Romans 1: An Old Word For An Old Problem

Romans 1: An Old Word For An Old Problem

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Romans 1

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. 26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 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 error. Romans 1

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 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. Romans 1

Fire Hose  Wayyyy too much to cover here  My aim is to cover it all but to get you think about just one thing  Take notes for Grow Groups  This will go quickly  Bad news always comes before good news

What’s wrong?  US children born poor have a 50% chance of staying that way  Addiction costs the United States 524 billion a year  The majority of the 20 million addicts will never get help  The average household in the US is 23,000 dollars in debt  30.5% of Americans are obese  24,000 people die every day from hunger, 18,000 of those are children, someone dies of hunger every 3.6 seconds, nearly 9 million a people per year  1 billion people don’t have clean drinking water and are in poverty directly because of greed, civil unrest, lack of knowledge, etc.  There is nothing NEW about the news, it’s a very old story indeed

What’s wrong?  Sin  This force that distances, decays, destroys  Augustine said that sin bends people toward the ground, making them like beasts  Luther said it bends people in on themselves  Important to note that sin in not necessarily the “breaking of rules”  Disruption of SHALOM

Wrath  Think direction when you think of wrath  God is moving all things toward restoration and wholeness  Sin is moving all things toward decay and death  God is OPPOSED to sin  Wrath is God’s reaction to His good creation choosing decay and death  Wrath is what keeps the story moving forward  Not an ESSENTIAL attribute  God and us

Rebecca Pippert “Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is. And the final form of hate is indifference.”

Suppress  Push down, hinder, bury under rationalization  By our unrighteousness  History is not on our side  Everything about man and creation is scarred  Even our good deeds will always be tainted by sin and evil  Genesis 3 destroys the sociological excuse  Why the Gospel is so revolutionary  “Felt the lie”

Revelation  General and Special  Creation (Ps. 19) and Morality  The Good under the Good  Most Greeks and Romans agreed with Paul here (Cicero, Seneca)  Epictetus even said anyone who looked at nature and concluded otherwise was “stupid”  Stoic philosophers were even saying the natural evidence pointed to a singular creator God  GK Chesterton

Worship  Verse  Humans are made to worship  Celebrities, athletes, etc.  Why?  Genesis tells us we will IMAGE something  A mirror needs something to reflect to serve its purpose  We prop someone or something up and then we start to resemble that thing  “Sex symbol”  Reduce someone to a function  Opposite of God, who seeks relationship

Idolatry  Verse 23  “Glory”  Think WEIGHT and PRESENCE  Modern day idolatry  The SIN under the SIN  We all serve something that gives us meaning  Something that defines us, we sacrifice for, protect, and invest  The Jewish mind connects idolatry and immorality  All things have something of goodness and glory in them  Making good things ultimate things

Rebecca Pippert “Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.”

Idolatry  Some examples of social/cultural idols:  Fascism  Communism  Populism  Capitalism  Rigid multi-culturalism.  Enlightenment humanism.  At the root of all problems (personal or social), all non- Christian philosophies and ideologies, is the elevation of some created thing to the place of ultimate worship and ultimate arbiter of truth and meaning.

Futile  Not going anywhere, empty of content, upside down  A claim of wisdom (V. 22)  Greeks made more strides than any culture on earth in thinking but had one of the most depraved cultures in the ancient world  Back and Forth (pendulum)thinking  US vs. THEM  Justification by comparison  An idle story  Anti-Gospel

Same sex attraction  Something that needs to be seriously talked about in Christian communities  1 Cor. 6  Picking and choosing  Paul is using rhetoric to emphasize Gentile typical Gentile sins  Setting a trap for the Jews  Common in the Ancient World (Pederasty)  Some have argued that this excludes loving, committed relationships

Same sex attraction  We have at most six verses in the Bible that mention homosexuality, we have around 3,000 passages that address greed, gluttony and the need to care for the poor  Claiming to be someone who has same sex attraction does NOT exclude someone from faith or the Christian community  When people get their life from their religion rather than from their relationship with Christ, they need to find some sin-group they can positively contrast themselves with

Decay and breakdown  Intellectual confusion and frustration  Emotional confusion and frustration  Bondages and addictions  Decay of personal and corporate life  1. Economic disorder – “greed,” 2. Social disorder – “murder, strife, deceit, malice,” 3. Family breakdown – “they disobey their parents,” 4. Relational breakdown – “gossips, slanderers, insolent, arrogant and boastful,” 5. Character breakdown – “senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

Highbrow and Lowbrow

Vince Gilligan “If there’s a larger lesson to Breaking Bad it’s that actions have consequences. I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice... I want to believe there’s a Heaven, but I can’t not believe there’s a hell.”

Highbrow and Lowbrow

Two things we know  1. God exists  2. We feel the weight of sin  Paul invites us to consider our direction  CS Lewis on Hell  Someone has to pay the price for sin  Christians point to Jesus  The Gospel is that you are worse than you ever realized, but more loved than you can dream

Prayer “Heavenly Father, please reveal to us any way, from small to large, in which we have suppressed the knowledge or practice of the truth about you. If we have substituted the glory of anything for your glory, please forgive us. If we have used you to advance our own agendas instead of revealing your glory, please forgive us. Help us to experience and reveal your righteousness to a lost world by living out the power of your gospel. Amen.”