Chapter 1:24-32
God Gave Them Up

“Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, ²⁵ who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. ²⁶ For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. ²⁷ Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

“²⁸And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; ²⁹ being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, ³⁰ backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, ³¹ undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; ³² who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.“

Thanks for the kind words and responses to these articles/lessons. While I and writers like myself do not seek the praise of men, it would be lying to say that it is not appreciated when we get it. The book of Romans is a hard book for many Christians; it deals with a lot of topics; it deals with a lot of history, and it is filled with doctrine. It deals with Israel, and it deals with secular governments and our reaction and responsibility to them. It is not a book that one reads and then moves on; it must be read and then explored.

In this article today, we will look at one of the most harrowing passages that mankind will ever read. These verses are a culmination of wrong choices and the consequences that follow.

The path to belief in Jesus and the realities of heaven and hell begin at home. We are told in the Scriptures that a child needs to be disciplined for bad behavior. Revelation 3:19 tells us that God disciplines those He loves. Proverbs 29:15 tells us that “the rod and reproof give wisdom.” Proverbs 6:23 tells us that “reproof gives life.” A child needs to know that there is right and wrong and that those actions come with consequences.

Over the past generation in response to the apparent harshness of the parent of the 50s, 60s and 70s, parents began coddling children; and we have come to the point where bad behavior is being rewarded, laziness is being accepted, and outright disrespect is being tolerated. Thus, we have a generation of children growing up thinking God is just as tolerant of sinful behavior as their parents.

Here is an enlightening little tidbit: God’s grace has limits. He will allow you to push so far, and then He just lets you get what you are asking for.

You see, God restrains evil; He keeps it at bay, and through the very presence of the Holy Spirit on earth, limits evil. But as we come to the end of Romans 1, we see a generation that has traded the Creator for the creation, a generation that has traded Godly wisdom for man-made foolishness, and a people who no longer accept that man is intrinsically evil. In fact, they begin to accuse God of being evil – at least the ones that still think He exists.

1. God gave them Up, verse 24

God simply lets them receive the consequences of their actions and choices. He allows sin to run rampant. He allows the spiritually unchecked mind to follow all of its imaginations; and this is where we are today. In one of the Alex Cross movies, the police corner a criminal, and just before he dies, he says this: ‘the mind is a terrible thing.’ This is partially true; the truth is that the mind, unchecked by God, His Holy Spirit and His Holy Word, is a terrible thing. But I would be surprised to hear that in a Hollywood movie.

In verse 24 of our text, God gave them over to uncleanness. Whom did He give over? The answer is in verse 25 – those who exchanged the truth of God for the lie. What is the lie? The lie is that we can be our own gods. The same lie that the devil told Eve, Genesis 3:5, ye shall be as gods. We have the illusion that we have control of our own destiny and future. So, God let them have it by simply stepping out of their way. He stopped restraining evil with His loving grace, and now we are reaping the ‘benefits’ of this plan of action.

One of the fruits of God giving people up to their own ways is the growth of the homosexual segment of society. Let us not kid ourselves; homosexuality is not new. It has been around since man has been around. It was rampant in Israel at times when they got away from God. It was a very open part of the Roman Empire and male prostitution was rampant. History tells us that some of the Caesars were homosexuals.

I can say that in my 53+ years I have seen more effeminate young men in the last 5 years than I did in the previous 48. One cannot enter a store, go to a mall, or walk in a crowd for very long without seeing effeminate men. Some men are more feminine than most of the women around them. On the ying side of that yang, there is a rampant growth of lesbianism, especially among young women and even among middle-aged divorced or widowed women.

These are the results of God ‘giving people up’ to the lie that they want to accept. This is what happens when homosexuality becomes institutionalized in society.

My little country of Barbados was threatened by the IMF that they would withhold monies if they did not decriminalize homosexuality. It did not take long for homosexuality to become ‘accepted,’ so to speak.

In 1973 it was still deemed a mental disorder; so here we are not even 50 years later, and it is on every TV show, and it is to the point that if you want to get ahead in the entertainment industry, one must ‘come out,’ and then you are accepted as authentic; and Oprah or Ellen has you on to tell your story.

2. The Road is Steep, verses 26-28

Mankind, apart from God and His Holy Word, has no clue how bad we truly are. Sadly, there are many Christians that don’t want to accept that the mind and the heart without God are terrible things.

I am a fan of the CSI shows and of Criminal Minds. Many of the episodes are based on actual crimes. Let that sink in; Criminal Minds has been on TV for 15 years; they do 20+ episodes per year. That is over 300 crimes that they could build shows on. We still have all the CSIs, the Special Victims Unit, and a host of other crime shows that we never seem to run out of stories for. This does not count those outside of North America. Mankind is evil.

The sex trafficking trade in North America is booming. Just the other night, I was listening to talk radio, and one of the guests was saying how some of the sex trafficking is being done by the kids’ peers in school. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys and girls even, selling each other out. We have gone from homosexuality hidden in backrooms and dark places to teenagers selling their classmates for sex. This fall has been rapid, and it has not hit bottom yet.

In the last 20 years here in Ontario, we just raised the ‘age of consent’ to 16 from 14 to help combat sex trafficking. Imagine that; not long ago the age of sexual consent was 14. This opened the door for pedophilia and the abuse of minors. Schools handed out birth control and taught our kids how to do safe sex. How many kids have died from safe sex? How many girls get pregnant on birth control? How many kids have sexually transmitted diseases?

The fall is steep once God lets us go. It is hard and painful. However, once you have accepted the lie that there is no God to answer to and that we are our own gods, we refuse to repent; so things get worse and worse, and we are like the frog in the cold-water pot. One gradually turns up the heat, and it cooks to death when all it had to do was jump out. We are drowning in bad sexual information. We have loveless and sexless marriages where there is no passion. We have sex thrown at us from all directions. It is portrayed as a thing to be used to prove your love, rather than an expression of one’s love inside the bounds of marriage.

In a battle against marriage, the world system has pushed marriage further and further down the agenda of life. We get out of high school and then go to college, then get out of college and establish a career, and then get married and have kids. Sadly, a lot of churches and Christian folks have fallen into this as well. Then we expect that our teenagers will stay sexually chaste for 15-20 years before they are married. We heap an almost unbearable burden on them. Generations before us knew that getting married younger was best for the people and society at large. Married men who are focused on pleasing their wives and providing for their homes tend to grow up faster and are less likely to be engaged in illegal activities.

What we have today is a horde of ‘manboys,’ 18plus-year-old boys who have no desire to grow up and no desire to contribute. No desire to serve anyone or anything but self and their appetites; and sadly, there are a lot of girls in the same boat.

3. The Cascade Effect, verse 29-31

Once we get the sexual part of people corrupted, everything else follows. Once we begin to use people as tools to get sexual satisfaction without being invested in them as a husband and wife should be in each other, then we can do all manner of evil to our fellow man.

You see, the idea of marital sex is that there is a mutual investment in each other. The husband serves his wife as Jesus served the church; the husband cherishes his wife as Jesus cherishes the church; the husband views his wife as precious as Jesus views the church; the husband is prepared to give his life for his wife as Jesus did for the church. You get the pattern. The wife, in turn, honors her husband, follows him and builds him up. The sexual union is an affirmation of this mutual investment. But when sex is just a hormonal release, each using the other for pleasure at the expense of investment, then hearts become hard, minds and emotions become stymied, and we can simply become as evil as the day is long.

We simply stop valuing other people, even our own family. Pastors become predators, parents are unloving, teachers are not trustworthy, police are corrupt, and we degrade into sin upon sin, upon sin; and then we begin to make sin normal and righteous, living illegally. We want to protect our right to sin and remove the human consequences of sin.

In verse 32 we have these words, words that the world system hates and words that many churches don’t want to talk about: ‘God’s righteous judgments.’

The same God who flooded the whole world, the same God who killed Ananias and Saphira, the same God who sent poisonous snakes to kill thousands of Jews in the wilderness because of their rebellion, will soon come to judge this world. He will judge sin. He will deal with the ones who deny His existence and the ones who claim to be their own gods. For many that is going to be a long, hard day. They will have the fog of The Lie lifted, and they will see, sadly too late, that they pushed away a loving, gracious and kind God; One who sent His Only Son Jesus to die on the cross for the sins of the whole world and then made sure everybody knew by writing about it in an eternal book that no government could eradicate, no matter how hard they tried.

Hell will be a lonely place for the multitudes that go there. They will live there with their memories of how they rejected the love of God the Father.

Come to Jesus today. Tomorrow is a myth that does not exist.

Acts 4:8-12 “Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders of Israel: If we this day are judged for a good deed done to a helpless man, by what means he has been made well, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole. This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca

 

Chapter 1: 18-23
God’s Wrath

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, ¹⁹ because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, ²¹ because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²² Professing to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.“

Last week we spoke about living by faith. This is one of those things that is easy to say but hard to learn and to appreciate.

Over the past year, some things have gone on in our home life that drove my wife and me to the Lord and to each other. When you want to live by faith and you place your life in His hands, then God will put you in places that give you no choice but to live by faith, to learn to trust Him in the darkest of times and to know His provision, His presence and His peace. I will tell you that the journey has been fraught with a lot of frustration because things did not go the way I hoped, and there was a lot of emotional pain. At times I felt alone, at times I lost hope, and at times I was very angry with God. But God is compassionate, God is merciful, God is kind and God is long-suffering with me, and with you if you let Him.

God wrote Psalm 103:14 “For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.”

In this article we are going to talk about a very uncomfortable subject for any pastor or Christian to talk about; God’s wrath. Even as I am writing, I can feel the apprehension. Who wants to talk about this? No one. It is not a nice subject; it is, in fact, a touchy subject and even more so today where we have removed most of the harsh consequences of real-life from all around us. Parents tolerate insults and wanton disobedience. Children grow up slower and slower; adulthood seems to take forever to come on. And, for a lot of parents, they like it that way; they want to feel needed, so the longer their kids stay kids, the better for them. For way too many parents, their only friends are their kids, and they can’t imagine life without them.

How many times have dangerous criminals been through the system because someone decided that life sentences were too hard, unless you were the victim, and the death penalty was only for the one being murdered?

No one loses in sports anymore. Everyone is congratulated. No one fails in school anymore; we push them through, afraid to damage their fragile self-esteem, not realizing that when they get to the real world, they will have to perform or be jobless. But don’t worry; we have welfare for that. I am astonished at how easy it is for able-bodied young men to get money from the government without working.

So, when we begin to talk about God’s wrath, it is almost a foreign concept to many around us. Many kids in the church have never had a thorough thrashing by a parent because of bad behavior; they have had timeouts and no cell phones. But most do not experience the wrath of Mom and Dad anymore. Sadly, many of our churches no longer follow through with church discipline; the removal of fellowship and exclusion so God can straighten people out. We are afraid that others will leave and then our numbers will be down.

1. The Wrath of God, verse 18

Paul tells us after he talks about the Gospel, about the wrath of God. The persons who reject the grace of God are then subject to His wrath. There is a Ying to the Yang. God is good all the time, even when He is executing His wrath. Many Christians know John 3:16 by heart; they can repeat it in their sleep, but just 20 verses later, the same John 3:36 says this, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

The wrath of God abideth on those that reject Jesus as Savior. You can trust in Jesus and have eternal life, or reject Jesus and have eternal wrath; the choice is yours to make. Hell is real. It was not primarily designed for man, but now it is. According to Matthew 25:41, Hell was first made for the Devil and his angels; but now, rebellious man will find a place in there as well.

When we read in Luke 16, we find that in Hell the rich man was awake, aware, able to recognize Abraham, a man he had never met. He was tormented in the flames and he had the full use of his mind. He was not dying in the sense that we think of the dead being lifeless and unfeeling. Rather, he was able to feel every last part of God’s wrath. Let us consider that maybe this account was about someone that was alive in Jesus’ time, then we can deduce that this man has been suffering for 2,000 years with an eternity left to go. God hates ungodliness; and most, if not all ungodliness begins with arrogance, the idea that I am above God’s rules, or worse, I try to deny that God is real, making myself God. I then am answerable to no one, or so I think.

Everyone is invincible until they die. How many people cheat death, so to speak, then one day death calls their bluff.

God extends grace, God extends kindness, God extends mercy and He offers forgiveness. But these, when rejected, end in His wrath. I have heard some say that God is not a loving God if He made Hell. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are born going to Hell. God set the rules for us not to go to Hell, knowing it would mean the death of His only begotten Son. Then He sent Jesus anyway and poured out His wrath on Him so you would never have to know what God’s wrath was. But in your arrogance, you took God’s kindness for granted; now you call God unloving.

2. The Reality of God, verses 19-22

The evidence of God is everywhere. He put it in us and all around us. It takes a special kind of person to deny God’s existence; they are called fools (Psalm 14:1). In verse 21 of our text, these people who deny God’s existence are called foolish-hearted and futile in their thoughts. God goes on to tell us that there is no excuse for denying God. Simply none. Not one. The very complexity of the world around us cries out that there is a God, a Creator, a Doer who did it all. God tells us in verse 20 that His invisible attributes are clearly seen: His power, His glory, His majesty, His beauty, His intelligence, and on and on we can go.

But, like Lucifer, mankind has become arrogant and full of themselves; they, like Lucifer, want to be God. But that job is already taken. They try to explain away God, take Him out of the equation, and all they do is spin nonsense and lie to people. They make us out to be animals who are just in existence because we are smarter than all the other animals, as opposed to the deliberate God who made people who reflect the image of God and His moral attributes. We know sin is wrong.

Let me ask a simple question or maybe two; if we are just the smartest animals, why is murder wrong? We don’t arrest lions for killing zebras; and if a dog is known to be dangerous to humans, we kill it. Why? If you are not strong enough to defend yourself against a dog, then, by the laws of evolution, you should die; you are not the fittest in the fight. Why is it wrong to cheat on your spouse? If you are a healthy man, nature says spread the seed, get out there, get as many pregnant a possible; that is what animals do. And, the men often fight over the girls; so if a guy has a girl you want and you can beat him, you get her. This sounds ludicrous because we have a built-in moral identity from God, as a reflection of His image. These things are wrong because God is moral, and He has instilled moral codes in us.

One does not need to be saved to understand right and wrong; it is a fruit of being created in the image of God. In contrast to being fools, those of us that are saved, those that bow to Jesus, are called wise.

Proverbs 9:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

3. The Need for God, verse 23

Man needs something to worship. We are designed to worship someone or something. So, we have ‘Mother Nature’ and we have Buddhas, we have idols of all kinds, both human and non-human. We have money as a god, sex, fame, nature, the climate, and on and on we can go. People will worship anything as long as it is not Jehovah God. You know that even the Devil does not deny God; he may not worship Him right now, but he knows better than to deny God. Some even worship the Devil. I once saw an interview with a man who called the Devil beautiful and loved worshiping him. He knew exactly what he was doing and was not ashamed of it.

Look around you; there is religion everywhere; man needs a god. And, when we reject the God of Heaven, we go looking for other gods. There are plenty of them. Man-made philosophies that make us feel so special and tingly all over, until we wake up in Hell. Oh yeah, that little thing about God’s wrath. AC/DC had it right a few decades ago; many like them are on a highway to Hell. Some know it and seem not to care; others are illuminated by their own light or the light of some man, and they will be astonished that they are in Hell. They will actually argue with God and try to make a case for their acceptance into heaven, but to no avail.

But no matter how you get to Hell, before you get into the Lake of Fire, the end for all Jesus rejectors, see Revelation 20:11-15; ALL will take the knee before Jesus and acknowledge Him, and Him alone and God Almighty. This acknowledgement will come too late to alter eternity, but it will come.

Are you wise or a fool in God’s sight? Are you fearing the Lord God of Heaven, or do you worship another? Are you a child of God, saved in Jesus, or are you a subject of God’s wrath? The choice is yours. God has done all He will to secure your salvation; the rest is up to you. Then, once you are saved, God can, through the Holy Spirit, begin to form Christ in you.

Galatians 4:19, “My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you.”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca