Without Excuse

Come on, lift up some praise to the holy King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

God's been good to you, say amen.

If God's been good to you in spite of how you feel, say amen.

If God's been good to you in spite of what you see, say amen.

The greatness of our God, the power of our God, the authority of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, does not fade away or diminish over time.

He is constant.

Jesus is constant.

The Holy Spirit is constant.

And so that should encourage us today that the crazy stories we see in the Word of God that we we hear about in other places around the world, we must understand this.

He is the same God yesterday, he is still the same God today, and he will be the same God, he will be who he is tomorrow.

So, in spite of what you have felt or had to walk through, in spite of where you are and walking through it now, in spite of what may come your way this coming week, in all agreement, we just said he is still God.

So whatever's coming, whatever you have to walk through, just keep walking, just keep walking.

And it breaks me.

How much I can fail him, how much I can step out of the character of a Christian.

Maybe I'll never done that.

That I can mess up on my end day in, day out, struggle after struggle, roadblock after roadblock, wall after wall, and yet he still is beside me.

He still walks with me.

Because he is the good shepherd.

He does not leave his f ever.

Look at our key verse today, Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Romans chapter 1, verse 20.

Romans 1:20

I know in here, I used to mess with I think it's Jehovah's Witnesses.

They didn't have any windows on their churches.

And now we're we have no windows at all in here either.

But when we get done with this message today, I want you to do something.

If you're saved and sanctified, and you feel with the Holy Ghost, you know, if you want to add that on there too.

I want you to walk out these doors and I want you to look up.

And as you leave here today, what I what I hope this message inspires you to do, maybe you know God, but maybe you grow cold.

How many of you know that's easy?

All that takes is a little bit of life to feel like I got a lot of distance between me and God.

Takes a little bit of not reading in my words, all of a sudden I don't feel like I know him anymore.

Takes a little bit of not coming to church to realize to realize you come back in and there's a bunch of new people and you're a stranger.

You're the stranger, you know.

But when we read this verse, we read the the the summation summation of this whole few verses.

I want you to think walk out the walk out the doors here, and I want you to look up, and I want you to breathe the air in that is given to us freely.

I want you to look up to the sky that a creator created.

I don't know if it's for me, but in my eyes it is, to where I can walk out there, look at the blue skies with those big old clouds in them, and just be like, wow, I can look at the grass out here and have us already changed colors.

I think the brown color is always a pretty color.

Some of the trees they're confused right now with 30 sexes, whether they don't know to go back to green or keep on changing, they're not sure.

So some of them split right down the middle, and they just can't decide.

But even in nature, as we're about to read, God is so evident that he is there, that his fingerprint is on everything we come in contact with, and look, we can see the maker's design that he had a hand.

Look around, there's not one person.

Some of y'all may be saying, Thank the Lord, there's not one person in here that is designed exactly the same.

He cares that much that even in your mother's womb, when he is knitting us together to make us unique, I'm grateful.

Verse 20 it says, For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky.

Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power, and his divine nature.

You know, Paul, here we go.

So they have no excuse for not knowing God.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you so much for your mercy and your grace.

Thank you, Lord, that even in opposition you created an opportunity where your presence came down as such a real way.

Father, we thank you for who you are.

I pray that every word out of my mouth and every scripture we read, let it land on hearts softened and prepared to take the seed of your word.

If there's somebody in your God that does not know you, or maybe there is confusion, Lord, I pray today they leave with clarity.

In your name we pray, amen.

You may be seated in the presence of the Lord.

I tell you what, starting off that first song that we did today, I was like, man, this ain't right in my ears.

And then my my guitar wasn't coming through, and I'm like, well, I was trying to think of that leadest song, and I'm like, man, I feel special.

Put the E D behind it.

It's all right.

So we're in the book of Romans right now, and we're going through this the entire book of Romans, verse by verse, line by line, chapter by chapter.

And so three words that I say every Sunday that I think really encapsulates the entire message of the book of Romans is gospel, power, and transformation.

So today we're actually gonna be last week we only went through what?

Two verses?

This week we got some more to chew on, okay?

We're going from 18, still chapter 1, 18 through 32.

Now we're gonna be titling this one today without excuse, because every person in here, or every person that doesn't know God, in my personal opinion, and what Romans is writing here, what Paul's saying, is that we don't have an excuse because there's so much evidence.

If you're gonna make a decision, you're gonna make a call in your life, what's the one thing you start doing?

If you're gonna buy a vehicle, if you're gonna buy a house, even if you're gonna get married, you start doing some research.

I want to already, before I get to the deciding table, I already want to know what I want, my necessities, my needs, my wants and desires, what it is that I want.

So we oftentimes forget God as we partake in the blessing that he has created.

Did y'all catch that?

So in this specific grouping of texts, Romans chapter 1, 18 through 32, it's one of the most sobering portions to me of scripture in the New Testament.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

We're gonna we're gonna pick it apart.

Why?

Because, first of all, it's a mirror held up to humanity.

Okay, it's a divine indictment against sin.

How many of you know sin has no place in the body of believers?

Sin has no place in a healthy church, sin should not have a place in your house.

For y'all like that, sin should not have a place on your lips, it should not have a place in your mind, it should not have a place in your heart.

Why?

Because it will kill out every good fruit you really do desire to be in your life.

As God says, He wants to bless us, he wants to pour out blessings on us, he wants to pour out his spirit on us, he wants to pour out healings on us.

But a lot of times when you get in deep into the healings and people aren't healed, it's because they haven't truly let go of sin yet.

So if we say we want to be a people that is healed, I'm not saying if God doesn't heal you, you're full of sin.

That's not what I'm saying.

Don't hear what I'm not saying.

What I'm saying is start with the basics and work your way up.

Say, do I have a problem?

Is there something maybe generational that has been passed on to me, not by my choice, but I need to renounce it so that I can live in my life now free.

How many of you know?

You've lived long enough, probably in this place today, that you uh sometimes end up becoming your parents.

Some of y'all just wanted to get up and leave, but hold on, we're going somewhere.

Some of y'all may end up like your grandparents.

You better say you like that.

They won't spoil you anymore.

Some of y'all sitting next to them.

But in a culture that rejects accountability, see if this sounds familiar to you, and I'm just coming from the book of Romans.

It's not the book of Longview or the book of the USA, huh?

It's a culture that rejects accountability, it embraces moral confusion.

Do you see how those two words together make no sense?

But yet that's what the enemy has done.

He has taken something they labeled as morality and have confused it to where they say it's truth, and we're the ones that are mean and hateful.

They are so accepting until you don't accept them.

Paul stands firm under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and says, There is a God.

He has made himself known, we have rejected him, and we are without excuse.

So this message is not for the faint of heart, but it is essential.

Okay?

If you want to follow the Lord, you have to chew on this too.

All right?

Because here's what we do we love framing everybody else as the problem, and we never actually solve the problem because we're not willing to first address ourselves.

Because you are not responsible for the person next to you or across the aisle from you.

You are responsible for you, how you act, how you respond.

What does a child do when they get in trouble?

They point the finger to everybody else involved or around them and say, Well, they did this, and that's why I did this.

That is not accountability.

Well, yeah, church.

That's not accountability.

What that is, is passing the blame, so I don't have to truly examine myself.

What's the mission and vision in this church?

Spiritual?

You can't get mature if you're blaming everybody else.

It doesn't work that way.

This is essential.

Paul, before he ever unpacks the beauty of salvation, he first reveals the depth of humanity's rebellion.

What is rebellion?

It is labeled as witchcraft.

You can't tell me that there is not a rebellious spirit that latches on to people.

And it's okay, we'll have prayer at the end for you to get delivered today.

And unless we understand the weight of sin, if we understand what sin costs us, what does it cost us?

It brings us, we purchase death through our sin.

Death is the wages of sin.

The wages of sin is death.

It's the actual correct scripture.

But death is what we are buying, what we are earning with our sin.

So the reason Jesus came is to wipe away the debt that we owed, that we can never pay.

So we have to understand that there is a weight attached to sin.

Sin looks like it will free you, and in the beginning it feels like it does, but it actually becomes bondage that sinks you to the bottom.

We will never treasure God's power and his grace until we understand what he has purchased us from.

That God has value on every single person in this place, and Christ came to purchase you back to his righteousness, to purchase you back to his holiness, to purchase you back under his glory.

God did not save us for us to hold on to it.

He actually saved us so that then we can go out and multiply what Christ has done in us.

How do we do that?

We share our faith with other people.

We talked a few weeks ago about the burden of the gospel.

As believers, we should have a burden on us, not no longer of sin, but a burden of the gospel that it it weighs on us that we must, you know, you feel like something's heavy on your chest, you're like, I gotta get this off my chest.

The burden of the gospel should weigh on us to where we need to get that off our chest.

We need to tell other people of the deliverance, we need to tell other people of the freedom, we need to tell other people of the salvation, and and we need to talk about where he brought us from without glorifying that lifestyle.

How many of you know sometimes we can be sinful one-uppers?

Well, I used to drink all the time.

Oh, yeah, well, I used to bang meth in my arm.

You know, we go we go through all these things, and we're just trying to outdo the other one.

I'm like, bro, we were all sinful.

It doesn't matter if you never touched a drink or you never touched a thing of meth in your life, you never touched cigarettes.

You needed the same salvation I did.

We are all sinners bought by the blood of Jesus.

So look, let's start at verse 18.

And our first point today is God's wrath is righteous.

There are all types of people out there that want to argue about, well, if God was all caring and loving, he wouldn't let they all immediately go to little kids having cancer.

It's always that same answer.

It is.

Every time they try to argue, and they go to the immediately the worst thing that could happen, and they do they they mention the worst possible scenario.

Listen, you've got to be okay with not having an answer and being okay with your life being God's He's the Lord of your life, which means whatever happens, you got to be okay with.

Because I am subject to Christ, I am underneath Christ.

So whatever God decides can happen in my life, I know whether I'm good or whether I'm not good, I will be okay.

Whether I am suffering here in glory or here on earth, or if I'm with him healed in glory, it doesn't matter to me because my life belongs to him.

In sickness and in health, we take this vow in our weddings.

Why do we not apply the same to our relationship with God?

So God's wrath is righteous.

Let's start at verse 18.

God, but God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

Now we're gonna go down these verses line by line, and you're gonna see, oh my goodness, Paul must have seen into the future of what our culture is today.

And I say to you, yes and amen.

So just if you're looking for some ammunition or some things to study on, here it is.

God's anger is not like man's anger, okay?

It's not irrational and it's not emotional.

Fellas, did you know that anger is an emotion?

I don't have emotions.

I hate everyone though.

You are an emotional creature, you just don't want to admit it.

You like to pass the blame instead of never mind.

God's anger, it is holy and it is just.

Think about who God is.

I tell my teenager this all the time.

When we get a little funny and we're joking around or whatever, and then he wants to joke around and pray, I say, you need to remember who you're talking to.

The same when he speaks to me, and I'm like, I don't know who you think you're talking to.

I'm not your friend.

Okay, when you grow up and have kids and they start doing what you're doing to me, then we can be friends because then you can understand something.

Same when we grow in in Christ, when we get older in the Lord, when we mature in God, then we become a friend of God because now we understand.

Now we're not making this stupid, same, dumb decisions as teenage Christians.

Now we can finally walk on our own and we're eating the meat instead of the milk.

His wrath flows from his nature as a perfect, righteous judge.

God's wrath is aimed not simply at bad behavior, but those who deliberately suppress the truth, who know what is right, but actively choose to reject it.

The phrase suppress the truth implies resistance.

This is not arrogance.

I'm sorry, ignorance.

It is arrogance.

I apologize.

This is not ignorance, it's not somebody who just doesn't know, but they are doing evil deeds and painting it up as truth.

This is called rebellion.

People do not sin accidentally, they sin willfully.

This goes to speech, that goes to thought patterns.

I'm not saying it's easy and it's going to be, you know, all rainbows and butterflies immediately when you come to the Lord, but what I'm saying is most of us have spent a lifetime learning bad habits.

And so when we get saved, we are no longer a willing participant in sinful nature.

Does that make sense?

We now turn away and we are born again, and so now we are a new creature, creation.

Some of y'all are creation, some of y'all are creature, but we are now new in Christ.

So what does that mean?

Now I reject my flesh.

Are you following me?

I reject my flesh and I'm no longer a willing participant.

That does not mean you don't accidentally mess up because we have to remember what is the root of the problem.

We all are flesh.

When man fell, when they fell out of the garden and was cast out, flesh was now introduced.

And so we have to constantly, this is a part of sanctification.

We have to constantly, every single day, choose that I am going to serve the Lord.

It is an ongoing process and decision that we must say, I am going to continue to follow Jesus.

That is choice, that is free will.

So we must recover.

I'm sorry, let's go to point number two.

So we have to.

This is two parts right here before we go to number two.

God is not only the savior.

We love talking about the Lord saved me, Jesus is the savior.

We have to remember a gospel truth, and gospel I mean from cover to cover, the entire truth that God is Savior, Jesus Christ is savior, but God is also judge.

We leave this out, this is a part of his character.

Character.

Do you understand what I'm saying to you?

He is the judge and the jury.

He is the executioner.

He is like we all love the rainbow Jesus of like, oh, it's all he's never gonna flood the earth again.

Not the other rainbow.

We're talking about the biblical rainbow where he's never gonna flood the earth again, and nothing ever bad is gonna happen.

And that's that is a part of God's nature.

But if you remember, the rainbow only came after he flooded the earth and killed everybody.

He is both savior and he is both executioner, he is the judge.

So we must reestablish the uh the real the real biblical fear of the Lord back in God's house.

There must be a reverence to the Lord.

Why are you here?

If it's for a man, you're in the wrong place.

Because I promise you, I didn't come here for you.

Most of y'all weren't here when I first came.

But think about it.

Why are you here?

Why do I stay?

These are important questions to ask when you're part of a church.

Is something small and trivial gonna make me kick up and say, no, I don't want to do this anymore.

Forget this.

Or can we look at each other with such mercy and grace as God looks at us?

And we allow love to be the first thing on our lips and our minds and our interactions with each other, and let love cover a multitude of sins as it should.

So God is our Savior.

He provided his son to die on the cross for us, but he is also the judge.

Point number two, God has made himself known.

Verses 19 through 20.

They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them.

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and the sky through everything God made.

They can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature.

So they have no excuse for not knowing God.

Creation is a testimony from the stars in the sky, in the order of the seasons of the miracle of the human body.

So we have all these things.

I say this all the time: God has displayed physical things, whether it's in our relationships, the way we live, and in nature, to display spiritual principles and matters.

So creation is a testimony.

You go outside and you look, and you can look at the testimony of who God is.

He's creative.

I mean, if you look at the seasons of how they change, you can see that wow, this was designed.

I have never gone in a parking lot and looked at a vehicle and said, There's no way there's a creator that made that.

Yet atheists will use this all the time to explain away there being no God.

But there is a God, He is powerful, He is eternal, and He is worthy of our worship.

This means that atheism is not a position of ignorance, but a position of denial.

Because you cannot walk anywhere on the face of this earth.

You can't even look to the stars in the sky above and deny that there is some sort of creator out there.

You let a plane 30,000 feet in the air drop a little bit, there ain't no atheists on there.

Even those, think about this, who have never heard a single verse of scripture have still has still heard and seen God in nature.

So I'll say it again: they are without excuse.

God is not hiding, God is not silent, he has declared himself through nature, through conscience, and ultimately through Christ Jesus.

Not only did he give us all of this to look at, but he sent his one only son who verified who he was.

If he would have just died, he would have just been a great prophet who did a couple tricks.

But he didn't.

Point number three, the rejection of God leads to moral collapse.

Romans chapter 1, verse 21 through 25.

Romans 1:21–25

It says, Yes, they knew, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks, and they begin to think up foolish ideas of what God was like.

As a result, their minds became dark and it became confused.

Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools.

I know a few of those.

The very thing God created, they made idols into to worship.

So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired.

When society knows God but refuses to worship him, refuses to acknowledge him, and tries to push him out.

One of the worst things they took and tried to, I believe, honestly, in our culture, it has changed everything, is taking the Ten Commandments down and taking prayer out of school.

It's utter chaos.

I mean, crazy things of like it's produced something in California to where you can go there and a child, a minor, can go there, hide from their parents legally by law, they will give them housing, they will take care of them, and they will give them sex change.

And the parents will be the ones getting in trouble if they try to find them.

My son can't even pick out candy at a gas station in 15 minutes.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, these kids, they're not even they're not even developed in areas, they're not developed in their brain.

What kind of what kind of backwards twilight zone nonsense have we have we allowed the church?

Now this is not their this is not their issue.

You understand?

This is not their fault.

We know better and have said nothing.

How many people did it take to be silent in a school to allow prayer to get out of there?

The answer?

A majority.

How many people didn't stand up and say, no, this is wrong?

The fad, the the fad.

The sad fact is we as believers should not have let it get to this place before we were willing to step up and say something.

Because what we do is we start negotiating sinful nature to be okay.

Yeah, I didn't like that, but that's the facts.

We start negotiating what can oh, well, that's that's not that that's not my business.

And all of a sudden, what used to not be your business is on every TV show, pushed in every major store, and now guess what?

It's not just in your business, it's in my children's business, it's in your children's business, it's in your grandchildren's business.

And now, because we said, Well, I don't want to upset anybody, I don't want to offend anybody, I don't want to hurt their feelings, it needs to we need to hurt some feelings.

I'm not saying be mean.

You can love people and be assertive and say the truth and not not try to hurt them, but I'm sorry, but when you begin to speak truth, it offends those living in the untruth.

It does.

That's the way it operates because if we as believers are not willing to examine ourselves and get a little offended and hurt, we won't want to change.

We won't want to get closer to God because we'll be latched on to the things of the world, we'll be latched on to the things we used to do, we'll be latched on to the way we used to think, we'll be latched on to our old definition.

But God has not designed us, He has not given.

Here's my thing.

I I in my in my personal walk, how do I say this?

I I'm not lazy with my walk with God.

I cannot, I I always I I remember this scripture, this story so well, and I can't remember the prophet's name.

Some of you have to help me.

When he was in the valley of dry bones, and he said, I am unclean.

And he he put he put the coal on his lips and he purified him.

That may be a mixture of two stories, but stick to the coal.

The coal is the main one, the coal.

And that's how that's how I feel.

The closer I get to God, is I am more aware of how unclean I truly am.

Does that make sense to you?

And so we as Christians have become content on how holy and how righteous living we are and how sanctified we act, because we we're good enough to make it into heaven.

Because we remember so well how God is the savior, and we forget that he is also the judge.

And so we need to stop and examine ourselves, because when when the church begins to live in the biblical truth, those who don't have truth are drawn to it by the Holy Spirit.

And so when that happens, we better have our stuff in order and we better know what we're talking about to answer for the hope that is within us.

Because when society, when culture, when even churches refuse to worship God, decay begins to happen in the culture of that place.

People don't want to come to churches because there is a stink in the house.

Paul outlines a downward spiral.

First comes the rejection of worship, then foolish thinking, then moral confusion, then idolatry, and finally the abandonment, abandonment that God does to our sinful desires.

You're thinking, well, God will abandon me.

Here's what I know.

This is firsthand experience coming from the book of Stephen.

Before I completely gave everything over to God, it took me being abandoned.

Do you understand what I'm saying to you?

Some of us who have, and you may already be you may already be in this area, it's fine, but some of us keep getting the life drawn out of us from people we should have let go long ago so that they can feel abandoned.

Now, as a as a believer, it wants to show love to everybody.

Sometimes loving them is letting them go.

That's tough.

There must be the sting of abandonment.

It's not the lack of love.

See, we we oftentimes pair these two things together when when we don't feel God or we don't we don't see him, we don't know what he's doing, we don't know, you know, I've been praying for this for a while, I've been going through this season, and I don't feel God is there to even love me.

We start all of a sudden painting the picture of he doesn't love us, which is impossible.

That's not his character, that's not his nature.

But oftentimes, so that you stop relying on things you rely on, you have to feel abandoned so that you will begin to completely rely on him.

One of my biggest crutches in my life used to be people.

I would do anything to please them, I would let them walk all over me, I would give them the shirt off my back, and not because I just loved them and that was who I was, it was because I just wanted to make sure that they didn't leave me.

I would this I don't know where it came from.

I have no clue.

There's nothing like childhood trauma, the perfect childhood growing up, but as a teenager, I had this sometimes fear of growing old and being by myself.

So I had to try to find a girlfriend.

And so then when rejection would happen, I would start getting depressed and thinking about how I wasn't worth anything, this and that.

And I kept rewriting my own definition of however someone treated me or didn't want me and all this other stuff.

And I never went to the creator to ask what his opinion was on his creation.

I let every I let relationships be my crutch.

So what did God do?

Through drug addiction, through all these other avenues that I had to be, I had to go through this process, God allowed me to be abandoned to where there was one family that I was around and some church people, and they just talked to me and loved me no matter what.

It wasn't a romantic relationship, it wasn't like it wasn't a dependent on anybody else except for my relationship with God.

He had to seclude me so that he can prove to me how much I needed him and how much he actually loved me.

Because other than that, all the other noise and distractions were getting between him and I.

Seclusion isn't a bad thing.

Matter of fact, the Bible tells us to get alone with God, to have prayer time with God.

I don't know what your time looks like or where you do it at, but find something.

Mine is in my vehicle.

Ain't nobody in there but me and God.

And it's times of seclusion, it's times of being alone.

Loneliness is not bad.

Fearing loneliness is the problem.

One of the problems that, or one of the uh things God worked on me on, y'all don't probably know this, but I'm a talker.

I know it's a shocker surprise.

Some of y'all can bear witness to that.

But one thing that God worked on me is to be okay in silence.

Now, I don't know how you're wired, but for me, that took some process of rewiring so that I didn't always feel like I had to say something to fill the silence.

Silence is okay.

Seclusion is okay.

I believe that if Paul wrote this today, this would be in the headlines of every every newspaper.

It would be a trumpet sounding loud because we need to remember that there is a God.

He deserves our respect, he deserves our reference, he deserves honor and glory, and we need to remember why we are saved.

I know when you first got saved, salvation was about you.

God came to you, Christ died for you.

Some of you, the Holy Spirit, filled you in that moment, but in that should be birthed a burden to now get someone else to help experience that in their life.

To be a witness.

When people turn from God, they do not become more enlightened, they truly become more enslaved.

They worship created things instead of the creator.

I'm gonna say something.

Please take it with all the love.

And I'm saying this from a person who is like this, okay?

I just I just I aired out my laundry about relationships and how they're very important to me.

I love my wife with all of my heart, I love my children with all of my heart, but they should never be equal or above God.

Never.

Sometimes we'll miss what God's trying to do in our lives because we won't stop worshiping our idols.

Because whatever we put over Christ, whatever we put over God, that is our idol.

And that means that we voluntarily have made it our master.

Whether that's relationships, whether that's a pastor, don't ever put me up on a pedestal.

I'm just a man like anybody else.

Whether it's somebody in your life that is mentored you, whether it's fill in the blank with whatever.

Nothing should be above God.

Because it breeds chaos in the camp.

It will make us malnourished spiritually.

When we refuse to see there is a God, we end up exchanging the truth of God for the lives of Satan.

How do you get truth in your life?

Undoubtedly, in a crowd this big, there's probably people here today that it's either about yourself, about your situation, about your circumstance, whatever the case may be, you there's some sort of lie that you probably believe and that you actually use as your foundation of how you interact with people, how you think, how you make choices in your life.

You only can get free of that bondage when you begin to replace those lies with God's truth.

That is the only way to break free.

The only way to live in freedom and to live in truth is to find out.

Even uh David said, Search me, O God.

That should be that should be our everyday prayer.

Search me, O God.

If there's anything unclean in me, if there's anything you want me to have less of, I will be willing to walk away from it for you.

That doesn't mean that what he asks you to walk away from is bad.

Many of us will negotiate things that aren't necessarily sin because we don't want to get rid of it because we don't think it's bad.

We don't think it's sin.

But just because something is good doesn't mean it's good for you.

Just because somebody else can doesn't mean you can.

Because the closer I get to God, the less I want anything to do with what used to look like, Stephen.

I don't want to look like me anymore.

I want to look like Christ without blame, without reproach.

So when we have lies in our life that dictate how we think, how we see our perspective, we sometimes can feel like we're free because we have we feel like we have the right to judge everybody else, but it's actually freedom.

I mean, it's actually a judgment on our head, it becomes bondage.

Romans 1 28, chapter 1, still, verse 28.

Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do the things that should never be done.

This is terrifying.

But this reminds me of a very simple short little little paragraph of Jesus when he died on the cross, and the Bible says that the Lord turned his face away from Jesus.

Because if I was a father watching my child, I don't know if I could restrain myself from taking him off the cross.

So he had to look away, he had to let the pain happen so that the fruit of that pain could take root.

God didn't abandon because he's unloving, but because he will not force himself where he is not wanted.

God doesn't abandon or turn away because he is unloving.

He is love.

That is another portion of his character.

It is who he is, his very essence.

But he will not force himself where he is not wanted.

When we continually push him away, he eventually allows us to get exactly what we desire so that we can feel the sting of our sin.

If we don't feel the sting of sin, we will not want to turn away.

The Bible calls us, pick up our cross daily.

Number four, the fruit of rebellion is everywhere.

Verse 29 through 31.

Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness: sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip.

Y'all like how all that with murder gossips right there at the end of it?

You want death to happen to a church?

Start some gossip.

You want death to happen inside of you?

Start some gossip.

It will kill a church.

It'll kill your spirit.

They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful.

They invent new ways of sinning and they disobey their parents.

Oh, come on, somebody.

Hallelujah.

Where's my teenager?

They're wasted.

I'll read it to them when we get home.

They refuse to understand.

They break their promises.

They are heartless and they have no mercy.

This last little portion of scripture describes some higher-on-the-horse church people.

That we don't have mercy for each other.

We're oh no, if you do that, you're done.

You're done.

No, thank you.

What if God turned that judgment on your head and you stood before him and he just said the same things that you say or act like?

Woo! Where's all the sanctified people at?

I don't want to be counted as heartless or that refuse to understand.

I want to be understanding.

I want to try, even when I don't understand, I want to try to understand someone.

Because when I understand where they're coming from, I can handle the situation better.

When I understand who they are, how they feel, I can actually understand and get their perspective.

Because how many of you know your perspective is not the only perspective?

And if you want to heal relationships, if you want to try to have unity in a body, especially of this size, you've got to be over the top understanding and have grace and mercy and love in every conversation.

If not, you will become the problem.

Look at verse 32.

They know God's justice requires that those who do these things deserve to die.

Yet they do them anyway.

Worse yet, they encourage others to do them.

Misery loves company, and so does sin.

Sin ain't no fun by yourself.

This is what happens when God is removed from the center of everything.

The heart hardens, compassion dries up, truth becomes relative, and righteousness becomes mocked.

What's striking is that many of the sins listed here are not violent crimes.

Think about it for a second.

Go back and read it for yourself.

They're things that we tolerate and justify every single day.

What is one of the things that was a part of Jesus' character while he walked the earth?

He would take things that were obvious wrongs, sin, bad things to do, obvious, and he would say, You think this is bad, even if you just think this way it's wrong.

I was like, come on, man.

That's not fair.

What was he displaying?

He was displaying this.

That if we think and we try to counterfeit Christianity, or we try to manipulate the system so that we can get by with things, we ain't truly doing what we think we're doing.

We're having a false sense of salvation, and in reality, all we're doing is getting, we're putting lipstick on the pig.

Y'all understand?

You putting you putting new paint on an old barn, and the cracks are still showing through.

The boards are still coming down.

Paint it up however you want.

But it is a heart posture.

Who I was is not who I am trying to become.

There should be a shift where who you were and who you are trying to be in Christ, there is a division that happens, not a schism.

A division, a true separation, to where you no longer resemble that person in any way.

That is spiritual maturity.

We don't want to look like the world.

We don't want to act like the world.

We don't want to do what the world wants to do.

I'm not telling you what's sin and what's well in your house.

I'm not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is this I know from personal experience the closer I get to God, the less I even want to look like it.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

My heart desires him, whatever it cost me.

Do you understand?

Whatever God requires of me, I'm willing to turn away.

God sees all of this.

And apart from his grace and his mercy, according to scripture, this is deserving of judgment.

Think about it.

Gossip.

Pride, disobedience.

What's one of those I mean, you wrap up all these in a single little snowball, and you could, I mean, pretty much encapsulate the devil.

But what's the biggest thing the devil got cast out for?

His pride got the best of him.

And it was a poison to who he was, what he was designed to do.

As we close, point number five.

Yet God offers mercy through the gospel.

Even though Romans 1, as we just finished up and we read, it's pretty heavy.

It's like, man, Paul, chill out a little bit, bro.

You got some more chapters to go.

All right, spread it out a little bit.

Don't hit us so hard in the beginning, you know.

But it's a setup.

So let's look at this.

You go to the third chapter, we're just gonna skip for a second in these two verses.

Y'all probably heard this.

For all have sinned.

So here we go.

Verse 23 and 24.

For everyone has sinned, we all fall short of God's glorious standard, yet God in his grace freely makes us right in his sight.

He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty of our sins.

So Romans chapter 1 was pretty heavy.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

It was like, listen, I'm gonna just go ahead and fire off, and I'm gonna get all of y'all's attention because every person that's gonna be reading this, you're gonna be included.

But in verse in chapter three, he says, Listen, you gotta understand, I know we're all sinners.

And he groups himself into it and says, We are all sinners.

That should bring hope.

What do we do as Christians?

We should first examine and say, Lord, do I have issues?

Is there something in me?

Because everything can be chaotic around me.

There could be all kinds of conflict and issues and drama and everything else, but what can I do to do my part to make it better?

Because you have to answer for you, you can't answer for the other person.

How many of you know there's some people out there that if you could, you would love to make them act right?

But you can't.

It is impossible.

Matter of fact, the more you try, the worse they probably get.

It's called rebellion, and they're practicing that witchcraft.

The same God who reveals his wrath also extends his mercy.

The same God who turns us over to sin and allows us to feel abandoned and turns his face from us also invites us into his salvation.

But here's the key point the door is only open for those of us who are willing to repent.

The door is only open for those of us who don't want, I don't have the desire to be anything like I used to be.

Now I'm not claiming perfection, I'm not saying I got all my stuff together.

But I explained to somebody the other day, they were worried about some things, and they're like, I'm still struggling with this.

And I said, Listen, if you're struggling, that means you care that you're doing it wrong.

Think about it, they are fighting, wrestling with that sinful nature, and that's a good thing.

It's when you stop fighting and you indulge, your heart no longer belongs to Christ, because now you have made your bed with sin again.

But it's the wrestling, it's the struggle, it's that fight that first of all belongs to the Lord, but second of all, don't give in, don't give up, keep walking towards Christ, and everything will be okay.

Because here what here's what I know when we step out of faith, we could use the simple story of Peter when we step out of faith, every person is called to Christ.

Every person, and what's kind of funny about this story that I'm kind of piecing together in real time is that Jesus called him.

By faith through grace, you are saved.

So Jesus is on the water and he calls him, and by faith, he stepped out of the boat, by faith, he stood on water as flat ground.

So when Jesus calls you, just step out of faith.

Step out of faith, step out of faith, and if or when you lose your balance and you begin to see, fix your eyes on the one that called you.

Because the one that called you out of the boat is the only one that can save you.

Don't look to yourself, don't look to your spouse, don't look to your parents, to your children, to your grandchildren.

Look to the one who called you, and the one who called you is the one that will save you.

By faith, you are saved.

By faith, you are whole.

By faith, you are redeemed, by faith you are delivered, by faith, if you will.