the letter iconLast week Ken opened our new series and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get into this awesome letter that Paul wrote!  We are going to be spending a few months walking through the book of Romans!  Today Kim and I are going to kick off this line by line walk through of the scriptures looking at a pretty heavy chunk of scripture.  When I first read through this and started to study it, I was pretty intimidated by it.  It seems really heavy, and pretty intellectual, and it hits some pretty sensitive subjects and I wondered how to present it to you today.  But the more I read through it, and the more time I spent really focusing on what Paul is saying here, the more excited I became to talk to you about this chunk of scripture.  Today we are going to be looking at Romans 1 specifically verses 16-32 and I’m going to tell you right off the top that I have some good news to share and some bad news.  The good news is that because of Jesus we have hope.  The bad news is that many of us turn our backs on God, and as we distance ourselves from Him, our lives are headed for a downward spiral.

So here’s the entire text, and we see Paul gives us the good news first which is pretty nice of him!

Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is God’s powerful method of bringing all who believe it to heaven. This message was preached first to the Jews alone, but now everyone is invited to come to God in this same way. 17 This Good News tells us that God makes us ready for heaven-makes us right in God’s sight-when we put our faith and trust in Christ to save us. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scripture says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.”  TLB

So that is the good news, we have hope…now Paul gives us the bad news…

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen. 26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. NIV

Well that is more than a little depressing isn’t it?  Not only does it seem depressing it is a little too deep for a Better Together service right?  I mean good grief my kids are in here Sam!  The more time I spent in this passage the more I feel like Paul is really after something here…something that is too important for us to ignore.  A lot of people take this scripture and focus on the sins, “the do’s and the don’t do’s” and that is part of it.  There really is sin in this world…and we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but I think Paul is after something more here, and that more is what I want to focus on with you today.  I believe that Paul is trying to expose our biggest issue in the world today.  As I read this passage it’s almost like he had a time machine to look at the world as it is in 2015 and that is where we will spend our time today.  We are going to look at our problem and God’s solution.  Because we would never want to just give you a problem without the solution to that problem, that just wouldn’t make for a nice week reflecting on this passage and let’s face it, from verse 18-32 we read of the downward spiral of humanity and it is pretty depressing but the coolest thing is Paul shows us the solution in the end.

The Problem: Paul exposes the problem in verse 18.

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

So many people read this and focus on the wrath of God being revealed.  For me when I started studying this I did the same thing and then I realized that in this one verse Paul is revealing THE PROBLEM…God is angry and his wrath is coming because unrighteous people (that is every one of us who don’t have Jesus living in us…this is life without God’s grace) are pushing the truth away.  We humans are suppressing the truth.  This is THE PROBLEM.  We are suppressing, or turning our backs from the truth…which should lead to a very important question:

What is the truth?  Well Paul explains what the truth is in verses 19-21.

Romans 1:19 But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! 20 By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. 21 What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives.  (MSG)

So we were presented with the problem, we suppress the truth, and Paul explains that the truth is that there is a God.  He is God.  We should glorify Him.  We should worship Him as God.  That is the truth that there is a Creator of all things and what is really interesting is that Paul says here that we all deep down know it.  That when we stop and look we see the eternal power of God in all of creation.  Think about how you feel when you are standing on the beach looking at the ocean.  Think about that feeling you have when you see a sunrise, or for you night owls who have never seen one a sun set.  We feel something there don’t we?  When your children run through the yard laughing and playing…you see creation and you know deep down there is a creator.  Look at Instagram, which I’m a picture guy and I love.  People see creation and admire, adore, and love it.  Deep down we know it, there is a Creator of the Universe and in it we see the truth.

The truth is that there is a God.  He is eternal.  He is The Creator of All Things.

He is saying that deep down we all know this, and when we open our eyes it is plain enough for us to see but, and it is pretty sad he says in verse 21 that we know God and we turn our backs on Him anyway.  Then it really gets interesting and this is where I truly believe Paul took a time machine to the year 2015.  I mean we live in the enlightened era right?  We truly believe we have wisdom that the old school people just couldn’t have had.  Well Paul tells you that was going to happen in verse 22!

Romans 1:21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen.  NIV

How many people do you know that will tell you that they don’t believe in God?  Yes, these are typically your friends that want to talk to you about God all the time right?  Well Paul would say that while we believe that we have everything figured out, we don’t.  We trade in God worship, worshiping the creator of all things…for worshiping things that He created…which sounds dumb when you say it that clearly.

So here’s what happens.  We suppress the truth.  That truth is that there is a God, worthy of our praise, and our worship. The God who created us to glorify Him and to worship Him.  When we suppressed that truth, God allowed us to go.  He allowed us to distance ourselves from Him and in doing so we lose more than we realize.  Without God we lose our purpose.  We lose our direction and we lose our focus.  In reality without the Creator who created us to love, worship and glorify Him, we lose ourselves to the point that we don’t even know how to be the humans He created.

What Paul is saying is there is a problem, we turn our backs on the truth.  The truth is that God is God and without Him, we lose ourselves.  Do you see it?  We forget how to be the people He created us to be, we lose our direction and our purpose without God!

So why would we do this?  Why would we turn our backs on God?  Why would we suppress this truth?  Well I think this is the core of the problem, and something that we need to look at.  Why do we, when left alone to our own devices, turn our backs on God?  This is the heart of the problem and Paul helps us see it in another letter he wrote where he is talking of Satan’s right hand man coming, a deceiver who will fool us and lie to us…well check this out:

2 Thessalonians 2:10 He will completely fool those who are on their way to hell because they have said no to the Truth; they have refused to believe it and love it and let it save them, 11 so God will allow them to believe lies with all their hearts, 12 and all of them will be justly judged for believing falsehood, refusing the Truth, and enjoying their sins.  TLB

So there it is, the dirty little secret.  The thing no one wants to say out loud!  We refuse the truth.  We turn our backs on God.  We see it in verse 12, we enjoy our sins.

Listen, this is where the rubber really meets the road.  Most sin isn’t painful in the moment…its fun.  You are having momentary pleasure, and the thing that no one really wants to say out loud is that many of us aren’t willing to give up those momentary pleasures for God.  We talked about this over and over in the last series didn’t we?  Jesus’ words:

Matthew 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. NIV

If you love sin you will not love God.  Because God is trying to take away your fun!  This is why man people suppress the truth (that there is a God) because we think that our sin is more pleasurable than God!  We are truly deceived and we are missing the very fact that a life connected to Jesus gives us true life!  We are exchanging momentary pleasures for eternal life.  We are exchanging the truth of God, for flesh filled desires.

We fall in love with good feelings.  We enjoy the pleasures of sin, it feels so good that our head gets involved and we begin to explain why we can continue to live in our sin!  We twist the truth in order to protect the idols and sins of our life!  This is what Ken was really exposing in the conclusion to the money series.  He told you that we hear God’s truth in scripture, and then we spend the next week thinking of every reason why that doesn’t apply to me, or we look for a loop hole to get us out of the truth of scripture.  Or even better we find a like-minded person who gives our claims support. Here’s every reason why the truth of God doesn’t apply to me!

You see this is a heart issue.  This isn’t a need for more information, this is not a need for new ideas.  This is our desperate need of a new heart!  With a new heart would come new passion, new desires, and new pleasures!  I struggle sometimes internally in one to one meetings with people who come to me with an issue.  It is a real issue, a sin in their life and I often hear every reason why they can’t stop doing what they are doing.  They just need prayer from me because they can’t stop overeating, over drinking, or looking at porn, or over spending, or whatever the thing is…and while I can pray for them and they feel better leaving my office, the reality is they are going to keep doing what it is that they want to do.  They enjoy doing it…and without heart change, my prayers even with Pastor in front of my name aren’t going to help…because the reality is they don’t want to change, they don’t want the truth, they are enjoying their sin.  (That’s not to undermine addictions and disease here, I fully understand the seriousness of those illnesses, and if that is the case professional help is required)  For the most part however, we don’t stop sinning because we are enjoying our sin.  We need a new heart which gives us new pleasures, desires, and passions.

Listen to these words from Jesus:

John 3:19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”  NIV

Jesus says they loved the darkness instead of the light.  Why would He say that everyone who loves darkness would hate the light?  It’s because the light exposes sin!  We hate the light because of our sin.  The truth of God exposes our sin, and gets in the way of us doing what we want to do, when we want to do it!  Jesus and Paul are really saying the same thing here, and I believe it is the dirty little secret that no one really wants to talk about, but the reality is it needs to be talked about.  We sin because it is fun in the moment.  We sin because we want to…we suppress the truth, we hate the light because it takes our “fun” away from us, and we don’t like that.

If we can’t hide in the darkness and truth exposes us well then we just think harder and twist the truth up.  We call this being enlightened.  We blur the lines between holiness and sin in the name of being smarter than everyone else.  Paul knew we were going to do it, and called it out a long, long time ago.  So Paul lets us know, “Houston we have a problem,” that problem is that we suppress the truth.  The truth is that God is God and we should center our lives on Him.  Why do we do turn from this truth?  Because we love our independence.  We love our sin, and frankly we don’t want to live for Him because we are enjoying living for us.  The result is the wrath of God is poured out on us.  What exactly is that?  Is it fire balls from heaven or plagues like Old Testament times?  That wrath is a life without Him that is leading to NO WHERE.  NO DIRECTION.  NO PURPOSE.  NO FOCUS.  NO LIFE TO THE FULLEST.  Like a dog chasing its tail, or that far side cartoon of the boy trying to push the door open that says pull.

Yes there is some fun moments, but we are living a lie.  We aren’t understanding the truth that a life with Jesus brings you real life, with better pleasures, more joy, and more fun than you realize.  Jesus tells you that apart from Him you can do nothing, yet we see our earthly successes and wonder what in the world He is talking about!  What do you mean apart from me I can’t do anything, I’m doing just fine on my own!

So What Is The Solution?  Paul gives us the solution before he showed us the problem…

Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is God’s powerful method of bringing all who believe it to heaven. This message was preached first to the Jews alone, but now everyone is invited to come to God in this same way. 17 This Good News tells us that God makes us ready for heaven-makes us right in God’s sight-when we put our faith and trust in Christ to save us. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scripture says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.”  TLB

This is our hope, this is our answer to the problem.  God gave us something in Jesus that we could not earn, and that we can’t accomplish on our own.  Without God, we forget how to even be the humans that He created us to be.  We sin.  We fall short of His amazing glory but because of God’s amazing love for us he gives us the solution.  That solution is Jesus.  Because of Jesus we can stand before God pure and blameless in His sight.  Because of Jesus we have hope, and can have a new life, a new heart, with new passions and pleasures that far out-weigh the sinful, lust-filled pleasures of our heart.  None of us can do it without help…and that is the beauty of Jesus, that God loved us enough to give us the solution to our sin problem.   We have hope, and that hope is in Jesus and that is something you can have today by simply asking Jesus into your life and believing in Him.  He paid your debt so that all of us can be saved from this downward spiral.

I told you today I had some good news and some bad news…the bad news is pretty depressing, but the good news is amazing isn’t it?