God's Wrath

Now, we've got a lot to unpack, right?

If you just listen to the words of that passage, we've got a lot of things to kind of work through, wrestle with.

And so I'm just letting you know on the front end, I'm probably going to be long.

So be patient, buckle in.

I'm not going to try and be too long.

But we are going to try and be faithful and give due diligence to the text to be able to understand what God has for us.

And this is something that we have to do before we really dive in.

My goal this morning is not to offend out of my own thought or out of my own kind of personality.

My hope is that if you're offended, it's because God's word was faithfully and rightfully preached.

And the gospel is offensive.

The Bible says that, right?

And so we have to understand that before we even dive in this morning, that some of us are going to have this kind of disposition or this response to what the text says and how it's preached, that's not going to feel great, right?

You're not walking out of here feeling better than you came in this morning.

Just setting the tone kind of right now.

Hopefully you will, right?

If the gospel is faithfully proclaimed it, you receive it with joy, then you should.

But here's something that we have to do before we even dive in is we have to ask ourselves this question.

As we approach this text, the simple question that has to be answered is do we believe the Bible is authoritative, absolute truth, or not?

That is the baseline of our Christianity.

Is the Bible authoritative, absolute truth, or is it not?

And if we're coming from a position this morning that it's not, we really find ourselves in one of two camps.

The first camp we might find ourselves in is that we're agnostic.

And what we're saying is we really can't know God.

He's so transcendent, he is so uh uncatchable or tangible that we can't fully know him.

Because what we're saying is that the Bible then is insufficient to fully tell us about God, who he is, how he has relationship with us, and so then we're remaining in a place of agnosticism.

Now, we might not uh understand that or consciously ascribe to that uh uh religious position, uh, but when you say that the Bible's insufficient, you're standing potentially in a place of agnosticism.

We can't really know God because the Bible isn't really trustworthy.

Or second place we might find ourselves in is that we're idol worshipers.

We're idol worshippers because we borrow from the Bible to worship a God of our own creation.

So we pick and choose what the Bible says and what we like about it, and the things that make us feel good, or the things that we connect with in the scriptures, and we try to push out other things.

But ultimately what we're doing is not worshiping the God of the Bible, we're worshiping a God of our own imagination and fabrication.

We are idol worshipers, and we're actually participating in the exact same things that this text talks about.

But if it is absolute, authoritative truth, the Bible, then we have to do this.

We have to submit our emotions, the way we feel, our reason, our ethics, our entire beings, including our physical bodies, to what it says.

And that's the rub that we're gonna feel.

That's the tension that we're gonna feel this morning, is how do we take our emotions, our reason, and even down to our physical bodies in submission to what the Bible says about God, about us, and about how we have relationship with Him.

So when we come out of this text, this is comes in and says, For the wrath of God is revealed.

This is this is Paul coming out and saying, Here, this is this is an anthropological survey, understanding of man in light of the gospel.

Because this comes straight out of Paul saying this, for I am unashamed of the gospel, because it alone is the power to save.

For the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness.

So why is Paul unashamed of the gospel?

Why is he so uh uh so fervent and zealous about the gospel?

Because God's wrath and man's unrighteousness are real things.

And he understands that salvation comes through the gospel alone.

There's nothing else in all of creation that has the ability to save us besides placing our trust and faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so this section that Paul lays out, if we can understand it anyway, is a radical demonstration of love.

For the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness of man.

What's Paul doing?

He is radically loving the people he's writing to.

He's not being this uh kind of Bible thumping, judgmental, uh hypocrite, you know, all these kind of words that we can put out against people who tell us that the things we do are wrong, right?

We might have this uh kind of propensity to cast lots or cast stones against them because of the way that they judge us.

But but Paul is not doing that.

Paul is demonstrating radical love for people because he understands that salvation is necessary.

And what we have to think about this in our Christian faith.

If salvation is an aspect, a reality of our Christian life, well, what in the world are we being saved from?

We ever asked and thought about that question?

You're not simply just being saved from hell.

Sure, that's great, right?

That's great that we're saved from hell and through Jesus, that we don't have to uh suffer eternally in the lake of fire, that we don't have to be cast into outer darkness.

But what we fail to realize oftentimes is that hell is real because the fullness of God's wrath is evident and present there.

You see, we used to understand, or what has been communicated in the church, is that hell is this eternal separation from God.

Kind of.

It is eternal separation in an intimate relationship with him as father and child.

But it is not eternally separated from him in his character and personhood.

Because even the psalmist David says, even though I make my bed in Sheol, there you are with me.

What is there?

God's ever-present, eternal wrath.

God is with us even in hell, but he is manifested in his wrath.

So Paul says, Look, I know the state you're in.

Because of your sin, because of your unrighteousness, I know what's coming for you, and because I love you so much, I'm gonna be unashamed of the gospel.

Because it alone is the power to save.

And Paul understood this simple principle that the gospel is the most beautiful good news when it's set against the backdrop of our sin.

The the Puritans used to talk about in a way of the stars can only shine bright against the darkness of night.

So the gospel is the most beautiful against the backdrop of our sin.

And so Paul goes to work in the second half of Romans 1 to help us understand what our state is, what our relationship with God is like apart from Jesus because of our unrighteousness.

And he starts off with this.

If we summarize verses 18 through 23, we would see this that we are without excuse when God's wrath is revealed against our unrighteousness.

We are without excuse when God's wrath is revealed against our unrighteousness.

The wrath of God is revealed against man's unrighteousness, who by that same unrighteousness suppress the truth.

So this is what Paul's opening argument is about us, who we are in our relationship with God.

That we practice unrighteousness.

That means these things that are are not holy and good, they're they're declared sin from the Father, they're uh they're they're this unrighteous act of which we participate in that also affects and permeates the members of our body.

And it is by that unrighteousness we also leverage it to suppress the truth about God, which is made evident to us.

You see, what can be known about God is plain to them in creation, Paul says.

So they are without excuse.

They are without excuse.

And see, what he's what he what Paul's referring to this is a theological term we call general revelation.

General revelation is what God has given to us through his creation and through the creation of man that helps us to understand who he is.

And what is the uh the reality about general revelation is that it's sufficient to condemn, but not sufficient to save.

You see, we can look around all of creation, understand that someone, something, had to have been behind designing all of this.

They had to be behind creating all of this.

I mean, you'll even hear it in secular institutions, especially in the medical field, where they'll talk about the body, and they'll say the cardiovascular system is designed to do X.

Even out of their own mouths, though they may not acknowledge him or give thanks to him, as this text says, they can't help but to communicate that the the beauty of us as creation, as creatures, it is so intimately designed and thought through that it couldn't have just happened by accident.

We we look at all of the world around us.

We stand at the precipice of the Grand Canyon, we look up at night to the constellations that fill the sky.

We can't help but to look around and see that God is here.

God exists.

But also, we can't help but to know our own hearts and minds to a certain measure and come up with the same conclusion.

You don't have to tell a child that certain things are wrong to do.

They feel that intrinsically within their being.

Their heart has some type of moral law written upon it that causes us to realize that certain things are not good or okay.

And you can look throughout all of the world and understand these parallels in these civilizations.

Things like murder, rape, uh, stealing, these are things that are universally known as bad.

Why is that the case?

Because God has not only just demonstrated himself in his creation of that which is around us, but God has revealed himself in us as us who bear his image.

So while general revelation is not sufficient to be saved, it is enough to be condemned.

That's what Paul's laying out as his opening argument.

He's saying, You can look around you and know that there's a God, but here's what happened You took that unrighteousness and you chose to suppress the truth and believe a lie.

So what did so so we stand without excuse.

And what is that without excuse?

That that without excuse is about God's wrath being revealed from heaven.

When God's wrath is shown to us, is revealed from heaven against us, we have no excuse.

You see, special revelation, that's the counterpart to general revelation.

Special revelation is God revealing himself to us through his word and through ultimately his son Jesus that has sufficient power and efficient power to save us.

It is the knowledge of Christ, of his finished work, of him being the Son of God, the Messiah, the Christ, the one who was coming to rescue us, who died in our place, whose blood paid for our ransom, whose death, burial, and resurrection accomplished for us new life.

You see, this is special revelation.

And it is sufficient and efficient to save.

You see, special revelation is God's merciful response to what we did with his general revelation.

When we looked around all of creation, we looked inwardly within ourselves and we pushed it down, we suppressed it, and we chose to worship creation rather than the creator.

God said, Here's my steadfast love for you.

The state you're in, without excuse, is sufficient for condemnation.

But I'm gonna come and I'm gonna bring you special revelation of my son so that you might be saved.

This is God's steadfast love for us.

So Paul goes on, they know God, they knew God, but refused to acknowledge him.

This is that physical nature knowledge and moral ethical knowledge, and what was the repercussion of that?

When they chose to take that truth that they knew and suppress it by their unrighteousness, their thinking became futile, their hearts became darkened, and claiming to be wise, they became fools.

Think about our culture right now.

We we can probably see a lot of this in the world around us, especially that last line, that thinking, claiming to be wise, they became fools.

The reason that we see this is because we continue today in our unrighteousness to suppress the truth and knowledge of God that we do have.

We failed to acknowledge Him.

In fact, we refuse to acknowledge Him.

And so sin then pervades.

You see, we stopped at the majestic beauty of created things and did not fall on our knees and worship at the majesty of the one who created it.

Gazing at the constellations, we would we determined to worship them rather than the one who gives them light.

And the Bible says this that we exchanged the immortal for the mortal.

We distorted God's image by creating lesser images, lesser gods in the image of created things.

This is the first great exchange that took place that Paul writes about here.

When he talks about our understanding of who we are and the relationship that we have with God, he works through these three great exchanges that take place.

And the first one is that we exchange the immortal for the mortal, the incorruptible for the corruptible.

And so we begin to distort God's image and we began fashioning gods in the image of created things.

And so we lessened God.

We we reduced God down to creeping things, birds, animals, even false gods in the image of ourselves.

And so the Bible communicates to us that our behavior then has consequence.

You see, we're without excuse when God's wrath is revealed against our unrighteousness.

Our behavior has consequence.

We won't have an excuse at the end of our life that we simply just didn't know.

All of our righteousness will be dealt with by God's wrath.

Because it is with that same unrighteousness that we suppress the truth.

So all of our unrighteousness in our life will be dealt with by God's wrath.

Because it's that same unrighteousness that we leverage to suppress the truth about God that is plain to us, the Bible says.

It's evident.

Just looking around, you have to exert so much mental energy, so much heart rebellion to look at all of creation and say that there is no God.

I love this uh book by Norman Geisler called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

When we look at this, it takes an exorbitant amount of faith to be an atheist.

To look around and push down as far as we possibly can the evidence that has been made plain to us as his image bears.

Then when we look through verses 24 through 27, we see that when we distort God's image, sin overtakes his image in us.

So this great exchange happened, right, in that first opening paragraph.

We exchanged the immortal for the mortal, the incorruptible for the corruptible.

When that exchange happened and we distorted God's image by making lesser gods in the shape and form of created things, so when we distort God's image, sin overtakes his image in us.

Verse 24 opens with what I would say is the most damning statement in the Bible.

Therefore, God gave them up.

That is the most damning statement in the entire Bible.

You see, it's not God's goodness or blessing to let us have what we want.

When God gives us up, you're in phase one of God's wrath being revealed against you.

Because God's love restrains while God's wrath releases.

Let me say that again.

God's love restrains, God's wrath releases.

We see discipline as God not wanting us to live our fullest life, right to the most extent of joy and pleasure of which it could be, to be our truest self.

We see discipline as God not wanting that for us.

And what we're saying is that, God, I know what's best for me.

Rather than trusting God's des that he desires, that he knows and has provided what is best for us.

You see, we look at God with such hardened hearts and such unrighteousness.

When we look at his discipline at us as not wanting us to be everything that we desire, and say, God, you got something wrong.

You need to repent.

You need to be the one who changes, and you have to allow me to be who I want to be.

And God says, Who are you, the clay to speak to the potter?

You see, we we are convinced that God doesn't know what's best for us.

We're convinced that he doesn't want what's best for us, and we're convinced that he has made it impossible to grasp.

But that's not the nature of God, that's not the character of God, and that's not how he has relationship with us.

God does know what's best for us.

He made us, he created us.

God actually desires what's best for us to flourish, to have joy, peace, to have to have all the goodness that he can pour out into us to be ours, and he in his mercy and steadfast love has provided it for us in Christ Jesus.

But what does God do?

In response to our unrighteousness, in response to our suppression of the truth, God gives us up to ourselves, and it manifests itself in sexual immorality.

So as we start going down into this passage, what we see is that as God gives us up, it manifests itself in this wrath in sexual immorality.

It says, Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

Why?

Verse 25, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

Amen.

Idolatry and sexual immorality go hand in hand throughout the scriptures.

When we look all the way back to Exodus when they were making the golden calf, we can see that narrative play out throughout the Old Testament, throughout God's people, throughout pagan worlds, throughout unbelieving worlds, even into modern day times that idolatry and sexual immorality go hand in hand with one another.

And what we have to do is we have to ask ourselves this question: why is that the case?

Right?

That's a pivotal question to ask.

And we have to try and wrestle with this tension that resides of idolatry and sexual morality consistently going hand in hand throughout the history of mankind.

You see, we can't look at this passage.

And walk away that believing sexual immorality is the problem.

It's solely the symptom.

And a lot of us can get caught up in this, right?

We can read this passage and we can look at it and we can come away saying, well, sexual immorality is the problem, right?

Homosexuality, which we'll get to here in a minute, that's the problem.

No, it's not the problem.

It's the symptom of a bigger problem.

Is it unrighteousness?

Sure.

And we'll get to that.

We'll unpack that better.

But it's not the problem.

Worship is the problem.

Sexual immorality is a symptom of our failure and refusal to worship God rightly.

You see, the second great exchange that Paul places before us that we make is we exchange the truth for a lie.

The truth for a lie.

And when we did this, when we exchanged the truth for a lie, we became spiritual prostitutes, spiritual adulterers, who began living out their spiritual reality in a physical one.

You see, we began chasing down the intimacy and pleasure that we ought to find in our maker in wicked and wanting substitutes.

So why does idolatry and sexual morality go hand in hand with one another?

Because when we were meant to be God's people, when we were meant to be in this intimate relationship with Him, and we in our unrighteousness suppressed the truth so that we might believe a lie, we went searching for the intimacy that we were supposed to have with our Maker and other people.

And the spiritual prostitution, the spiritual adultery that invaded our heart started to play itself out in a physical one.

And Paul says, for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

This reason is a worship reason.

This reason is an adultery reason.

You see, it's not just our sin that God is pouring his wrath out against.

And when we did that, we began worshiping other things, created things, the corruptible things, the mortal things, rather than worshiping the God who made us.

And when that worship, false worship, that idolatry took place and took root in us as mankind, God gave us up, sexual immorality was just a natural outflow.

And Paul gives us this clear example of sexual morality in light of idolatry.

And he does so in homosexuality.

So when we look through this passage and we see verse 26, for this reason 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 heir.

Paul's clear example of what idolatry lived out in its fullest looks like is homosexuality.

Again, homosexuality is not the focus here.

It's an example of what idolatry lived out to its fullest extent looks like.

The issue still is in this text, worship.

Homosexuality is unrighteousness, it's deserving of God's wrath, and is a clear portrait of the effects of our idolatry.

But ultimately, our sexuality is a worship issue rooted in image.

Ultimately, our sexuality is a worship issue rooted in image.

You see, when we refuse to know, understand, acknowledge that our image is in Him, we turn in sexual immorality and try to find our image in others.

Sex has very little to do with procreation or pleasure and everything to do with image.

We can't make the sexuality argument about procreation.

We can't make the sexuality argument about pleasure.

We have to make the sexuality argument about image and worship because that's what it's rooted in ultimately.

These other things are byproducts, symptoms, implications.

But what is at the heart of the sexuality conversation is image.

You see, when God made us, he made us in his image.

In the image of God, he made them male and female, he created them.

And when we understand this aspect of image, what we see is that God, when he first made Adam, the Bible, in its original language in Hebrew, this is a gender-neutral word that this name given to human Adam.

And God said, Okay, I'm gonna make you a helper suitable for you.

Because he tried to find one amidst God's creation, he could not find one to work the garden, to have dominion over the land and the way God called him to, so he said, I'm gonna make a helper suitable for you.

So God put Adam to sleep, and from him he took a rib, and he made and fashioned Eve, the woman.

And for the first time in the Bible, we have the gendered language: the Isha in the man, and the Esha in the woman.

And so this separation of Adam to make the two causes for us this reality of complementarianism.

You see, we are distinct in our maleness, and we are distinct in our femaleness.

We are not equal in all parts.

In dignity, value, and worth, we are equal because we bear God's image, but man and woman bear distinct and complementary aspects of that God.

And so Paul writes for us later on that it is when a man and a woman come together in harmony that they become one flesh.

And so the man, the Isha, and the woman, the Isha, who are complementary and distinct to one another, when they come together in sexual union, they make one flesh.

They rejoin the Adam who bears the fullness of the image of God.

That's what our sex is about, that's what covenant's about, that's what our relationship is about, that we might display to the world around us the image of God of which He imparted in us when He made us.

You see, it's a worship issue, it's an image issue.

And any type of sexuality that is not between one man and one woman, confined within covenant marriage, cannot, does not, and eternally will fail to mimic, portray, reflect God's image.

You see, this isn't about sex alone, this isn't about sin alone, this isn't about pleasure or procreation, this is about worship.

We were created in the image of God, and that through sex, the gender spectrum would be completed fully, reflecting the image of God that we are made in.

You see, I'm half of that gender spectrum as a man.

I'm half of that gender spectrum.

And I need an Eve, I need a woman, that complement, that distinctness to join me so that we might complete that gender spectrum.

A man and a man can't do that.

When a man and a man tries to come together, what happens is you're just communicating I'm only half of what I should be, and I need another just to complete the half of which God made me be.

I'm that insufficient and deficient in my gender, in my sex, that I need another to make up the gap.

You see, all sexual immorality is unrighteousness and is in contention with the image we bear.

All other attempts at sexuality that are outside of the boundaries of one man and one woman with the covenant of marriage is a false religion whose God is sex and their altar is their bed.

And they display to the world around them an impotent and pathetic substitute for our Maker.

This is why we need Jesus to renew the image of God in us through conformity to his righteousness.

You see, it's only in the New Testament do we really start to see language of the ability to remain single and live a full life sold out for the kingdom of God.

Why?

Because in this in this transcendence, in this grand plan of God, Christ becomes our groom and we his bride.

And any one of us in that consummation of that eternal relationship that we have with him can demonstrate what we're supposed to in our own human sexuality.

But it's on a much more majestic and grandor scale.

Christ can complete us, and we have to be renewed in his image through conformity to his righteousness.

The last great exchange we participate in is what is natural for what is contrary to nature.

What this language is talking about, this contrary to nature, is pre-fall in the garden, when God created, what were we supposed to be like?

We can't try to understand this passage of text post-fall.

In our own way to understand how sin has pervaded, how it's permeated our members, how it's impacted every aspect of creation.

We cannot try to strive and understand sex, gender, and sexuality through that lens.

We have to look back to what God had intended in the garden.

And what we have done is we've exchanged the natural, what God created us to be like, for the unnatural.

Sin has so pervaded our members that the image of God we are made in is at times hardly even recognizable.

Because here's what happens when we distort God's image through idolatry, he gives us over to our sin, which distorts his image in us.

Let me say that again.

When we distort God's image through idolatry, he gives us over to our sin that distorts his image in us.

When we look at verses 28 through 32, we see this: that there is no end to the depths of our depravity.

There is no end to the depths of our depravity.

God's final act of giving us over is to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

From this debased mind flows unending depths of depravity.

I mean, just look at the list here.

They are filled.

And I want to help us understand.

This is in the same context, the same paragraph, the same rendering of sexual immorality.

You're going to get this all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

They're gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

This is the long list of which Paul lays out of what our unrighteousness fosters and cultivates in the world around us and in our own hearts.

Why?

Because we have a debased mind, because God has given us up.

Debased means to be reduced in quality or being rejected after testing.

We don't have what we should have in the way that we think.

Sin has so permeated our members, our body, that we don't even have the ability to think the way that we were created to.

We need a renewed mind.

That's what the Bible says.

We need to be renewing our mind through the power of reclaiming the truth that we once suppressed.

To reject a lie of which we believed and held tight to and white-knuckled for so long, we have to reject that and renew our mind by reclaiming the truth.

Our unrighteousness once suppressed.

He goes on to say that 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.

That's such a condemning statement.

Because here's what it does: this is the nail in the coffin for without excuse.

We're not talking about, oh, you were raised on some remote island and the gospel never got to you, and you you somehow you didn't look at the ocean or the trees or the birds of the air and come away thinking, God, you are all, and I should worship you in everything that I am.

We're not talking about that.

We're talking about that same man who does things that he knows within his very being deserves death.

That's a much different understanding of, oh, you didn't look out at the Grand Canyon, you didn't look upon uh the mountain range, you didn't, you you weren't there in the midst of all this beauty of creation and come away worshiping me rightly?

Well, you're going to hell.

No, Paul puts the nail in the coffin and says it's it's it's even beyond that.

It's that when you do the things you do, you know they deserve death, but you do them anyway.

And you champion others to do the same.

They know not simply that it's wrong, but that it's deserving of death.

And not only do they do them, but they generously give approval of others who do the same.

We are a culture who celebrates unrighteousness and is zealously recruiting others to do the same.

Through hashtags and parades, through curriculum and indoctrination.

We're not just celebrating, we're recruiting.

We're not just giving approval, we're championing others to participate.

You see, we are these people Paul describes.

And as we look at this list, we have to stop and try to observe something.

All of this unrighteousness was birthed out of our own suppression of the truth and refusal to worship God for who He is.

Yet we are seeing in our culture the image we bear being attacked the most through affirmation of what is a distorted and perverted understanding of God in our gender, in our sex, in our sexuality.

Think about how why is that the most attacked thing?

Why is that the conversation?

Why is that the one?

Because that's the one so closely, intimately with our worship.

That's why.

Why is it that it's in this gender and sexuality do we fight for identity?

Because we're in a fight for image.

We're in a fight for image, the image that we were made in.

And when we say, no, no, no, no, you don't understand, I feel this way, I identify this way, I'm attracted this way.

What you're telling God is you messed up.

I know more than you.

I know better than you.

And I need you to repent to me.

It's attacked because it's about image.

It's attacked because it's about worship.

And it's pervading the church.

And it's sad.

Because mostly this is done through a lens of false and empty empathy.

Claiming to be born with such feelings should not be required to suppress them.

But we should foster and celebrate them.

This is false empathy that helps no one and hates the one you give the message to.

All sin is innate.

All sin is a feeling that we didn't ask for.

All sin demands restraint and discipline to be submitted to God in his righteousness.

Go through this list.

Let's just take sexuality out of this list of which Paul labors through in this passage of Romans.

Uh, envy, jealousy, slander, gossip, strife.

Y'all felt that this week?

Maybe?

Right?

I'm gonna assume you have.

Um, if you're on Instagram or Facebook, you probably have to some measure compared yourself to someone else throughout this week and felt like, man, I'm envious of that.

I'm jealous of that.

Um, why don't we say, hey, look, I I didn't ask for that feeling.

I didn't ask for that feeling, so therefore I'm just gonna fully embrace it, foster it, and see it cultivated in my life.

How dare you tell me I have to suppress that or bring restrain or discipline around that feeling?

Let's go through the list some more.

Um, boastful, disobedient to parents.

How many of y'all looked at your children this week when they just straight up disobeyed you and you're like, you know what, honey?

You didn't ask to feel that way.

You were born feeling that way.

And so I'm gonna allow that to be celebrated in our home.

You keep just yelling at me because you don't like the mac and cheese I made you.

No, what do we do?

All sin is innate.

All sin wasn't, we we we we have these feelings with right from our birth, but what do we do?

With every other sin besides our sex and sexuality, we demand discipline, restraint, and change.

Why do we not with sex?

Why do we not with gender?

At the end of this parade of gender, sex, and sexuality, church, hear me.

At the end of this parade are filthy dogs who nip at the heels of the exact same argument.

Wickedness and evil to the likes you have not seen.

If you can simply say, I was born this way, I can't help the way I feel, and therefore you should allow me to do what I want to do, you can't imagine the inventing of evil that comes behind that.

Because that same argument you can use for any matter of perversion and lust and sinful desire.

And we're seeing it played out.

It might not have hit us now, it might not hit us here in the next couple of years, but on the back end of that is pedophilia, on the back end of that is bestiality, on the back end of that it is polyamory, on the back end of that.

I'm telling you, you can't imagine the wickedness that follows that parade.

Why?

Because we are inventors of evil.

And though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but they give approval of those who practice them.

We are seeing to the likes that we have not seen in our culture ever.

The celebration, the championing, the recruiting, the indoctrinating, all of these things of unrighteousness.

And it's being done in the name of love and empathy.

But there's a problem.

We come back to the very beginning question.

If God says that this is unrighteousness, and God says that it is deserving of his wrath being poured out against it, then are we not hating those that we affirm?

Isn't our empathy impotent and unable to do anything for them but damn them?

Do we believe the Bible?

You see, the main idea is that we've exchanged the truth for a lie.

This is the kind of the summation of what Paul's talking about in this passage.

We have exchanged the truth for a lie.

The truth of God is known and has been known, but we actively and intentionally suppress it.

In this, we're left without excuse for having God's wrath revealed against our actions.

This is the thrust of the passage.

It's an anthropological survey of why we need the gospel and why Paul is so unashamed of it, because the gospel is mankind's only hope.

We have to repent of the lies that we've embraced and submit our whole selves, our emotions, our reasoning, our ethics, our morals, and even our own physical bodies to the authoritative truth of God's word.

We are beyond general revelation.

So we are the most without excuse.

We have the special revelation of the gospel.

We have the Bible.

If any generation throughout human time is without excuse, it is us at most.

Because we actively exchange the truth for a lie.

And there's many of us who are going to wrestle with this in so many different ways.

One of the ways that we have to understand and kind of approach this is that our truth, our truth, I'm talking about this personalized, independent truth is all a lie.

Our truth is all a lie.

We see this in relativism, right?

That's your truth.

No, no, our truth is no truth.

There is either absolute truth or there isn't.

But as I was talking at a uh UC class one time, um, we were talking about this subject of absolute truth.

And they were throwing all these little things at me of uh questions and arguments, and I simply looked at this one young man and I said, Here, do you want to know absolute truth?

You're gonna die.

I don't know how you're gonna get around that one.

And so if that absolute truth exists, doesn't all others also you see, we want to reject absolute truth because we want to be our own God.

We want to have this self-determining truth.

We seek to play God in our own lives.

But if we embrace relativism, our truth becomes no truth at all.

It has no power, it has no redemption, it has no salvation.

And a lot of us have bought into this and has created a nominal Christianity in our culture.

This Christianity where you jump on the bandwagon because you you it's it's cool to be spiritual or you want to live that blessed life, or uh you want to you want to be this person who has their own personal, unique relationship with God that no one else does.

You see, we've created this nominal, and you can look at it, you can look at surveys of theology, people rejecting that Jesus is God, rejecting the resurrection, uh, rejecting sin and the doctrine of hell.

They're rejecting all of these things.

And what are they creating?

Not Christianity, they're creating their own personal religion of whom they are the God of.

And we have to contend against it because it's either all of Jesus or none at all.

As a church, we are going to find ourselves in a war, in a battle for truth.

And we have to come from it, from this foundation.

Allowing people to live in a lie is unloving and ultimately evil.

You see, we have allowed for lies to replace love in the name of a love, which is ultimately hate.

Let me say that again.

We've allowed for lies to replace love, so we think that speaking the truth is unloving, so we distort truth in the name of a false love, which is ultimately hate.

Jesus told us to love our neighbor.

Loving them is doing what Paul's doing here.

You don't understand you're under God's wrath.

You don't understand sin and unrighteousness is real.

You don't understand God's judgment is upon you.

You don't understand Christ is the only answer.

That's why Paul says, I'm unashamed of the gospel of Jesus.

Some of us will wrestle with this in the fact that our God of love has no wrath.

Our God of love has no wrath.

And I've made that a lowercase G because it's one that we've created and fabricated ourselves.

Modern Christianity has distorted and diminished God's image to something weak and powerless.

When we reject sin and its deserving wrath and replace it with a weak God who have a relationship with us simply because he's nice.

Honestly, we act as if God will ultimately overlook, sweep under the rug, or shrug off our sin and unrighteousness.

And so for us within the church, the cross becomes a token of spirituality rather than a reckoning of what our unrighteousness demands.

The cross becomes a token of spirituality rather than a reckoning of what our unrighteousness demands.

Do you want to see what the wrath of God revealed from heaven looks like?

Look at the Son.

Look at Jesus.

Look at the cross.

You see, when we fail to understand God's wrath-filled relationship with our sin, when we fail to understand God's wrath-filled relationship with our sin, we cannot begin to fully understand God's grace-filled relationship with us through Jesus.

And so if sin is real, then a God without wrath is ultimately a God without love.

Because only a loving God would have wrath against that which destroys his children.

When we exclude the wrath of God from our knowing him and understanding him, we create a weak God who hates us.

Because again, if unrighteousness, if sin is real, then a God without wrath is an apathetic, passive father who does not love his children.

But allows them to run out into the street in traffic, grab the hot pan off of the stove, allows them to do whatever they so desire.

And you've seen this in parenting, right?

You've seen this in, oh, I just let my kid do whatever they want because I love them.

You don't love them.

If you love them, you discipline them.

If you love them, you'd put restraint around them.

If you love them, you would identify the things which would destroy them and do everything in your power to stop it.

That's love for a child.

And so if sin is real, then God in his loving state would have wrath against it because it destroys his children.

The beauty of the gospel for us church is that Jesus takes the wrath of God of which we deserve.

Remember when I said, I've got like ten minutes.

Hold me to it.

Um the wrath of God of which we deserve.

Remember when I said this?

All of your unrighteousness will be dealt with by God's wrath.

The hope for us is that when that time has come, we find ourselves with Jesus standing in front of us, taking on that wrath in our place, taking on the wrath that we so deserve.

Just because we are saved does not mean that we are fully removed from God's wrath in a sense that somebody had to bear it.

Somebody had to take it instead of us taking it.

And that person was Jesus.

This is the final great exchange.

When we look at the three exchanges that we have throughout this uh passage in Romans, right?

We exchange the truth for a lie, the mortal for the immortal for the immortal for the mortal, and then what was natural for what was unnatural.

The last great exchange that the Bible presents to us as image bearers of God is that which Jesus stands in our place, taking the wrath which our unrighteousness so fully deserves, and then imputing to us, giving to us, transfusing within us his very righteousness.

No longer deserving of God's wrath, but deserving of his intimate relationship as his children.

Matthew 26, 39 says, speaking of Jesus in his last moments here on earth, he goes into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, and it says, And he went a little beyond them, speaking of his disciples, and fell on his face and prayed, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.

What was that cup Jesus was talking about?

It was God's wrath.

It was the cup of God's wrath.

We see in Revelation, the cup of God's wrath being poured out.

Christ drank from that cup.

He gulped down that cup for us.

This is submission.

This is sacrifice.

Not my will, but yours be done.

Imagine if Jesus fully embraced this emotion that he was feeling in the garden and ran.

Who fostered this fear, this feeling, this emotion, and didn't go through with it.

What did Jesus do?

He demonstrated for us what we should do and everything.

God, what's your will?

What have you revealed is your will for me.

I'm going to do everything in my power to submit my emotions, my reasoning, my very body to it.

You see, God's wrath was the cup that Jesus drank from.

It was God's wrath for us.

When we see the wrath of God revealed from heaven, the day turns to night, the foundation of the earth trembles, the dead come out from their graves, the people run in horror, and a son is left lifeless on a wooden cross.

You don't want to know what God's wrath looks like?

It looks like that.

And that was him holding back.

So how should we live then?

Number one, we have to submit to the truth.

Church, this is something that is going to be the biggest fight that we have coming up.

But the reality is, this is the most ancient fight the church has ever faced.

All of our Christianity is going to be contingent upon.

Is the Bible real or is it not?

Is it truth or is it not?

And like I said, this is not just the fight that we're looking forward to.

This is the fight that has been from eternity past, or from at least the garden.

Because we're in the state we're in over three words.

Did God say?

All of this unrighteousness, all of this sin, all this wickedness, all of this fallenness that we're experiencing is founded upon three words.

Did God say?

That's the battle we're in.

That's the battle we've been in.

That's the battle that still continues.

Is the Bible true or is it not?

Did God say or did he not?

And everybody is starting to just throw away what the scriptures say to embrace their own idea of what truth is and who God is and how we have a relationship with him.

And I'm telling you, it is more damning, more condemning than any other past church thing that has we have experienced because we are fully affirming people in the sin that separates them from the Father and demands his wrath be poured out on it.

We have to submit to the truth.

If we're going to sustain as Christians, if we're going to sustain as a church, then we have to fight and contend to submit to the truth no matter what the culture around us is saying.

We have to submit to it in our emotions, what we feel.

I tell a lot of people about this.

It's interesting.

There was a documentary, you can watch it.

I watched it on Netflix, but there's a documentary called For the Bible Tells Me So.

And it followed that the arc of the documentary was following the first ordination of the first homosexual bishop within the Anglican church.

They also followed in that documentary five evangelical families who had children who came out as homosexual.

In that documentary, four of the five changed their theology to embrace their child and rejected what the Bible said.

Because they could not find within their own mind and reasoning and in their emotions an ability to love their child and still call unrighteousness what it is.

And this is the great lie.

This is the great lie that they believed.

That to love my child, I have to affirm them when ultimately that affirmation is the demonstration of all hate and evil that they could have.

Maybe it'll have you a great life here and now, maybe in the 80 years that God provides for us, that it might be good and have relationship, but eternity beyond.

We have to submit to the truth.

Number one is that.

Number two, we have to speak the truth.

Speak the truth.

And this has gotten a bad rap in the church lately.

Like, speak the truth in love.

We say that, right?

But here's what we mean.

Don't speak the truth, just be nice.

That's what we're saying when we really say that.

That's trash.

That's garbage.

Those two things cannot be separated from one another.

If you fail to speak the truth, you do not love that person.

Okay?

And so we do have to temper it with love.

We do have to temper it, the truth that we speak.

But Ephesians 4, 14 through 15 says, then we will no longer be infants.

Talking about when the body's equipped to do the work of ministry, he says, then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching, and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head.

That is Christ.

The truth in love is doing what?

The truth, the in love part, you know what that's doing?

It's trying to capture back, ransom back, prevent people from being tossed to and fro by every new thing that's coming out of our culture.

Every time a new lie is invented, every time a new wickedness is created, every time that false deceit starts to rain, when we speak the truth in love, it's to try and capture them back so that they might be mature in their growing up into Christ who is our head.

Why do we speak the truth in love?

So the world does not take them out to see.

So those two things cannot be separated from one another.

And in the church, we've got to fight against this false notion that when we say speak the truth in love, what we're really saying is love them.

Don't speak the truth, just be super nice.

Because I hope I've laid enough argument for you that it is unloving to not speak the truth.

But you have to do it in a look at the heart of Paul.

When we do this, when we speak the truth, we have to look at it from this same lens, this heart of Paul, that loves his people so much, the people who he's pinning this letter to, he loves them so much that he will be unashamed of the gospel of Jesus because it is our only power to save us, because unrighteousness has so pervaded our world and permeated our members that it is deserving of God's wrath.

That's Paul's love for them.

Not condescending judgment, not Bible thumping.

It's his love for them.

So thirdly, what should we do?

We should show true love to others.

Church, sin is real, hell is real, God is real.

His wrath is real.

Oh, but his love.

His love for us in Christ Jesus.

You can't begin to fathom the depths of his love for you.

For God so loved us, the world, the cosmos, his creation, his image-bearers, that he gave his one and only son.

And whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

This is basic Christianity, but it is transcendently powerful.

We need to be a people who show true love to others.

This is going to mean at times that when we speak the truth because we've submitted our lives to the truth, that it's going to be hard.

I'm just telling you, it's going to be hard to make friends doing this.

When we really show true love to others, it's going to be super hard to be like popular or in the PTA or, you know, that uh that cool assistant coach on the T-ball team, whatever it is you're trying to go for, this is going to make it really hard.

But we have to love these people.

We have to love them.

We first and foremost, we have to share our lives with them.

We have to be found among them, but not like them.

And we have to show them true love.

If we present the gospel, see, we we do the same thing in our evangelism as we tend to do when we take a look at this scripture and we try to make sin the focus.

What they're doing, their behavior, their actions.

That's not the focus.

You on you on we have to understand people sin because they have a worship problem, not because they have a behavioral problem.

And so when we show the truth in love, we have to start at the root.

If we try to dig up a plant, right?

I don't know.

We have um in our backyard, we have some uh honeysuckle.

That stuff is atrocious.

And uh if you just cut it down, that stuff just grows right back.

If you don't get down in the root of that thing and yank it out, you're gonna continue to have it come back and come back and come back.

Because in our own power, we're unable to not sin.

And so so many times within the church, when we try to demonstrate love, we do it as treating the symptom rather than the problem.

And we get behavioral focused.

Uh I d I don't expect sinners to not sin.

And we sh you shouldn't either.

And this should make us comfortable to some measure living among them.

Because we realize, look, I understand, you you don't understand, I understand, your behavior is not rooted in something you can fix.

It's a worship issue.

And you have to have the power of the Holy Spirit to change you, to fill you, to renew you, that you might begin to worship rightly.

And as we worship rightly, right behavior will follow after it because we're conformed to the righteousness which now fills us.

And so to show true love to others, we should start working at it from the worship issue.

You've suppressed God, you've suppressed the knowledge that is evident to you.

You've suppressed it in creation, you've you've you've suppressed it in yourself.

Because you you'll never encounter one person who hasn't had those moments that when they lay their head down at night, they know.

They know.

And so, church, let us strive to submit to truth, to speak the truth, and show true love to others.

Amen.

Let's pray.