suppressing the truth actively.
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That's an active word in the Greek, that they are actively suppressing the truth. They have clearly perceived the hand of the
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Creator in the world around them. How many of you think this is kind of a difficult truth? It's kind of difficult. How many of you ever had a conversation with an atheist who was just adamant that they did not believe that God exists and the text is disagreeing with them?
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It's saying, no, you're suppressing what you know in your heart. Just look at the world around you for a second and see it.
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It's there. They've clearly perceived the hand of the Creator in the world around them and for their own reasons, we're gonna get there here in a second because Paul's gonna explain at least a couple of the motivations for why they would suppress that truth, but they are actively suppressing it.
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And I find it interesting that it is a slide, that in this slide away from God, the God that all of us, it said we all know something of Him, it says that they knew
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God, but they didn't want to honor Him or give thanks to motivations for suppressing the truth that God exists, that there is a
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God who is over us, that there is a God who created us, that there is a God who rules us, that designed us and gets to call the shots.
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Part of the reason in the human heart to suppress the knowledge of God is that we do not want to honor Him and we do not want to thank
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Him. We don't want Him to have any authority over us, nor do we want to act like what we have has come from Him, but we want to thank other things.
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So in one sense, Paul is saying, show me someone who rejects God and I will show you someone who has a motivation for rejecting
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Him that is centered somewhere between lack of gratitude and a desire to honor something else above Him.
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That's what he's saying. So I would suggest to you that in our grasp for autonomy, self -rule, he goes on in verse 21 to say, we plunge headlong into futile thinking because we start with the basis of knowing something, we suppress that and supplant it with something else.
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And so we try to grasp for silly standards and try to honor ourselves and thank ourselves and that leads to darkness by the end of verse 21.
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All kinds of words that we would give to ourselves there. So in verse 22, one of the steps in the slide away from God is always an arrogance that claims to have the answer.
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Look at verse 22 with me real quick. I'm claiming to be wise, they became fools.
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There's an arrogance in that. And even if that answer, there's always an arrogance in the answer that when we claim that there is a wisdom in us, but suppress the truth, even sometimes that answer is that nobody can have an answer.
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Some of you have maybe had a conversation with somebody who would self -identify as an agnostic. They say, I don't believe that anybody can truly know that God exists.
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How many of you know somebody like that or have had a conversation with an agnostic? Someone who says, I just really don't believe that anybody can know.
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And it has a veneer of humility, doesn't it? It always comes with some really thin coating of humility.
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I just don't believe anybody can truly know. And if you claim to know there's a God, then you're arrogant.
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You must be really arrogant and you claim to have all knowledge and all wisdom because how can you really know?
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And there's a humility, a false humility that comes with that. But ironically, agnosticism is a problem of arrogance, not a problem of humility because it fundamentally disagrees with what is stated in verses 19 and 20 that say that you do have enough evidence to believe in God.
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God's word says it. So what appears to be humble, nobody can really know, is actually an arrogant,
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I know better than God's word. Do you see that? There's actually an arrogance in it.
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It's a false humility at the first blush. And so as the slide into depravity continues, we come across really the heart of the message this morning, the three dark exchanges.
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And these demonstrate that the slide into depravity begins, the first slide is with the mind and what it focuses on in the end with acting out physically according to our own plans and our own ownership of ourselves versus acknowledging
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God's ownership of us. So the first slide is to exchange his glory.
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To exchange his glory for images resembling mortal men. Idols is what he has in mind here, but certainly idols are not just strictly limited to those wooden or precious, you know, silver and gold statues that people would worship back in ancient times.
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But whatever we would set up in the created order of things to worship above him, he says they resembled mortal man, birds, animals, creepy crawlers.
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But the point of verse 23 is the complete and utter foolish nature of exchanging the eternal, intrinsic, majestic glory of the creator
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God for created stuff. Created stuff that decays and rots and falls apart.
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But even the Jews, be careful with the way you think about this because even the Jews did this with the golden calf.
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Remember the context, even while the glory of God was swirling around the mountaintop at Mount Sinai and Moses was gone from them, they are speaking with the almighty
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God to receive the 10 commandments. What were they doing down in the valley? Make us an image.
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He's been gone too long. He's probably been consumed. Make us an image so that Aaron crafted for them a golden image of a calf and they danced and they reveled there at the foot of the mountain where the glory of God had descended.
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I wanna just suggest to us that as we enter into these exchanges that are ultimately gonna result in the one that is the biggest in our culture, the one that our minds swirl around the most, be careful that along this way in this slide, we don't forget to concern ourselves with our own fallen hearts.
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We are tempted along this way somewhere to throw in with Paul and say, yeah, those wicked, foolish sinners out there, those idolatrous people out there.
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But be careful because he's setting us up here in the remainder of chapter one, all of this text is a setup and I'm stealing my own thunder from next week but he's going to level us in chapter two.
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He's gonna prop us up with these passages about this wickedness and these evils and all of those things that wicked people do and then chapter two, verse one, he's gonna come at us with, therefore you, talking to us, talking to believers, talking to the church, you have no excuse, oh man, every one of you who judges for in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourselves because you, the judge, practice the very same things.
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You who would set yourself up to judge others on this exchange have your own exchanges, your own dark exchanges where you have exchanged the truth for lies in your life as well.
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And so as we think about these three exchanges, do not think of them as historical events in the past or something that happens in dark alleyways in broken cities across the nation and the world.
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This is a pattern of exchange that if you're listening and the spirit is speaking to you, they will sound familiar to you.
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They will sound very close to your own heart. Every time you have ever intentionally sinned, you have gone down this well -worn pathway of suppressing the truth.
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So recast never let a conversation about sin stay outside of yourself. Let it always come back into your own chest.
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Always be honest within your own thoughts about your own brokenness before your creator. When we sin, we exchange the glory of God for the glory of some created thing.
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Most often in our day and age, it's our own pleasure, our own security, our own joy, our own comfort, our own self -determination, our own power, authority, fame, control, all kinds of things that we would worship.
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And so we see a pattern that after each exchange, you know, this first exchange exchanging his glory for the created things, after each of those exchanges,
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God gives up mankind to something. The word give up is hand them over. Like at the end of a battle and you've lost and you go into exile and you're handed over to the enemy.
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And in verse 24, he hands his people over to the lust of their hearts and to impurity. Even to the extent he goes on to say of dishonoring their bodies among themselves.
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And I find that really an intriguing phrase, dishonoring their bodies. You see the dishonoring of the body is shown in our culture so directly and clearly right now.
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We now live in a society that says that the physical body counts for nothing when determining gender or even sexual function.
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On this subject, I recommend a very thorough and powerful book, Love Thy Body by Nancy Piercy. There'll be a picture of it up there.
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I think we have three copies out there at the desk, but it's really a thorough approach and a really powerful approach to understanding the direction of our culture and how the devaluing of the body is the central component of multiple serious issues in our society today.
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I wish that everybody would pick up a copy and read that. It's not light reading, but it is very valuable reading.
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If you want to understand what's going on and it's gonna cover all the hot button issues, but it really comes down to how our devaluing of the human body is having an impact in multiple spheres of our culture and society.
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But God, it says in the text, God gives them up and it's not passive. It's not passive as if we're moored to a slip or to a dock and he just merely let the rope off and let the wind take us away.
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It's not passive like that. It's like he gave us a shove towards the waterfalls and that might not necessarily rub us the right way.
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I mean, you might be a little offended by that. Like, would God push us towards destruction? Would God push us down the river towards our demise?
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But you see, humanity rejected him as their creator God and so he is now steering our course toward tragedy.
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I think we already know that that's the case and even I would suggest to you that that is a mode of God's grace.
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Like a parent who no longer lets their meth -addicted son stay in the basement but in deep grief would set them free out the door and would push them away so that they will hit rock bottom.
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Sometimes it is out of love that we might steer a person toward the consequences of their sin.
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You see that in real life? And that's what God is doing to us when we act out on this exchange.
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You see, if a person truly wants a godless existence, if that's what a person really is striving for and really wants, God's willing to oblige.
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But I would say to you, oh, that is a miserable way to live. We actually have a word for it in the English language.
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What it means to live without God, the word is hell. That's what the word means. At the end of the day, a godless existence, a way, the one who would seek to get the furthest away possible from God is the person in hell.
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It's the furthest that you can get from his rule, from his reign. And the fact of the matter is, those in hell would not want heaven.
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Why? Because they hate the one who presides over it. There's a second exchange.
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The first is exchanging the glory for the created to center our focus away from God.
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You see, we have to start with God. And I would just encourage you in that first exchange to review your own heart and say, am
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I centered on God? Do I start my theology with him? Do I start my understanding of the way that the world works, the way that salvation works, the way that life works, the way that getting better and improving in life works?
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Does it all start with him or does it start with me? Where is the center?
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The focus on God. Don't exchange that for self or for other things.
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The second exchange in verse 25, the further they exchange the truth of God for a lie, where the first exchange was an exchange from focus on the glory of God to false glory of the created world.
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The second exchange is an exchange from serving the God over all to serving the created world.
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Now it's not just a shift in focus, but now it's a shift in service. What you're working for now changes.
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You're no longer working for God. You're working for self. You're working for the creation. You're working for whatever it is that you might worship in this world.
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And in this slide, we've moved from our focus off of God and placed ourselves in the middle. And then the next logical step is to only serve ourselves.
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And that is part of what's leading us deeper toward the wicked actions we see in the world around us as well as in our own lives.
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There was already a hint of sexual deviancy, by the way, in verse 24, the way that it was worded with the phrase lust of their hearts and dishonoring their bodies.
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And here in verse 25, we find a vital connection of giving up God to this slide into sexual sin. How in the world, what does idolatry have to do with sexual sin?
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How do we get there in this passage from here? Idolatry is an issue of worship and all of that.
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And so what really is the mechanism that transfers us toward sexual sin from an idolatrous heart?
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And the correlation is very direct and very important that we understand this because it's all over our culture.
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This passage, by the way, when you line it up with the way that our culture has gone in the last 20 years, it's like we've done exchange check, exchange check, exchange check.
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And we just keep marching through this passage as America. And God forbid that I see it even in the church.
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But the correlation is direct. If you do not believe you have a creator, hear me carefully, if you suppress that truth, if you know and you look at the world around you and you say there's a creator, but he has no right to control me.
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As a matter of fact, I'm gonna act like I believe that he doesn't even exist. I'm just gonna say that I don't believe he exists. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna convince myself that I don't believe that he exists.
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If you do not have a creator, then you were not designed. And if you have no design, then there is no standard function to anything.
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And if we center everything on a naturalistic, materialistic, this world is all that there is perspective, then that leads to our passions and our lusts and our drives and our instincts.
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We're just animals. And so our instinct rules. Do you see that? Do you see how we move from idolatry to just crazy deviancy quickly if we are not owned?
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If there's nobody else outside of us to call the shots, this is a logical flow in this text that Paul is talking about.
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And I think we know it to be true. If there's no design, if there's no proper function, if there's no right and wrong, then it's just whatever we feel.
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And each one of us are a rule unto ourselves. You see, only believing that we have been created by God and for God do we arrive at any substantial sexual ethic.
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There is no sexual ethic outside of us other than foolishness and silliness. Without a creator, functions, roles, design go out the window and we're left with paltry things that we grasp for like the current word.
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Does anybody know what the current word is that our sexual ethics are based on? Somebody got it?
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Consent. That is the only sexual ethic that the world is espousing for now.
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Let that sink in what I just said, for now. Nobody can tell you why.
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Nobody can really give you a good reason why they stopped at consent yet. But there's no reason.
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And that's a scary thought. It's a terrifying thought. In a second, then giving up takes place.
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And so we exchange and God gives up a little bit more and we exchange and God pushes us a little bit further down the road.
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And so he gave them up to dishonorable passions, he says. And he illustrates this with what makes us uncomfortable.
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He illustrates it with lesbianism and male homosexuality, which is styled as the third exchange.
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The third exchange is simply this. They exchange the God -given order, the God -given design of things for their own preferences and desires, their own passions.
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And he says that the women exchange natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. The interesting thing is, and we'll get there in a second, that there's the word natural relations in there.
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That implies some kind of standard. That implies that there's a right and a wrong. There's an ought and an ought not. But they exchange that which was natural and natural relations for those that are contrary to nature,
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Paul says. And then in verse 27, he goes on to say, likewise, in the same way, in the
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Greek, the same way as the women, the men burned with passion for one another so that you can't really squeeze out from underneath in verse 26.
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Well, is he really talking about lesbianism there? Is that really what he's getting at? Yes, because he says in the same way, then, the men burned with lust for one another, just like the women.
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And so the word that must be carefully and clearly defined in these verses, it's very important that we get it right, is the word natural.
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What do we mean by natural relations? What does that mean? It's clearly about sexual relations there, but what is the natural thing?
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And I would suggest to you, I've heard it argument. I read a lot of different things. I read a lot of opposing views, different views. People who are pro -homosexual stance writing on these passages and trying to explain them away and trying to define or redefine the word natural, and they would have to pose on this passage that Paul is talking about mother nature.
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Do you believe Paul's talking about mother nature here? Is he who believes in the divine creator
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God is going to now appeal to mother nature on this? Just the way that things are naturally.
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That's not what he means. I don't believe in any way that Paul would be positing a non -theistic argument in the middle of this slide against God.
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He isn't saying mother nature tells us that there is a right sexuality. He's not even just merely saying, look at the parts, they go together.
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That's not what he's saying. But rather the created natural order, what he means by nature is the created natural order that springs from the creator's good design, from the way that he has designed things to be.
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You see, the reason I'm even saying this is I have heard Christians give the wrong argument on this time and time again.
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I've seen it on blogs. I've seen it on Facebook. I've seen it all over the place. Beware of basing any opposition to homosexuality on common sense.
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Don't go there. Don't argue that it's common sense. What is common sense?
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You see, there is nothing common about sense in a materialistic worldview. If you believe that all there is is material and natural world, all there is is molecules and that's all that exists, there is nothing common to sense.
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There is only the individual sense that differs from person to person to person. Everybody has their own sense in our world today.
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Everybody is just as justified as the other in the stance that they take regarding their own ethic in a world without God.
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And don't let anybody confuse that or convince you otherwise. You cannot appeal. Do not appeal to common sense on this one.
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Appeal to the revelation of God's word. Appeal to what he has revealed of himself on these subjects.
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But let me be clear. Homosexuality is used as an illustration because it's one of the clearest rejections of God's right to order us according to his design.
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You see, Paul isn't talking about homosexuality, lesbianism, male homosexuality here because it's a worse sin than all the others.
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As a matter of fact, he's going to go through a litany of our sins that are this exchange. He's using this as one model and one example because it's very clear.
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It just clearly shows the illogical way that sin manifests in a rejection of God's right to tell us what to do.
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It's very in your face. It shows you our willingness to go against what
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God has shown us very clearly in his word. Do you see that? And so it's an illustration.
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It's not like, oh, Paul was just sitting there scratching his head going, what's the worst sin I could think of? Okay, I'll use that as an illustration.
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No, it's just because it's a very clear way that in this exchange we would say, no,
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I'm not gonna go with your order. I'm not gonna go with the way that you design things. I'm not gonna go with the way that you have caused things to function.
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I'm gonna go my own way. And so by the end of verse 27, it is clear. It's very emphatic.
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The word error that's translated there at the end of the text is not as strong and maybe some people are like, oh, it's just an error.
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It's just a mistake. No, it's a strong word. And at the end of verse 27, it's clear.
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Homosexuality is an error. It is, in other words, there's nothing right about it and it results in a just penalty and punishment just as does all sin.
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Now, I wanna be clear. Some people have really just messed things up by looking at verse 27 and looking for specific things like AIDS or different issues like that.
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The fact of the matter is AIDS exists because we're fallen humans. All diseases exist because we're fallen humans.
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All of us, by the way, every sin you've ever committed bears some penalty in your flesh.
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Every time that you sin, you are bearing a guilt. You are bearing a shame. You are bearing a weight. You are putting more and heaping more and more on yourself and so that's all that he's saying here is that it is worthy of incurring penalty and judgment just like all of us.
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And so verses 28 through 32 really summarize then the results of these dark exchanges. You see, homosexuality is not the only result but all sin follows the same pattern of exchanging the glory of God, exchanging the truth and exchanging the
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God -ordered function of humanity. You were made to worship him. You were made to honor him. You were made to love him. You were made to love your neighbor as yourself and every time that we sin, we are functioning in a way we were not created to function.
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Do you see that? Every sin, every one of us guilty and since they did not see fit to acknowledge
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God, the third giving up, he gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
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Ought not to be done. You can't even really, really the word ought does not function in the
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English language without authority outside of you. If you have no authority outside of you, the word ought means little to nothing.
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You really ought not to even use it. Ha, see what I did there? I did not do that on purpose.
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It's great. It's not a word that functions well without an authority outside of yourself to tell you what you ought and ought not to do just like at your business.
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Because you have a boss or the business has an owner, you have oughts at your workplace. So let me clarify something that many of us might be wondering because the text doesn't necessarily go there so I want to just caution you that I'm going out just a little bit further than what the text does but primarily to kind of whet your appetite or to help you just to see how some of this applies.
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You might be asking yourself, how am I to relate to same -sex attracted individuals or what if I personally struggle with same -sex attraction?
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What do I do with that, Don? How am I supposed to work with this? And I can never answer every specific instance in a general message like this.
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I'm speaking to all of you and so I can't speak to every situation. That's why I'd love to sit down and meet with you if you've got your own issues or things that you're working through or even just a family member that you're trying to figure out how to deal with things but let me state that a same -sex attracted individual who acknowledges
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God as the creator and believes that he is truly worthy of honor and he is our designer will let their sexuality be subject to him.
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That goes for every one of us in the room. Let me be clear. For that matter, every single opposite -sex attracted individual will acknowledge
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God and want to honor him in their sexuality. You see, I would go so far as to say and I believe this firmly, every single one of us in this room are sexually broken in some way and therefore all of us, all of us to a person have some wayward passion.
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Every person in this room. And I would even go so far as to say this and what I could think of as an extreme example, it's possible that some of you in this room, your wayward passion is a frigidity and coldness towards your spouse, a spouse who rightly deserves sexual satisfaction within your marriage.
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And I say that to keep those who fall on the far end of the spectrum of disinterest in sexual expression from letting yourselves off the hook on this one.
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You see, some of you here in this room are tempted and have been tempted throughout your lives to think of your prudery as a virtue when in fact it is a vice that needs to be repented of.
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But hear me carefully recast. The solution to homosexual feelings is not to try to get tripped and hot for the opposite sex.
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But the goal is to honor God. To honor God as creator and accept his standard and his design.
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You see, a person can live in an honoring way before God and still struggle with same -sex attraction. It's acting on that temptation that is a sin.
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And two men who have helped me to clarify in my own walk and my own understanding of this, that two men that exemplify an amazing commitment to holiness as men who struggle with same -sex attraction.
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One is a professor at Moody that I met. His name is Christopher Yuan. He wrote an excellent book called Out of a
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Far Country. I would highly recommend it. It's a powerful book about his journey through as a second generation
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Chinese American who came over here. His mother's prayer life for him and his journey out of a, through drugs, through nine years
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I think it is in a federal penitentiary to coming to faith in Christ in that federal pen to coming out of homosexuality.
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And not that his desires have changed but his desire to honor Christ has changed.
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A really powerful book. The second is Sam Albury who I've heard speak at conferences. He's a pastor in the UK. They both written about their commitment to celibacy based on same -sex attraction.
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And here's the thing. As I recognize that it is a difficult and a tough calling. Almost as difficult as being a 17 -year -old and being called to not have sex with your girlfriend.
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Almost as tough as that, right? Like are we all, are we not all called to give up things for Christ?
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Is that not a part and parcel of what it means to be a follower of Jesus? Are there not parts of our life that we need to forego?
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Jesus Christ himself never had sex.
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The greatest of all men who walked this planet gave that up for us.
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Tempted in every way. It says in scripture, tempted in every way like us without sin.
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And these are two men who would stand before conferences and say, Christ could do that for me.
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That's a little thing to give up for him. You see, our culture worships it, don't we? Our culture has exchanged everything in exchange for the big
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O. That's what everybody's living for. But that's not what it's about.
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So this is a tough truth. Raise your hand if you think this is a tough truth. To go to a high school student or go to a college student who's struggling with same -sex attraction and say, either one of two things is gonna happen if you give your life to Christ.
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Either you are going to live a celibate life, God is calling you to singleness, or he's gonna change those desires within you, and he can do both.
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I'm not at all, I'm not all promoting reparative therapy. These guys changed my mind, by the way. These authors changed my mind on this.
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I don't believe that everybody's going to get shifted and changed when they come to faith in Christ, just like your temptations didn't go away right away when you came to Christ.
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It's a lifelong journey, isn't it? But there are people who sometimes come to Christ as an alcoholic, and they never touch it again.
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My grandfather was one of those people. Praise God. And then there are people who will come to faith in Christ and will struggle with that and fight it to a knockdown, drag -out, to -the -death fight.
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Some of us know those people as well, right? And so God chooses to work in lives in different ways, and he will so in this subject as well.
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Well, there's a little bit more text here. Verses 31 and 32 give an overview of various sins, and most of them are quite straightforward and need little comment.
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There's not a whole lot there that needs to be explained, but there's a couple of them that I'd like to highlight for you. I want to note the presence of the phrase
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God -haters in verse 30. You see, the dirty little secret of atheism is that they actually hate the
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God that they claim they don't believe in. Because they don't want to thank him, and they don't want to have him exercise control over them.
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They recognize that God, if he is indeed divine, if he indeed exists, if he is indeed created this world that they can perceive with their eyes, then he has some rule over them, and they don't want that.
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And I'm not making that up. That's not my opinion. That's what the text is saying. So God -haters in this.
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It's clear. The second word I find interesting is the word that comes right after that, the word insolent. It's a very special word in this text for a primary reason.
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It's in verse 30. Insolent, different translations. It could be violent in some of your translations. But because this word only occurs one other place in the
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New Testament, this is what makes it beautiful that it occurs here in this list of the exchange. Because Paul himself identified himself as a person who was guilty of this exchange as well.
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Why? Because the only other place that this Greek word appears in the New Testament is when
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Paul is giving his testimony to Timothy in writing in 1 Timothy. And he identifies himself as insolent and violent before he encountered
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Christ and believed. I just find something beautiful about that. Because Paul here is modeling the humility.
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I believe that this text is calling each and every one of us to, to acknowledge that exchange in our lives and to see
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Christ as better, to see him pulling us out. The third thing I wanted to highlight is just this funny phrase.
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I mean, none of these sins are funny. Not straight -faced, but disobedient to parents. Did that catch anybody else's attention in this text?
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All of these really terrible, wicked things, and disobedient to parents too. It makes the list, and I think that some of you are thinking about bringing back family devotions just so you can camp on that verse for a few weeks.
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Right? I mean, you know what I'm talking about. So yeah, maybe we should, you know, I was ribbing your spouse.
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Maybe we should get back to family devotions on this one. But as we wrap up this text, verse 32 lands the plane,
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I would suggest to you, right in the middle of American culture. You see, when you were reading the Old Testament, we are reading about thousands of years ago, a couple thousand years of history have gone by since the writing of these things.
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A lot of things have changed. We now have the internet, you know, stuff like that. But there's a very, very small difference between their culture and ours.
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You see, he says here in the text that all humanity has some understanding of God's righteous decree, that guilt and punishment are earned by practicing evil.
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That's why we have a justice system. That's why there's courts and judges and laws and lawyers and all of that stuff. We recognize that there should be a punishment for those who do wrong.
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But the ungodly and the unrighteous, he says, at the end of this text, not only do these things, but here it is, this is an
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American phrase, they give approval to those who practice them. And we've even gone a step further, haven't we?
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We give approval to those who give approval to them. And we reject those who would, reject those who approve of them.
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It's a very contemporary verse. In America today, we've taken it a step further and turned to endorsing sin as a virtue.
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We can't end the message in this dark place. I love that we take communion each week because it forces our attention back to joy and life and light.
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The dark point of this text is simply the unrighteous and ungodly will be eventually given over to their passions and desires to suppress
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God and live however they darn well please. Remembering where we began back in verses 16 and 17, there is a righteousness from God that is available.
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There is a power available to any and all who would believe. You see, Jesus came.
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Jesus lived a sinless life. He was offered the dark exchanges and instead kept true to his
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Father. And he went to the cross so that anyone who would believe in him would be granted an abundant life in his eternal kingdom.
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Paul paints a dark picture here. And as we come to communion, take some time to reflect, maybe even before you get up and go to the table, to reflect on the desperation of your plight without God.
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And then thank him with joy for the salvation he has provided for you in his son.
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During the next song, if you receive the righteousness of Christ by faith in his sacrifice on the cross for you, then come to the table and take a cracker to remember his body broken for us and take a cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for us.
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And then let's go out this week, recast, with an honest assessment of our desperate plight, the desperate plight of all humanity without God, not ours, but the world.
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And instead of judging the world out there, how about we live and move in compassion? Instead of fearing the world out there, let's live and move with the power of the good news that can arrest anyone's slide into depravity, anyone who would believe.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for the transforming work that you're doing in us.
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And Father, just as we think about this exchange and the way that we even are guilty of doing that, even this last week for many of us,
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Father, I pray that you would be correcting us, fixing us, and most importantly, fixing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith.
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I pray that we would be leaning more into your spirit, leaning more into your words, studying, praying to know you better so that we can walk with you day by day and moment by moment.
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And Father, I pray that as, we've talked about a subject that has been so pressed down in the church by judgmentalism and criticism of the world out there.
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Father, I pray that you would protect any in their hearts and minds from a judgment of the world out there, but instead a judgment of our own selves and a recognition of the need that we had for a righteousness that came from outside of us.
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And that some with a really sensitive conscience right now are really wrestling with that slide. They see it in their own lives.
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I pray that you would set them free by the reality and the glory and the beauty of the forgiveness that comes to us through Jesus Christ, that we are made and declared righteous before you.
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And that same righteousness is available to anyone who would believe. I thank you for that in Jesus' name, amen.