Sin, at its core, is a worship problem
Sin is NOT:
• An information problem
• An emotional problem
• A psychological problem
• A political problem
• A lust problem
• A gossip problem
• A lying problem
• A substance problem or addiction problem
• A worry problem
In fact, sin is not a behavior problem in any form. It is, at its core a worship problem.
That is Paul’s clear message to us this morning as we continue our study of the Book of Romans. Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Romans 1 and follow along as I begin reading in verse 24 and continue through the end of the chapter.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 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.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 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. 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. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 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 1:24-32 ESV)
As I pointed out last week when we examined what Paul had to say about God’s wrath, it is absolutely critical that we make a proper diagnosis of who we truly are apart from the gospel of Jesus. It is only when a proper diagnosis is made that we can begin to apply the proper treatment.
That is especially true when it comes to our sin. Throughout history man has tried to apply many different solutions to the problem of his sin. And my guess is that all of us here have tried many of them in our own lives, only to find that they just don’t work, at least not in the long run. See if any of these potential solutions to sin sound familiar to you:
• Will-power. This is the idea that I can overcome my sin through my own self-discipline. I’ll just choose not to drink too much or eat too much or look at pornography or deal with whatever other sin I am struggling with. In some people with a strong will, this might work for a while, but it is never a lasting solution to sin.
• Denial. This is where I just deny that I have a sin problem. This can take several different forms. I can convince myself that what I am doing really isn’t a sin. Or I can make excuses for my sin or blame it on someone else.
• Accountability. Although accountability is often a very wise way to help us deal with our sin, by itself it is still not a solution because we can almost always find some to work around that accountability.
• Professional help. First, let me be clear that I am not saying that appropriate, Biblical based counseling can’t be helpful, especially if that counsel helps a person get to the root cause of his or her sin. But three recent studies point out the limitations of psychiatric services, in particular, to deal with our sin. Those studies found that as spending on mental health services increases, the suicide rate actually increases, not decreases as one would expect. And psychiatrists have some of the highest rates of suicide, alcoholism and substance abuse among all professions.
• Legislation. This is where we try to deal with sin through the political process. Let me be really clear here. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be active in the political process or that we shouldn’t vote for candidates that support Biblical standards. But what I am saying is that no law has ever prevented the sin that it attempts to address.
The list of ways we futilely attempt to address sin is obviously much longer, but I think these five give us a pretty good cross section of the solutions to our sin that just don’t work because they don’t address the root problem – that sin, at its core is a worship problem.
You’ll notice that this passage breaks into three parallel parts that each center around the phrase “God gave them up…” That particular phrase is found in verses 24, 26, and 28. In each of those instances, that action by God is precipitated by some kind of an exchange that man makes. And in each of the three cases, the result of “God giving them up” is that men end up engaging in destructive sin. So let’s begin with an overview of this entire section, which we can chart like this:
vv.23-24 vv. 25-27 vv. 28-31
Exchange Glory of God for idols Truth about God for a lie Knowing God for knowing self
God “gave them up” to Dishonoring of their bodies Dishonorable passions Debased mind
Result Bodies dishonored Homosexual behavior Filled with sin
What we see here is a typical use of Hebrew parallelism in which all three sections are looking at the same truth from a slightly different perspective in order to give emphasize and provide deeper insight into the truth being taught here.
Unfortunately, from what I have seen in my study this week, so many times the treatment of this passage tends to center on just one of the nine boxes in our chart – the middle one in the bottom row – homosexual behavior. And what usually happens is that those who preach or comment on this passage tend to go to one of two extremes – they either ignore this part of the passage altogether or they make it the centerpiece of their treatment of this passage and therefore make this a passage that is primarily about homosexuality, when, in my opinion, that is clearly not Paul’s main focus here.
So what I hope to be able to do this morning is to take a more balanced approach – one that recognizes that the Bible clearly teaches that homosexual behavior is a sin, period, but which also recognizes that it is a sin that is no more egregious to God than the more than 20 other sins that are mentioned in this passage.
WHY SIN, AT ITS CORE, IS A WORSHIP PROBLEM
1. Everyone is a worshipper
I’m sure that almost every unbeliever would argue with this assertion, but it is nonetheless true. We all have people or things that we love, that we would be willing to sacrifice, and perhaps even to die for. There is something or someone in our lives that is our number one priority and object of our affection.
David Foster Wallace, an American English professor and writer was by no means a follower of Jesus. But even he recognized this truth, which he expressed in an often quoted commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005:
In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
I think that based on these words, Wallace would agree with our second point this morning:
2. Everyone either worships God or worships self
The problem Wallace had was that he figured that pretty much any old God would do. In that commencement speech, he specifically mentioned a number of so-called “gods” - Jesus (who he referred to as JC), Allah, Yahweh, the Wiccan Mother Goddess, and the Four Noble Truths. But there seems to be a sense in which he did recognize that essentially we either worship God or we worship self.
That is the point Paul is making as he describes the three potential exchanges that man may make:
• The first possible exchange is actually found in verse 23 and we looked at that last week. There Paul described how man exchanges the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal creatures. As we talked about last week, whenever we choose to worship idols, whether they be physical carved images or things like money and prestige that become more important than God, we are basically choosing to worship gods which we can master and we essentially become our own gods.
• The second potential exchange is described in verse 25 where Paul writes about how men exchange the truth about God for a lie, resulting in worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. This is just another way of describing the same exchange we saw in verse 23. Man takes the truth about the God – the fact that He is immortal and glorious – and exchanges it for the lie that mortal man, God’s creation, is somehow equal to, or even superior to God.
• The third potential exchange is described in verse 28, even though Paul doesn’t specifically use the verb “exchange” in that verse. When he writes that man did not see fit to acknowledge God, the wording there suggests that men were testing God or sitting in judgment on God. They had put God on trial and rather than seeking to know Him and submit to Him, they decided it was more important to focus on knowing themselves and following their own desires.
3. We become what we worship
We don’t really see the positive side of this truth in this passage, do we? Fortunately, Paul will get to that later in his letter. We will see clearly that when Jesus is the object of our worship, we tend to become like Him.
But for now, Paul wants his readers to understand the serious consequences of worshipping self rather than worshipping God. So three times he proclaims that God “gave up” those who made the choice to worship self.
• In verse 24, we see that God gave them up to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
• In verse 26, we see that God gave them up to dishonorable passions.
• And finally, in verse 28, we see that God gave them up to a debased mind.
We could easily get the wrong idea about what it means when Paul writes that God “gave them up”. The verb that Paul uses there is a judicial term. It does not merely mean that God just passively removed His hand of restraint. The idea here is that God actively pours out His wrath by consigning those who would rather worship self that worship Him to the consequences of their choice. But while this is God’s response to those who have given up on Him, when God gives a man up, it by no means that God has given up on that man. In fact, as we touched on last week, God’s wrath is accompanied by His mercy and is a tool that God uses to get man to recognize his true nature and his need for a Savior.
In exercising that judgment God determines that our disordering of our relationship to Him is going to be reflected in our relationships with each other. And each time that God gives man up, the consequences become more severe:
• In verse 24, the result is a general dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
• In verses 26 and 27, there is a more detailed description of what that entails. Women and men exchange natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. We’ll come back to this idea in a moment.
• Finally in verses 29-31, Paul gives us a whole laundry list of the ways our relationships with other people are destroyed by various sins.
Although we are led to believe that the numbers are much higher, recent studies consistently show that homosexuals in the U.S. comprise less than 4% of the population. And I would guess that within the church the numbers are even less. So since that is a sin that most of us aren’t likely to struggle with, it’s real easy to just focus on that sin in this passage and ignore the other sins Paul mentions here like envy, gossip, slander, deceit, and pride that we do struggle with. I think that why it is common for many Christians to view this entire passage as being mainly about homosexuality, when its focus is actually much broader.
But on the other hand, there is no doubt that Paul does give more attention to that particular sin that he does to any of the others. I am convinced the reason he does that is because homosexuality is the most vivid illustration of the connection between the disordering of our relationship with God and the disordering of our relationships with each other.
As we saw in our series on Biblical manhood and womanhood, the marriage relationship was established by God to be a picture of the covenant relationship between Jesus and His body, the church. Our relationship to God in heart worship is dramatized by the heterosexual union of a man and a woman in marriage. So when men and women turn from worshipping God to worshipping self, God hands them over to what they have chosen and that choice is dramatized when male and females turn to images of themselves in order to express themselves sexually. So homosexual behavior is the wrath of God in response to choosing to worship self rather than worship God.
Before we move on, let me take a moment to address a common question related to homosexual behavior that is clearly answered by our passage this morning. There is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about whether a person can be born a homosexual. But I would suggest to you that that answer to that question really doesn’t matter In view of Paul’s teaching here.
It certainly seems that it may very well be possible for a person to be born with homosexual tendencies, just as it is possible with someone to be born with a tendency toward the abuse of alcohol, or violence, or for that matter toward any of the other sins that Paul lists in this passage. In fact, we are all born with a predisposition toward sin.
But the Scriptures are also clear that, as we have seen this morning, we all have the ability to choose whether to worship God and follow His plan for our lives which leads to blessings or to choose to worship self and end up in a downward spiral in which we are controlled by our own desires and which inevitably leads to a life that is characterized by constantly increasing sin. So homosexuality is really no different than any other sin in that God gives us the ability to make a choice as to whether or we’ll reject the clear teaching of Scripture and engage in that sin anyway. That idea leads us to our next observation.
4. Misdirected worship inevitably leads to a seared conscience
Paul ends this section with an alarming observation. The word “know” in verse 32 is a compound Greek verb that implies personal and intimate knowledge. So what Paul is pointing out here is that at some point, a person who enters this downward spiral of sin comes to the point where his or her conscience becomes so seared that they continue their life of sin even though they know it leads to death.
So even though they know deep inside that they deserve to die as a result of their sinful lifestyle, they not only choose to continue to revel in that sin but they actually encourage others to join them. Pastor John Piper rightfully refers to this as “committing spiritual suicide and taking others along.”
I think most of us would agree that this last verse is an apt description of our culture today. Sins which less than a generation ago would be committed only in secret with every effort being made to keep those sins hidden from others are not only now committed openly, but they are actively promoted.
And unfortunately, Christians are not immune to this. I am constantly amazed by the books that they read and the movies and TV show they watch. Now I understand that it is virtually impossible to completely isolate ourselves from sin that is openly committed and celebrated in our culture. But what I don’t understand is why so many so called Christians are literally addicted to TV shows that are completely built upon promulgating and promoting openly sinful lifestyles. And they not only watch these shows or movies or read these books, but then they go on Facebook or Twitter and let everyone else know they are doing that. And the danger is that little by little our consciences are being seared.
And there is a lot of evidence that that is exactly what is happening. Entire Christian denominations now allow homosexual marriage ceremonies in their churches. And the number of Christians who support allowing homosexual marriage continues to increase. And most disturbing of all, we are completely losing our young people, with nearly 70% of millennials (those between 18 years old and their mid-30’s) who identify themselves as evangelical Christians approving of homosexual marriage. And we find similar results when it comes to other practices that the Bible clearly identifies as sin.
Sin, at its core is a worship problem.
So that means that the solution to my sin problem can never be anything that I can do on my own. More information or more will-power can never solve my sin problem. And it means that in our culture no politician or law or court ruling is going to solve our sin problem as a nation.
In just a few weeks, we face an important election in this country and certainly God desires for us to participate in that political process and vote for men and women who uphold Biblical principles. But given the even greater stakes of the souls of men, God has not called us to win elections, He has called us to win hearts, and souls and minds. God has not called us to take control of Congress or our state government, He has called us to lead people to take control of their hearts and give them to God. God has not called us to judge the behavior of others, He has called us to keep the glory of God at the center of our lives and encourage others to do the same.
The solution to all of our problems and our sin, is to put God back at the center of our lives, where He rightfully belongs. Pastor John Piper uses the illustration of our solar system to describe how to deal with sin by making sure our worship is directed properly:
The root of all our disorders - sexual and social and physical and emotional - is the exchange of the glory of God for other things. The solar system of our soul and our society was made to orbit around the glory of God as its all-controlling sun. And the entire human race has exchanged the glory of God for weightless, substitute satellites that have no gravity and can hold nothing in its proper orbit. Therefore all the world is disordered and decaying and moving toward destruction.
In his book, The Weight of Glory¸ C.S. Lewis summarized what happens when we choose to exchange the glory of an immortal God for the futility of worshipping self:
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Why would we ever want to settle for mud pies in a slum when God offers us a holiday at sea, especially when all that is required is for us to put God at the center of our lives and make Him the object of our worship?
Since this is such a critical truth, I want to give all of us some time to reflect on what we’ve learned and respond. So I’m going to ask our elders to come to the front and pray for all of us over these next few minutes. And I’m going to ask all of you to go ahead and bow your heads and close your eyes.
[Paul prays – asking that people would yield to the Holy Spirit as He speaks to each heart]
First, let me address those of you who have never committed your lives to God through faith in Jesus. For you, I am praying this morning that God’s Holy Spirit has revealed to you that you’ve spent your life worshipping self rather than worshipping God. You’ve lived your life based on your own desires. I’m praying this morning that as you’ve reflected on God’s Word, God has allowed you to see the futility of living like that.
If that describes your life and you would like to change that by putting God back at the center of your life where He belongs would you raise your hand so that our elders can pray for you.
[Don Gailey prays. Even if no one responds, you can pray for God to continue to work in the hearts of those who have not yet responded to the gospel]
Now for the rest of us who have committed our lives to God through faith in Jesus. Would you take just a few moments to meditate on what we’ve learned today and ask God to reveal to you any areas in your life where you consistently deal with some sin because you have submitted to self rather than submitting to God? And as God reveals any of those areas, will you confess that to God and commit, with His help, to restore God to His rightful place at the center of your worship.
[Steve prays]
