Exposed: The Great Cover-Up, Part 8

himself as to charges perhaps
of his own integrity shortfalls that he had intended many times
to go to Rome hadn’t gotten it done. It had nothing to do with
his confidence in the gospel. Paul knows that he bears the
very gospel of God that has the power of God and announces the
righteousness of God. When Paul gets into this later
section, the section that we now are in our eighth part, this
section that we called exposed the great cover-up, the cover-up
of God literally, that began in verse 18. That section there
talks about how the tendency of man has always been to cover
up God. I want to pick up in verse 21.
where we begin in our consideration of what I term the cycle of judgment. That’s where you get that cycle
is in verse 21. And then the cycles are repeated
three times throughout the end of the chapter. If you would,
beginning in verse 21. And we’ll go through verse 27
this morning. For even though they knew God,
they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became
futile in their speculation And their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory
of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible
man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts
to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them.
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped
and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed
forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave
them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the
natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same
way also, the men abandoned the natural function of the woman
and burned in their desire toward one another. Men with men committing
indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty
of their error.” We saw the pattern. in the cycle of judgment. Rejection
rather, replacement, and then finally, reprobation. We’ve seen
the first cycle already in verses 22 through 24. Rejection, replacement,
and reprobation. And we’ll see it again today
and in the verses that follow once again. Perhaps before we delve in to
what is a very difficult subject, Let’s refresh our minds. In a
very real sense, let’s renew our minds. Let’s take comfort
from God’s Word even before we delve into these difficult thoughts. Your mind’s eye, just think with
me to the opening words of the entire Bible itself. In the beginning,
God. In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth. And we have a tendency to drift
away from that thought and to forget that God is the one that
created everything that we see. God has a created order. God
established institutions. God made us. We see the opening
pages of Scripture, how God’s creation unfolds. On day one,
God creates light. On the second day, atmosphere
and the heavens are created. On the third day, the land and
the seas are separated. Later on that day, God puts for
the first time on earth, vegetation. On the fourth day, God creates
the sun, the moon and the stars. On the fifth, sea creatures and
birds. On the sixth day, animals. And
God looked and saw and it was good. God made a good creation. God made no mistakes. In Genesis
1, verse 24, it is recorded that then God said, let the earth
bring forth living creatures after their kind. And all the
animals were created. And then God looked and saw that
it was good. And in verse 26 of that chapter, Moses puts down that God said,
let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and
let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of
the sky and the cattle, over all the earth and over every
creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in
His own image. In the image of God, He created
them. Male and female, He created them. And once He had made that creation,
He said, behold, it was very good. You get the details of
creation later on in chapter two, especially with regards
to man and wife. And I believe that is where God
institutes the first marriage. God set his design in order there
in the pages of Scripture. God looked down and said it is
not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable
for him. God did this. Out of the ground
the Lord formed every beast of the field, and you know the story,
how He brought them one at a time, but there was not found one.
to be a suitable helper for Adam. So the Lord God caused a deep
sleep to fall on man and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs
and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord fashioned into
a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought
it brought her to the man. And the man said, this is now
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She should be called
woman because she was taken out of a man for this reason. A man shall leave his father
and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become
one flesh. And the man and his wife were
both naked and were not ashamed.” What beautiful words of Scripture.
What a beautiful account of the creation of God, that God had
a plan in mind, that God set it in order and God made it.
And in God’s assessment, it was good. It was right. It was perfect.
The history of humanity has shown. That what was good and right
and perfect for God was not good enough for us, and we have perverted
it in a multitude of ways. What Paul Intense to address
this morning is perhaps arguably the low point of all of man’s
degradation. And we pick it up in verse twenty
five. Well, we begin to see the rejection of God once again. Remember, I told you these aren’t
different occasions in the history of humanity. These are rather perceived as
different waves or phases in God’s reprobation of humanity. Where it is recorded in verse
25, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They exchanged,
they exchanged, they exchanged. They cashed in the truth of God. The phrase here, the truth of
God, is a very broad term. It just talks about God and His
true being, the reality of God, who He is in His revelation to
humanity. The truth of God, said one, is
the same thing as God in His truth, or the true God as He
had revealed Himself to man. It is the truth about God. It
is that same truth which was mentioned in verse 18 already.
At the beginning of this whole discussion, Paul said, the wrath
of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because that
which is known about God is evident within them. It’s the truth about
God. And as one said, sin has always been an assault on the
truth and the truth of God. One said it this way, the scriptures
teach that the wicked make an attempt to suppress the truth.
The fool is constantly trying to convince himself that there
is no God. Even when he is confronted with
the voice of God addressing him by means of special revelation,
He still refuses to submit. They were repressed. They sought
to exchange, cash in the truth of God, the truth that there
is one and only one God. Humanity hasn’t liked that from
the very start. That there is one God, that he
is the one true God, that he’s a living God that would take
anything but, that he’s a holy God. The truth that God is a
holy God offends men. Because how can we possibly live
up to that standard? That He is a sovereign God. That
He is in control. That He is sovereign over all
the affairs of men, over all the world. That He is the Creator. That He is the Designer. That
He is the Sustainer of everything that exists. That He is merciful. That offends us. That offends
the natural mind of man. That we need mercy. That we have
to somehow live up to this impossible standard, and if we don’t, we
need mercy. There are other things that offend
the seemingly more sensible side of mankind, that he is just and
righteous, and that he will punish evil, that he is a wrathful God.
That’s the truth about God, and that is what they cashed in.
They said, you know what? If that is God, if that’s the
God of the Scriptures that you’re telling me about, I don’t want
any of it. They’ve already seen God. They know Him to be what
He presents Him to be in all of creation. They know He’s a
sovereign God. They know He’s an almighty God. They know that He’s the Creator
God. They cashed it all in and they began the replacements. Not only did they reject God,
look at the end of verse 25, they exchanged the truth of God
for a lie. A lie. All kinds of false ideas,
false theories, false speculations of what man can create in his
head. As we saw last week, Calvin said that man’s mind is a factory
of idols. What he speaks of here is the
entire futility of idols and idolatry. What he referred to, said one,
is anything which is not what it pretends to be, or what is
supposed to be, is in the Scriptures called a lie. And so you get
in the Bible a frequent characterization of idols and idolatry being termed
as lies. Isaiah chapter 44. Which passage
we read several weeks ago, this is the passage, remember, that
talked about the foolishness of idolatry. Part of the tree
becomes firewood and part of the tree is carved into a god.
And that passage closes with the indictment of the idolater
in these words. He feeds on ashes. A deceived
heart has turned him aside and he cannot deliver himself, nor
say, is there not a lie in my right hand? As he holds that
statue, it’s a falsehood. It’s a lie. In Jeremiah, it’s
translated deceitful. Later on, falsehood. Jeremiah
16, 19 again, falsehood. These things are lies. Robert Haldane, a great commentator
on this incredible book, said, they lie. The lie refers to practice
consisting not only in speculative errors, but in perversity of
action and superstition and idolatries. The heathen changed the truth
of God, the true idea of God, exhibited in the words of creation,
in the works of creation, into the false representations made
of him. in their superstitious idolatries.
It’s a lie. It’s one big falsehood. It’s
a sham. They exchanged the truth of God
for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than
the creator. Now, some people locked in only
to the idea that by creature here is referring to some, you
know, Bambi or a cow or what have you. But a creature could
just as easily be something that we created with our hands, an
idol. It doesn’t matter. It’s anything other than God.
Anything other than God is a creature. Even an idea becomes a creature
of our own mind. And what it points to here, it
establishes really the manner in which the exchange took place,
one for another. The worship and religious service
of anything other than God is idolatry. And that’s what’s in
view. To worship is a general word to serve is literally religious
service. This is the language of the priesthood
and of the temple. They worshipped and served the
creature rather than the creator. And it shows here the deliberateness
of their actions, they deliberately chose one over the other. They had full view of God and
who He was and what He had done and what His nature was, says
the Scripture. And they deliberately chose one
over the other. It wasn’t out of ignorance. This
was willful. It wasn’t merely giving a preference
of one to the other. Giving kind of a passive attention
to God. No, this was a wholesale giving
over. For they exchanged the truth
of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather
than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Now, this seems
like a strange place, doesn’t it, for worship service, but
that’s basically what Paul does. He pauses and turns his eyes
to heaven and thinks upon God and expresses how blessed and
how glorious and how magnificent is the God that he served. Like
I said, in the midst of this discussion on the wrath of God
and idolatry and knowing where he’s headed to talk about the
most impure, vile behavior on the face of the earth, and all
of a sudden he wants to have a worship service? And there were a number of people
that couldn’t quite put their finger on why Paul would have
done this. But there were a few. There were
a few that really noted, and I think rightfully so, because
the interesting thing was in the midst of this week. This was a difficult week of
study to have to focus on these things. And I found myself empathizing
with Paul on this point. What one said was, it is an affirmation
of the blessedness that belongs to God. Well, that’s obvious.
Because he goes on to say, the dishonor done by men does not
distract or detract, rather, from this intrinsic and unchangeable
blessedness. Paul wanted to remind himself
of this. And he wanted to remind the Roman
Christians of it. And he wanted to remind us. You
know what? This doesn’t phase God. God isn’t
phased at all by this. But there’s another element here
that I think we need to acknowledge. It says, one said, a spontaneous
expression of devout feeling called forth by the forced mention
of that which reverence would rather hide. I wish I didn’t
have to talk about this this morning. I wish that I didn’t
have to study it. I wish that I didn’t have to
read up all these ridiculous articles of all this perversion
that takes place. I know Paul did not want to talk
about this subject, but he had to. Because it was so rampant
in his day. It had literally overtaken society. It is as one characterized it,
It relieves the writer’s feeling as he contemplates such horrors. And I get that. I get that. He is the God who is blessed
forever. Amen. And then Paul gets down
to business. Rejection, replacement, and as
the pattern fits, reprobation. Look at verse 26. For this reason,
God gave them over to degrading passions. This second in the series of
reprobations, second out of three, points not just to sensuality,
but it’s a sensuality of such an impure and vile nature that
it perverts nature in addition to disregarding God himself.
It goes as bad as it can get. And that’s why so many people
sought to really bring out the meaning of these words. Shameful
passion, said one. Passions which bring dishonor,
said another. Literally, it is passions of
dishonor which emphasize their disgraceful and disgracing character. 1 Thessalonians uses One of these
words, lustful passion, passion that is lustful. What it points
to, as one said, is that God had abandoned them. God had abandoned
them over to degrading passions, not just passions that in and
of themselves were bad, but passions that in and of themselves would
take them down even lower. They were degrading passions,
which he identifies in these two verses as homosexuality,
which is the ultimate expression of man’s moral degeneracy, the
most degrading and repulsive of all passions. Paul says this
is the bottom. It doesn’t mean that homosexuality
is the only sin, because you’ll be shocked to see the list in
which homosexuality is placed. For this reason, God gave them
over to degrading passions. And shockingly, he starts with
the women. You would almost think that even in our own day and
age, even in our own society, women and homosexuality, it’s
almost an afterthought. The more prominent, the more
visible is always the male equivalent. But Paul starts with the women.
for their women exchange the natural function for that which
is unnatural. So I said, first of all, it’s
important to note that Paul doesn’t refer to the two genders by traditional
words, men and women. He uses the much more generic
male and female. And I think one pastor provided
a good explanation as to why he said the usual Greek terms
for women and men imply a certain dignity. When you appeal to men,
you say men. When you appeal to women, you
say women. When you appeal to them both, you call out to the
men and women. And it implies a certain dignity. And Paul refused to ascribe even
an implied dignity to those who degenerate into homosexuality.
Paul refers to them as males and females, generally speaking. And it says that these females
exchanged the natural function. Function is a euphemism for sexual
relations. The phrase natural function is
used again here in verse 27, and there it is absolutely clear
what the men abandoned. was the intimacy of male and
female relations. Likewise, here, the women abandoned
the natural function, the same intimate male and female relation.
They walked away from that. And it becomes clear from verse
27, what Paul is talking about here, that the fact that he mentions
the women first, literally trying to point out
the low point to which society had sunk in the heathen world,
highlighting the moral failure of even the typically more virtuous
gender. As one said, the women are always
the last to be affected in the decay of morals. Their corruption
is therefore proof here that all virtue is lost. The point
is not that women departed from God-given norm first, It’s not
saying that like the apple that Eve partook of it first. That’s
not at all what it’s saying. But that society had degenerated
to such a point that such vile behavior was common even among
the women. And the King James translates
that little particle even it captures that. For this reason. God gave them over to degrading
passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that
which is unnatural and in the same way. Also, men, the men
abandoned the natural function of the woman. And Paul. Launches into. This subject that
is condemned at every turn in Scripture. Without addressing the male female
relationship, he elevates that natural union that it is implied
as being right and pure and proper. It is the natural order that
was established by God in creation. And he says any deviation from
that is sin and sinfulness. Paul elsewhere establishes these
truths in first Corinthians seven, he said this. Because of the
immoralities, because of the great tendency towards sin in
this area of our lives, each man has to have his own wife,
not multiple wives. I can remember, you know what
the amazing thing is? Not even what, 17 years ago,
I wrote a definition of what marriage is. And I made clear
that it was one woman, one man. I never dreamed that we’d be
talking one day about same sex unions. All I was talking about
was we’re supposed to have one woman for life. What I was really
focused in on. Let’s get away from this idea
of divorce, kids. I was talking to my college kids.
Let’s get away from this idea of dipping into that union as
tentative. That if things don’t work out,
we can just back out. That’s all I was focused on.
one woman, one man. Because of immoralities, each
man is to have his own wife, Paul said, and each woman is
to have her own husband. The husband shall fulfill. And
in case you don’t think that it’s talking about that union,
the husband must fulfill his duty to his wife and likewise
also the wife to his husband. What Paul is talking about there
is the beautiful, naturally created order that he had implemented
in the garden with Adam and Eve, the first marriage. God put them
together and God said what God puts together, no man should
separate. But look at what happens when
sinful man takes a hold of the good creation of God. For this
reason, God gave them over, verse 26, to degrading passions for
their women exchanged the natural function of that which is unnatural.
And in the same way also, the men abandoned the natural function
of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another. It isn’t necessarily a bad word. that burned in their desire.
Elsewhere it’s used of unfulfilled desire. That’s not wrong to be
passionate necessarily. What it points to here is the
intensity of the passion. What one called rage of lust. And that’s pretty accurate. Here,
as one said, is the burning of an insatiable lust that has not
natural or legitimate desire, of which the lust is the perversion
or distortion, something that is essentially and under all
circumstances illegitimate. It’s wrong. And that just fans
the flames of this illegitimate passion. Verse 27 again. And in the same
way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman
and burned in their desire toward one another. Men with men committing
indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty
of their error. Those are difficult words to
even read. indecent acts, shameless acts, translated in Revelation,
shame, 1 Corinthians 13, 5, unbecoming, just almost unspeakable. And at the end of this passage,
Paul calls it an error. It’s definitely not strong enough,
a strong enough translation. One translation rendered it the
fitting wage of such perversion. Another said this, the error
repaid by abandonment to these unnatural vices is the apostasy
from the worship of God. The repayment itself consists
in the nine unsatisfying lust itself, together with the dreadful
physical and moral consequences of debauchery. What he points to here is their
sexual perversion is itself. The consequence of abandoning
God. And you say, well, look at our
society. The more homosexuality increases
in our society, the more one truth becomes plainly evident,
and we’ll talk about that in a moment. But our society isn’t
the first society that faced the burgeoning and overwhelming
sin of homosexuality. One chronicled that ancient Greek
and Roman society not only regarded paterasty, and I never even heard
the word, had to look it up. I’ll just say that it’s older
with younger. They regarded this with indulgence, but were also
inclined to glorify it as actually superior to heterosexual love. That it became
so prevalent and so prominent that that That was the norm. Few, indeed, were the voices
raised in protest within the society, but Greece and Rome
had no monopoly on homosexuality. It was common throughout the
Semitic world as well. And the sad truth is no one stood
in the way. No one looked to God’s word. Very few, especially
in the heathen world, looked up and looked to this God, this
holy God that they knew existed and said, no, this can’t be right. This is sin. This can’t be the
natural created order. That led one to say that in the
whole of the literature of the pre-Christian period, Do you
get the magnanimous nature of that statement? In the whole
of the literature of the pre-Christian period, hardly a writer has even
decisively condemned it. Nobody said anything about it.
In Crete, in Sparta, the practice was favored as a means of education
and was acknowledged by law. It was perfectly legal and even
good and pressed out. as being virtuous. I want to take you to a perfectly
stomach-turning event. Genesis chapter 19. In Genesis
chapter 19, you know the situation. Abraham is concerned about Lot
and his city. God is purposing to destroy it
because of their great sinfulness. God sends a couple of angels
to verify for him the nature of this sin and this society. Not that God needed these earthly
angels, these angels that took on earthly bodies to report back
to him necessarily. But that’s the way the story
plays out. Pick it up in Genesis chapter 19, verse 1. Now the
two angels came to Sodom. In the evening, as Lot was sitting
at the gate of Sodom, when Lot saw them, he rose to meet them
and bowed down his face to the ground. And he said, Now behold,
my lords, please turn aside to your servant’s house and spend
the night. Wash your feet. Then you may rise early and go
on your way. They said, however, no, but we shall spend the night
in the town square. It was a test. Well, of course,
Lot is mortified. He couldn’t bear the thought
of these men staying the night in the town square, and you’ll
find out why in a moment. He urged them strongly, so they
turned aside and entered his house and prepared a feast for
them. He bakes unleavened bread and they ate. Before they sat
down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the
house, both the young and the old and all the people from every
quarter. And they called out to Lot and said to him, Where
are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out so that we may
have relations with them. In the verses that follow, I
will pass over for propriety’s sake, skip down to verse 9. But
they said, Stand aside. Furthermore, they said, This
one came in as an alien, this Lot. And already he is acting
like a judge. Now we will treat you worse than
them. So they pressed hard against Lot and came here to break the
door. But the men, that is the angels, reached out their hands
and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door.
They struck the men who were at the doorway of the house with
blindness, both the small and the great, which means that everybody
in the city, all the men, were affected by this impure and vile
sin, both the small and the great, so that they wearied themselves
trying to find the doorway. In their blindness, they still
could not set aside their lustful desires. Then the two men said to Lot,
whom else have you here? The angels begin to tell them,
you need to flee, because God’s judgment is coming. God’s judgment
is not going to hold up and wait while you gather up all your
earthly belongings either, as Lot considered. Verse 17, when
they had brought them outside, One said, escape for your life.
Don’t look behind you. Don’t stay anywhere in the valley.
Escape to the mountains or you will be swept away. God’s judgment
is coming. And then in verse 24, then the
Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord
out of heaven. He overthrew those cities and
all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on
the ground. But his wife from behind him
looked back. She became a pillar of salt.
Abraham arose early in the morning and went to the place where he
had stood before the Lord, and he looked down towards Sodom
and Gomorrah. And toward the land and the valley, and he saw,
behold, the smoke and the land ascended like smoke from a furnace.
Nothing left. We tell you where we are in our
own day. The homosexual agenda is on the advance in almost every
sphere of our life. schools, workplace, military,
churches. One writer recently wrote, the
powerful gay rights lobby has been crusading tirelessly to
promote special legal rights for homosexuals, indoctrinate
the nation’s school children with their worldview, radically
redefine the institution of marriage, repeal the US military’s time-tested
rules of conduct, intimidate and discredit all critics, and
perhaps worst of all, criminalize and punish the open expression
of the Judeo-Christian worldview. You think I’m kidding? You think
that’s an overstatement? Here’s one article that proposed
to consider barring Christians as foster parents, because we
wouldn’t promote an alternative lifestyle. Another article went on to say
that once gay marriage is legalized in America, which is very possible,
schools will be required to indoctrinate children that homosexuality is
a perfect, normal, and healthy lifestyle. And children are totally
in the middle of this target. They’re totally in the middle.
They’re the bullseye. Listen. Home Depot. hosted a series of
events across the country at homosexual rallies. And they
set up children’s craft workshops in order to appease the younger
members of these crowds. There was a gay pride event hosted,
a great party, where a 10-year-old was named as the Grand Marshal.
It has gotten so bad The pediatricians, the American College of Pediatrics
warned educators against promoting the gay lifestyle to students.
And yet Obama names a czar whose homosexual agenda is so aggressive
that it would overturn the very ethics that we hold to today.
One wrote of him, a homosexual congressman from Colorado has
proposed a gay law critics say would give controversial federal
school safeties are Kevin Jennings, a longtime homosexual rights
advocate, almost unlimited authority to mandate indoctrination in
public schools at taxpayer expense. There’s a game for six-year-olds
that pushes and endorses same-sex unions. The game that we’ve played
even in our own home, the game of life. But if you play it online,
you’re encouraged to take a same sex partner. How about this? Moms and dads,
last year, do you know that Mother’s Day was banned in a particular
school district to avoid offending children with homosexual parents? It’s gone so far that one high
school performed a gay Thanksgiving, a gay themed play on Thanksgiving
Day. And on and on and on it goes. One gal, Christian gal on a university
campus was threatened that because she claimed that homosexuality
is a choice, it said that she had to enter into a remediation
program to include sensitivity training on homosexual issues,
additional outside study on literature promoting homosexuality and the
plan that she attend a gay pride parade and report on it. It’s
absolutely out of control. And you might be pulling your
hair out, you might be sick to your stomach and you should be.
Because you might even be saying they’re winning. And I’m going to tell you this
morning, no, they’re not. They’re losing. The more homosexuality
is promoted, the more they get into it, the more lose in the
worst possible way. Because they bring down the judgment
of God upon them. They are being given over. What do we make of all that?
It’s judgment. It’s a clear mark of the judgment
of God and crystal clear indicator that we had better do everything
in our power as Christians to proclaim Christ in these waning
hours. We are in precisely the same
spot as lots. We are living in Sodom. It was
this particular context that prompted Billy Graham one day
to say, if God does not judge America, he would have to apologize
to Sodom and Gomorrah. God hasn’t changed his standard.
What is homosexuality? It is not a naturally occurring
condition. One who engages in homosexual
activity is not born that way. I’ll tell you a little anecdote
in closing. I get a lot of my news online
and I clicked on the Nine News website some time ago. And they
had a little ad in the corner that encouraged readers to create
their own gay superhero. I couldn’t believe it. I clicked
on it. And literally what it was, as
if you can imagine, you know, remember the paper dolls where
you put various clothing on them? Well, this allowed you to dress
them and color them and and put all kinds of different attributes
to them. All in the name of having your own personal gay superhero
when you log on to Nine News. So I called. I said, you know
that they won’t even let Joe Camel advertise his cigarettes
anymore to children. And here you have a cartoon that
create your own gay superhero on your website. The man took
exactly the position I knew he would. Nine News has been more
Gay friendly than any of the news stations, although they
all drift in that direction The man went on to chastise me or
attempt to Because I held to this idea that this is a choice Homosexuality is not a naturally
occurring condition. It’s not cute. It’s not amusing. It’s not a joke. I It is not
something about which we are to be amused, like the flamboyance
of a Liberace or Elton John to make fun of and smirk at. The prevalence of that activity
in our own day is a solemn indicator of the judgment of God, and it
ought to grieve our spirit, much like the psalm this morning.
It is not a sickness. It is not something that a little
therapy and a little counseling can help somebody get over. It
is not an alternative lifestyle. It is a sinful act. It is a sinful
lifestyle that ignores not only the God-given design of the human
body, but the act of procreation as God designed it, and it suppresses
the natural desire, fosters illicit desire, and ignores the God who
created it all. Leviticus 18.22, you shall not
lie with a male as one lies with a female. Leviticus 20.13 gives
the The punishment of that first
Corinthians nine and this is the first Corinthians six verse
nine and ten. And this is the passage that
I wanted to encourage you. Homosexuality is absolutely a
sin. It bars people from heaven and
sends them to hell. But look at the list that it’s
in. Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit
the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators,
nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals,
nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers,
nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. We live in an amazing day. Our
day is the day of Lot and Abraham passing by, directed to stand
afar off on a hill. We have a very narrow window
of opportunity. One of the things that we’re
looking at as elders is our ministries and what it is we’re doing and
why. My great fear is that we just become lukewarm and passive
and just sit back and take it all in. We have a very narrow
window of opportunity to preach and proclaim Christ to our neighbors
and to our friends and to those who are perishing. To examine our hearts before God. Merciful God. We humble ourselves
in your presence. We are both shocked and even
overwhelmed at the words that we’ve pondered. We know well
at the advance of that agenda in this day and age. And yet
we know you and we know that you are in control. We know that
your standards have not changed and you will judge. Grant us
the grace, Father, to take Christ to those who are lost and dying,
to those whose vile sin will one day call down the judgment
of God. Grant us that grace, Father.
It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray. Amen.