WWUTT 1166 Dishonorable Passions? (Romans 1:26)

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When you have a culture that is worshipping the created things rather than the Creator, that is suppressing the truth for the lie, eventually

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God is going to remove his restraining grace and they will fall into deeper sins.

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When we understand the text. This is when we understand the text studying

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God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Thank you for subscribing and if this has ministered to you please let others know about our program.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you Becky. We are so touched by the number of families who have contacted us and have said that they use when we understand the text as part of their devotional learning.

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Parents and kids getting together and maybe eating breakfast or something like that while they listen to me teach through the scriptures and we are honored by that.

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It's in knowing that that's our audience. I feel it necessary to add in this disclaimer today.

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What we're going to be looking at as we come back to Romans 1 is going to be rather mature in subject matter.

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So you may want to listen to this first, especially if you have young kids before you let your children listen to it.

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There may be some things you want to discuss with your kids first and that's fine. I just wanted to make you aware of that being some of the things we're going to be talking about as we come into some of the more serious content that Paul addresses regarding the depravity of man we have described in Romans chapter 1.

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I did this last week, but I'm going to come back to it again. Again, reading Romans 1 verses 18 through 32 all the way through in context, the apostle

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Paul wrote to the church in Rome, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for His invisible attributes, namely

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His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.

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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

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the

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Creator who is blessed forever. For this reason,

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God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, 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.

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They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. 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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The opening statement that we have in this particular section is, of course, in verse 18 where it says, 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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And then what we have after that statement, after we have the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, we have the reason why

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God's wrath has been revealed. And it first of all begins with, by their unrighteousness they have suppressed the truth.

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So men are choosing to go after their sin rather than love the truth of God.

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A person is deciding to honor themselves and pursue the passions of their own flesh, their own personal desires, rather than seeking after what

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God desires and honoring Him with the gifts that God has given to them. As Paul describes it in Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 through 3,

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God has given us a body and a mind and in our sinful nature we use those things that God had given us for His glory and instead we exalt ourselves and go after our glory instead.

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We love our sin. We hate the truth. We love ourselves. We hate God. So God's wrath is revealed for that reason, because a person loves their sin and in their sinfulness they would rather go after the things that titillate the flesh, that satisfy the body and the mind, and therefore suppressing the truth in order to have to do that.

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They will know that what they're doing is wrong, but they have to suppress the truth so not to have that cognitive dissonance or that eating away by their conscience that is constantly reminding them what they're doing is wrong.

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It's rebellion against God. So they suppress the truth and go after their sin. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them, not just that He exists, but even

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His holy qualities, His eternal power and divine nature.

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God is holy. We are not. Even that has been revealed from heaven to us.

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They have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made so that men are without excuse.

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But instead, though they knew God, they don't honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they become futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts are darkened.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools. You're talking about man's wisdom at that point.

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The things that man or a culture or a society would declare to be wise, but in God's eyes are foolish.

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And when it comes to recognizing what we should inherently know through general revelation, what we recognize as truth just from the things that have been made, that truth is even suppressed to go after the unrighteous thing.

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We should be able to recognize that the sin and the pursuit of that unrighteousness is inherently foolish.

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Just through general revelation, we should be able to recognize that. But although they knew

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God, they don't honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they become futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts are darkened.

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So they're going to get deeper and deeper into the foolishness that they pursue.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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So recognize here that instead of worshiping the creator, they're now worshiping the created thing.

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And what's going to happen from here is that mankind is going to fall into deeper and worse depravity.

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Those things that pertain to the worship of the created things, since they do not want to worship the creator.

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So then what you have in verse 24 is the first word that we have here is therefore the argument that Paul is unfolding is that when a group of people loves lies instead of truth, they love their sin instead of God.

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They worship the created thing instead of the creator. As they continue in that chasing after the passions of their flesh, eventually

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God is going to remove his restraining grace from them and they are going to fall into deeper and deeper sins, therefore to come into condemnation.

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And again, this is why God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of man.

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It's not just God wants to be a vindictive, wrathful God. It's because mankind deserves it.

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And as they go further and further away from God, eventually God just lifts his restraining hand and they fall into deeper depravity so that their condemnation is just.

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As it says in Psalm 51 for David said against you, you only have

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I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.

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In second Thessalonians chapter two, verse 11, it says, therefore God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe what is false in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

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And as a culture or a society continues in that pleasure of unrighteousness, they will fall into deeper and more degrading sins.

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And that's what we have described here in verses 24 through 28 in particular.

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So looking again at verse 24, where it says, therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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Amen. So because they worship the created rather than the creator,

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God gives them what their heart desires. The heart is wicked and therefore the body follows.

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So what we're talking about being described here, verse 24 is sexual immorality. God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

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You want to look at a culture, a society that is at the height of its depravity or that God has removed his restraining grace from.

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You need to see in that culture a growing lust in sexual immorality.

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You will be talking about a pornographic culture. And that is exactly the culture that we live in.

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That kind of describes the entire Western world. Sex sells, as the slogan goes.

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And so just about any commercial product that's out there, it's almost like just about everything that you see on TV, that you see in the magazine racks at the store, that you're seeing pop up in ads on your computer, just as you're not even looking for the sexually suggestive stuff.

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You're just doing your regular searching. And yet you've got ads popping up that are using some sort of sexually suggestive imagery in order to sell that particular item.

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That's the way that our culture is right now. It is so commonplace that we almost don't even think about how regular it is, how often and how frequently we see it.

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I mean, we're practically desensitized to it, even if you're not a person that actively goes looking for it online.

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And you most certainly shouldn't. But you have become desensitized to the level of pornography that this culture has fallen into that you don't even know how much you're being exposed to it on a daily basis.

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There's just it's almost like there's just no decency about it anymore. And even

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Christians don't seem to have a problem with it. Professing Christians will watch

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TV shows that are very sexually explicit. And I'm not just talking about the stuff that you watch on on cable

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TV or even like CBS or NBC or something like that. I'm even talking premium channel type shows like the kinds of things that HBO makes.

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And Christians are watching that and they have no problem with it. Watching Game of Thrones, which is incredibly sexually explicit.

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And I made a video on this. I never watched an episode of the show, but because it's made on HBO, I know exactly what's in the show.

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HBO has that kind of reputation. And you can go on websites and you can find people who chronicle this kinds of stuff.

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Every time there's some sort of sexual encounter in a show, they write about it on the website.

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Here's how many sex scenes there were this last season. You can find stuff that lists that. So I don't even have to go watch the show.

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And I know it's full of that kind of material. Plus, you can go on a website like IMDB and you can click on parental guy, the parental guide.

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And it'll have the details in there about the kind of graphic content you can expect to watch in that show.

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There's not a reason for me to have to watch the show to know that it's just really, really bad. And yet, when shows like that get real popular, you can go on social media and you will find

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Christians defending watching it, that it's completely fine to watch this material because it's all it's just make believe.

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It's just fantasy. And we need to have a little bit more Christian liberty when it comes to watching this kind of stuff.

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Hey, you might feel guilty about watching it, but I don't. The reason you don't feel guilty about watching two naked bodies miming sex on a screen is because you're desensitized to it.

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And that's a very, very serious problem. Do you think that God is

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OK with the level of sex scenes that we have that come up in these kinds of shows and movies?

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You think that God's all right with that? And so therefore, you who is a follower of Jesus and your body is a temple of the

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Holy Spirit, you think it's all right for your eyes to be watching that sort of a thing? Something that I put in one of the what videos that I made about this, about the kind of porn content that we see in a lot of these shows and movies.

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I said, would it be OK for you to stand at somebody's window and watch two people having sex?

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Even if they were giving you permission to do it, would it be OK for you to stand outside their window and watch them have sex?

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Would any Christian say that's all right? I mean, it's kind of like we know just from having a redeemed conscience.

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That would be bad. That would be horrible. You would not want anyone to know that you had ever done such a thing, even if you had done that, even if you could somehow rationalize that that would be acceptable because the people gave me permission to do it.

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You still wouldn't want anybody else to know about it because, you know, in your heart of hearts, just how wicked that is.

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You're a pervert watching porn, and it doesn't matter if it's on a

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TV screen or a computer monitor or you're watching at someone's bedroom window. It is arbitrarily the same thing.

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And our culture is so steeped in this that we've just become desensitized as to how awful this really is.

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How degrading it is that people are just objects, that bodies exist to titillate your own mind and your own flesh.

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It is objectifying of persons, not just the objectification of women, but objectification of men and women and and even taking something as beautiful as sex is because God did create it to be good and perverting it and turning it into something wicked.

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God created sex to be something intimate between a husband and a wife in marriage.

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That's where it's meant to be enjoyed. And it has left the marriage bed and is just all over the place in society.

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I mean, how much of a chore it is for a parent to be able to protect their kids from this kind of stuff.

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I was trying to show my kids a YouTube video one time and the the ad that came up just punching a button on my phone.

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And I'm very careful the stuff that I look at. And here I'm pushing play on my smartphone. And what played was an ad from Ariana Grande.

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And what she was doing in that ad was R -rated because our music has become like this as well.

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Top 40 radio, pop music. It's all R -rated. It is. You can't watch the music videos.

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Don't even bother. Don't even test me on this. Going and watching the top 10 biggest songs that are out there right now.

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I guarantee you nine out of those 10 songs is going to contain content you would never let your kids watch.

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At least I hope you're not letting your kids watch it. This is how widespread it is.

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It's absolutely everywhere. Something that God made for the marriage bed.

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And now it's not even in the marriage bed anymore. It's out in public and everywhere else, but the marriage bed in a lot of places, marriage rates have declined rapidly.

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People are waiting until later in life to get married. All the averages show this.

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And the reason for it is largely to do with porn. Young men in particular are waiting until later in life to go and look for a wife and then even to have children because they're getting their fleshly desires fulfilled through the porn that they watch.

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And then all these fantasies that they've built up in their mind through pornography when they do get married, they have this expectation of being able to live out these sexual fantasies with the woman that they're married to and their wife becomes an object of their sexual desires rather than this woman that they're supposed to love and lay down their life for as Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her.

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The charge that is given to husbands on how to love their wives that we read about in Ephesians chapter five porn is, of course, also ruining marriages from the inside out.

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Men who cheat on their wives, committing adultery by going downstairs, getting on the computer and pulling up videos and images of other people having sex.

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He takes his mind and body, which is supposed to belong to his wife, and he gives it over to complete strangers instead.

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And God will judge that man if he does not repent. 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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They go after the passions of their flesh rather than desiring what

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God desires. If God does not desire it for you, then it is a sin for you to desire it.

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Now, fortunately, our God is a gracious God and there is forgiveness in Christ Jesus.

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If you are guilty of the sin of pornography, you must repent and you must get away from it immediately.

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The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, first Corinthians chapter six, flee from sexual immorality.

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Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

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Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God?

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You are not your own for you were bought with a price.

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So glorify God in your body. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the

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Lord and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.

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Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? So commit yourself unto

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Christ. Romans 12 one says, in view of God's mercies, present your bodies as a living sacrifice unto the

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Lord, holy and pleasing before God. And this is your spiritual act of worship.

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So flee from sexual immorality. Do not get caught up in the way of this culture, the pornographic mindset that our society has fallen into.

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Don't be so desensitized by it that you can just shrug your shoulders at it. Be repulsed at it because God certainly is.

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He is not pleased with the pornographic direction that this culture has gone.

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And don't indulge yourself in the entertainment of this culture, thinking that it's okay.

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You are a participant in it when you watch it. Repent, stay far away from it.

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As James says in James chapter four, you may need to have an attitude where you just get wretched and mourn and weep.

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Cleanse your hands. You sinners draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

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Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the goodness that you've shown to us in Christ.

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Forgive us our sins and never let us lose our sense of conviction, the conviction of the

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Holy Spirit in our hearts. For once we lose that conviction and we start justifying to ourselves all these sins that are perfectly okay, that's the moment that we should recognize that God's spirit has abandoned us.

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Your restraining hand has been lifted from us and we're now falling in our depravity to our judgment if we do not repent.

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So let us be convicted in heart over our sin, be wretched and mourn and weep, cling to Christ and be forgiven.

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Give us a new heart that goes after the things of God and not the ways of our flesh.

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Lead us in paths of righteousness. For your name's sake, O God, to the glory of your great name we pray, amen.