January 26, 2025, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
Transcribed by Beluga AI.
Amen. Who have I in heaven but you? And besides you, I desire nothing on earth. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God, you are the strength of my life and my portion forever. Amen.
All right, so we are going to be in Romans 1. And I got good news and bad news for you. The good news is this is a great book. The bad news is for the next three or four sermons, Paul is going to be talking about the problem of human sinfulness and tonight the wrath of God.
And boy, we don’t talk about that in modern church very much anymore: the wrath of God. But that’s what he’s going to be talking about. That’s what we’re going to talk about tonight.
So what I entitled this is the bad news before the good news, the bad news before the good news. And what makes the good news so good is that the bad news is bad. All right, we have good news in the light of bad news. It’s like, you know, the doctor says, the bad news is you have cancer.
The good news is we can heal you. You can be healed, all right. But in our culture, we avoid bad news. We avoid the bad news. We medicate.
What we’re like is a bunch of cancer patients going to the doctor, and the doctor not wanting to upset us by telling us we have cancer. And so he just prescribes painkillers. And so we deny the bad news, but when we deny the bad news, we make ourselves immune from the good news. We can’t get the good news.
And so we’re going to be talking about this. And what Paul’s doing intentionally from Romans 1:18 until about Romans 3:20 is he is making his case as a prosecuting attorney to lock everyone up under sin so that he can say in Romans 3:23, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
And so this is the start of his argument that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; (Romans 3:23, CSB)
Romans 1:18-32.
And here’s what the apostle says. For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.
For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless and their senseless hearts were darkened.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.
Therefore, God delivered them over to the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator who is praised forever. Amen.
For this reason, God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
Their men, in the same way, also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with other men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.
And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to corrupt minds so that they do what is not right. They’re filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They’re full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice.
They are gossips, slanderers, God haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.
Although they know God’s just sentence that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them all on the nightly news.
18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles. 24 Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen. 26 For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error. 28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. 29 They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. 32 Although they know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die —they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them. (Romans 1:18-32, CSB)
So this is the bad news from which we’re going to get to the good news. And the bad news is this, that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven on the human race.
Well, what is the wrath of God? Let me tell you what it’s not. First, it is not fly off the handle human anger. All right, sometimes I have fly off the handle human anger. Something upsets me, something kind of triggers me, and all of a sudden I go into at least a semi rage.
I yell and I shout and I just get frustrated, and it has no real rationale. When I just settle down and I think about it more clearly, it’s like, oh, I don’t need to be angry at this, but I’ll fly off the handle, all right?
And I’ll respond in anger. That’s not the wrath of God, nor is it capricious or unpredictable.
The Romans lived in a pagan culture that believed in many gods. And in the many gods they believed in, the gods were capricious and unpredictable. The gods could fly off the handle and be unpredictable. The gods could get it.
And the secret in living in a polytheistic pagan culture basically was don’t get the gods mad. You know, and different gods had different quirks that would make them mad.
You know, and if you ever have lived with an angry person, we have a phrase for that. You know, you’re walking on eggs, right? You don’t want to get them mad because you don’t, you know, you don’t want to set them off. And so you have to be very careful.
And that’s what. That’s how pagans would live. Have to be very careful and give the right sacrifices and the right amounts at the right times to appease these capricious and unpredictable gods.
Neither does the wrath of God tell us that God is up in heaven and he’s just in a bad mood. In fact, the Bible says a lot about joy, and we serve a joyful God.
I don’t know. Christmas Carol, the Dickens story. A Christmas Carol. And years ago, they did a cartoon version of it. And the Ghost of Christmas Present, I thought, man, they nailed it. They just got it right. He was a big, boisterous ghost, and he couldn’t talk without laughing. The ghost of Christmas Present was a ghost of joy.
And God is a joyful God, so he’s not in a bad mood. But the wrath of God is this: the wrath of God is God’s holy hostility toward evil. It is a refusal to condone it, to kind of say, oh, well, boys will be boys, turn his back on it, or come to terms with it. It is a righteous judgment upon evil and the people who carry evil.
Now, before you get upset at the wrath of God, realize that we all have within ourselves a deep sense of justice. We want the bad guys to pay.
All right, Christmas time comes around, and Amazon starts delivering packages in our neighborhood. And we get messages from neighbors. Oh, there’s so and so going around. And what are they doing? What do people do?
They go around neighborhoods, they steal packages off people’s neighborhood, and they rob people of their Christmas presents or what they ordered. And Jill and I don’t do this because we don’t have a dog.
But if I had a dog, I would be strongly tempted to get a box, shovel all that dog poop in the box, close the box up, and put it on my front porch with the hopes that one of those people would come and steal it.
Why? Because just the delight of them opening that box full of dog poop. Ha ha. Bad guy. Got it. Justice. We showed them.
Or my wife. Speaking of dogs, my wife works at 911, and she likes the bad guys to get caught. She doesn’t like the bad guys.
From what they do, she doesn’t like. She hates theft. Oh my gosh, Jill just hates theft. If it’s not yours, don’t take it.
And so every once in a while, there’ll be a bad guy running away from the cops. The bad guy will stop his car and run into the woods, thinking he can escape the cops in the Washington Woods. The cops, you know, they have long days and they have hard jobs. So these cops won’t chase these bad guys in the woods. They have a better plan.
They’ll just shout to the bad guy, I have a dog. Stop or I’ll send the dog. I tell you, I ever hear that from a cop, I am frozen because I’ve been to the fair and I’ve seen those dogs. They train those dogs.
But these bad guys are stupid, alright? That’s why they’re bad guys. They’re stupid. And so they keep running, thinking that’s a bluff or I can outrun that dog or whatever. They’re just stupid or they’re high on drugs or something.
And so my wife actually delights in this. She’ll come home and I’ll say, did you have a good night? She goes, oh, yeah. I said, what made it a good night? She said, I had to call in for medical aid for a dog bite on a stupid bad guy. Says, oh, good boy. Got him. You a good boy. You got that bad guy.
She actually likes it when the dogs bite the bad guys. Hence we have no dog. Just saying why we don’t have a dog, alright? Or if we do, she’s not going to train them, alright?
So we all want justice for the bad guys. I love the genre of movies, Westerns. Because westerns are all about justice, right? The bad guys are in town, they’re real bad. And then John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Kurt Russell comes into town, just starts cleaning up the town and the bad guys get it and we love it.
Except in one instance when we’re the bad guy. Then we don’t want justice, we want mercy. But before you get too hard on God’s wrath, realize God’s wrath is holy and righteous judgment against evil.
And we want evil to pay. We want evil to pay. God’s wrath is revealed against godlessness and wickedness and the suppression of the truth. These are all willful things.
Listen, when people say, well, I’m an atheist, I just can’t believe in God. No, no, no, mother saying, all right, here’s a mother saying, do you mothers. Do you go to school and learn these mother sayings before you have children? Like, don’t play with rubber bands. You can what? You put an eye out, right?
I got hit flush in the eye with a rubber band in the sixth grade. Guys were shooting rubber bands at each other. Just boom, hit me right in the eye. I was incredibly amazed that an eyeball wasn’t sitting in my hand. They just didn’t fall out. Because I’ve been told by every mother in my neighborhood, you play with rubber bands, you can put an eye out, right?
All right, you know, and if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge? I don’t know, Mom. How high is the bridge?
You know, maybe it could be fun. All right, so I had one mother, but she would say, you know, when her daughter would say, I can’t do that. And here’s the mother saying, can’t lives on won’t street. Does that sound like a mother saying, can’t lives.
I can’t do my homework. Can’t lives on won’t street. You won’t do your homework. No, I can’t believe in God. It’s not true. It is never. And I don’t use the word never very often, but I’m convinced of this. Atheism, agnosticism is never a head problem. It’s a heart problem.
It is a chosen godlessness. And godlessness then creates wickedness, because wickedness means living a life that does not have what we call a moral compass or an anchor or a foundation. And therefore we are just tossed around.
And without God, that’s exactly. You know, modern. Modern man has both feet planted firmly in midair. Without God, we make up the rules as we go along, and we borrow from him some, but when borrowing from him becomes inconvenient, we make up other rules. And therefore we do what?
We suppress the truth, not because the truth can’t be known, but we don’t. We’re like that was few good men. You want the truth, you can’t handle the truth. We don’t want the truth. Truth. We don’t want the truth. And so we suppress the truth.
And people say, well, why would people do that? Hasn’t science shown us that it’s unreasonable to believe in God? And really, science can answer all our questions. Nothing could be further from the truth. And in the 21st century, that has never been further than the truth than it is now.
Dear ones, I just got to tell you, there is more evidence now for what Romans 1 says, that God has revealed himself through creation. There’s more evidence now than there ever has been.
Our ancient people believed it because it seemed self-evident. The enlightenment came along, and it was a great opportunity to get out from underneath God. And we said, no, science has all the answers. And a Darwinian theory of natural selection shows us how life began and how life, you know, came to be on earth. We don’t need God anymore.
And then the 21st century came along, and science got three huge shocks. Shock number one: For that kind of evolution to take place over time, it takes a humongous, in fact, an infinite amount of time. Therefore, the universe has to be infinite in time.
In the 21st century, we discovered it had a beginning. Now, Christians always believed it had a beginning. Some Christians believe the beginning was 6,000 years ago. Some Christians believe the beginning was 14 billion years ago. But it had a beginning.
And every reputable scientist now believes the universe had a beginning. And that leads to a huge problem for people who don’t want to believe in God. Because everything that has a beginning has a cause.
You see, it renders it down to two possibilities and only two possibilities. Time, space, matter, energy exists because something without a beginning, an immense power created them. Or time, space, matter, energy exist because they came from nothing.
Do you hear that? There was nothing, then there was everything. Well, let me just tell you, if you believe there was nothing and then there was everything, you believe in God because your nothing is really powerful. your nothing is a big nothing, a big powerful nothing.
And then we went on to discover more in the 20th century that, in fact, the laws of physics in the universe that we live in are so infinitesimally fine-tuned to make carbon-based life possible on the planet Earth. I mean, it’s like dials have just been.
And there’s nothing, there’s nothing that says the laws of physics have to be what they are. It seems like they were specifically chosen to be what they are so that life could emerge on this third rock from the sun.
People say the universe is so large, there’s probably life forms everywhere. Now there’s nothing in the Christian faith that says there can’t be life forms. In fact, we say there are life forms everywhere. They’re not, they’re not physical, they’re spiritual, but that they’re physical life forms in other places in the universe that could be possible.
That’s possible. And that wouldn’t contradict Christian belief or faith at all that we’re the only beings in the universe. However, now science says it’s highly unlikely. Why? Because the fine-tuning it takes for an atmosphere and water and an orbit for life to emerge on this planet is so particular that it’s, like, mathematically impossible for it to replicate itself anyplace else.
Third, DNA. All right, there’s a code in Sophia. In her cells, there’s a code that says, Sophia, your nose is going to look like this and not like Sean’s nose.
I don’t know how much Sean’s nose look a lot like yours, but it’s not the same nose. You got different noses, all right? And the reason you have different noses isn’t just by accident. There’s a code written in you, in your cells that say, this is how big your nose is going to grow. This is what your nose is going to look like, all right?
And all of everything we know has this code. All these cells have this code telling these cells how to operate. This code is a language.
Well, where did that language come from? Random mutations? Well, first of all, where do the proteins come from to mutate into that? I mean, it just. It goes back and back and back, and there’s no real explanation.
And random mutations do not bring about order. Like a code that talks about, you know, how tall Isaiah is going to be. Random mutations effect bring about disorder.
Saying that random mutations brought about the DNA that controls our lives, that shapes our lives, is like saying there was an explosion at a printing factory and 300 dictionaries, perfect dictionaries, came out from the explosion. No. Wherever you find a language, what do you automatically assume?
Wherever you find a code, what do you assume? Listen, you got one of these, right? Did this come to you because somebody dumped all the physical ingredients that are in this and put them in a blender and turn the blender on and out popped an iPhone?
Or did this come to you because of intelligence? Because really smart people wrote codes and programs and processors and put them together so that you can spend hours and hours doing valuable things like wasting your life looking at reels on Facebook.
So there has never been a time in history when Romans 1 hasn’t been more true. Nature reveals there is a God. Now, it doesn’t reveal Jesus Christ as that God. That’s not what Paul is saying. But natural revelation reveals enough truth to believe there is a God.
And therefore, if you don’t suppress the truth, the only alternative is to seek that God. And that’s the sin.
I was in a debate one time with a person, and they were an alcoholic. They said, well, alcoholism is a sickness, not a sin. And I said, well, I’ll grant you, let me grant you, I don’t know that this is even true, but let me grant you that the predisposition to be addicted to alcohol is biological. And you had no choice. Once you took your first drink, you know you were biologically predisposed to alcohol.
I got a lot of Irish in me. I can believe that’s true. All right. Why did God allow whiskey to be invented? So the Irish wouldn’t rule the world? You know, my people seem to have a predisposition to that. Maybe it’s cultural, maybe it’s biological. But I said, I said, even if it is, even if that part is a biological sickness, which I’m not necessarily conceding, but even if it is, here’s the sin. Denial. You lied to yourself. You kept telling yourself, I don’t have a problem.
That’s why the first steps of Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t go to the doctor and get medicine for your sickness. It’s admit to yourself and to God that you have a problem and you’re powerless against it.
And you need his help. You need something more powerful than alcohol because alcohol is more powerful than you. And so that is the problem. We have enough truth to seek him out, but we don’t. We suppress the truth. We’re in denial.
And so to not believe in God isn’t the conclusion of an intellectual mind not being able to answer the question of why would a good God allow there to be evil in the world? Which is a tough question, I grant you that.
No, it’s not that I don’t want there to be a God. I suppress the truth and therefore refuse to honor God as God, refuse to worship, refuse to give him thanks. And then thinking ourselves wise, we become worthless, senseless and dark hearted fools.
Man, you may not be comfortable with Romans 1:18-32, but I don’t think there’s anywhere in all of literature a more succinct observation and pinpoint accurate diagnosis of the human condition.
We think ourselves wise and become fools. Arrogance is a problem. Pride is the problem. We want to be little gods unto ourselves.
And listen, I had a professor in college and said, you know what? Religion is not a matter of smart people being against simple people. Because if it was smart people, if religion were true, all the smart people, and it was just smart people, the smart people would believe it, and the simple ones wouldn’t. He said, but in fact, it’s always a mixed bag, right? Some smart people believe it, some don’t.
And in fact, in Christianity, I gotta say, this is no shot at y’all. But we’re much more popular amongst the simple. And so the smart community will say, well, see, you just.
You’re just naive people who believe myths and, you know, you don’t know how to discern things through facts and the scientific method, yada, yada, yada.
No, I would say there’s another explanation that’s much more accurate, and that is if you are gifted athletically, if you’re gifted in intelligence, if you have power like you’re in politics, there is a strong temptation in broken human beings to the sin of hubris, the sin of pride, arrogance.
They thought themselves wise. Many, many smart people, they got high IQs, think themselves wise, but suppress the truth.
Not all of them. In fact, I just watched an interview with the man in the world who has the highest recorded IQ, and he’s going to write a book on why there is a God. So not all of them, but we have enough to seek him out.
But we’re worthless, senseless, darkhearted fools. And we become idolaters. In the ancient days, that meant they would worship created things, different animals. You know, Aaron makes the form of an ox, right? A golden ox. And people would create idols. We don’t do that as much today.
We worship fellow fame, money, success, sex. There are lots of things we worship. Appearance, physical appearance. Listen, I’m not picking. If you’re a bodybuilder, I’m not picking on you. But it’s interesting to me that bodybuilders will tell you that what they’re doing is they’re getting in shape.
They’re getting in physical shape. That’s the goal. Well, then how come the room’s full of mirrors? No, it’s. What is it? If I look like this, will you love me? It’s just brokenness. It’s just brokenness, people. It’s an idol.
Your own body becomes the thing you worship and you pour your life into. Everybody gives their lives to something. Everybody gives their lives to something. It’s idolatry. So that’s what happens to people. So how is God’s wrath revealed?
Well, three times in this passage, he says, God gives them over. Ultimately, God’s wrath is revealed in the end by God’s ultimate and final judgment, which is inevitable. But up until that time, God’s wrath is revealed in such a way that his desire is to lead us to repentance.
The first thing God does is he tells us it’s wrong. And he tells us he’s good. And he reveals to us that it’s wrong. And he reveals to us that it’s good. And he’s hoping that we’ll just have the common sense to believe in him. All right?
We did a birthday party for a young man one time, and his father brought him to the council of elders. All us older guys, and this kid was turning 18, and we all had to give him our wisdom. And he was there to listen.
And I told him, I said, and the guy I was sitting next to was a prison guard. And I told this young man, I said, listen, there’s three types of people in the world, right? Those who can count and those who can’t. No, that’s not what I said.
So there’s three types of people in the world. I said, there’s people who listen to the wisdom of the elders. They obey their parents’ instruction. They got a bunch of old men telling them, these are the mistakes I made, don’t make them. And they shock us.
Yeah, I’m not gonna do that. And they listen. And that is the least painful way to live, right? Why do we tell our kids, don’t do this and do that? It’s not because we’re being harsh.
It’s because we don’t want them to experience the pain. We know that doing A is painful and doing B will lead to less pain. Doing A may provide more immediate gratification, but it will lead to a lifetime.
I know all sorts of people provided themselves a lot of immediate gratification at 18, and they’re still paying child support for a one-night stand, alright?
And our parents don’t do that. Like, oh, but daddy, she was so cute, and it was so fun and. Yeah, well, how cute and fun is that child support payment? Don’t do it. Oh, it’s so fun to get drunk. I felt so good. Now you’re spending your life in jail because you killed somebody. Don’t do it.
So listen to the elders, listen to the wisdom, read the Bible, do what it says. It doesn’t mean you’ll have a painless life, but you’re going to avoid some hurts. That’s the wisest way.
Here’s the second: you do it, you make a mistake. That mistake is painful, and you learn from it. God gave them over not because he hates them, but he told them, don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that. I want to do it. Okay, go ahead. And you’re going to hit bottom when you do turn.
And so that was the second thing we told. I told this young man I said, listen, if you do make these mistakes, at least be smart enough to learn from it.
If you put a penny in a light socket once, you were disobedient to your parents, but you learned. If you put a penny in the light socket twice, there’s something just wrong with you. That was a mistake. It doesn’t always do that, you know.
And what do we say? That boy ain’t right. You know, my dad used to say, hey, we were a safe family of the 60s. You know, we had a big several hundred pound TV on a dinner tray. You know, you go up there as a kid and shake it.
My dad would say, don’t do it. And you kept doing it. Then he’d say, well, let it fall on you. That’ll learn you, you know. So I told this young man, learn from your mistakes. If you don’t listen to us, learn from your mistakes.
And the guy, like I said, the guy sitting next to me was a prison guard. I said, the third kind of person is living with him. If you don’t listen to the wisdom of the elders, you don’t learn from your mistakes. Society and ultimately the third kind of person goes to hell.
If you don’t repent, you’re lost. But God gives people over not because he hates them, but he wants them to hit bottom because they didn’t listen to the wisdom. So if you’re not going to listen, go live that way.
See, I have a good friend of mine. He’s a wonderful Christian man. He was just a hellion as an 18-year-old teenager, drinking and driving and carousing. And his dear mother, just the dearest woman you ever want to meet. Just, you know, he’s driving her crazy.
And on his 18th birthday, he walks in. Hey, where’s Waffles? Mom, where’s my breakfast? I’m not making you breakfast. What do you mean? You always make me breakfast. No, you’re 18 now. I don’t have to legally make you breakfast anymore. Well, what do you mean turn around?
He turned around. There, a suitcase was at the door, packed. Bye now. Does that mean his mom didn’t love him? No, it meant his mom loved him. You won’t listen to the wisdom of the elders. Go out there and hit bottom.
And he did. And now he’s a wonderful Christian man. So he had the sense. All right, Paul then highlights to highlight what this is like, he highlights one particular sin, homosexuality. I don’t know why he does that one instead of another one, but he does.
He says, look at this. This is what giving people over, this is what giving a culture over looks like, that men and women start leaving their natural functions in male and female.
First, he talks about sexual impurity, and then he says they practice this kind of sexual impurity. Dear ones, there has never been a time in the history of the church, there has never been a time where more pressure has been put on us to ignore these verses and to try to explain them. Well, that was Roman homosexuality. That was pedophilia.
That wasn’t two adults loving each other and entering into a loving, committed relationship. Well, the problem is that’s not what the Bible says, and that’s not what the Bible means.
Here’s what the Bible means. That same-sex attraction is brokenness, and that indulging in that is sin. Now, does that mean Paul then goes on, and he has a huge laundry list of sins?
I remember one time I was in the Methodist church, and we were debating this, a big debate in the mainline churches, and somebody said, well, how dare you? You’ve never struggled with this. How dare you judge people who have struggled with this.
I’m not judging anybody. I’m just saying broke is broke and wrong is wrong. You say, how dare you? And then I looked at the rest of the list. Inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, arrogant, boastful, proud.
30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, (Romans 1:30, CSB)
I thought, well, you know, the only thing in this whole passage that I haven’t done is homosexuality. I’ve done all the rest. I’ve done all the rest.
So there’s two mistakes we make in this. One mistake is we highlight homosexuality. Some kind of super sin, some kind of worse sin than other sins. It’s not. But the other mistake we make is we succumb to the cultural pressure, and it is intense in the public square.
You will be labeled a Nazi type, KKK type, bigot for simply affirming that men having sexual desire for men and women having sexual desire for women is a symptom of the fall of human being and brokenness.
To indulge that is a violation of God’s law. I mean, I thought for years that just preaching on this passage someday would put me in jail in this culture. And it may still. All right, it may still.
But dear ones, the other error we make is thinking that people who struggle with same-sex attraction are somehow worse sinners than people who don’t. And it’s just not true. All right?
Somebody once asked me, you know, do you struggle? I said, not that one. That’s not my deal. Not that one. Do I struggle with being arrogant and proud, always wanting to be the smartest guy in the room?
Yeah. Do I struggle with attraction to females? The Bible doesn’t say you’re only supposed to have attraction to females. The Bible tells me I’m supposed to have attraction to one female.
All right, well, for years, I used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated, and every February, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue would come out, and it would come out right after the Super Bowl.
So I’d be sure to get that issue because I wanted to read all the interesting articles about the Super Bowl, of course. But, you know, when you’re doing that, the pages would just open, and there are these beautiful models and these incredible beaches and just these teeny bikinis with just, just these smoking hot bodies.
And, you know, and purely for research purposes, I would look at those, and it’s like, no. I remember one time I got it, and I was in seminary, and I thought, you know what?
I’m not going to sneak off to my room and look at this behind my wife’s back. That’s tawdry. I’m going to just go to Jill and say, you know what, honey? Let’s just look at this together.
And she said, okay. I thought, well, that’ll be, you know, at least is open about it. And so we open this up, and there’s this beautiful model just laid out in her little bikini. And my wife says this. This is what my wife says, because my. She has big feet.
And all I could think of was, honey, it would be two months of looking at that picture before I ever got to her feet. And I just kind of said, I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
Well, guess what? Broken. The Bible says I’m to desire women, but not in general. Just one. I’m 66. There’s some TV commercial. Come on, some girl be like. And I’m just walking by. I don’t even. I don’t even know. I’m not looking to lust. I’m just looking to, you know.
And I walk by.I was like, hey, whoa. I remember I had a friend one time. He said, well, the first looks radar, but it’s what you do after that first look. Now, ladies, I don’t want to bore you with this. You have your sins, but I’m not going to pick on them tonight.
All I’m saying is what Paul’s doing here is he’s not just taking one group of people and saying, this is the supreme example of what sinfulness looks like. He uses it as an example, but then he gives a whole laundry list of other things.
If you can’t find yourself in that list, my guess would be you’re a liar in denial. All right. God allows us to hit bottom. And here’s the ultimate bottom. And this is so true in our culture around the issue, particularly of homosexuality, but others as well.
Not only do they do these things, but what? They approve of it. Ultimately, we’re very close to being lost. Not when we do bad things, but when we start reversing good and bad.
And the culture so tries to take the moral high ground by telling us wrong is right, and we’re wrong to debate that. They not only do it with the issue of homosexuality, they do it with the issue of the life of a child in a womb. Right?
You are shamed as somehow being anti-woman and anti-health for women. If you believe that, there ought to be some protection for that life that that woman carries. How dare you, man? How dare you tell a woman what to do with her body? You know what?
If there was a serial killer out there, I’d tell him what to do with his body. Stop going into people’s houses and killing them. If you’re going to go kill somebody, I have a right. Not because I’m a woman, not because I are not. And you can’t take that right away from me because I don’t have ovaries.
As a human being, I have a right to say, don’t kill that child. That’s wrong. And you don’t get the moral high ground on that. You don’t get the moral high ground on that.
But we not only approve, we not only do wrong things, but now we do them without shame.
When I first was a pastor, young couples would come to me and they’d want to get married. And I would be very, I’d be very upfront. I’d ask them, are you living together? Are you sexually active?
And they’d kind of like, well, yeah, yeah. Then I’d say, okay, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to marry yet. But here’s my, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to be celibate from now until the wedding night.
And so often the women would say, well, I think that’s a sweet idea. I think that’s good. I’ll make it special. And the guys would be like, we need to talk, pastor. It’s like, no, that’s what we’re going to do. That’s what we’re going to do.
Now, when I ask people, are you sexually active or you’re living together? Like, yeah. So everybody. No, we’ve reached the point of not only doing wrong things, but approving wrong things.
And so why do we pray for revival? Because we read this passage and we go, that’s kind of us. That’s kind of the world we live in. That’s the world Paul lived in. That’s the bad news, the good news.
Here’s a spoiler alert: once we get into Romans chapter three a little further, the good news is what James says actually is that mercy triumphs over judgment, that God’s wrath is being revealed.
But at this point in history, until Jesus Christ returns, until you die, until history is summed up, the opportunity out there to repent, to turn around, is there. And the good news is there’s mercy.
You don’t have to do 3700 good deeds to earn it back. But you do have to turn. You do have to admit this simple thing. God, you’re right, I’m wrong. God, you’re smarter than me. And God, I don’t feel like I can overcome. I don’t feel like I can get better.
Hey, that’s his. He’ll make you better. He’ll make you better. But turn to him in humility and brokenness and say, God, I found myself in that list. I found myself in that list and I’ve even done the bottom. I’ve even called wrong, right?
To appease a culture that gets mad at me when I don’t. If I could say anything, I just want to say, don’t be mean, but don’t be buffaloed, dear ones, don’t be buffaloed.
People will yell at you and call you names. It might not be their intent, but it certainly is the devil’s intent to intimidate us into silence, intimidate us into acquiescence. And you don’t have to be mean to not acquiesce.
And if they call you mean, it doesn’t mean you are. You don’t have to take the labels you follow. All right, thank you, Ats. There is mercy that is more powerful than judgment. This table says so loud and clear. There is mercy.
We’ve all found ourselves on that list. Well, what are we going to do? Paul’s going to get to it later in Romans. But spoiler alert, here’s what he’s going to say. If you put your faith in Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven, you start new, and there is mercy for you, not wrath. The wrath of God is being poured out.
And at this point in history, it’s being poured out not because God wants to punish us, but because God wants us to repent. So be person number one. Listen to the wisdom of Rev. Kev. Don’t do this stuff. Or be person number two. Already done this stuff, and it’s messed up my life.
But by golly, I’m going to repent. Just don’t be person number three. Turn to somebody next to you and say, don’t be person number three. Don’t be that stupid. All right. Listen to your parents, Sophia. That’s the best. They’re good parents. They’re smart. Yeah, there you go. All right. All right.
Dear ones, on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it. He gave it to his disciples. And he said, this is my body, which is given for you. In the same way, after supper, he poured out the cup, gave thanks to his Father in heaven. And he said, this is my blood, which is shed for you and for many for forgiveness of sins. And as often as you gather together, do this in remembrance of me.
24 and when he had given thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:24-25, CSB)
And, dear ones, I want to tell you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven. Your sins are forgiven. Amen. Amen. Come and eat.
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