Sermon for CATM – September 12, 2010 –The Problem with Humankind
What are some of the influences in your life? Why do you believe the things you believe? Who or what do you allow to influence your opinions and views?
Each of us has a thousand voices outside our heads vying for our attention. Each of us has to choose which of those voices to listen to, because many of those voices or opinions are contradictory.
So, what are some of the key influences in your life? [Parents, newspapers, friends, teachers, movies, music, TV shows etc] Of course, we are all influenced by our culture, ideas that the majority hold to.
Interestingly, this has sometimes been referred to as the ‘spirit of the age’ or the ‘spirit of the times’. In German philosophy the word used is Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation, along with the general ambience, morals or mood of an era. The zeitgeist, or ‘spirit of this age’ influences us a great deal. Likely more than we generally like to admit.
It’s important to be aware of our influences, of what shapes us. It’s important also to realize that we are stewards of our time and our energies. We are accountable to God for our actions, for our views…for everything actually. Let me ask you another question. How much are you influenced by the Word of God, by the Holy Bible? Is it: A spiritual book among many other spiritual books; An old book containing some true things that you never read? A book you believe is true but which you rarely access? The Living Word of God?
The Bible itself is not fuzzy or non-committal about what it is. Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
The Bible is the revelation of God about God and about humanity. It contains all the key truths necessary for salvation. It shows us the way to God. On this planet there is no book near its equal. No book with near its authority. No book with near the claim on the life of the Christian man or woman.
Now, all this is by way of introduction to the second in our series on the Book of Romans. This series is also a course in our Journey through the Bible Program, part of CATM Academy’s curriculum.
I do believe that some have joined us today specifically for this course, and if that’s you, I want to welcome you this afternoon. I hope you’re enjoying yourself today. The course outline, that gives details as to the course requirements, is out on the information table at the back.
Now that we’ve set the tone a little bit regarding the gravity of the Bible, the weight and importance of the Word of God, let’s please stand and read together the second part of the 1st chapter of the Book of Romans. It is on page ______ in your red pew Bibles.
{Just as you’re standing…if you recall last week’s message was on the 1st half of Romans up to verse 17. We discussed how Paul states that he is not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. Let’s start with vvs 16-17 to get a bit of the flow from last week.}
Read Romans 1:16-32 (New International Version)
Let’s review a bit from last week to get our bearings on where we are in the second half of the 1st chapter of Romans.
Paul wrote the letter to the Romans in part to address some rumours that were floating around that were distortions of his actual teaching. The gospel, as it truly is, mattered to Paul. He wrote to enable believers to be confident of and to be able to clearly communicate the Gospel.
Paul had not established the church at Rome and had no apostles there. We don’t know who established the church in Rome, humanly speaking. Therefore he wanted to make sure they were on the right track.
Now the people of the church in Rome lived under Caesar in the powerful Roman empire. They were considered a Jewish sect by Rome. Often the church faced persecution.
One of the basic tenets of living in Rome was that Caesar, or the emperor, was considered a god…a god that citizens of Rome must pledge allegiance to. In effect, the rule of thumb in Rome was that “Caesar is Lord”.
Christians affirmed in their conversation and their songs and their preaching and teaching that Jesus is Lord. That was, obviously, a direct challenge to norms of behaviour in Rome.
The Christian’s primary and most important allegiance and fidelity was to God, to Jesus Christ. At times, depending on who was Caesar and who was the local prelate or governor, a puppet of Caesar, the Christians would face horrendous persecution.
So he wanted to give them a proper perspective on the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles so they could joyfully spread the knowledge of Jesus Christ among other Gentiles in God’s kingdom.
Last we looked at how Paul feels obligated both to the Jews, his own faith and ethnic background, and to the Gentiles, to share the gospel. They are both deserving of the gospel. And Paul is not ashamed of the gospel. Not even a little.
Let’s look more closely at today’s text.
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
Last week we looked at the key truth of the gospel…that Christ has become for us righteousness. His righteousness, his right standing with God, becomes ours through faith in Jesus, who gave His life as a sacrificial offering to God. This was Jesus who Himself is truth…as He said it: He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
As I said last week, truth matters. Truth matters. The gospel matters. It is how God reclaims you and me, it is how God rescues us from our life of sin and from a Christ-less eternity.
To deny this core truth, to remove the cross from the picture when considering matters of faith, is to be left with a cross-less faith.
Everyone of us has a responsibility before God to stay true to His holy Word. And how can we do that….HOW can we do that, if we’re not immersed in it, if we don’t read it and discuss it together?
Verse 18 here doesn’t mess around: 18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.
You know, we can suppress the truth by wickedness, but we can also suppress the truth by being poor witnesses of Jesus. We can take the focus OFF of the love of God and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We can divert people from Jesus instead of helping to reveal the beauty of Jesus. How can we do that? We’ve seen it this past couple of weeks.
A pastor in Florida threatens to burn the Muslim holy book, a profound insult and humiliation to a huge people group, a people who God loves and Jesus died for. So once again, with the help of the media, never a friend of the church, Christ is misrepresented. Christians are misrepresented.
Seekers and those who might be drawn to Jesus through the love and caring of the community of Jesus, the church, are diverted in their journey, misled to think that a Christian, let alone a Christian leader, would do such a thing. Our actions count.
Our lives are the only Bible most people will read. If we are poor witnesses to Jesus Christ, we functionally, for all practical purposes, suppress the truth of Jesus. May it never be said of us. May it never be thought of us, that we would misrepresent the Son of the most high God.
Back to Romans: The Message paraphrase explains well: God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.
But…how is that fair? What if I don’t know the gospel? Before that, what if I know NOTHING of God? What if I’m just completely ignorant of God?
I can relate to that, because I was raised by atheists who were ignorant of God. I was pretty clueless to the idea of God and especially of the Christian faith.
The next section says this:
19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
You know, even though I was raised to not believe in God, and to think that those who do are kinda dumb, I knew that beautiful things…landscapes and babies and sunsets and nighttimes skies…I knew that beautiful things pointed to something I couldn’t see.
I knew that things that exist are caused to exist. Even if something is an accident it has value and meaning and came from SOMEWHERE. I was just clueless as to where.
If our eyes are open, we can understand that there is power behind creation, that there is intelligence behind existence, there is something sublime, something beautiful, something divine that calls to us in the simplest things.
IF our eyes are open. If our eyes are closed to it, that is no excuse. If I resolutely squnch up my eyes like a little child and refuse to see, if I block out my heart, my emotions, my most basic intuition, even my mind, my intellect so that I “CAN’T” see any evidence for God, that does not make me innocent.
Once again the Message is helpful here: “By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Something about all the energy we drain from ourselves shutting out the reality of God makes us stupid. Or, as it says here, our thinking becomes futile and our foolish hearts are darkened.
22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
There’s a progression here. Evidence of God is all around to those who open their eyes. Important things can be known about God by taking in the grand expanse and beauty of nature, the created order of things, with an open heart.
But when this evidence abounds and humans do not give praise to their Creator, when we do not glorify and worship God as we were made to do in order to be fully human, something goes wrong. Always, those who deny God’s existence or who deny that God is worthy of worship, do so claiming to be wise.
Whether it’s the new atheist movement or old school sceptics like the Jesus Seminar-ians or other liberal theologians who are never sure what they believe about the Christian faith, they all proceed with a confidence that they are wise. Or wiser than the rest of us.
But…sadly and unavoidably, they become, as v 22 says, fools. Paul is aware of Psalm 53 in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, that says: Psalm 53: The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, and their ways are vile; there is no one who does good. 2 God looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. 3 Everyone has turned away, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.
Basically, when humans don’t worship God as He has revealed Himself, they find something else to worship. In Paul’s day that was idols made of Roman and Greek gods…you know…Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo etc.
What might be some modern idols that people substitute for God? [TV, Music ‘idols’ – American Idol etc, sex, even things like the internet…really it’s any thing that we are devoted to more than God].
So, to those who exchange the glory of the immortal God for idols, God has a response. It is a response that actually respects, in a sense, the choices that people make. God gives people what they want:
24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
To those not satisfied with God as He is, to those who reject the revelation of God that comes from God, to those who throw away the laws and guidance and directives of Holy Scripture, to those who abandon the holiness of God, God allows them to go where they choose:
26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Far from being a reference to temple worship, as some wrongly claim this passage to be about, this is a commentary that should get our attention, because of course it goes very much against the grain of contemporary thought. Here the Word of God describes sexual behaviour that is outside of God’s design.
There are sexual relations that are ‘natural’, part of God’s created plan and order, and there are what Paul calls ‘unnatural relations’.
This of course will really, really bother some folks. If we don’t want to hear what this is saying, we will call it “out-of-date”, or insensitive, or we will find a way to interpret it so that in our minds it says the opposite of what it actually says.
This is one of many areas where our influences truly rule. If we accept the ‘spirit of this age’ as our primary influence, we will reject what the Bible says about this topic, or we will ‘explain it away’. If we choose to allow the Word of God the highest place in our thinking, however, we will accept what this says, though not without struggle of course.
There are many folks like me who came into the Christian faith from the outside. As such we were children of the zeitgeist, children of the spirit of this age.
As a result of that, and this might sound odd to you, but my first, inborn response to matters of sexual morality is to not care a whiff about it. I was raised to believe there was no right or wrong in adult sexual behaviour. My views only began to change as I began to embrace the gospel.
Part of embracing the gospel is realizing the reliability and the authority of the Bible. It is only through the Bible that I know about the gospel, which I believe and know to be true without a doubt. Having lived it for 30 years since helps, as you can imagine.
The same Bible that tells me that God is love, and that tells me that Jesus died for my sins, says what v26 and 27 says. I learned that I can’t accept the passages that I like, and reject the passages that I don’t like. There is, of course, no integrity or honesty in doing that.
Anyway, this is a difficult passage. It runs directly against the grain of what our culture in general believes. There is much more to say on this matter, and I invite further conversation about all that we are studying. But, we need to wrap up, so let’s look at the last 5 verses of chapter one
28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
There are a lot of folks who like to avoid the book of Romans. Perhaps the reason why is becoming evident as we continue our journey through this book. Today’s sermon is titled (I should have mentioned this earlier) “The Problem with Humankind”.
The first part of the book of Romans looks at the issue of human sin and human brokenness. We often don’t really like thinking about our sin. In part that’s because we don’t want to dwell on the bad…we want instead to dwell on the good.
In part it’s because it’s hard to think about our sin without realizing there is a need to change our behaviour, and that always seems like SO MUCH work, and we’re a bit divided as to whether or not we really WANT to change some of things that we do that we know are wrong…but like ‘em.
But the book of Romans begins by looking at sin to help us understand the problem. There is a big, big problem. We want, or we’re starting to want, to be in right relationship with God. The more we learn about God the more we know that He is holy. He is, really, holy. That means He is different from us.
He is without sin. He is a person who is pure goodness, justice, mercy. He is, as the Bible says, love. God is love. Everything else that God is FLOWS from the fact that He is love.
But me…you know. I’m a sinful man. Even if I’m not doing sinful things, (on a good day)…you know, I’m thinking ‘em. Am I the only sinner in the room? Should I leave?
Of course we all sin. We are all sinners in need. In need of what? That’s what Romans is about. It’s the Word of God to us. It reveals to us our quite desperate need of a Saviour.
Paul paints a potent picture of human sinfulness, which is the problem with humankind. We are in serious trouble, both is this life and the next, when we are not in right relationship with God. And the more we learn about God, like I said, the more we know that He is different from us, He is holy.
Not only different. Actually, kinda incompatible. How can pure holiness dwell with sinful people? How can we retain our sinfulness and selfishness and at the same time be in right relationship with God. There’s an answer to that question, you know. The answer is, we can’t. There is no way for light and darkness to exist in the same place.
It is this ‘pulling no punches’ examination of human sin that helps us to realize our need for God’s grace. His unmerited, undeserved favour. And it is this understanding that we need to have in order to appreciate, to truly appreciate, all that God did in sending His only Son to live among us in order that He might die for our sins. He Who was without sin became sin for us, says 1 Corinthians.
That’s what this is all about, you know. The gospel keeps coming back to this one stunning, mind-blowing fact: that God came in human form to this planet in the person of Jesus Christ in order to lay down His life as an atonement for our sins. The only way the barrier between us and God, sin, could be removed, was through Jesus. Jesus sacrifice accomplished this. His death, as a pure, spotless offering, a spotless lamb, atoned for my sin, for your sin.
Jesus was perfect. He was righteous. That means He was in perfect relationship with God. Jesus, in dying, became our righteousness, when we believe. And when we believe in Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins, the Bible says, God gives us the right to be His children. Are you His child…bought with the precious blood of Jesus? Have you sins been atoned for? Have you said ‘yes’ to all that God has done for you in sending Jesus. If you have, you are free. You are a liberated soul. You are among the most blessed of humankind, to have received the gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
If you have not received Jesus, you know all that’s required is a mustard seed of faith. A little, itty-bitty seeds-worth of faith.That’s what I started with, after a life of believing in nothing, I started with a seed of faith. And man, what GOD CAN DO, with a seed of faith.
How God can transform a life that yields to His love, that yields to His truth, that yields to His Word!
Let’s pray.
