Letting Go Of The Leash Series

When a sinner gets what he wants he never wants what he gets. God gave them over to the consequences of their sin.

God gave them over in this lust of their hearts and the insistence to have their own way.

IMPURITY: Real sick word, same word used to describe the contents of a grave. A decaying foul lifestyle. Like a dying limb on a body that serves no purpose. It also was used in their day to describe what we might call, ‘Contamination’. Like the tools of a surgeon become no longer usable so we become that way before God.

Verse 25: Exchange the truth of God for THE LIE.

What a choice. I would rather have the lie because in the lie I have more fun, do what I want. The foolishness of such a decision.

TO DEGRADING PASSIONS (26) For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions;

I was watching a track meet on television two months ago. The meet was being held in Moscow Russia and the American commentators were making less of an issue of the running and more about a recent ruling by the Russian Parliament. The ruling simply stated that it would be illegal in Russia to try and teach homosexuality to children. American runners were quoted about how they supported the gay lifestyle. A female Russian pole vaulter simply said, ‘We in Russia simply believe that boys go with girls and men go with women’. I thought as I watched and listened about how once Christian America now compared even to a nation build on atheism.

Paul says that our impurity will eventually move into a new category of sin. At one level we take that which God has given to us for good and abuse it such as sexual sin in this context. Things such as adultery, sleeping around, prostitution. Abusing the normal use of what God has given. But the next step is not only to ABUSE what God has given but to actually ABANDON the natural use of it. Sin by its very nature will press farther and farther without the grace and mercy of God to retrain it.

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 person the due penalty of their error.

We see something here that has become all too familiar in our day.

Same-sex marriages are quickly becoming legal all over our nation.

Personalities such as Ellen DeGeneres and others are now celebrated. Every time I see an image of Ellen dancing around with an audience full of women I have this tendency to try and look for a GOLDEN CALF.

The words used here for women and men are not the normal words one might use. It literally says, ‘males & females’. Like you would speak of dogs or other animals’. Devolution: man becoming more and more like animals and less like God.

Lowest description of a human being. Paul uses the term here a ‘degrading passion’.

Paul is writing this letter from Corinth, a city that lay in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexual pleasure. Her temple prostitutes were highly valued as priestesses and were honored guests at public festivals