Romans 1:28-32

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

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Oh, I'm weird. All right, here we go. All right, last week.

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Oh, maybe I should say this. Romans 1, 28 through 32.

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Oh, you know, I would scald my throat right before I'm speaking, fixing to talk for 30 minutes.

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Yeah. Yeah, it is a love -hate relationship.

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Anyway, last week, we began talking about the signs that show up in society when

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God judges them with abandonment. And today, we're going to continue in what

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Paul is telling us, that he is writing to the church in Rome and for them to look out for.

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Starting in 28, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge

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God, God gave them up to a debased mind to what ought not be done.

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They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

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They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

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They're 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 they give approval to those who practice them.

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Sound familiar? Mm -hmm.

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So, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, where he starts here in verse 28, or they did not see fit to have

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God in their knowledge. A week before last, we talked about I keep wanting to say that G.

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Epinosus, right? The one thing that I unfortunately left out is the fact that not only means knowledge, but it means knowledge that is gained from objective observation.

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Some people would pronounce it epignosis, but it just sounds like I'm saying a pig, but I don't pronounce it that way.

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Anyway, creation itself, we're told, screams or yells of the fact that there's a creator.

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Everything in nature says that someone created it. That much is very basic, very plain.

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This is called general revelation. It is the general revelation that is given to all men.

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Everyone sees this, but we don't want to accept it as natural man, because it means that we're answerable to that creator for everything that we do in the dark.

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Now, the majority of people who are unsaved individuals that are in their natural flesh do things in public and don't care.

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Those aren't the things we're worried about. We're worried about those things that we keep secret. We should worry about the other things also, but if we're willing to do them in public, then we don't care about people's judgment, do we?

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But of course, it is completely rational that if you don't recognize something as true, then it obviously isn't like they're being a creator.

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As we saw in verse 21 earlier, for although they knew

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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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As we proceed, next we see the phrase, God gave them up.

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So God removes the means by which our nature, our sin nature, is kept at bay.

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It's kept in check. Part of this means is self -interest.

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That may sound funny to some people, but self -interest is a very big contributor to our reluctance to sin.

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Even the means by which our sin is kept in check in natural man, even that is offensive to God.

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Natural man doesn't sin because they don't want to offend

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God. They don't sin because they don't want to get in trouble. It's self -interest.

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It's because humans don't want to get punished for the things that they do.

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It's like the teenager who would be more than willing to steal the Ferrari and take it for a joy ride, so long as he wouldn't end up in juvenile detention until he's 18 or 20 or however long, because it's grand larceny or grand theft auto rather, not the game.

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But God has the wonderful ability to use sin sinlessly because of His sovereignty.

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Even those things we do in the dark are used for the righteous plan that God has for His creation, whether we like it or not, because we're all created.

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Paul continues again with to a debased mind.

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The NSV says depraved. The word in the

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Hebrew, I can't pronounce, so it's not in here, but it means unfit, an unfit mind, unfit for reasonable thinking or logic, but also inevitably self -interest.

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Even the sinful means by which we keep ourselves in check goes away.

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Anyone think of a time in scripture where this played out? To take a point from Matthew Henry.

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At first, Pharaoh hardened his heart, but afterwards, God hardened it for him.

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Thus willful hardness was justly punished with judicial hardness.

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At first, it was just Pharaoh saying, no, I'm not letting your people go because of his own self -interest, but after nine plagues, boils, flies, and all of his court saying, let them go.

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This is enough. What does he say? No, I will not let you people go out of completely disregarding his own self -interest.

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Then he chases them through the desert as they're following a pillar of smoke and flame in the water parts, and he decides to ride through it lacking self -interest by any measurable standard.

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Paul says then to do what ought not be done, things which are not proper, ought meaning obligation, or to do what should be done, that which is proper, ought.

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If you listen to a lot of reformers or read a lot of reformers or listen to people who are reform teachers today, you will hear a lot about ought, especially when they talk about society.

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Those of us who can't just came back from G3 would understand what ought a person do.

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29. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

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They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. These are things that are on the inside.

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These are things that we can't see. They're gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, prideful, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents.

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Can anyone identify with that one as children or parents? 30.

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Foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless. Having been given over to this unfit mind, they're not merely tainted with these things or half full, but Paul says filled up.

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I'm not going to try to pronounce this Greek word either, though I do have it on the page in blue, but it is translated as to completion, fulfilled, fulfilled to fill up the action of doing something to completion or fullness.

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They are overflowing with unrighteous thoughts that lead to actions. This is an ongoing and worsening situation for those who are judged in this manner.

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See, man doesn't like God because He shows us our sin, as I stated before.

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So we sin more in effort to ignore it. I said depraved, an unfit mind, but as I said in 29,

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Paul is telling us the things that are on the inside, the things that only God sees that we can't see, and just before, and I say it this way for a reason, just before 30, he starts a list of the things that we can see.

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The people who have the first list, that's what they look like on the inside.

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This is what they look like on the outside. These are the things that we can see.

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If I could direct you to the text that we just read before in John 3 19, or I can just go through it.

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It's up to you. In Christ's conversation with Nicodemus, Christ says, starting in 19, and this is the judgment.

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The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil.

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For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.

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I would like to point out is that there are people who come to the light, right?

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Because God makes them. Not that we want to. God makes us do it, but what happens to those people who do, who do have their sins exposed in the full light of Christ?

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He covers them, right? Those of us, all of us in this room, at one time or another, hated

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God. Whether we knew it or not, whether we would confess it or not, we did on the inside or from at least myself on the outside as well.

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I was quite a few of these things that were on this list, but in him exposing my sin, he took care of it.

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It's not a problem anymore, and while I do remember it also, we talked about before, it is a gift that I remember it, but I am not,

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I don't feel guilty for it, and I shouldn't. Not anymore.

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Paul also warns Timothy in 2 Timothy 3, 2 through 5,

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I'm going to start in verse 1. Yep, 2

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Timothy 3. We'll start in 1, in verse 1. But understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty, for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self -control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.

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Avoid such people, Paul says to Timothy. Now, Paul reiterates what he's already written in Romans, here to Timothy, about people that are under the judgment of abandonment.

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He goes on to say in his second letter to Timothy, that some of these people will be within the church, even being teachers and leaders in it.

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And this was something that was just as relevant to Timothy as it is to us today.

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Paul is not talking about a far -flung time in the future where this hasn't happened yet.

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He's talking to Timothy 2 ,000 years ago.

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People were just like this. And we have not gotten any better. In fact,

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I would argue that it's worse. Because it has been these last days, as Paul references, the entire history of the church, this has been going on the whole time.

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When Christ ascended and we were gifted with not only the

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Holy Spirit, obviously, but the apostles, the foundations of the church, it has been an ever -declining slope of depravity.

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Now, some cultures end up a little bit better than other cultures, but I would say it seems that the larger a culture gets, the more tendency it has to rapidly decline in this very manner.

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Paul goes on in 32, that they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die.

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They not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

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Paul uses the word epignotis. It sounds similar, but it's the oris tense of that verb, knowing.

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The oris tense meaning an action that took place and is continual, like sanctification.

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At some point in our Christian lives, we began to be sanctified, but it is an ongoing process, like discerning truth.

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At some point, you started to discern truth, but once you start, you never finish. It's ongoing.

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In English, this would be called the continual tense or present continual tense.

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Notice that he says they know, not that they're ignorant of God and what they're doing is evil.

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They know it full well. It says so in verse 19, for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world.

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The things that have been made, so they are without excuse. We even state this in our confession, although the light of nature, part one, although the light of nature and the works of creation, the providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God as to leave men inexcusable.

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As we talked about before, that's called general revelation. All men understand the most basic of truths.

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The creation means a creator and not only that, but the universal understanding of all men of right and wrong.

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Majority of cultures consider murder bad, rape bad, harming children bad, theft bad.

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Even the smallest tribes around the world understand that those things are bad.

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Why? Do they know God? Do they get it from his Bible? No.

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There are plenty of people in the world who've never seen a Bible or heard about Jesus. But they understand on a level that is deeper than a book or a pastor that these things are bad.

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They are against the created order. Throughout the world, most of these things are frowned upon.

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In a large majority of the world, they're still illegal, just the

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West that's a little bit lax on things. Paul goes on to address this very thing in chapter 2 in verse 15.

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They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

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After that, Paul issues a warning. In the latter half of 32, that those who practice such things deserve to die and that men know it.

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There is no escape. None of us are getting out of here alive. To paraphrase

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Dr. Baucom for a moment, there is no other non -biblical sermon that speaks louder to men than a cold, dead corpse.

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There isn't. It affects us like nothing else.

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We all deserve that. The only difference between the church and the rest of the world is

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God's grace. That's it. We all still face that.

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Paul says that they know that these things are deserving of death, and yet they do them anyway, like a thief knowing that he's being watched and stealing anyway, irregardless of the consequence.

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He also says that not only do they know that these sins deserve death, but Paul says that people actively promote them.

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The world approves of these things. They're contrary to God. This is the societal outcome that we see today and in other cultures of individuals needing affirmation for the sin that they want to do.

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Plain and simple, they need everyone else to do what they're doing or to at least affirm it so that they can continue in that sin, trying to drown out everything else that's telling them that it's wrong, including themselves, their conscience, and especially the church.

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Why do you think that the church over the past 2 ,000 years has become the bad guys in every single culture?

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And if you think that there's some frame of argument there that we haven't, I'll read you this because I was quite on a trip digging into this, and one of the things

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I came across was a clip of Paul Washer, who's a wonderful teacher, and he was quoting

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Roman historians. So I dug into what he was talking about. This is an excerpt from the

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Annals of Tacitus. Consequently, to get rid of the report,

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Nero fashioned the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called

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Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origins, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators,

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Pontius Pilatus, and the most mischievous superstition thus checked for the moment.

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Again, broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

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Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all people who pleaded guilty.

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He's speaking of when Rome burned, by the way. Then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted.

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Not so much of the crime of firing the city, but as of hatred against mankind.

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Does that sound at all familiar? Man must always silence truth speakers, those shouting from the rooftops, declaring the gospel, so that they can affirm themselves in what they're doing.

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We have even a history of this in the Old Testament. This is a rhetorical question, so you don't have to answer it, but think for a moment how many prophets you can name that lived to an old age.

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How many lived to be old? To quote

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John Murray, we are not only bent on damning ourselves, but we love to congratulate others who are doing the same.

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Everyone is running as fast as they can towards hell, and they're cheering each other as they do it. Please forgive me for adding this, but woe to a church who lets them do it while remaining silent, much less affirming them in their sin.

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Woe to those pastors, to that congregation, when the judgment comes, when they stand before Christ and defend their manipulation and hatred of his bride.

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They will stand there and not have an argument as to why they whored out his bride, because that's what they're doing.

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As God said in Zechariah, what

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Israel was doing in the world and not of it, that's not from Zechariah.

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We're supposed to be in the world, but not of it. I'll end with a quote from John MacArthur.

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Today, sin is called sickness, so people think it requires therapy, not repentance.