Homosexuality (Part 1)

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No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

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Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

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Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

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Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the Scriptures, verse by verse with no compromise.

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Well, when God saved me in 1989 and then called me to be a preacher, probably in 93 or 94,

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I said, Lord, I'll preach everything in the Bible, and if I live long enough, I want to teach you every single verse.

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Whether those verses are encouraging, uplifting, warming, controversial, politically incorrect, or will send me to jail,

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Lord, I will preach through the entire Bible by your Spirit's grace. And so let's continue our series in 1

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Corinthians chapter 6. Please open your Bibles today, and we want to examine a topic that is in the news.

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You've got people from Westboro Baptist Church on one extreme, you've got other people who say homosexuality is righteous on another, and my question this morning is, what does

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God say about the sin, the forgivable sin of homosexuality? What does

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He want us to think about this particular sin? Is it a unique sin? Is it a forgivable sin?

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How do we deal with people who are enslaved to the sin of homosexuality? How should we love them?

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How can we love them? What does God say? And so that's my purpose this morning, jumping off from 1

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Corinthians chapter 6 verses 9 and 11, thinking biblically with proper discernment about the topic of homosexuality.

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I want you to be Bereans. I want you to study the Bible to make sure you know what it says.

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And we, when we were fallen, could see God's handiwork in creation, and we could know that He was wise and powerful, and that He was a great creator, but we couldn't know specific things, because we were fallen creatures, and so then

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God gave us specific revelation, revelation found in Genesis through Revelation, so that we could think

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God's thoughts after Him. That's the real issue. If you're a Christian today, I want you to think about this topic the way

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God thinks about it, right? That's what we're called to do. No less or no more. God has clearly spoken.

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How should we think about the topic? And remember in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, there was a lawsuit going on, and Paul said, don't sue another

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Christian. It's better to suffer now and inherit later, right?

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It's better to suffer now in time, in space, while you're on the earth, in your body, and then for all eternity, there's a great inheritance of righteousness for those who follow that paradigm.

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He says, I don't want it to be the other way around. Inherit now, get now, and then what?

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Suffer later. And so Paul says, suffer now, inherit later, and he gives this warning found in verses 9 through 11 of 1

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Corinthians 6, and he says something that everyone at Corinth should know because Paul had been there for a year and a half, and he says in verse 9, do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

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Do not be deceived. And then he gives a list of many common sins that were going on in Corinth, common sins today as well.

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There are other sins, all sins damning, but these are particular damning here in context because they were being exercised, they were being done.

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Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

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And then he gives just great news after that, verse 11, and such were some of you.

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You're not that way anymore, why? But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Here's the outline for this morning, thinking biblically about homosexuality with a series of questions and then a series of answers from the

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Bible. Questions and answers to get you to think properly, to calibrate our minds or maybe recalibrate our minds about this important topic that's certainly not going away anytime soon.

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So, let's do questions and answers about the topic of this forgivable sin, homosexuality.

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Number one, why would we focus on this sin when there are nine others in the list?

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Why are we as a church, why am I as a pastor taking time today and maybe next week to talk about this issue when there's all kinds of other sins on the list?

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Why isolate this one? After all, we could isolate drunkenness or sexually immoral, fornicators, adulterers, idolaters.

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Why spend time on this? Answer, because the culture is trying to normalize this sin.

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The culture now is attacking this particular sin, calling what God calls unrighteous, they're trying to call righteous.

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They're not just trying to say we need to be in a permissive state, we permit it. The culture is now trying to say to us, aren't they?

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We aren't just to permit it, we are to celebrate it. And so when this is attacked, then pastors stand up and talk about the part of the fort that's being attacked.

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If the fort is being attacked about idolatry in the world and they're trying to say, you know what, you can be a gay

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Christian, we stand up for that. If you can be a gay, excuse me, a drunk

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Christian, well then we'll stand up and address those things. Listen to what John Calvin said, a dog barks when his master is attacked.

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I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would be silent.

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So where the battering ram is trying to knock down the gate of the fort, that's where we stand up as Christians and as a pastor as well.

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It's not that I'm trying to isolate this and say it's so much worse, I'm saying to you that the culture is trying to make you celebrate what

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God says is unrighteous. Do we want to celebrate any sin? Is any sin laudable, praiseworthy?

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Wow, that's just wonderful. No, because it denigrates the spirit of God. No one is trying to legislatively justify reviling drunkenness or adultery, but they are in fact trying to do that with homosexuality.

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Within the Christian community you will have people like Phil Yancey, Philip Yancey, going to conferences called gay

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Christian conferences and then not saying, by the way, you can be free from this sin.

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Like adulterers can be free and revilers can be free, but no affirming that there is such a thing as a person who practices homosexuality and that they are going to receive the inheritance of God, contrary to 1

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Corinthians chapter 6 verse 9 and following. If you haven't seen the push from the community inside the church and outside, you're going to see it soon.

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And so we have to stand up and ask ourselves the question, let's think biblically about this topic.

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Roy Clemens was a pastor for a long time in England, still calls himself a pastor, expositor verse by verse, kind of like one of your favorite radio preachers on the radio, very, very well known.

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Chuck Swindoll, John MacArthur, known that well in England and now he's left his wife and he now has a male lover and he's writing

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Why Evangelicals Should Rethink Homosexuality. Because, he says,

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Christian hostility towards homophile relationships rests on an interpretation of the

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Bible which is in many respects open to question. Roy said because there is a diversity of opinion among Christians about the issue which will cause division within the churches unless an attitude of greater tolerance and mutual respect prevails.

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He also said because current pastoral practice is damaging homosexual

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Christians and so alienating the gay community, generally that evangelism is impossible.

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And so what Roy is saying is, if you talk about this as sin, it splits the church.

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As a matter of fact, truth does split, doesn't it? It separates truth from error. He says, you know what, if you keep saying

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Christianity declares that the Bible teaches homosexuality is sin, the gay community is not going to like it and you won't be able to evangelize as well.

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All sin, including homosexuality, is unrighteous, ungodly, perverse, and not pleasing to God.

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Society is attacking this and we need to know how to think through it. Number two, are

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Bible teachers and Christians homophobic? Are Bible teachers and Christians homophobic?

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Well, maybe some are. I think you have to define homophobic, don't you?

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McKinsey Institute defined homophobia as the fear, dislike, or hatred of homosexuals.

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Are you afraid of homosexuals? Do you hate them or do you dislike them? Well, I guess if that's true, then you're homophobic.

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But we as Christians, especially those who have been redeemed by Christ, ought we not to love people who are sinful?

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What did Jesus do? What did the Pharisees say Jesus did? I'll read you the passage. Now all the tax gatherers and the sinners were coming near Jesus to listen to him.

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And both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble saying, this man, Jesus, they can't even say his name.

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We won't even, you know, lift him up to the elevation of saying his name. This man receives sinners and eats with them.

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I don't hate homosexuals. I have friends who are homosexuals. This is going to come somehow, come across as a boast or something.

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I don't mean this at all. This is the grace of God working in my life. I've had a homosexual man ask me to do his partner's funeral.

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He knew I was an evangelical and I knew they lived together for 30 years. I don't hate homosexuals.

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Are they image bearers? Do they have a soul? Does Jesus kindly address sinful people and is around them?

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Of course. But that's easy to just throw out. You're homophobic. Homophobia is an irrational fear of someone.

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We're not afraid of homosexuals. We don't hate them. We love them. And by the way, shouldn't we love them enough to say, what you're doing is a sin against God and here's how

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Christ Jesus, the great Savior's blood, is sufficient to atone for sins like homosexuality.

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Should we say that? You want hate speech? Here's hate speech. Say nothing to a homosexual about his sin.

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Or say God loves you just the way you are and you're fine. Or say you call yourself a

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Christian and you're living with somebody of the same sex and everything's good. That's hate speech.

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We can live next to homosexuals, but we as Christians cannot endorse sinful behavior, heterosexual or homosexual.

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Number three, why do people insist that homosexuals are born this way?

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Why do people insist that homosexuals are born this way? Answer, it alleviates guilt, or at least it tries to.

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Let's turn our Bibles to James chapter 1, please, and discuss this. And by the way, if you're not a homosexual today and you're just a person that struggles with sin and you're like everyone else trying to blame, this is going to be good for you.

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This is not just for people who struggle with the sin. This is not just for people who know about this. This is for all of us today and God's Word does such a great job through His Spirit's work that we can look at a problem like this, but it can still minister to our own hearts.

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More and more and more you'll see studies that will come out to try to prove the gay gene.

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For instance, 1991, Simon LeVay of the Salk Institute did autopsies of homosexual men and women and tried to say that the small part of the anterior hypothalamus was different in gay men versus heterosexual men.

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1992, Laura Allen and Richard Gorski of University of California did studies on the corpus callosum in the brain saying that it was larger in gay men than in straight men.

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1991, Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, same kind of thing. 1995, Dean Hammer of the

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National Cancer Institute of Maryland studied the rate of homosexuality in relatives and twins. You're going to see a lot of this data come to try to justify homosexuality.

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What does the Bible say? Before I read

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James 1, let's just put it this way. I don't think there's a gay gene, but everybody we're going to see in James is born with a propensity to sin.

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And you're either a born homosexual or a born fornicator or adulterer, but you are born bent with propensities because of Adam's fall, yes?

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But you can't use that as an excuse to stand before God and then say, see, I was born this way and therefore

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I have illicit, lustful thoughts about a woman and that's just who I am. Ecclesiastes makes it very clear.

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We are born, God created us rather, created Adam upright. God didn't make

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Adam broken. He created him upright and then Adam fell. We and Adam fell and now we're born with propensities, but we can't blame these propensities on God.

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You made us that way. Hey, I'm only human. So if people say, I'm born a homosexual and here's the data to prove it, well,

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I don't believe it, but even if I concede that, then I'm a born fornicator and still I'm not going to call my fornication righteousness before God.

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So look at James 1. This is good for all of us to make sure we think properly about sin.

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Maybe you're a heterosexual, but you like to blame your sin on diseases, syndromes and disorders.

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This is good medicine for all of us because Proverbs 28 is true. After you confess sin is sin,

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God gives you mercy. Don't you want the mercy of God? If you don't want the mercy of God, then just blame your sin on everybody else.

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Blame it on your mother, blame it on your father, blame it when you got, because you got spanked, blame it on your spouse, blame it on your heritage, blame it on your

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Italian temper, whatever people do. People do that. I've got the Italian temper. Blame it on Twinkies, Twinkie defense for those of you old enough to know that.

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James 1, this is a book, talked to us about saving faith. Do you have saving faith?

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Talks about this great inheritance in verse 12 and then he says in verse 14, but each person is tempted when he is lured or enticed and enticed by his own desire.

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You make yourself sin. Nobody else makes you sin. You make yourself sin.

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James is saying this is an individual matter. Each and every time you're tempted and you sin, it's because of your own sinful lust.

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What I struggle with, my own, might be different than what you struggle with, your own, heterosexual, homosexual, but it's our own lust.

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It comes from the inside. We say, well, I like to sleep, but when

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I sleep too much, it's laziness. I like to eat, I eat too much, it's gluttony. I like to have,

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I have a desire for marital relations in a marriage, it goes outside of that. What's good turns into something bad because of our own hearts.

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Listen to Mark 7, don't turn there, but listen to what Jesus said. Then you are also without understanding.

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Do you not see whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him? Sin enters not his heart, but his stomach.

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Since it enters not his heart, but his stomach and is expelled, thus he declared all foods clean.

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What comes out of a person is what defiles him. From within, out of the heart of man, comes evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

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All these evil things come from where? Within, and they defile the person.

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James could have said, Satan's tempting you, but he says, you made you do it, the responsibility is personal.

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And by the way, doesn't society hate that today? I'm going to take ownership for my own sin, I'll take my own responsibility,

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I made me do it. By the way, if you ever get pulled over by a policeman, why don't you do what

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I do? If I'm not paying attention, I'm driving too fast and I get pulled over, I just do what society never does.

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Here's what I do. Hands at 10 and 2 positions so they don't think I'm trying to find my Uzi or anything in the car.

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By the way, when you're in Israel and you cross into the Palestinian controlled West Bank and an officer, an

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Israeli soldier who's about 18 and a half, and a young lady walks onto the bus with an

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Uzi checking everything out, you get religion really fast.

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I have no idea, what am I talking about? What was the sentence I said just before that? 10 and 2.

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10 and 2, that's right. I just wanted to see if you're paying attention, Dan. Sir, did you know you're speeding?

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Yes, officer. I have no excuse. I was speeding. I could give you a lot of excuses, a busy day, but I was speeding.

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I'm guilty. They look at you like, what are you doing? Why are you saying guilty?

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And then they usually run my plate and say, have a good day. The compassion in Proverbs 28, 13 comes, the mercy comes after you confess sin and say,

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I agree with you. God, I agree with you that I make myself sin. It doesn't mean the circumstances don't lend themselves more easily.

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It doesn't mean that since I've been sleeping not as much, or I have a headache, or this or that, that I'm not more susceptible.

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It doesn't mean that Satan doesn't tempt, but at the end of the day, I made myself sin.

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Listen to Proverbs 19, 3. A man's own folly ruins his life. A man's own folly ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the

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Lord. And look at James, the master illustrator. He's got a half -brother named

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Jesus who is a wonderful illustrator too. I think he learned it from his brother. Look at verse 14 again, dragged away and enticed.

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ESV says lured and enticed, but lured is really enticement. It's dragged away and enticed.

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Enticed, lust forcefully dragging someone away, carried away, the lion carrying the prey away.

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And then enticed, enticed comes from the word where we get the fishing word, bait.

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What does the fish see? The fish sees a big, ugly, barbed hook. The fish sees something good, succulent, sweet.

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It entices him. Listen to what Hebert said. This word depicts the juicy worm being dangled in front of the fish.

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His inner craving to appropriate it for himself prompts him to bite, but he is deceived and caught.

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Instead of enjoying the anticipated pleasure, he is caught on the hook concealed within. When a person is confronted with alluring temptation, he sees only the attractiveness of the desired object.

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Only when his will has sanctioned the performance of the sinful act do the tragic consequences come into operation.

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Sin entices, sin lures, but James says you have to take ownership.

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And look at how he changes the metaphor now to a woman who's impregnated with child. Verse 15, then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

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What a contrast from verse 12 with the crown of life. Now this brings forth death.

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The craving, the action, death, separation.

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We know the verse, the wages of sin is what? Death. We don't want to excuse sin and I also don't want my friends who are homosexual to excuse sin either because if you excuse sin, who needs a savior?

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You need medicine, you need therapy, you need applause, you need confirmation. No, we recognize our sin because there is a great savior who sins.

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Why in Titus, why in 1 Timothy, why in 2 Timothy is God called God our savior all the time?

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Because pastors need to know, churches need to know that there's a God who saves. He couldn't just be a creator, he couldn't just be the judge, but he's a

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God who creates judges and then judges his son in our place.

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This goes way back, blaming sin. Can you imagine Adam, God the woman you gave me.

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I went to bed single and I woke up married, basically that's what happened and then she made me sin.

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You made me sin by giving me her. Remember, whatever the excuse, homosexuals along with every other sinner sins willfully against the

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God that they will answer to. Number four, is it easy to be tricked or deceived when thinking about this topic?

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The answer is yes. You've got the constant media barrage, you've got your own heart, you probably know people who are homosexual, you work with them, you go to school with them, they seem kind and nice and certainly they're image bearers and they can be kind and nice.

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Family members, people on TV, and look at what verse 16 says.

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This is an echo of 1 Corinthians chapter 6, isn't it? Don't be what? Deceived.

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If you weren't going to be deceived, he wouldn't say it, but this is a thing that you could easily be deceived on.

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Don't be deceived, there's kind of the sharpness and he gives some tenderness to my dear brothers.

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Can't blame God, can't blame Satan, man is responsible. Don't make any mistake,

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James is saying, about the origin of sin and evil. Proverbs 5, for a man's ways are in full view of the

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Lord and he examines all his paths. The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him, the cords of his sin hold him fast.

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The French have a little proverb and here's the proverb, sin makes ugly.

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Sin makes ugly. And if I could add to that proverb it would be, sin deceives the naive.

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Sin deceives. I'd rather be with David, who after committing adultery, a forgivable sin, says, then

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I acknowledge my sin to you. I didn't hide, I didn't run, I didn't blame, I didn't say, God by your providence you could have had

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Bathsheba laying inside, being inside, clothed and I walked outside and you put her right there before my view, you could have got me redirected someplace else, but in your providence

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I went outside, there she was, then I sinned. No, David says in Psalm 32, a wonderful psalm, and if you've sinned this is good medicine for you.

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Then I acknowledge my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity, I said I will confess my transgression to the

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Lord and you forgave the guilt of my sin. And then he says with five little letters,

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S -E -L -A -H, what's that mean, S -E -L -A -H, Selah. It means just stop and let that sink in.

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How good it is of God, could have killed David, should have killed

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David, but God is merciful and gracious and David confessed his sin and God forgave

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David. Our service times are

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Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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