Dead to Rights

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

And, man, what a great time of worship. Let's pray, and let's ask the Lord to bless our time here in His Word. Lord, we ask for you to show us what is going on in your Word. Help us to understand, help us to read and react, help us to hear what you're saying to us in your Word. It's your name that we pray. Amen. Okay, this is the second week in our sermon series, Right This Way. And we're talking about being made right. Okay, we're, like last week, we looked at the gospel in simple terms, okay? What the message of Jesus is. And we talked about it in real kind of just, it's way more than this, but this is a good summary, that Jesus is making people right. And that Jesus is making people alive. And then our part is to believe. So Jesus makes people write, he atones for sin, he beats death. Jesus makes people alive to his grace and his mission. Our part in that is to opt in.

In other words, we can't just hear the good news. We have to believe. We have to stake our lives on it. We have to follow him. We have to say yes to it. We have to believe. Today we're going to continue in Romans, But we are going to start again where we left off, but we're going to start, it's kind of a quick turn. And so we'll just let the verses speak for themselves. Romans chapter 1 verses 17 and 18. Last week we left off on 16 and 17, and so we're getting the second half of that. And then into 18.

So Romans 1, 17 and 18 says, for in it, the gospel, in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Okay. That's a quick turn in two verses. Okay, we're talking about the gospel, we're defining the gospel in it, the righteousness of God is revealed, and then we're straight to wrath. Okay, we just kind of left turn into wrath, we're going, okay, we didn't ever go into the just the wrong neighborhood. You're like, I don't even know where I am. I don't recognize anything here. This is kind of what these verses do. I want you to focus though on the word revealed. And I want you to understand that in 17, it talks about how in faith, righteousness is revealed.

So in other words, when we believe scales fall from our eyes, when we believe we're able to understand spiritual things, God's righteousness begins to make sense to us on some fundamental level in a new way in a way We didn't wait didn't have before okay So in faith righteousness is revealed in Unrighteousness wrath is revealed Okay, so that's definitely a there intentionally that word is repeated twice. There's there's supposed to be some symmetry there It's kind of this inverted relationship between faith and wrath We're going to get to all of that, okay? But to understand the fact that God's wrath is revealed, right? As people stay in sin, as they stay in bondage, God's wrath begins to come to the foreground in ways that they didn't really expect, right? They begin to feel the wrath of God in ways that were kind of unexpected. So we're going to look at righteousness revealed later,

whenever Romans talks about that. But today we're going to follow Romans chapter one, verses 18 through 32. So we're gonna finish out the chapter, chapter one. And in this whole chapter, wrath is revealed, okay? So I really wanna define for us though what wrath is. Because sometimes wrath gets thrown around as just really angry. That's not wrath. Wrath is a desire for wrongdoers to be punished.

Say it again, wrath is a desire for wrongdoers to be punished, and it stems from, this desire stems from just a righteous anger. Another word for that is indignation. If someone is indignant upon something, then they are righteously angry at it. Let me give you an example. When you see a Down Syndrome kid being bullied, not a pleasant thought. The reason that's not pleasant is because it brings up wrath in us. We begin to feel wrath. We begin to be passionate about justice being pursued in that particular situation, swiftly.

We begin to want to intervene in that situation and to make that situation right. Okay, teachers, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You see this probably on the weekly. Just a kid who is getting bullied and you just want to make that right. When we do that, when we take the law on our own hands, that's called vengeance. That's not ours to do. That's what Batman does. You shouldn't do it. Vigilante justice, right? That's taking the law into your own hands and exacting revenge. It is taking wrath, feeling wrath, and saying, I'm gonna be Judge and Jerry. I'm going to execute that justice. But the wrath part that you feel is not bad. Again, it is a desire for justice, and you are angry that justice is not happening in that moment. So when wrath is revealed, justice is being carried out. So it's kind of a euphemism. God's wrath is revealed, and that means justice is happening.

Okay. In Romans, wrath is revealed in two ways, almost as if it's coming from two different directions. And we're only going to get to one direction today. It starts in these verses. And the second comes up at the beginning of Romans chapter 2, which we will cover next week. So we got two weeks on wrath. Okay. Who's excited? So it is important though, and I'll say this, that this isn't just an exercise in learning words or in studying the book of Romans. I mean, there really is something here for us for today, for right now. And we need to hear it, so let's do it. So the first direction that wrath comes is toward the irreligious. So you're going to remember back to last week, and if you weren't here, I'll catch you up. Last week, We talked about how the book of Romans is a letter written toward kind of two major camps of people, the religious and the irreligious.

So the religious is kind of this Jewish insider culture. So the religious people, and I'm kind of giving them generic names, you'll see why, but the religious people, the Jewish insider culture, they already had the law, they already had the heritage, they were already waiting for a Messiah, the Old Testament made a ton of sense to them and they could see it, man. When somebody would say, Jesus is the Messiah, I mean, just like you could hear like 60 locks unlocking like in their head, right? Like it's like click, click, click, click, click, like they're getting it, okay? And it's because Jesus being the Messiah made sense to them, even stories that they heard as a kid. I actually know a guy, Sean Schwartzman, he's a Jew by heritage, he's a believer. And he said, like, when I became a Christian in high school, the dreidel made sense. Okay? When I became a kid in high school, you know, the whole Passover feast, it made sense now.

Right? Like, I got it. And I think that's what's happening with this Jewish insider culture, is that they're hearing the gospel and they're going, oh, okay, I get it. A lot of things are now making sense from my childhood, from how I grew up. There's also an irreligious culture, and it's a Greek outsider culture. Okay, and we'll get into these guys in a little bit, but it's enough to say that they're pagan

in that they're kind of just kind of worshiping whatever, and they're very oriented toward the physical world. Okay, we'll talk about what that means in a minute. And so today, as we look at the irreligious culture, as we look at this Greek outsider culture, So in Romans 1:16, it talks about how the gospel is first for the Jew and then for the Greeks. But it's the idea that there is... It really just means it's for everybody, but it's talking to two specific groups that are in this Roman church.

And so today, we're talking about how the gospel, why people who are irreligious need the gospel. And maybe as we talk about it, we can kind of see ourselves in its reflection, so to speak, okay? And if we're talking about irreligious people, there is kind of a burning question that we need to answer first, and that is why do irreligious people, people with no knowledge of God, people with no heritage, no nothing, they don't know what a Messiah is, how do they, why do they receive wrath at all? Why do, how are they supposed to know that there's a Messiah, that there's a God? How are they supposed to know any of that? They didn't grow up with it, that wasn't their heritage, they're completely outsider. They don't have all of that. And the first couple of verses, the next couple of verses that we read kind of answer that question. So Romans chapter 1, verses 19 and 20.

It says, for what can be known about God is plain to them. because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. So people are accountable to God through creation. But to introduce this idea, there's some wordplay saying his... God's invisible attributes are clearly perceived. Okay, those are... That's kind of supposed to be an oxymoron, right? Okay. In other words, how are these invisible attributes playing? Well, they're playing through the eternal power in creation and the divine nature in creation and the things that have been made. So Job 38 does a great job of talking about this. And this is God asking rhetorical questions of Job. And he says, where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Right? Do you see like all the snow, all the hail? Do you see all these things? How did you control that? And the answer is, or the kind of what God is trying to help Job understand is that I'm in control of all of that. That snow itself is an expression of me being creator. And so creation itself, creation itself by existence, by just being there, it kind of shows how non-eternal we are. And I think that's some of what we feel when we kind of step up to the Grand Canyon. It's like this is so many of my lifetimes and then I'm just me. I'm just worried about like what I had to eat for dinner or something. You know, like I'm so temporal, I'm so finite, and this is so eternal.

So we can see kind of his eternal power in creation in Proverbs 3. No, Ecclesiastes 3, it talks about how eternity is set in the hearts of men. Right? In other words, that we understand on a fundamental level, whether we know the Lord or not, that there is such a thing as eternity and that we ain't it. Divine nature in creation. So we talk about eternal power, not divine nature. Psalm 19 does a great job of this and it says, The heavens declare the glory of God. Sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech. Night to night reveals knowledge. There's no speech nor their words whose voice is not heard. There is a, let's put it this way, There's a delicate majesty and a butterfly, right? There is a grandeur in a sunset. Every single one of them, I know they happen every day, but they're all beautiful. They're all gorgeous. And I know this might sound really elementary to you,

but I don't know if you've ever grasped the amazing intricacy of photosynthesis, okay? Okay. All right. Doctors in the house, can I get an amen? Okay. All right. There is a wonderful thing. And it doesn't take long. You know, like you open a science textbook and you're thinking to yourself, man, this is incredibly complex. This is incredibly, this must have been designed by somebody, right? So we have the divine nature of building creation. We have the eternal power of building creation. There is a poetry that is woven into the world around us and it's constantly calling out to us and this is why it says at the very end, verse 20, it says, so they are without excuse. In other words, this eternal power, this divine nature, while it does not mean, it does not mean that somebody can just know God personally by watching a sunset. That's not what it means.

But it does mean that everyone, regardless of their situation, regardless of their heritage, regardless of whatever kind of specific knowledge they have, they know enough to reach out. Verse 20 says, they are without excuse. And although it doesn't say it here, the particular group it has in mind is these irreligious people, right? This is why wrath can be revealed against irreligious people, all people, even irreligious people, because even though they know the truth, Verse 18 tells us they suppress the truth, right? You can't suppress what you don't know. And so it appears that we are all, every one of us, whether religious or irreligious, we are all kind of born with this eternity set in our heart, this ability to grasp the grandeur of creation and we know enough to call out. And this is really the why. These two verses talk a lot about the why. Why is wrath revealed against the irreligious?

But Romans also turns to the how in the next couple of verses. And so how wrath is revealed against irreligious culture. And I want to help you understand the religious culture just a bit, kind of just outside our culture. And I would say this, that we have irreligious and religious culture today, okay, that what they're dealing with in the Book of Romans is not just some particular Greek perspective that's different than a Jewish perspective. that we can really grab on to this very well if we're talking about it in terms of religious and irreligious, okay? Now, you either are irreligious by your culture or you know somebody who is. Either you didn't grow up in a religious family or even if you did, you ran from it fast and often, okay? If in an irreligious culture there is a major orientation to the physical world, in other words, kind of what you see is what you get.

If I'm irreligious and somebody tells me they have a gut feeling on something, typically irreligious people are going to disbelieve unprovable things. They want to see it, touch it, feel it, understand it. There's suspicion, irreligious people are suspicious of religion generally, and they typically value authenticity over rule keeping. Irreligious people are wary of these traditions, like big traditions. They're like, they just want to celebrate a tradition for a tradition's sake. And the reason that we need to just understand religious, irreligious culture, excuse me, is because there is truth in here for all of us, okay? Even though a lot of these verses are directed toward people that are in kind of an irreligious culture, there's still something for all of us. So as we look at wrath revealed against an irreligious culture, we need to see them as warning signs for us too, okay?

So Romans 1, 21, and we're gonna start moving through verses pretty quick here. Romans 1, 21, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Okay, so becoming futile in your thinking and your heart being darkened, when we run from God, we begin to lose our ability to reason or to care. Okay, Romans describes this process as we keep going, as a giving over, okay? So verse 24, 26, 28, therefore God gave them up to the lust of their hearts, to impurity, for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind. There is something called the noetic effect of sin It's a really fancy way to say, when you resist God, you get number. You also get dumber. You get number and dumber.

When you resist God on a continual basis, there's a point at which God just says, okay then, just fine. Here, I'm going to give you over to it. I'm going to help you see what that's like. I'm going to help you see what that's like if you pursue that with your whole life. Go ahead. I'm not going to restrain anything, and you're going to see what that feels like. Another thing that we should understand is that there is a direct connection between your humanity and being right with your creator. It's not to say, in other words, that religious people cannot sympathize or reason. It is to say that the reason, and I don't mean reason like, I mean the ability to reason, for rational thought. The ability to reason and to care, they don't really have a home. They don't really have a basis for it. If somebody's irreligious and they still want to be a nice person, it really is when you

break it all the way down, it really is just being good for goodness sake. Or it's just being smart to be the smartest person in the room. It's not based on it. It's not seated anywhere. It doesn't have a place. It doesn't have a home. And without the Lord, we can see that people can turn in on themselves. And we see this described in these verses. Let's keep reading, verses 22 and 23. It says, claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So another big thing, So, you know, irreligious people kind of suffer the ability to reason or care. They kind of lose their humanity, right? They also suffer a perversion of the created order. This is a really big theme here. And you see it, it says they exchange God's glory for images, resembling that word, images as icons, which is a bit ironic because when it

says we are made in the image of God, that's the word it uses, icon. So these are, they're exchanging God's glory, something beautiful, something magnificent, something we can't even behold for these little icons of mortal man, birds, and animals, and creeping things. Now, if that actually, if that little phrase seems real familiar, birds, animals, and creeping things, it's because that's a direct quote from Genesis, right? And it's even later going to talk about male and female, and so the only time it uses is in the whole book of Romans. So the idea here is that as we're reading this, our minds should go to Genesis and to understand the thing that Romans is trying to tell us right here is that when you run from God, you lose your humanity and you pervert the created order. So created order, I mean the way that God intended for things to be. And the mortal man, birds, animals, creeping things.

That's a callback to Genesis 1 and 2. The next few verses, Romans 1, 24 and 25, it says, Therefore God gave them up in the lust 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. Okay, so something that we see a perversion of the created order, they're exchanging the creator for creatures, right? It changed in the Creator for things created. So in rejecting the Creator who made us for specific purposes, and this is what the created order is, in other words, it's not an order like one, two, three, four, five. It's not exactly what it's talking about. In other words, it's saying that your life is ordered to happen a certain way, right? You as a human thrive in specific circumstances, in specific activities, and you don't thrive

in other specific activities. Specifically, something that's pretty obvious to see these days, marriage, marriage, incepted by God in Genesis 1 and 2, is intended to work a certain way. And it doesn't work if things are inverted, if those purposes are not being realized. And when you reject the God, the Creator who gave you purpose, right? When you reject that created order, you are left to find your own purposes by yourself. And what you do when you are left to find purposes by yourself is that you look around you. You look to other things and you look to other people. Many pagan religions. today and have been for centuries are animal oriented. They start looking around them going, okay, what's purpose? What are we here for? And they're really oriented toward the physical world. A lot of them are also astro oriented, like sun, moon, stars. So you look at Egyptian culture, you look at Eastern religion.

A lot of them, I mean even Zodiac, right? That is astro oriented. So in other words, when people are saying, no, these aren't my purposes, my purposes are over here, what people are left with is to look around them and to deify the things that are around them, to make them God. Additionally, many cults, many of these also these religions have a sensuality to them. And that's why we can read in the 26 and 27, it says, for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchange 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." So they're perverting the created order, they're exchanging the creator for creatures, and they're also exchanging natural relations for unnatural relations.

They're perverting the relationship. Listen, when you reject the created order for men and women, all bets are off. And this is exactly, I mean, I don't even need an illustration, right? You can turn on the news. You can look on social media, it's everywhere. That gender labels themselves are now considered by some a form of oppression, right? In other words, if you're gonna tell somebody, if they're male or female, So that is you on a power trip telling somebody what gender they should be. Okay? That is because we have rejected the created order and we are now looking around going, okay, where's our purpose? I'm going to reject the purpose that was given to me as a human being in Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 even. I'm going to reject that, but now what do I, what fills that void? tells me who I am. Well, in a modern Western culture, you know who tells you who you are?

You. You tell you who you are. Think about how many commercials you see that talk about discovering your purpose, discovering your identity. And look, I'm not against that. I'm not against like thinking long and hard about what the Lord has called you to do, what he's made you to do. That's a good endeavor. But when there's no finish line, it is a Who's Chase? Go find your purpose. Where is it? I don't know. Go find it. What you end up doing is you end up making it up and you end up calling that good. That's exactly what you do. That's all you can do. I mean, I don't even wanna vilify people in this point. If somebody is growing up in this culture right now and they are irreligious, they don't have parents that follow the Lord, they don't know anybody following the Lord, they're just living life, what are they supposed to do? What? Tell me. They're looking for purpose and meaning and identity

and there's nothing. And even their parents are looking back at them going, no, you figure it out. You be whoever you wanna be. That's happening all over, several times over. Creating your own identity and your own purpose is put forward as a freedom, but it's really a trap. Be whoever you wanna be. You and I can't make our own purposes. Sorry, we just can't. We're not that cool. We're not that good. We didn't make us, our Creator made us. We only find our true purpose and identity in our Creator.

It is backwards and paleolithic as it sounds. Our order, our created order, is in Genesis 1 and 2 and 3. It's in Scripture, it's here. Our Creator has told us who we are and what we are to do, Plainly. But we exchange that. And this is what the gospel speaks to, and I just want to be really clear here, that this is why Jesus had to come and make people right. Because if we were just left to ourselves to figure it out, we would have never gotten it. Ever. It just wouldn't have happened. We would not have stumbled upon the real purpose outside of the Lord God making that clear through creation, by His eternal power, how He's made us to yearn for those things, we would have never figured it out on our own. We rebel against the process of Jesus making Himself known to us. We rebel against that process with all we've got at every turn. Left to ourselves, we rebel against that process.

And if you grew up in an irreligious culture, then you already have some suspicion toward religion in the first place. Then when you have a culture telling you, oh, those churches, man, they just wanna tell you who you are and how to live. They just want your money. They just want you to be a suck, be a sheep. They just want you to bat real good. Man, that makes a lot of sense to somebody who's irreligious, who's skeptical of religion in the first place. So let me just say, if you have a friend, and maybe you're thinking about him even now, if you have a friend who's a religious, man, pray for them. Man, there is a lot of obstacle in front of them in accepting the Lord God, in accepting that God made himself a man who was perfect and died on a cross to absolve and forgive your sin. That sounds crazy to somebody who's irreligious. It does. And we need to remember that.

We need to remember that as we're sharing our story, as we're sharing truth. Don't just bank on the fact that people understand spiritual things. It's a bad move. And so again, we're all kind of in this, right? We have religious and religious cultures in churches, okay? We have religious and irreligious culture. Now, just because you're in a church building on a Sunday, even because you're faithfully attending, does not mean you're religious culture. And it's not a cool thing necessary to be religious culture or to be irreligious, it's just different, okay? The distinction is helpful because it helps us kind of wrap our brain around it. That we all deal with rebellion to the Lord and his purposes on some level should help us understand that we are kind of, we at least swim in that irreligious culture, be it ever so seldom.

Let's keep reading. Romans chapter one verse 28, it says, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up, again, we just read that before, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done, right? We want to have our lives our own way. And yeah, these verses are speaking to irreligious culture, but this is every last one of us. We all wanna have our lives our own way. We wanna have our marriages our own way. We all wanna conduct our families our own way. We all want our careers to have the arc that we want because we want it. And we live in a culture, and none of us are unstained, right? We live in a culture that tells us, if you want it, go get it, because you deserve it. I mean, I think I've just said like 99% of every commercial that I've ever seen. Okay, that's, and it's common. Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 32, they do well to help us understand perversion.

When these verses are usually preached, it's usually against homosexuality in particular, right? And a lot of those verses are talking about that, but We need to also understand it deals with perversion of all kinds, not just sexual perversion. That we, in other words, that we are all subject to this kind of perversion in multiple areas of our lives. We're subject to this perversion where we start writing our own purposes and we start behaving on that line. And we don't really care what the Lord says about how we raise our kids, about how we spend our money, about what we watch on TV, about how we dress, any of that, all we wanna do is live our lives our way. We wanna be perceived a certain way and we go down that road. But that, right there, what I just described, is a perversion of the created order too. It's just not sexual in nature. So we're not talking about homosexuality, specifically in those examples.

But sexual and otherwise, all that perversion is all in Romans 1. And here's the proof. Look at verses 29 through 31. Okay? They were filled, and listen to kind of the adjectives here. 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, disobedience of parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. That's perversion of every kind. That's every single one of us. And we would do well to remember that sin slavery, when we participate in it, it dehumanizes us at our core. And we become rebellious, insecure, hopeless, cynical. Or like verse 31, we become foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Pretty poetic, I think. And if you're saying inside, if you're listening to this and you're saying inside,

that's me. That's me. I'm insecure about religious things. I'm extremely skeptical. I'm far too cynical to even believe what you're saying right now. Like, that's me, I'm in that culture. Then the gospel is good news. That's actually a really good thing. The gospel is good news because it offers us a path to becoming more human. And I know that's a different way to describe it. Usually we talk about the gospel being a path towards salvation, it is. We talk about the gospel being a path to a relationship with the Lord, it is. We talk about the gospel being a path to joy and righteousness and a life that is abundant and it is. But another way to describe that would be,

it's a path to becoming who we were originally created to be in the first place. Before the fall, before sin, we were all perfect in the garden. In Christ, we're not going back to a garden, going back to a city, but in Christ, we begin to live that abundant life. We begin to live that even now. We become more human. In the gospel, we kind of return to our roots. We remember our original purpose, to enjoy kind of an open and honest relationship with our Creator and be more alive than we've ever been. If that's you, let me just be real clear. If that's you and you wanna start on that path, then believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. It is that simple. You might say, no, it's not that simple. It's that simple, it really is. Believe that Jesus is the only one that can save you. Believe the gospel. Believe that Jesus wants to make you right. It make you alive to His grace and His mission.

As we enter into our time where it's time of reflection, I want you to consider, I want you to consider not just if you're in a religious culture or not, like I said, there's something for all of us in there, but I want you to consider maybe where you are standing at odds with your creator. If your creator has made you specifically with your temperament, with your life situation, with your history, with your everything, all your decisions that you've made, good, bad, and indifferent, everything, your particular, even the residence you have, even the fact that you're in this room right now, the Lord God has put you here, your creator has done those things. How can you respond to that in a way that says, I'll follow you, I'll do it, I'll live for you? Maybe in a way that you've never thought of before. As we pray and then sing, after the service is done, I'm just going to be sitting over here, to my left, your right,

or standing. Either way, it's going to be awkward for you to look at me, and that's okay. You can do that and just look at me, it'll be awkward. But after the service, if you want to talk, if you need prayer, if there's a question that you have about what we talked about, we covered a lot of ground today. And so if there's a question that you have about it, then that's fine. I'll be right over there standing awkwardly. If you want to help me make it less awkward, you can go and talk to me. But I'm OK. I'm OK over there. I want you to consider those things. If that's you, right, there's good news for you.

If there's people in your life that are behaving like a complete pagan, maybe it's because they are, right? And they need you to pray for them and they need to see the Lord. Maybe in a sunset, maybe in a butterfly, maybe even in photosynthesis. I don't know. But I know they need to see the Lord too, just like we all do. Let's pray toward that end. Jesus, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the ways that you love us and the ways that you bring us closer to the purposes that you have written since before time began. You have a great plan. You have purpose for us. Set aside our lives written out. I pray I pray that you would help us to trust you with how that story is supposed to go. I pray that you would help us to walk in a manner worthy, walk in a way that helps us to see our humanity as originally intended, not broken, not severed from you. Lord, in the gospel, you made a way.

Help us to walk that path. Help us.