The Wrath We Deserve. The Grace We Need // Romans 1:18-25

I want to tell you something. And by the way, multiply campus. I hope you guys are enjoying those brand new kneelers at your campus. Guys, at all of our campuses, I want you to know that the church is a family of families. Think about that, let me for a second. It's a family, okay? That's why there's the brother, sister, language, and scripture, okay? And when as soon as you realize the church is a family, realize that's why we have so many crazy uncles. Okay, that's all right, that's all right. But the church is a family of families, which means, listen, it means that the job of the church, at least one of the jobs of the church, is to help the families in the church. And that's why we're launching our first ever parent conference. Mark your calendar, clear your calendar. I've met some of your kids. You definitely need a clear calendar, okay? February 27th and 28th. Now listen, here's the thing. Last year we did our first marriage conference. And as soon as you talk to people about marriage, for some reason, everybody wants to come to a marriage conference, which is great. For some reason, when we talk about our parent conference,

here's the thing guys, I'll just be honest for a second. We've had some parent trainings. Look, we brought in this lady, okay? Godly lady from Dallas, Texas. She runs the only ministry in the entire world that talks to elementary school students about sex in appropriate ways from a visible worldview. And we brought her in, and like 150 people show up. You don't know 150 people feel like in this room? Guys, we're bringing in Adam Griffin, okay? You never heard of him. That's because you need to be listening to his podcast. He's got a family podcast. He's written three books. He's a dad of three kids. He's a pastor in Texas. We're bringing him, okay? All the way from Texas to talk to you. Here's what I want you to know. If you are a double income, no kids. Dinks, okay? That's what I lovingly call you. I want you to come here, okay? If you don't have kids yet, go back and listen to my first message from multiplying this. If you need to have kids, okay, that's it. But you need to learn about kids before you have kids. And the best time to learn how to be a parent is before you're a parent. But this is for anyone who's got kids

from diapers to diplomas, okay? Some of you, seriously, you feel like my kid is too far gone, and she's already 15, and we don't have a great relationship, and I've got two and a half years left, and she's always on her phone, and you need to be here too. Guys, we're gonna have an incredible time. In fact, register in your app. We just gave you something to do with that app, okay? Or text or, I think it's now parents, okay? It's a 3-9-8-0-8. And here's what we're doing. If you register, or when you register, we're gonna immediately begin to give you exclusive content. So when you register, we're gonna give you some parenting resources, I guess you'd say. And then my hope is, we're trying to set up a call where I interview Adam before he even gets here so you get to know him before he shows up here. He'll also be on our podcast when he gets here, but with that said, let's pray and let's get to work. Lord, I just asked, started with myself, but for every mom and dad in here, to view the home as the first church in the first mission field. And I pray you'd build here a culture where we can talk about parenting and talk about each other's kids.

And so many people, they have never seen Christian parenting displayed. They've never had it explained to them. And so it's very hard to do something you've never had explained and never even personally experienced. And I'm praying that this parenting conference won't help with that in the presence of Jesus. Amen. Well, have you heard of the Ick? Do you know what the Ick is? Okay, I'm 41 years old, so I just learned what the Ick is. I know, been out for a while. If you're over 60, listen up, you don't know what the Ick is. Let me tell you what the Ick is, okay? The Ick is something women get. Now men might get the Ick, but women talk about the Ick, okay? They get in their car and they cry on their videos and they tell us about the Ick. Let me tell you what the Ick. The Ick is something you get for your boyfriend, or maybe your fiance or your spouse, okay? But mostly for your boyfriend, and the Ick is like, it's disgusting. It's repulsive. You find out something about him that you didn't know and you didn't like. Now, sometimes it's silly.

They say a lot of women get the Ick when they see their boyfriend wear socks with sandals. I don't think men should wear, I'm not sure if men should wear sandals, okay? But men should not wear socks with sandals, okay? They say it the first time you text him something funny and he texts back he he. Instead of ha ha, no man should ever text he he, okay? It could be when you go home and watch how he treats his mom. It could be something really funny. It could be something really serious. The whole thing is, I didn't know this about you. I don't like it. And now I don't know what to do with it 'cause once I see it, I can't unsee it. If you'll turn to Romans 1, God gives people the Ick when they realize about the wrath of God. People are like, I love the idea of a God that's loving in Graceville and maybe truthful. I don't know, we'll see. But I love kind of a peaceful, gracious, loving God, but when you find out that God sends people to hell, when you find out that God gets angry, when you find out that God judges, you're like, I got the Ick. and they don't want to talk about it. They can't see what they've, you know, they can't unsee what they've seen. So today we're going to talk about the wrath of God.

Why are we going to talk about the wrath of God for like 40 plus minutes? 'Cause I had a bad week. No, that's not why. Okay, could you imagine? I'm angry. Nah, no, it's not why. It's because we practice here as the main diet of our church, what's called expository preacher. I know it's a big word, but you can see the root word of expository is expose. My job is just to open up the Bible and tell you what it says and not to root it in my authority or my passions or pet projects or hobby horses. So we're going to talk about the wrath of God today. By the way, next, if you think this week is intense, you probably don't want to come next week. I'm not even going to get into it. I wondered if I should even warn you 'cause I don't even know if I believe in that stuff warning everybody about everything all the time. You know, you might get triggered or something, but just so you know, just read verse 26 and 27, you know, and you decide if you want to come next week and you decide if you want to bring your middle scores and that's seriously up to all of you guys. If they're already riding the school bus,

they already know about all this stuff, okay? But next week's going to all be about sexual perversion this week's all about the wrath of God. Now, why are we doing this? Well, I told you because the Bible talks about these things. Here's a second reason we're doing this, okay? Because it's very crowded on Sunday mornings. When you struggle to get a parking spot, you struggle to check your kids in. And I've tried. You know, and you're still coming to the 11 o'clock service. Even though, I mean, I tried. We showed you a video. We told you all the reasons you should go to five o'clock. We told you that it's growing, but it's still too crowded at nine and 11. So we just figured if I preach on the wrath of God and sexual perversion by February, it'll be wide open in here, okay? So if you're struggling in a park, you'll be fine early February, okay? If you'll turn me to Romans 1 verse 17, okay? We're gonna pick up in verse 1 17 where Paul says the righteousness of God is revealed. Do you see that? Put it on the screen. 1 17, for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith, for faith as it is written, the righteous will live by faith, okay? I'm gonna talk to you about the wrath of God

that I want you to notice that the wrath of God comes after the righteousness of God, okay? The righteousness of God is God's perfect, God's holy, God does what is right, we do what is wrong, which leads to verse 18. Look at verse 18, verse 18 says this, here's, we're gonna spend a lot of our time in it. For the wrath of God, okay, is revealed. By the way, stop for a second. It doesn't say it's going to be revealed. What I'm hoping is by the end of this sermon, if your eyes are open, you're able to see the wrath of God everywhere. Okay, there is a wrath of God that will be revealed. We'll talk about that. But there is a wrath of God that's currently revealed against, look, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, okay? So you shouldn't be surprised because if you understand the righteousness of God, you need to understand the wrath of God because here's what, you don't even have to be a Christian to think like this, just think for a second. If you're like, God is perfect and holy, this should be your second thought, then he must be upset. I mean, just think about, I don't know, think about the things you've done, but you probably don't wanna do that.

So think about all the bad things people have done to you or think about your Twitter feed or think about CNN or Fox News or wherever you find your news. You're like, you just hear about it and you're like, okay, if the God of the Bible is true, he's gotta be angry. Well then it's like, well, people don't like that because they think, well, no, he's loving. Well, anger's the other side of love. The opposite of love is not anger. The opposite of love is indifference. I told you a story before this couple, they're fighting, true story. They're fighting in a restaurant and they're arguing and all this kind of stuff. And this lady walks up to them and says, if I fought with my ex-husband the way you guys were fighting, we'd still be married because what kills a marriage is when one or both spouses says, I don't even care anymore. So God gets angry, it's different than our anger. Now there is, when it comes to you and me, there is righteous anger and there is unrighteous anger, okay? Moses probably experienced unrighteous anger. We're upset because someone's not doing what we want them to do, when we want them to do it. Righteous anger is I hate the things God hates for the reasons God hates them, okay? But we're told in the Bible, be angry. I'm quoting scripture, be angry and do not sin.

So it's, listen, Martin Luther, who I guess I'll quote a lot 'cause he wrote a lot about Romans, he said, he thought he wrote his best sermons angry. Anger tends to focus the mind, right? Anger you only sees the bad version of things. or your brother afterwards, like, "I'm so sorry." In that moment, I could only see every negative thing you've ever done to me for the last 10 years. Yeah, that was angry. Well, I'm gonna talk about the wrath of God. In verse 18, it says, "The wrath of God is revealed." I need to talk about the three types of wrath of God. See, part of what we have to do in this series, you have to do it, I have to do it. I told you, like, I think it was last week, you need to be a deeper person than you are. And so you need to understand that it takes the whole Bible to make the whole Christian. And you can't just read a phrase and think you understand it. There are three types of the wrath of God. The first is hell, okay? And actually, this is the only time today I'm gonna talk about hell, because it's not the wrath of God, right? That's the wrath of God that will be revealed. Hell is eternal, conscious, irreversible torment. If you're in the Twitter sphere, blog, the blog's gonna exist anymore, podcast sphere. You probably saw the Kirk Cameron, you know,

from growing pains, okay? It's having some growing pains in regards to understanding his view of hell, okay? And he's changed his view of hell. And it's because it's, let me explain something about the doctrine of hell and the wrath of God, okay? It tells us something very important that you want to be true, okay? Even if you don't believe in hell, you want what I'm about to tell you to be true, which is this, you don't live in an unjust world. Let me give you an extreme example. Just stick with me for one second on this, okay? So one of the worst things that happens in our world today, okay? And I don't know how many times it happens, but it shows up in the news two, three, four times a year, is a mass shooting. And it's hard to say other worst mass shootings than other mass shootings. But you think about like, you know, Sandy Hook Elementary School from a while ago. By the way, the reason that these mass shooters, they tell us in their journals, if you read them, the reason mass shooters shoot up elementary schools, you're gonna, why would you go to elementary school? It's because they hate being that much, that they want their final act to be to take out the most innocent people. They write about it before they do it.

This is what they want to do. Well, here's what happens with mass shooters. You know this, almost all mass shooters kill themselves. Or they're killed in a battle at the end and they die. And so what happens is you hear the horrible news, hey, 15 students have died and the shooter is also dead. And then everybody thinks he escaped justice. Well, even if you capture him, what do you do? Well, if you're not on the death penalty, you can't even give him the death penalty in your state. Okay, well say you can give him the death penalty. So he dies one time and he kills 14 kids. Do you understand the problem with this? Hell says that when the mass shooter kills 14 people and then kills himself, the next person he meets is God. And it's too much to get into. There's people in hell are paid back according to their deeds. Some people's experience of hell will be worse than others, but everybody, and here's what, everybody will know that they deserve it. There's no one going to be in hell gone. You know, I don't deserve this. It's going to be unbelievably obvious to them. Second type of wrath of God is what's called the judicial wrath of God. And I think we'll get here in like October-ish. In Romans 13, Paul says the state, okay? 'Cause a lot of us do not have a good understanding of God and government and we're going to get there. We'll get there in chapter 13.

But basically I'm quoting scripture here, okay? Where Paul says the state is the avenger of God's wrath. In other words, the state, when it's acting rightly and you know, and often it's not, okay? We know that. There's dictators and totalitarian governments and all, you know, injustice everywhere. When the state's acting rightly, what it does is it punishes that which is wrong and rewards that which is right. But it's not talking about that. Here's the third type of wrath of God. So there is eternal wrath, there is judicial wrath, okay? And then there's passive wrath. And I think, well, in this life I know, it is the scariest type of wrath of God. Because when people think about God's wrath, I think like God is like, you know, it's active wrath and lightning bolt from heaven, you know, kind of thing. And God has a passive wrath. It's called, if you want the technical term, it's called the wrath of abandonment. If you've ever watched a guy leave his wife for a woman half his age and move across the country and not care, everybody's like, I don't get it. He's been given over. He's been given over to the desires of his heart and the restraining grace of God is off his life. And it is that he thinks he is free

and that is the most terrifying place to be. So I need to talk to us about what the wrath of God is again. So wrath of God is against, do you see it verse 18? I want you to see all this because we're here we are talking about this big scary topic. I want you to see it in the Bible. It's against ungodliness and unrighteousness. Think vertical and horizontal. Ungodliness, okay, what is God's wrath against, okay? What is ungodliness? It sounds like a big phrase, okay? Here's what it means. People don't want God in their life. And we'll get to how they deal with that. It's like, you know, I don't mean this in a political way. But like, why is everybody against prayer in schools? Like I'm about freedom of speech and freedom of religion. And I know we got to think about all these things more. I'm just, but I'm like, I want to ask this code. What's going on in your heart that you wouldn't want that? Why do people want the 10 commandments down from everywhere? I don't know. I don't know the legal stuff about it. Okay. I'm just, I'm asking the hard question, like, what is going on in your heart that you don't want the 10 commandments wrong? What's going on in your heart that you don't want people talking to God in front of you? It's like, there's a godlessness. We, we, we, you know, in the church, what you do instead of that is like,

you just have a domesticated view of Jesus. That's a little bigger than you and a little smarter than you. We have our own versions of ungodliness. Unrighteousness just means, it means injustice. It means to break the law. It means to cross the line and we're all so worried about injustices in the world and not injustices in our heart, you know? Everyone's like, ah, climate change, you know, global warming. It's like you hate your sister. But do you think if like you find the big boogeyman out there to yell at that you're on the right side of history and that you can continue to be a jerk to everybody in your life and be unbelievably personally greedy and be filled with lust every night, but you're against injustice, whatever that means. Well, here's the interesting thing. Paul, I need to read more because you need to see this in verse 18. Paul says, for the wrath of God is revealed against heaven from heaven. I'm sorry against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who buy their unrighteousness, suppress the truth. Follow this. I want you to see this. Let me tell you first, actually. Okay. Here's what Paul's doing. Paul's, and I want you to see it. I want you to see it in the text. Paul is saying God is angry and he's pouring out his wrath on the unrighteous and the ungodly. So he's answering the first question. Nobody is going to get God's wrath.

Who is innocent? The innocent person who experiences God's wrath does not exist, but there's a second question that Paul's answering that I want you to see him answer, which is very important. Well, what about if they're ignorant? Is there a man on an island somewhere that's always like what happens in like some theology class, seminary class, religion class? Like, is there a guy in the Amazon jungle and he doesn't, you know, or just you get more practical. Well, what, what, not everybody gets to grow up at two cities church. And so, you know, what do I do? Oh, you got to ask that question. Here's what Paul's going to say. Nobody is ignorant. Nobody is innocent. Nobody's ignorant. Nobody's innocent. Oh, look, you're not going to believe this. If you never read this, look, verse 19, okay, God's going to pour out his wrath and is pouring out his wrath because why? Verse 19, for what can be known about God? I want you to see this is plain to them. That's the first time Paul is saying. So what God wants to communicate about himself is super plain to everybody. Okay. Because God has shown it to them. Okay. That's the second time it's playing and then God makes sure they see it. Okay. Because God showed him verse 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 clearly perceived why so that they are without excuse. Nobody can play the victim card. No one can blame it on their circumstances, their situation, their genetics, their parents, nobody. Okay. Here's what I want you to understand. Our main problem in life is moral, not mental. This is so important to understand your main problem in life and everybody you know's main problem is not mental, it's moral. It's not knowledge. It's what you won't acknowledge. Think about it this way. There are certain, this is what the Bible says. There are certain things catch this. There are certain things you can't not know. If I know it's confusing, but think again, there are certain things that you said double negative here that you can't not know. So here's what he's saying. Paul's saying that God gave us an internal witness and an external witness that he exists. It's called natural revelation. I need to, I want you to, this is actually really important. Stay with me if you can. There's two types of revelation. There's natural revelation and there's special revelation or spiritual revelation. Okay, Paul's going to talk about natural revelation. He says God put a witness in you and around you so that every

person who's ever lived knows God exists. [BLANK_AUDIO] accuses you when you do wrong and approves of you when you do right. Everybody has a conscience if you don't, you're a sociopath, right? And the way that you get there, by the way, your conscience is malleable. It's supposed to be calibrated by Scripture, but it's malleable. In other words, you know, the first time you lie to your spouse, it's hard. And by the fifth or sixth time, you're like, this is a lot easier to do. You can sear your conscience, the Bible says, okay? And so, but here's what your conscience tells you, God is just. And all of us go against our own conscience all the time. The conscience is powerful. See, as Lewis said, your conscience is so powerful that you'll leave a burning building. And if there's people in it, your conscience will tell you to turn around. There's not powerful that is. There's something in you that will say, do the right thing in the heart of circumstance. But we suppress it. So God says, okay, I'm going to give you a second one. It's what he spends almost all his time on here. He says creation. In other words, he says, every time you brush your teeth and you look in the mirror and you see an image bearer of God or you look around here and you see people made in this image, you know God exists. Every time you get on an airplane and you get above the clouds and you look down, you know God exists. Every time you go to Lake Norman or Boone or Wilmington Beach, you know that God exists. Okay, here's what he's saying. It shouldn't be controversial. It's not controversial. It might be controversial today. God's saying there's no such thing as an atheist. God doesn't believe in atheists. And I'll explain how we get atheists in a second. But by the way, have you ever noticed that every atheist is mad at the God he doesn't believe him? Do you know every famous atheist in the 20th century had a horrible relationship with his dad? What happens is 4% of Americans today say that they're atheists. But do they really believe that nobody times nothing equals everything? Do they really believe that the personal experience that we have happened from an impersonal force? Does any of us really believe that chaos? The answer when you talk to people is always time. Well, you know, plus billions and billions and billions. Okay, chaos, randomness, plus billions and billions of years equals that we're just close enough to the sun, that we're not frozen and it doesn't burn us to death. I don't think so. And I don't think anyone thinks so. And you have to learn

not to believe in God. This is, you know, you could grow up in like San Francisco and the most secular progressive house ever and your three-year-old son will say to you, "Dad, who made God?" Because it's built into us. So then what do they do? This is where we have to focus on. So the first thing you know is your main problem is mental not more. The second thing you know is there's no such thing as an atheist. Everybody believes in God. This is, by the way, this is kind of interesting. I think it's interesting. I think you'll think it's interesting. When it comes to apologetics, some of you might be interested. So just know this. So apologetics just means to defend the faith. There's two different camps when it comes to defending of the faith. There's the evidentialists and the presuppositionalists. I know big words for you Sunday morning. The evidentialists, they're basically like, "Here's what happens. We just need to give them as much evidence as possible." You know, this is Josh McDowell, who's a great guy and a good Bible teacher and godly man. But it's evidentialists because people are neutral and we just got to give them the information. Actually, the oldest forms of apologetics were presuppositionalists, which means they presupposed that every person knows about God already. We just have to get them there. Well, then you would go, then what's going on? Look here. Let me show you. Here's what they do. Turn on the verse 18 one more time. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness." Look, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, okay? To suppress means to hold down something that's trying to get up. It's like trying to drown a very strong man. It's like it's going to take a lot of time. You're going to have to use a lot of energy and he's going to keep trying to get up out of the water. There is, I know, it's like there is a mass conspiracy among humanity to suppress That's the truth. You know what they say? The difference between a conspiracy in the news is, six weeks. We don't like it when people suppress the truth, right? I mean, I don't know which way you drive around here, but the way I have to go home from here, I have to drive under that bridge

with all those people with those signs. And I don't know who they are. I don't even know all of the, I can't read every sign, you know? Half the signs, I don't understand what they mean, that I can read. But they have this, they always, there's this group, release the Epstein files, okay? And the reason that there's been such a passion, I think on, that's been a, you know, a bipartisan kind of desire is there's this feeling like, you know things, people, who knows who knows them? People know things. This guy had a private island. How does a math teacher become a billionaire? This is all very strange and somebody's lying to us and that upsets us. Well, God through Paul says, we're all suppressing the truth. So then let's try to answer the question first. Why do we suppress the truth? I mean, you kind of think about it, but why would we suppress the truth? I mean, think about it this way. There's a little bit of you and a lot of truth. So I wouldn't recommend suppressing it. You know, that's what happens when people try to live alive for a long time. It's like, uh-oh, there's a lot of reality and a little bit of you.

I'd be very careful messing with this because reality is going to win. So you go, well, why don't we suppress the truth? The answer is because understanding there's a God means we're accountable. So let me explain how this works practically, okay, in the church world. You know, thank God for our, you know, basically thousand kids between our kids ministry and our student ministry of like a thousand plus kids. We want them to all love the church, walk with the Lord, all that good stuff. What happens, unfortunately, as a lot of times a kid goes off to college and then he comes back during fall break or during spring break or at the summer and then he somehow figures out a way after usually his parents have to ask him to basically say, I don't know if I believe anymore. In a normally point two or show points, oh, well, I took in a new Testament one and the authenticity of this account or I took biology and creation evolution or what's something like that? Well, here's what's interesting. I heard a pastor say he was pastoring a church that was growing really fast in a large city with lots of young people and people would come up to him and this would happen. He said, whenever someone comes out to me who grew up in the church, knew the Bible, claimed Christ

and then said they're having all these intellectual problems with the Bible, he said, my first question to ask them is, who are you sleeping with? What are you looking at that you shouldn't be looking at? Did you get drunk and like it? And he said, when you start to ask those types of, 'cause no one wants to talk about that. Everybody wants to act like they're deconstructing their faith because they're having an epistemological crisis. It's like most deconstructing of the faith in the college campus does not happen by the professor in the classroom. It happens by partying in the dorm. So we suppress the truth 'cause we don't like it. Now, yeah, that's the question. How do we suppress the truth? Well, there's a lot of ways 'cause we're very, very creative. Some of us, just by never thinking about it, which is very easy to do 'cause most of you, most of you should get your airbuds surgically in, you know, implanted into your ears. Or whatever, your big cool headphones that you work out with. Some of you, you're always listening to something, you're always watching something. There's always something new to listen to and distract you. And so if you're distracted, that's a great way to suppress the truth. I'll just never think of it. Or it's interesting, like recently,

I was watching this podcast and it was about how the younger generation, it's the first, you probably heard this maybe, the younger generation is not drinking as much. In fact, a lot of them aren't drinking at all. I thought, well, this just gotta be a good thing. You know, and I was listening about this and it was like, you know, I was thinking, are they not drinking 'cause of like the abuses of their parents or they're not? You know, and one of the things is they're not drinking as much because of all the, you know, basically health stuff with alcohol and recovery and sleep and all this other stuff. But the number one reason they're not drinking is 'cause they found a lot of other ways to get high in buzz. And with the acceptance of all types of gummies and I can't even pronounce all the words that are in these things, okay? But I just realized, wait a second. Okay, they're not drinking as much alcohol. There's a whole young generation asking, how can I get high in buzz? So I don't have to think about this. We can do it by rationalizing, right? Everybody's like, you know, I know. Here's how we do it, actually. We read the Bible, this is for us in the church. You know, what is the word drunk mean in the Greek? It's like, okay, I know your problem is, you know, you know, what does it mean to forgive?

What is forgive? I need a definition of forgiveness, you know, and then of course everybody wants to make exceptions. When nobody understands what happened to me and, you know, I know the Bible says we shouldn't go have a tape, but we're married in our hearts. What does that even mean? We're married. But people do this kind of stuff all the time. We use euphemisms. It's not pornography. It's a dulled entertainment. It's not getting drunk. It's having a good time. It's not an emotional affair. It's just having fun together. And then some of you guys, you guys suppress the truth because you, there's through your silence, you help others suppress the truth because, you know, God forbid that it be a little uncomfortable and some of your homes and some of your friendships to tell the truth. So we suppress the truth, but then you need to see what happens when we suppress the truth. So I need to see the order. We know God exists. We don't like it. Everybody knows God exists. So we have a moral problem, not a mental problem. And then we push it down. And by the way, this is what's dangerous. The smarter you are, the better you are, it's oppressive. But then here's what happens. When we do that, Paul says this happens. Look at this, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks

to him, but they became futile, literally empty. Okay. So when man decides not to worship God, he becomes a philosopher, but they became futile when they're thinking and they're foolish hearts. So what happens in the mind goes to the heart, we're dark and claiming to be wise, they became full. They got, they went to the best colleges and they got all of the great degrees and they have more degrees than Fahrenheit, but they don't believe in God. And they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images. Look at this. They start by resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So they start worshiping God and they end with creeping things. Okay. Now here's what I want you to understand. The Bible says that our origin story is the exact opposite as you were taught in biology. Let me say it directly. The Bible teaches devolution, not evolution. Here's what you were taught. If you haven't been taught, let me give you, let me give you the one minute version of what you'll be taught in university or whatever. Okay. Here's what you're going to be taught. A long time ago, you were, you come from a single cell organism and again, thankfully for chance and time and circumstance, you know, you, you kind of grew into whatever you were next and then kind of you were like a chimp for a long time, but then like it was millions of years, but then after being a chimp, you came out of being a chimp and then you were a Neolithic, you should read about the Neolithic, then you were a Neolithic farmer. And you did that for a long time, but finally you came out of being an Ithaca and then you were a homo sapien.

And once you were a homo sapien, you could begin to think about the future. And as soon as you were able to think about the future, you were able to think about death and as soon as you were able to think about death, you began to think about God. That's the origin story taught in university. God says it's the exact opposite. You knew about God, but you would not know and love him. So you devolved into worshiping all types of things. And we read this and we go, wait a second, creeping and we're, you know, modern people read this and go, who would worship animals? It's like, have you seen how some people treat their dog putting a sweater on a dog? Don't tell me that's not worship. When I watch you pick up his poop, I'm like, I think this is worship. Okay. You know, and so, or think about this, in North Carolina, in North Carolina, what do we worship? The panthers and the hornets, isn't that amazing? You know, you could argue one of the religions is America's sports and what do we do with our sports teams? We give them the name of animals and we worship them and we're so mature, I don't think so. So here's what's interesting. I need you to see this, our main problem is moral, not mental. We suppress the truth. It leads to devolution in our life. We become again, like, if you've ever seen somebody really giving over their sin, they're like an animal. All that's left is their hedonistic pleasures and all they can think is short term, not long term anymore. Well, Paul then says the sign that you have suppressed of, well, follow the logic. I know about God. I don't want to know about God. I push it down.

How do I know if I've pushed it down? You worship idols. Notice here, it says this, follow along. We're at verse 23, let's read verse 24, therefore God gave them up. God gave them up, the passive wrath of God, the wrath of abandonment. Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity. That's what we'll talk about all next week. To the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth of God, the truth about God for a lie, and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. I wanna talk to you for a second about idolatry, which if you've been around for a while, I've discussed it many times. So I'm gonna do this quickly because there's one last thing I wanna talk about. But what happens is, as G.K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic, said, when you stop worshiping God, you don't start worshiping nothing, you start worshiping everything. And idol is when you look for something in the creation that only the creator can give you, okay? God created the world very simply. Genesis one and two, we're supposed to worship the creator and rule over the creation. But what we do is we worship the creation

and then you'll see this in a few minutes and it rules over us instead. And idol is when you take a good thing and you make it a God thing. When you take a desire and you to make it a demand. Now, here's what's interesting. We don't think we worship idols. It reminds me of a story I heard of a pastor. He goes to India, true story. He goes to India and he's overwhelmed by the idolatry there. There's like the chicken God and the cow God and people are sacrificing animals to random gods. And he meets this Christian woman who'd been there and she'd been a Christian for a while. And she's a strong Christian lady and he says, you need to come to America. I'd love to bring you and tell your testimony there. And she says, I can't handle going to America anymore. I went one time, I can't handle idolatry. And he's like, have you seen the chicken God? And he's like, what do you mean? He's like all of your restaurants. The idol of the stomach, the idol of food. All of your big stadiums where you worship all your sports people and your absolute obsession with entertainment. Like, oh, it's hard to see idolatry when it's in our culture. David Pallason, he was, in my opinion, the late, great David Pallason,

he did Christian counseling for like 30, 40 years. He defined Christian counseling as dealing with people's idols. Yeah, you're doing marriage counseling, you're dealing with each other's idols. In fact, a lot of marriage conflict is, you're worshiping your idol and I'm worshiping my idol and would you worship my idol instead of worshiping your idol? It's like, well, what if we both worship Jesus instead? But he said, there's four types of idols. There's power, comfort, control and approval, which is really interesting. Just, that'd be a good conversation with a community. And he basically said what's interesting is somebody could look like they have the same idol, we think of the same money, but their source idol, power, control, comfort, approval could be different. Someone could want a lot of money because they want power, they want access. Some people could want a lot of money 'cause they just want a comfortable life. Some people could want a lot of money because they finally want to show their dad that they did it. Well, Paul says, here's what happens. We end up worshiping the creator, sorry, the creation, instead of the creator, and then here's the final move I want you to see. It says this, verse 24. Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity and to the dishonoring of their bodies

among themselves. So basically here's what God says. You know I exist, your problem is moral, not mental. You push it down. You still don't care. You worship idols. You still don't care. Maybe you'll start caring when your body is being destroyed by it. You know, it's interesting, we are obsessed with our bodies. I mean, part of it's to be human is to love your body and that's nothing, you know, the body's a gift from God. God's gonna raise the body from the dead, okay? But I've never seen a generation as obsessed with, is my VO2 max where it needs to be. What's my sleep score from last night? Carbs in, carbs out, gluten free. I mean, we just, we care so all women with all their lotions and potions, okay? It's just like, we care about the body so much that God says, you know, maybe you'll start caring when you see how this is destroying the body that you love. See, in Alcoholics Anonymous, they have a very important principle that they teach Alcoholics and it's this, whatever you abuse, abuses you back. And you can see, not the pick on Alcoholics, okay? 'Cause we've talked about Alcohol a couple of times. But sometimes you can, you can just say, Oh my goodness, he has drinker's face. You know, they're embarrassing drinker's face,

but it's like, yeah, you drink so much, I can see it on your face. It's red, it's bloodshot, bloodshot is puffy. The effects of sin begin to show up in our bodies, right? The workaholic blows out his adrenal glands, right? I'm, you know, every time I go to my parents have normal television, okay, so that when I go to my parents house, I'm introduced to something I hadn't been introduced to in a long time, which is commercials. And I just wonder, and we're not against, you know, we're not just not against medication, we're pro medication, pray and take a pill. Okay, that's our philosophy. But, um, but I've wondered how much everything's about, you know that, right? Every every commercials like medication medication medication with all these warnings, you know, may lead to coma, may lead to death. It's like, what? You know, as they have to put all the warnings at the end, but I'm wondering, I'm like, wait a second, are we on so much medication because we are living our lives the complete opposite way God designed us to live it, and therefore it's showing up day to day and the brokenness of our bodies, and we don't even see it. And then, you know, you know, how could I not talk about this? What is the ultimate example? Like every once in a while, God just gives us culture gives us, but God gives us just the quintessential example of somebody suppressing the truth. It just happened that it was one of them that happened this week. We're Senator Josh Hawley. If you haven't seen this, you must be hiding under rock because it went super viral. When Senator Josh Hawley asks a woman doctor who is sent by the other side to test like she's supposed to be the woman doctor, a woman doctor, a best educator, whatever, and he just goes, can men get pregnant? It may, it's uncomfortable to watch because she will not answer the question for you. You know how long you know how simple that question is? Do you know how uncomfortable was for me to watch five minutes of him asking her and her to squirm and not answer it? And I thought this is, it's written, we've gotten to the absurd nature of the suppression of the truth. And it's not, it's not a joke though, because if you think about it, it's the suppression of the truth of male and female that has led to the destruction of so many bodies. The transgender movement is a parable of the destruction of the body when we suppress the truth. When you cut off women's breasts and you give puberty blockers, which is a way to chemically castrate children before they go through puberty so that they will not develop normally and never be able to have kids. When you cut off healthy limbs, when doctors become butchers and then suppress the truth by doing it all in the name of compassion, you know? So we, you know, it's like

we talk about these things and I'm not, you know, it's like, and then you think about abortion. I know I'm bringing these hot topics up and I'm like, what has happened? It's like, what does he say? The lust of our flesh, the dishonoring of our bodies among one another. Because sex is the religion, every religion has to have a sacrifice. The sacrifice for sex is unborn babies, so they are not to be too graphic, but vacuumed and torn limb by limb from what should be the safest place in the world, their mother's womb. And we've done that to 65 million babies. You know, so he said, yeah, well, I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am. Very good. And so in here, here's what this is important guys. And so I just say this and then listen to this. And then what happens is the whole OnlyFans movement is first usually women, they've been due to objectifying themselves, dishonoring their own bodies. And then everybody that, you know, the objectification, the commodification of the human body is another way that we're just dishonoring our bodies. Here's why verse 25 is so important. In verse 25, he says this, well, this is where we're in. Verse 25, he says, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and they worshiped and served the create creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever and then. Now, here's Paul says, he's like, and we're going to come back next week because we're leaving in the middle of an argument, but Paul goes, here's the problem, guys. The main problem in your life and my life is we've exchanged the truth for a lie. It's very old. Don't think you don't do it. It's so old. Our parents did it. Okay, Adam and Eve. And here's what I want to challenge us. Okay? Because we're all over the place, maybe what we believe and where we are in this room. Okay? I want to encourage you today to have a new relationship with the truth. The Bible says not just that we will know the truth and the truth will set us free. Jesus said that. the Apostle Paul in writing to one church, he calls them lovers of truth. Before you can defend truth, before you can stand up in your hospital, before you can stand up in your dorm, way before you're ever gonna be defended, you gotta go, I love it. Because I have a deep conviction

that everything God teaches is for human flourishing. Paul writes to another part, to another church, he says to those who rejoice in the truth, we can't just love it, we have to enjoy it. Here's why guys, and this is important, we're gonna maybe even differently than you thought. I told you early on that in the sermon that you could see it from the text that God speaks to every person through creation and conscience. I told you that in conscience, he says, "I am just." And in creation, he says, "I am powerful." But you know what the problem is? It's not enough, it's enough to condemn us, it's not enough to save us. It's only in the gospel of Jesus Christ, it's only in special revelation, it's only in the person and work of Jesus Christ that we realize, wait a second, yeah, God is just, and God is powerful, but God loves us. And God forgives us, and God wants to give us his righteousness, and so part of what I want us to do is I want us, I'm gonna give a second to respond, I want us to love the truth. And part of that means telling the truth about your idols, you know what? In Jeremiah chapter two, the prophet is writing to the people of Israel who've been worshiping idols, and he says to them, chapter two, verse 13 of Jeremiah, he says, "Your idols have become broken cisterns for you."

That may not mean much to us, but back then a broken cistern could no longer serve its function, and so it had two functions, it was a trash heap or a prison. And that's where idols lead us, it leads either to being like, "Man, why do I feel so dirty and horrible, and why do I feel so in prison?" See, the opposite of suppression is confession. Suppression is to deny what you know, confession is to admit what you know, confession is to agree with God, and if we suppress, the Bible says the wrath of God is poured out, if we confess, the blessing of God is poured out. So in a moment, I want you, I'm gonna give you a chance to pray, I'm gonna give you a chance to come forward, you may want to just come forward and say, "God, here's my main problem, let me encourage you with this. Your main problem is a worship problem, so if you're stuck in some addiction, you're stuck in some habit, you worshiped your way in, and here's the good news, you're gonna need to worship your well. You're gonna need something bigger than your idols, and that's what Jesus is. And so in a minute, I want to encourage, if you need to come down, just pray, maybe you need to pray for somebody else, maybe you need to come forward, and you need to pray for somebody in your life, you're one who's far from God and close to you. And you know this person, that I love,

that you may call a mom, dad, son, daughter, friend, they are suppressing the truth, and I want to see the power of the gospel. Show up in their lives. If you'll stand, I'll pray for us. Lord, as we all stand, Lord, He ends with blessed is the creator forever, Lord. Lord, we have an opportunity to respond, we have an opportunity to worship. Lord, I pray that people, even in this moment, would worship their way out of their idols, Lord, that we would commit to loving the truth and replacing it with the lies, Lord, that we would have a culture where we confess in our set free, Lord. I pray for all the people in our cities and across our nation and across our world who have just enough knowledge of you to be condemned. And that's why in Romans 10, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring goodness, would this message give us a passion to tell the people who know there is a God, what His name is, and it's in His name we pray, amen. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) You [BLANK_AUDIO]