Sermon: “Our Miserable Condition”

TEXT: Romans 1:24-32 (page 757 of pew Bibles)

REVIEW

1. Give up on Excuses for Your Sin: The idol-worshipping pagan world is without excuse, since they know God through the things He has created, but refuse to worship Him. How much more are you without excuse when you cling to sin. For you know God not only through the things He has made, but also through His saving work on your behalf.

2. When You Repent, Repent Deeply: It is more than right, then, for you to fully turn away from all sin. When you do this, don’t just turn away from surface visible sin. Turn toward God concerning the root issue underneath your sin. When you sin, it is because you refuse to worship God, you refuse to glorify Him fully, and you refuse to give Him thanks in everything.

TODAY’S PASSAGE:

²⁴ 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.

²⁸ And 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.

1. God gave them up to worship and serve the creature.

Last Sunday we heard in Romans 1:18 about the revelation of God’s wrath from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and we wondered how it is that God does this revealing of his wrath. The answer comes to us this morning in a three-fold use of the Greek word paradi,dwmi (par-ad-id'-o-mee). This word means to give up someone into the hands of another. It is the word that is used to talk about Jesus being handed over to His enemies to be crucified. In Mark 14 we read, “Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Him to them.” The word translated “betray” is the same word we have here, to give up – to hand over – to deliver. It is also the word used for the ultimate act of church discipline. When Paul writes to the Corinthian church about a man who is involved in an immoral sexual relationship he says, “deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” The hope is that through being declared to be outside of the team of Jesus Christ, that the person might come to his senses and repent.

The way that God reveals his anger and judgment against sinners, according to Paul, is by giving them over to something. Three times in today’s passage we are told that God gave them up or gave them over. Who did God give them over to? Paul says that God gave them over to themselves – to their own evil desires and to their own foolishness, and to the foul adversary who is seeking whomever he might devour. This is how the wrath of God is so profoundly revealed in this fallen world. People don’t want God. They do not want to worship, glorify, and thank God, so as an expression of his wrath against sinners, He gives them over to what they do eagerly desire. He gives them what they want, and this is His wrath revealed against them that we see all around us since the day sin entered the world.

Human beings do not want to use their bodies to worship God, so God gives them up to what they want. They prefer lies to truth. They prefer being stuck in the service of their own lusts for fellow creatures, rather than serving the Creator who is forever blessed. He gives us up to ourselves.

2. God gave them up to vile and unnatural passions.

How bad a thing this may appear to be depends on your assessment of the human condition after sin enters into the world. God made man good. We know that from the beginning of the Bible. But we know more than that. In the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 7:29 “Truly, this only I have found: That God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” If you think of humanity as simply innocent and wonderfully creative and inventive, good-hearted, generous, and noble, then perhaps it will seem like a small thing that God would hand over man to himself. If you recognize, along with the Scriptures, that man after the fall is darkened in his heart, then your thoughts about this will be more on target. Out of the abundance of man’s dark heart his mouth speaks, and even his most righteous acts are as filthy rags before God. Knowing these biblical truths, we should shudder to consider the consequences of God withdrawing His restraining hand from over us. God restrains us every day. We do not see the full wickedness that we are. But when we turn away from God, the revelation of His wrath comes as God gives us over to our own depravity.

Paul speaks at length here about the strange desires and practices of homosexuality. Why does he do this? He uses this as a premier example of how our own evil desires become expressed in inconvenient and unnatural ways that are obviously against the pattern of our design. Man was made to have close and intimate relationship with woman, and woman with man. If you consider the engineering specs you will find this to be the case. This intimacy is connected with the bringing forth of children. For a man to have desire for a man in this way, and then to act upon this desire is not only against God, Paul says. It is against nature. And then, to think that even women give up the natural relation with man, preferring to have such a physical relationship with a woman. Something has gone very wrong.

Paul was not speaking here about something that Greeks and Romans were unaware of. His comments are not at all bound to any particular culture or time on this point. There would have been those within Roman society that would have rejected the beauty of God’s plan for sexual intimacy only between one man and one woman in a relationship of covenant commitment. Many today reject this good and beautiful plan. But can we not all have a moment of clarity here and see that same-sex intimacy is not natural? And that is all that I really want to say about that.

But there is the point that Paul is making here that we need to see rightly. He did not introduce this topic out of the blue to make people feel guilty about their homosexual impulses and actions. He introduced this topic so that people would see that their homosexual impulses and actions are an obvious expression of the wickedness of the human heart in our fallen condition. To put the point very bluntly, you cannot trust your own heart. You cannot look within your heart for your direction in life. Your heart is depraved. If God would withdraw his restraining hand from your life and allow your heart to express itself according to its real fallen nature, then you might find yourself longing for sexual intimacy in a way that is plainly against the way you have been designed.

3. God gave them up to approve of those who practice such things.

What follows the third use of paradi,dwmi (par-ad-id'-o-mee) is an inspired list of our depraved condition, a list that covers heart, word, and action; rebellion, murder, adultery, stealing, false witness, and coveting. Let me just point to a couple of things in this last section. First, Paul tells us that all this rebellion against God is worthy of death. Second, Paul says that the revelation of Gods wrath (in allowing our depravity to be more clearly seen according to our depraved wishes) is particularly displayed when we not only do such things ourselves, but when we also approve of those who do them.

APPLICATION:

Paul is not here describing the condition of some of humanity. He is describing the condition of all of humanity without the gospel. This is not just about one religious leader in New Hampshire and his supporters. This is about you – your condition. Your condition without Christ is miserable. If you are at the crossroads of your life and God has brought you here today to consider the truth about your condition, do not dismiss what you have heard as merely my interpretation. Do not think of these words in Romans as merely Paul’s opinion on things. This is the way things are without Christ. I beg you to turn away from a life without God, and turn to a life of union with a holy God through faith in Jesus Christ.

Finally, if you have grown up in the body of Christ and forgotten the beauty of the cross, allow this frank discussion of your own depravity to draw you back again to the purity of loving Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord. See the cross that more than conquers our horrible and unnatural depravity, and ask God for a continued work of the Holy Spirit within you, that you might cling in true love to Christ.