Transcription:
Let’s open up our bibles to Romans chapter one. I appreciate many of the things that have been said. The fact of the matter is, if you hear from a speaker tonight, you wasted your time, especially from this one. There are no great men of God, it’s preposterous language. Spoken by those who need to be a little bit more refined in their theology, there are only weak and pitiful and faithless men of a great and merciful God. Anyone who has been used by God in any degree is almost ashamed that he or she has been used. It almost seems as though it’s not right. When I look at my own life and many of my shortcomings that are there, I can only be amazed at the grace of a very very gracious and compassionate God. You see to preach to an auditorium like this or to one much larger or to stand out in the street and to share the gospel while people are throwing things, that does not take a lot of godliness or Christ-likeness or purity of heart. The way you know that a person is truly Christian is by the way that they live with those who have the closest relationship to them. The great discerning point or the great point of discernment regarding whether a man is a man of God is not his speaking. The devil speaks well. It is his relationship with his wife, with his children, to his brothers and sisters in Christ, it is his personal piety in the secret place when no one is watching. And we all fail in those area and that is why we are all in need of the grace of God. I remember when I first read of Peter and Jesus told him to cast his net and Peter obeyed and when the net was filled with fish, Peter collapsed. On the boat he just seemed to fall to pieces and he said, “depart from me Lord for I am a sinful man.” He saw Christ do something magnificent, and his response was “depart from me, get away from me, I’m a sinful man.” And I think what Peter was seeing is this, “Christ I should not be allowed to see what I am seeing. Maybe you don’t understand, let me explain to you, I’m not the man maybe you think I am, Lord it’s not even right that I am seeing something this great with my own eyes.” Every man of God, every women of God who has been used by God will have the same thought in their heart. As I stand here today or I preach in Paulo, India or Peru or anywhere else in America, I’m constantly amazed that God will have such mercy on a man like me. I hope that I’m not a hypocrite. I hope that I’m something of an honest man but the best of men and sinners are sinners and we constantly need to be told that because as John Calvin said, “you and I, our heart is like an idol factory.” We want to make someone, put someone in front of us that we can see when in fact the one we need in front of us is the one at this moment we cannot see and that is Jesus Christ. If I say something fabulous here tonight, it’s just a pathetic words of a pathetic man. What we need is to hear the Word of God and we need the Word of God taught to us, not simply by a fallible man but we need God to speak to us through his word and the only hope this preacher has is that God is powerful enough to use the weakest among us to speak. Whenever someone says, “brother Paul that was a good sermon”, my favorite line is this, “well, then, there we have it, living proof that God still speaks to rocks and donkeys”, because that’s all it is, all it is. I realize that when I stand up here to preach, there are men and women in this audience maybe you do not know but they have forgotten more about God than I know and probably exceed me in their piety and their love for Christ. You see God doesn’t always use his best man forward. Often times he’ll put his weakest man forward just to demonstrate his power that he can take the most useless among us, that would be me, and still work. Now if you are here tonight and you are kind of thinking, “what is this Christianity?” Well, it’s not what you think. I know that some of you are possibly here and you are thinking well, you know it’s all about these TV preachers and all this sort of stuff and the noise and confusion and crazy ideas. No it’s not, it’s not about any of them. It’s not about men and their crazy ideas. What you see on television and what you see in many churches...but many of things that you see even in what’s called evangelical churches or Christian churches, it’s not biblical. It’s not true Christianity. It’s just noise and confusion. I was speaking with a brother back there before I got up to preach and it reminded me and told him, sometimes Christianity in America reminds me of a poem about a Jesus; he comes in after many many days in the wilderness, he’s hungry to worship and then it says that “shock meets with the anger that burns on his face when he enters the wasteland of that barren place.” That’s how sometimes I feel when I look at what’s called western or evangelical or American Christianity. It’s just a wasteland of confusion and then in the poem Christ makes this whip and he drives all of them out. All of the so called ministers. He drives them out and it says this, “the noise and confusion gave way to his word; at last sacred silence so God could be heard.” It’s what we so need. It’s to return back to a biblical Christianity. A Christianity that is modeled by Jesus Christ. A Christianity that was proclaimed by the apostles. We have to cut through all our North American culture. All our secularism, all our psychology, all our ideas and return to what a Christianity is truly about and it is about the work of God in redeeming sinful man through the person of Jesus Christ. That the greatest revelation of God and the greatest work of salvation from the hand of God comes from one singular person, the man Christ Jesus. Now I want you to understand something that is very important here. I do not mind being mocked. I do not mind when people are extremely angry but the greatest offense you can pour upon the head of any man is to patronize him. That is to listen to him and say, “oh that’s nice, that’s nice what you believe, I mean everybody needs their own belief. Just go on and have a wonderful with your little belief that’s unique to you, living the dream that you choose for yourself but I hope that it ends up happy in the end.” Listen to me, you need to understand something. As the scholar C.S. Lewis, you may be familiar with him from Chronicles of Narnia, as the scholar C.S. Lewis said, “you cannot patronize Jesus Christ, you cannot come half way.” You see you have only three options when you’re talking about Jesus. One, He is the worst of all liars that world that the human history has ever known because he told everyone he was the son of God, God in the flesh, he knew he wasn’t, he did to deceive and he has deceived more people than any human being or movement in the history of humanity. So the first possibility is Jesus Christ is a liar. Now the second possibility is this; he was a raving lunatic because any man who stands up and says he is God in the flesh and sincerely believes it when he is not God in the flesh that man is a raving lunatic. Or number three, Jesus Christ was and is exactly who he said he was. He is God in the flesh. The eternal son of God that for the salvation of men, left his throne and glory and walked upon this earth as a perfect man. He lived before God the father as a perfect man obedient in every command, keeping the covenant in every way and then according to the predestined plan of God, he went to the cross. It was God’s doing to put him there, it was Christ’s choice to go to the cross and on that cross, He took upon Himself the sins of his people and all the judgement of a good God that should fall upon men, fell upon Christ and right before He died, He cried out it is finished, meaning paid in full that with His death he had satisfied the justice of God, appease the wrath of God and made possible for a just God to justify or forgive wicked men because their crimes had been paid for and then on the third day he rose again from the dead. His resurrection was a public declaration from the very throne of God about two things: number one, according to Romans 1:4, that He is the Son of God declared to be so with power and number two according to Romans 4:25, that God accepted his sacrifice as a payment for the sins of His people and now all who would come, can come freely, be pardoned and reconciled to God through Jesus Christ who died in their place. That is a very superficial summary of the gospel. And now God calls all men everywhere to repent, to turn from their sin, and to believe in His Son and that the eternal destiny of every human being is intricately related to what they do with Jesus Christ. For this Jesus who was crucified in weakness was raised in power; was then exalted to the right hand of God where he now reigns over captains and kings and at the appointed time, although it does seem foolish to the secular ear, at the appointed time, he will return in power and glory and judge the nations. This is the gospel. This is a small fragment of the gospel. Now tonight, and in the days to come we are going to deepen our look at the gospel. The gospel, the good news of God but we need lay some groundwork, I want us to go to Romans chapter one. What I am going to tell you, some of you are not going to agree with but what you need to understand is this, I am not here to do an apologetic, I am not here to debate, I am not here to argue. I am only here for one reason, to set before you what real Christianity is so that if you accept Christianity, you know what you are accepting. If you reject Christianity you know what you are rejecting. Now why do I say it that way? Because when I get on an airplane or I travel anywhere and someone asks me what do I do and I tell them that I am a Christian and that I teach the bible, the first thing that I have to do after that is explain to them that I’m not what they think. See they reject me right off the bat, why? Because they have all these ideas about Christianity and Christian ministers that simply are not true. They turn on television sets and they watch these men with great big hair asking for their money and promising to heal them. They hear from their secular professors, all the reasons why Christianity is nothing more than a myth and yet those men and their reasons could be shot down in a half an hour with both reason, logic, scripture, history, I can go on and on. And so most people have this idea that Christianity is simply a sort of a religion for goofy, weak, anti-intellectuals. Well, let’s see what it really is. I’m just going to tell you what the bible says and also not only about Christianity but I’m going to tell you what the Bible says about you. Why is that important? I believe in the bible for many many reasons, many reasons but one of the reasons that most demonstrate to me why the bible is true is because of what it says about me and what it says about mankind. It seems to identify the problem with a uncanny precision. It seems to cut away all the crazy ideas on how noble our race truly is and gets to the heart of why we live in a world with constant warfare, constant hatred, constant death, constant conflict whether it be in the microcosm of a man’s soul or the macrocosm of nations going against nations. The bible explains to me why there is so much suffering in the world. Now let’s begin in verse eighteen. Romans 1:18; “for the wrath of God”, now there’s something you don’t hear about much today, I mean even a secular television show will tell you that God is love but here we have the apostle Paul speaking about the wrath of God. What is the wrath of God? The wrath of God is his anger? It’s his anger. You’ll hear a lot of evangelist, a lot preachers, T.V. preachers, they’ll get up in the pulpit and the first thing they’ll say is: “I want all of you to know that God’s not an angry God.” Well I want all of you to know that he is in fact is an angry God. Not only is He angry the Bible says He’s angry every day. Now you say, “well I don’t like the God like that.” Uh, that’s really not the issue is it. Whether you like God to be that way or not doesn’t change reality, the only question, is it true, is he really this way? Well the bible says it, “for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” Now why would God be showing or demonstrating His wrath, His anger in this world? He tells us; “for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness in men.” God gets angry when men do bad things. It’s amazing how many university students, they tell me, “I’ve got a problem with that. I mean God’s love, God shouldn’t be getting angry.” Oh really, have you ever picked up a newspaper and maybe read a story about some terribly perverted man who kidnaps a little child whose seven years old and keeps him in the basement and tortures him for let’s say ten years before the child is finally found discovered. You ever read something like that? When you read it, let me ask you a question. Where you okay with that? Did you just kind of feel neutral about it. Did you just say “well you know, everybody has their own opinion about how they should live.” No! You didn’t did you! When you heard a story like that, what happened? You got angry! Now the bible teaches that you and I are fallen creatures and many times our anger is not just, it is not righteous but it’s mixed, it’s tainted, it’s contaminated with sin. But you know when food is shipped over to some country where there are starving people and the government officials grab that food and they sell it on the black market somewhere else and all these people die, what do you, do you smile at that? No! You get righteously angry! We call it, righteous indignation. Now isn’t it amazing that most human beings say that when there’s such atrocity such as six million Jews being killed in the Holocaust, they say, “we should be angry about that!” or even people who go into forests and tie themselves to trees. They’re angry because people cut down trees. You see? We reserve the right in our human race to be angry about certain injustices; are you going to tell me God does not have that right when His anger is not mixed with sin but is perfect, is just and is good? So the bible says there is a real opposition in the heart of God against what men do and against what men become, that the wrath of God is revealed in this world, against what? Against all unrighteousness and ungodliness. Now you may be thinking to yourself, “that’s right you know, when we see atrocities like this, these political figures that act in corruption or these great CEOs of these corporations making multi millions of dollars at the expense of their workers, when we see nations fighting nations and we see men doing horrible things to children, God should be angry, okay preacher, I agree with you!” And now here’s my other question: what’s He supposed to do with you? You say, “well I’m not…” you’re not what? How many times have you hurt people? How many times have you lied? How many times have you sought your own selfish gain at the expense of others? I was speaking in a University in Europe years ago...very hard crowd to preach to. So I’m back there praying, “God, what do you want me to do, what do you want me to do, I mean if I go out there, they are ready to crucify me! They just want to fight! What can...give...help me!” And it dawned on me. So I walked down on the platform and I said “I’m going to tell you the most terrifying thing that can ever be told the human race about God. Before I do though I want to warn you, this is going to be terrifying, it may stop the hearts of some of you and if it does I’m not responsible. Now are you ready? I’m going to tell you the most terrifying thing that can be told a man!” And they’re like, “woah?” okay...go for it.” Okay here it is, “God is good.” And they all went, “and that’s a problem?” “What’s so terrifying about that?” “No you don’t understand, God is perfectly good, he’s perfectly good, he’s perfectly loving!” and they say “what’s the problem with God being perfectly good?” I said, “here, you’re not listening to me! God is perfect! He’s good! And they say “again what’s the problem preacher!” And I said this, “you’re not! You’re not good! So what is a good God supposed to do with you?” “If he’s the judge of all the Earth and you must stand before Him and your eternity is to be decided by him and he is all goodness, then what’s he supposed to do with someone like you? That’s not? And if He is all love and all loving, how can He allow someone like you to continue to exist? Because you’re not all loving? You love yourself. You’ve proven it in the relationships you’ve broken, the people you’ve angered, the way you’ve canial for your own success....everything about you! So what’s a good God supposed to do with the likes of you?” Then he goes one, “for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, now this is a general term, it includes women also, “who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Who hold down the truth. Now, he is saying this about all of mankind, about you and me. Now why is there conflict in the heart of God because he says this about you and about me, about anyone prior to being reconciled to him, this is what he says. This is what he says: “I have shown you enough information, I have given you enough evidence to prove that I am here but you will not listen. You suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What I have made known to you, you do not want to hear, you suppress it.” Now you say to yourself, “well first of all, what does he mean? I mean God has shown himself to everyone?.” In a sense, let’s read on. He says in verse 19, “because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. Now, this is where you may not accept it, but that’s not my department. I’m just simply telling you what God has said. In every human being, God has left his imprint so that they have knowledge that there is a God and not just a God, the bible says they know about the one true God, to be held accountable on the day of judgement. So now you can oppose that or you can be in agreement with it but it really doesn’t matter, what the bible tells the whole world is you know. You know enough that you ought be seeking, you ought to be striving, you ought to be looking, you know enough and the fact that you are not doing that will make you without excuse in the Day of Judgement. Now, here’s an amazing thing; the bible teaches, this is the opinion of scripture, that there is no such thing as an atheist. There are men who lie, men who suppress the truth, men who drive God out of their consciousness but there are no atheists, that men really know there is a God to whom they are accountable. Now you say, “well if that’s true then why do people suppress? Why don’t they want to hear? Why don’t they want to see?” Jesus told us in John chapter three, Paul tells us here “they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” You see what the bible teaches us about man, we don’t have time to get into this mystery of the whole event but what the bible teaches about man is that is he is a fallen creature. He is fallen. He is a moral creature and he has turned his back on morality and righteousness and man has given himself over to evil that is what the bible teaches and not only has he done that but man loves it that way. That is why when man has a sense or a knowledge or is being told that there is a God who is righteous, he hates it, he doesn’t want to hear it, he doesn’t want God, he doesn’t want a good God because man himself is not good, he doesn’t want a loving God because man himself is not loving. The indictment is this: God is good, God is loving, God has made himself known to man, man is not good, man is not loving and he wants nothing to do with God. Jesus said, “they will not come to the light because their deeds are evil.” Do you know, theologians, Christian theologians talk about something that’s called inability, that man cannot come to God. Now that left to itself is very very dangerous, it needs to be explained because if you say man can’t come to God, then if a man doesn’t come to God, he’s not responsible. It’s just like if I put a book, that’s not braille, when I put a normal book before a blind man I can’t judge him because he cannot read it, he has no ability to read the book, I can’t punish him for that. But here’s what you need to understand. The bible says that man cannot come to God because man will not come to God and he will not come to God because he hates Him. In the book of Genesis we have Joseph and his brothers. Joseph, it says this about his brothers, “they could not speak a kind or a peaceable word to Joseph”, they couldn’t do it. Now, they both, all of them spoke the same language, so how is it that Joseph’s brother could not speak a kind word to him, they could not speak a kind word to him the bible says because they hated him. So let’s summarize again: the bible teaches that man is a fallen creature, that man has given over to his own immorality, his own kingship, his own sovereignty and that man although God has revealed himself to man, man wants no part of God and man cannot come to God because man will not come to God and He will not come to God because he hates God so much. And so man will fill up his life with every sort of lie, every sort of entertainment, every sort of an excuse in order to justify the fact that he lives in rebellion against the God he knows is there. The God he knows is there. Now let’s go on, let’s look at verse 20. God not only has put his knowledge in the heart of every man but also it says this, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. Not only has God put the knowledge of himself in the heart of every man but also he has given us creation to demonstrate his existence and many things about his character. Now the moment I say that, especially I’m thinking of a time when I was speaking in London two years ago, whenever I say that, that’s when students kind of start to chuckle and they go, “okay, all right, now we understand this guy. Okay, he has had me going on there for a minute but now we understand he’s one of those guys that believes in creationism. I mean I didn’t know they existed, they still let these people run free? He actually believes that there is personal God who created the world!” And I can see him, I remember I was preaching there and I saw them, they were all lined up there and they were laughing, they were having a good time. And so I just stopped the sermon and I said, “young people, obviously now you understand that I believe that there is a personal God, an intelligent designer who created the universe” and they were like “yeah, yeah.” “Okay, umm, and obviously I don’t accept evolution in the sense that it’s been taught to you, I don’t accept it at all.” You can see him kind of snicker and laugh and I said, “well have you guys been to the University?” they go, “we’re in the University”, they were University students. I said “oh great! Then if you’ve been to the University, you’re obviously very smart, you’re obviously very intelligent and you’ve gone through all these things, I see you snickering at me, you’re laughing having a good time but please have a little pity on an old man who doesn’t have the intellectual capability of all of you sitting there in the audience.” I said, “you know maybe you can help me? There’s a whole bunch of reasons why I don’t believe in evolution, just a whole bunch of them but let me just throw out two and if you can answer them for me then man, this may help me come to see the light! Alright here are some of my reasons, irreducible complexity and punctuated equilibrium. So could you now...I’m going to go ahead sit here and stand here and if you could one of you stand up and explain to me why that shouldn’t be a problem? Maybe you could really help me.” And I just saw them go like this (shrug). “I mean comon, help me here, I’m an social dinosaur, you have to move me into the 20th century. You know, irreducible complexity, I just have a tremendous problem with that, could you explain to me why that shouldn’t be a problem?” And after a while within sitting there dumbfounded I said, “look at you, look at you, you sat there for a good part of fifteen minutes and you laughed me to scorn because I do not accept the theory of evolution and yet when I tell you to explain to me two minor problems regarding the theory, not only do you not have an answer for me, you don’t even know what I am talking about! And yet you have bought into this hook, line and sinker, why is it that you would believe that something as complex as a molecule, something as complex as the universe could be created at everything or not created at every step by random chance and yet you refuse to entertain the idea that there is a designer who created this.” And I said “here is the reason: it is not an intellectual problem, it’s the problem of the will. You do not want a God in your universe and you especially do not want a righteous God in your universe because the moment you see there is a righteous God then you’ve got a problem! You’ve got to live in rebellion all the days of your life and go on exactly as you’ve chosen to go on or you have submit to Him.” Philosophically one day I was speaking with a man from Spain and we were dialoguing over a book called “La Vida es Sueno”, “Life's a Dream” by a famous Spanish philosopher by the name of Uno Muno. And we were talking about this book and we were debating it back and forth and here is Uno Muno, this is what he basically says, “we ought to be seekers of the truth, we ought to do everything in our power to obtain the truth, we ought to be seekers of the truth, it is a noble thing to seek the truth” and then Uno Muno turns around and says, “but, anyone who thinks they’ve found the truth is an idiot because the truth is unattainable.” Now here’s the problem: it’s a noble thing to pursue something that cannot be taught, that’s vanity. Here’s the greater problem: men want to seek the truth because it’s a noble thing, they want to stick out their chest and say: “I’ll seek the truth, I’ll go wherever it will lead me! I am a noble seeker of the truth”, but they don’t want to find the truth because the moment they find the truth, they have to submit to it and that’s what they don’t want to do. This whole thing about God, creation, evolution and everything, it is not an intellectual matter as much as it is a moral matter of the will. The bible says: even though men know there is a God, His existence is clear through what God has put in their own heart and what God has made in all of creation, they will not accept the simple truth of God’s existence because they do not want His righteousness. They do not want His morality. Now look what it says. I want us to go just for a moment also to verse fourteen of chapter two. “For when the gentiles who do not have the law do instinctively the things of the law, these not having the law are law to themselves and that they show the works of the law written in their hearts, their conscious bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.” Now, here’s what I want you to see: isn’t it amazing, isn’t it amazing that in almost, almost completely, perfectly, it is considered a violation of morality to murder in almost every culture in the world. Really? It is considered an immorality, almost every culture of the world to lie. It is considered an immorality in almost every culture of the world to take another man’s wife! In almost every culture of the world, even the most detached from Christianity, there’s an idea that there is a God, that He is righteous, that He has been sinned against and the sins must be atoned for. Whether it is cutting the neck of a chicken or slaughtering a lamb. Now, is that all a coincidence? No, other fact: that God, that God has written his law upon the hearts of men. So not only the conscience but the laws of God written in the heart, creation itself testifies to the fact, not only that there is a God, but that the biblical God is the one true God and He is righteous and since men are not righteous, he does not want God because they do not want his law. One other time speaking, I began to talk about the righteous standard of God, the law of God. And students began to say things like this: “ we don’t want to be oppressed under God’s law!” They said it straight out! We don’t want some Puritan ethic hanging over us! And so I looked at them and said: “okay, let me ask you a question: let’s go through the laws of God and you tell me which one you hate and refuse to be oppressed by. Okay let’s see, umm, honor your father and mother, why do you hate that one? Uh, you shall not bear false witness, why do you hate that one? You shall not murder.” We went down through several laws and then I said, “what kind of people are you if you think these kinds of laws are oppressive, you see that?” “What kind of moral creature or immoral creature have you become when someone says God has a law, these are the laws and you’ve become so angry, you’ve become almost a beast to fight against them?! What does that say about you. I’ll tell you what it says, it tells you, it says this, the bible’s true.” “Why would anything but a fallen creature hate such laws as, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’?” Now a young person comes up to me and says, “I don’t have a problem with love your neighbor as yourself, it’s just that these restrictive laws against our freedom, our sexuality.” “Okay.” “Why does God consider it a crime to lust for a women? No really why? I’ll tell you why young man, because when you turn around and you look at that woman, you’ve killed her. You’ve reduced her to a thing upon which you desire to feed, that’s why God hates it. And young men, all of you!” I asked them, I said “how many of you have broken hearts, left girls crying, made them ashamed, everything else you’ve done and then you laughed about it? Don’t talk to me about your sexual freedom and everything else, what it is is a lack of love, you are beasts and you know not how to love. All your wildness.” “Ah, who cares if I get drunk!” “I care because I’m going home from church with my wife and three kids and when you drive drunk and you kill us all, that bothers me.” “It shows a lack of lovelessness on your part. Every malady and crime in this society, every so called boast of human freedom and our sexuality and everything else, I can point it right back to the fact it is people simply desiring to feed off other people.” “So you see if you look at sin that way, it doesn’t sound so Puritan, it just makes you look guilty.” And this is our world. Now let’s go on. And here’s the problem, verse 21, “for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish hearts was darkened, professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of an corruptible man and of birds and four footed animals and crawling creatures.” Tell me this has not been proven time in time again in our world! Look what it says! Even though they knew God, there again, regardless of what you think about yourself, this is what God says about you, you know God, and that is why in the day of judgement you will be without excuse. You know God. You say, “no I don’t”, well I better accept your opinion or the scriptures opinion, I take the scriptures. Scripture says you know God. “For even though they knew, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks.” Even, even, most of the people, even the secular North America, United States of Canada will say that they have, you know, “yeah I think there’s a God.” But do they honor Him as God? No. Do they give thanks? No. Look what happens. It says, “even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks and because of that, because they did not respond correctly to the revelation that God gave them, God made himself known to men and makes himself known to men constantly but they do not honor Him as God, they do not give thanks and therefore they become futile in their speculation and their foolish hearts are darkened.” How is it darkened? “Professing to be wise they became fools.” It’s like those young people. Oh they’re so wise, they know so much they can’t explain one reason why they believe what they believe. They just had been fed a line of goods and I want to tell you something: evolution and all of that is a powerful drug to give freedom to the wicked. I’m just an evolved beast, I have no supreme being, I have nothing over me, there is no fixed morality, I can do whatever I want but here’s the problem that always leads to Auschwitz, that always leads to four thousand babies being aborted each day in just one country. And if there is no God, there is no defined morality and if there is no morality, you can’t create one and expect everyone else to follow it and so the whole world becomes almost a zoo for dangerous beasts. Now, look we go on. “They exchanged”, verse 23, “the Glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man, of bird and of four footed animals and crawling creatures.” You know that it’s always been thought by anthropologists, it’s always just been said in Universities and everything else that man began as animists; worshiping trees and rivers and all these different things and then gradually man evolved and he became to understand a monotheism. So it went from animism, the tree and water and everything as god to polytheism, that god is somehow transcendent over the universe but there’s many different gods, to monotheism in which there is one God, transcendent over the universe, creator of the heavens and the earth. The only problem is that was a statement made by Darwin who never studied any of that. Who never even explained it or investigated the claims. The fact is, it’s just the opposite; man began monotheistic, one true God. And we can see as nations all over the world, he’s returned to polytheism, the worship of animals, and now even in America and Canada, the worship of rivers and trees and crystals and stones. You reject the one true God and although you profess yourself to be wise, you are a fool. And you say, well here in the west though, we don’t do, we don’t worship, not all of us, most of us don’t. Most of us do worship an idol, it’s called man and it’s called self. Man is the measure of all things in our society on this side of the border and on my side of the border. Man is the measure of all things, man is the goal of all things, the humanist manifesto states it clearly. Man is supreme. The worship of man, the worship of his power, the worship of his intellect, the worship of his body, the worship of everything he is. Rejecting God, we made ourselves gods and regardless of what all these hollywood actors supposedly have become god, we make a very poor god. Because only the tiniest amoeba, the tiniest bug has to crawl under our skin and our deity comes to end with our death. We cannot make our hair white or black by any natural means. We cannot add by any natural means, one cubic, one inch to our stature. We are here today, gone tomorrow, we are but vapors. Now let’s go on. Verse 24, “there God gave them over in the lust of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever, amen. For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged their natural function for that which is unnatural and then the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire towards one another...” I cannot even keep reading...As a society, as a culture goes further and further away from God, the very pillars of creation begin to fall apart. The very order of the universe begins to arose so that men no longer have any reason or morality whatsoever about them. Look it goes on. Verse 29, “being filled”, or in verse 28, “and just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do things which are not proper. Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, they are gossips…” you say, “I’m not a murderer, I’m not this, I’m not that”, have you ever bore false witness against your neighbor? Have you ever gossipped? God considers that sort of crime, as heinous as murder. “Slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil…” They are content with evil as it is today but they want to invent more. They want to invent more wickedness, do things more twisted ever thought of by the generation that preceded them. Without understanding and trust worthy, oh it goes on, “inventors of evil, disobedient to parents…” Isn’t that amazing? We have a cult of youth today. One of the signs of the judgement of the nations according to Isaiah chapter three is that little boys will begin to rule over their father, over men. One of the signs of God returning to a culture is that the hearts of the children are wed once against to the hearts of their fathers. We have seen a generation after generation, since World War II especially of men and women giving birth to children more and more distant from their parents to the point now where we see at times its seems full-scale slaughters of parents by children. Disobedience, railings of children against their parents, fighting and bitterness in the home, it’s monstrous. Everything that God says about man here we see to be true. And listen to this, “without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful and although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things that they are worthy of death and not only do the same but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” Unless you are blind or you live in a cave or you cannot hear or you have totally disconnected yourself from medium, you must understand that I just described for us, us. Just read the newspaper. I have just described our societies, yours and mine, through the reading of the scriptures. And the further our nation’s pull away from God, the more you will see men turned over. And here’s what I want you to see, most people read these lists of sin after sin and they think, “because of these sins, you know these horrendous things God is going to judge us”, that’s not true. First of all you need to understand something: the horrendous sin in this passage is not what you think. You may be thinking it's all the things that I read from verses 24 through 32, that those are the horrendous sins that are going to bring the judgement of God upon the United States of Canada, no. The horrendous sin in this passage is found in verse 18, 19 and 20 and 21. That although God made himself known and continues to make himself known to us as a people, we have rejected Him. Although we knew God, we did not honor him as God or give thanks and because of that, God has turned us over to all of us. You see people look at all the sin in our society, all the crime, all the injustice, all the perversion, everything that’s in our society and they say, because of this, God is going to judge us, no that’s not true. When we look at all the perversion in our society and all the crime and corruption, what we need to realize is this is evidence that God has already judged us, for what did He judge us for? Because although we knew him, we did not honor Him as God or give thanks. So he simply did what we asked, he turned us over. We said, we did not want God, God said ok, I let you go, and when that happens you have a society that I just described here and the society that you find everyday written in your newspapers. It is not that we are going to be judged because of our crimes, it is that we already are judged because of the greatest crime a man can commit: although He knew God, he did not honor him as God. You see, it’s very important that you understand this because in Canada there are some people who totally reject God but they appear to be very very moral people and they think that they are good people and if there is a god they’re going to be ok because they never murdered anybody, they never stole from a bank and all these things but what they need to understand is they have committed the greatest crime. The greatest crime is although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks. Look at us. Look at our countries. Look at our world. Someone says, well the other day there was a peace, you know there was peace, there was no fighting, if there’s ever a point in this world, where there’s no fighting, it’s just because both sides are reloading their guns. There’s always war, there’s always violence and we don’t have to go farther than our own hearts to see the same thing. We are exactly what the scripture says about us, we are a broken, fallen people, who are more concerned with self love than we are with love for God or love for our neighbors and the question is, what is a good God supposed to do with people like us? I mean if there is a new creation, if there is a heaven and he let the likes of us in, look at what we’d do to it. We would turn it into hell in a matter of minutes. So the great problem that we’re going to discuss tomorrow night is this. Are you ready? And this is what the gospel is all about. I’ll put it in several different ways. One: if God is good, what can be done for people like us? Two: if God is just, this is the biggest question in Romans chapter three, if God is just, well let me put it not as a question, let me put it as a statement: if God is just, He cannot forgive you. And so the question of the Apostle Paul is this: if God is just, how could He forgive wicked men and still be just? Have you ever heard it that way? It’s the very question of the universe. If God is good and God is loving and God is just and God is the judge of all the earth, then how can he pardon us without losing his justice? How can he simply turn away from our sin and still be just? There is only one way. In the cross of Jesus Christ: as I shared with you at the beginning of this message, God became a man in his justice, in His holiness, He looks down at the entire human race and he condemns us as we ought to be condemned but in order to reconcile us to himself through his love, God becomes man and lives a perfect life deserving no condemnation goes to a tree and upon that tree, he carries upon himself all our crimes, all our iniquities, everything we have ever done against Him and then all the just and righteous punishment of a good and loving God fell down upon God’s own son and right before He died, He cried out, it is finished because it means he had suffered justice in our place. He had satisfied the demands of justice in our place and now wrath is appeased and man can be reconciled to God only through Jesus Christ. You see, every other religion is a religion of principle, a religion of work, a religion of law, do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that but Christianity says this: it doesn’t matter. First of all you’ve never kept the law, what makes you think you’re going to keep it and even if you could keep the law perfectly from this day forward, you’re already a violator of the law because cursed is every man who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law to perform them. So Christianity says, you can’t be reconciled to a good God by yourself, that good God has to do it. Now many of you may be questioning and saying “why can’t He just forgive? Why can’t he just turn his face away?” and that right there is an indictment against you and your culture. We no longer understand righteousness, equity, fairness, justice. We think we can just go on and go on and go on in our sin and it ought to be accepted by all but it is not accepted by God. And the only way that you can be reconciled to Him is through what His son did for you on that tree. When he died in your place, having suffered the wrath. Now I’m going to close and I’m going to close in a way that is going to upset some. I am a preacher of the gospel, I am not a charlatan, I am not a manipulator of men. There will be no dampening of the lights. There will be no soft music. There will not be anything of me telling you to stand here and if you close your eyes and then try to get you to raise your hand and once you raise your hand, try to get you to come down forward to repeat a prayer after me then call you a Christian. We’ll have none of that here. I beg you to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, I plead with you to trust in Christ and Christ alone as your Lord and Savior, I admonish you to turn from your sin and throw yourself upon the only savior who is Jesus Christ our Lord but I will not manipulate you. So although they may end this thing in all sorts of ways that I know nothing about, I’ll tell you this, after this service is finished, if you are troubled in heart about what you have heard and you are desiring further counsel then I’m going to be back right behind this platform here and I will talk to you. Not only will I talk to you, I will stay here until six o’clock tomorrow morning talking to you but I am not going to play with your emotions. I have told you the gospel in there is very little else I can do for you. Call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Some of you instead of even talking to me, maybe should run home to your house, get a room and cry out to God until he does something for you. This is serious business, it is not something to be bought and sold, you are not numbers, I am not trying to get converts in that sense. I want people to be reconciled to God through Christ and if God is working in your heart and you have questions and you want to sit down and talk to someone, I will talk with you along with other counselors. To show you what God says is true. To show you. Oh that you would listen. Tonight is very difficult for me to leave this platform because I’ve only been able to lay a tiny foundation; to say only a few things. Tomorrow when we come back, we will get to the meat of the matter. The Cross. Now I’m doing it this way for another reason; enough has been said tonight that if God is working in your heart you’ll want to come back tomorrow night to find some answers. And tomorrow night, I’m going to preach about the Cross, what happened there when Jesus died and why or how can that lead to our forgiveness before God. So if God’s dealing with your heart, come back and we’ll talk about the meat of the matter tomorrow night.
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