When God saved you, that salvation did not include a vaccination from sin. If salvation provided some sort of vaccination against lust, if it provided some sort of armor against the sins of the body, then Paul would never have had the right to Timothy. Timothy, flee youthful lusts. And would you notice he did not say Timothy, now stand and here's how you fight it. He said Timothy, flee it, run from it, lace up your boots and be gone.
Don't hang around, run, leave. While it's true that all of us sin, we don't need to be dominated by our sin. God's Word gives us guidance for dealing with sin properly.
For the unbeliever who ignores God and lives in rebellion, God allows that person to be completely given over to sin. Have you ever taken a plunge into the ocean and swallowed a mouthful of salt water? It might have looked refreshing and cool, but it only made you thirstier. In this message called salt water, Stephen Davies shows you how the world's vain philosophies and empty pursuits are just like drinking salt water. Thanks for tuning in to Wisdom for the Heart. Here's Stephen with today's Bible lesson. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote these provocative words. He said, every man shall one day be seated at a banquet table of consequences. In Romans chapter 1 verses 24 to 32, you discover a vivid description of what those consequences looked and acted like. Paul will spread the table with a list of sins that will make all of us uncomfortable. We will find each of us in some way reflected in this list.
None of us escapes, and we would perhaps rather skip it altogether. Now you might be thinking this list in Romans 1 verses 24 to 32 are not consequences, but the sins alone, but in a way that's true. But in a very real sense, these sins happen to be nothing less than the consequences that enslave the life of the person who refuses to acknowledge God.
The person who says there is no God or I know there is a God, but I refuse to worship and honor him. This is the table spread before them, and he will cover it all from adultery to arrogance, from lesbianism to gossip. You will find here as he spreads the banquet table, people who are unrestrained in their evil and unrepentant in their wickedness and uninhibited in their perversion. I believe that I am led by God to refuse the temptation to hurry here, even though there will be times that we will hold our breath and hang our heads in shame. If God did not want us to expound on the darkness of man's nature, he would not have inspired Paul to spend nearly half of the first chapter bringing it to our attention.
There is warning here for us all, warning that will save us. Now back in verse 21, all of mankind knows about the existence of God through creation and conscience, we have learned, but they refuse to place him on the throne. They refuse to thank him for the kindness of the rain, the warmth of the sunshine, and they in effect say to God, leave us alone in the darkness. We would rather have our sin than the Savior, so leave us be, and God gives them their wish. Three times you read the chilling words in verse 24, God gave them up, or God gave them over. In verse 26, God gave them over.
Verse 28, God gave them over. Now you need to understand in the context of this passage that Paul has already revealed to us that man has given up God before God gives up on man. Man has chosen to ignore God before God chooses to ignore man. Man chose to violate that intuitive voice of conscience before God allowed man to ruin himself in immorality. We don't want a holy and righteous God, man says, then have a seat at this awful table of consequences, for as sure as I am standing here, you will eat from this banquet. You cannot trifle with the truth of God's word and hope to escape unharmed.
You abandon God, God will abandon you. The tragedy of these words, God gave them over, God gave them over. The Greek word for this phrase is one word, pareidomy. It's a word that comes right out of the Roman system of law, and Paul, the former attorney, brings us back into sort of a courtroom setting. It means to be handed over to suffer the payment of crimes that you have committed. The word was used in Mark chapter 1 verse 14 to speak of John the Baptist who was handed over to the authorities and put into jail. The word is also used in Matthew 5 verse 25 where Jesus Christ himself used the word saying, make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way to court in order that your opponent may not deliver you to the judge, there's that word, and the judge deliver you to the officer and you be thrown into prison.
The word is also used in reference to fallen angels or demons and some who immediately face judgment in 2 Peter 2, 4 where we read God did not spare angels when they sinned but cast them into hell, and here's the word, committed them to pits of darkness reserved for judgment. So when Paul writes here in Romans chapter 1 verse 24, therefore God gave them over. This is the act of a righteous judge who takes the unrepentant sinner and abandons him to his own undoing. Now the verb could be understood passively that is if you could just imagine God standing on the bank of a river holding in his hand man, only man is in the form of a bottle, and he lets man go and he releases man.
He gives him over to the current of the river and the river picks him up and pushes him forward until he heads toward that waterfall, but speed and momentum are against him and he crashes over the edge and down on the rocks below. God simply withdrew and let man take his full course of sin and its consequences. That's passive. He could also be active in its understanding that as God just didn't let man go in the water, God constructed the boat, boarded unrepentant man on it, and set it to sail down the river over the waterfall to crash on the rocks below.
You can understand both of these senses in this word. God not only passively is involved in allowing man to destroy himself in sin, but he is actively involved in judging sinful man by giving over through his wrath these consequences that they must reap as penalties of sin. And so man today wanders about in his misery, he wanders about in his unfulfilled state, he wanders about seeking and speculating despairing of life. Man has said we will choose to ignore our conscience with its moral whisperings. We will choose to dethrone the Creator and make a God in our own image that's more comfortable with us and more conducive to our sin. We don't want anything to do with Creator God.
If you're out there, leave me alone. And God grants the wish. There is something also about this word, paredidomy, that has within it the nuance of sadness. It describes the feeling of the father whose son turned his back on him and said, I want to get away from you.
I want to leave. Give me my inheritance. And so the father released him. The father gave him what he wanted. He gave him his inheritance. And it says the son went into a far country.
That implies that he wanted to go to a country that was as far away from his father as he could go. And there he lived it up with his inheritance. He bought his friends. He bought his pleasures until he ran out of money, I believe, several years later. He had spent everything that he had had given to him by his father. And he ended up in a pig pen. You know the story covered with filth, trying to satisfy the cravings of his stomach with food meant for the pigs.
He was, ladies and gentlemen, seated at the banquet table of consequences. Apart from the mercy of his father, he would live the rest of his life a slave, but his father gave him mercy and robed him with grace. While you're still living, my friend, while you have breath in your lungs, you can run to the father. You can stop chasing the mirage of the world and run to him with parched lips and beg for mercy. And he will give you mercy. He will robe you with his righteousness as he forgives you. He will put on your finger the ring of redemption upon your feet, the sandals of salvation. As long as you have breath and maybe for some of you today, go to him and say, Oh, God, with me, I put you upon the throne of my life. Lord Jesus, become my savior. Redeem me.
And he will. For those who won't, if you want to swim in the current of sin, God abandons you to the waterfall. You choose the country far away from God, and I predict there is a pig pen in your future. And Paul simply describes it for us in chapter 1, verses 24 to 32. He begins the description of this banquet table of consequences by saying in verse 24, Therefore, that is on the basis of what they have denied in preceding verses, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. Now, if you notice the progression, you first dishonor God, and then you dishonor yourself and you dishonor yourself first in your heart and then with your body, the lusting in your heart and the craving in your heart that is unfettered by a conscience. You remember the conscience has been choked off and it has been silenced and what once brought a pang of guilt. And you may have looked both ways before doing or seeing or acting. Now it no longer can choke out a warning.
You have silenced it. The word lust here is epithymia. It is a word in this context that refers to the sins of the flesh, the sins you commit to or with your body. These unfulfilled cravings, the Bible tells us, can come in many forms, forms that we know today, forms that were current in Paul's day. Drug abuse was current in Paul's day and current today. Pornography, sexual immorality.
The point that Paul is making is that when you do not long after God, you will long after something else. You think that something else will satisfy me, but my friends, it's salt water. You drink it and you're thirsty for more and you drink it and you're thirsty for more.
You drink it and you're thirsty for more until it destroys you from the inside out. Society in our generation is consumed with sexual content and activity. I read this past month that 68% of all television shows have something to do with it. 89% of all the movies that are on feature some form of it. And nearly 9 out of 10 times you see it, it will be activity between either single people or between married people with someone to whom they are not married.
If you're like my wife and me, you now consider even the commercials to be out of bounds. The trouble with sexual sin or the lusting of the heart is that it never satisfies and it is never satisfied. One author wrote, when the heart becomes hardened and the thrill is gone, forbidden pleasure needs more and more like a drug addict who needs higher and higher doses to get that original high. Sinners have to go to more and more extremes to get the same sense of pleasure. And ladies and gentlemen, we are in the process of watching our world go deeper and deeper into sexual darkness and deviancy, seeking the same high. But it's taking so much more.
An article out of World Magazine, March 10th, 2001, says virtually the same thing a few years ago. But the portrayals now of sex in the media keep growing more and more explicit, more and more extreme. More importantly, as the culture keeps stepping over the line that marks what is illicit, ever more outrageous perversions slither out and make their claim to be socially acceptable.
This article that I read and filed away talked about a couple of illustrations. One is this past year's Oscar winner for Best Picture American Beauty. It is a story that hinges on a man who rediscovers his vitality by lusting after his daughter's underage friend. Nowhere, this review said, does the movie ever present the main character as a repulsive figure, as movies usually depict pedophiles.
And the audience is led to be definitely on his side. Another review, recently Hollywood attempted to recast an 18th century pornographer, a Frenchman named Marquis de Sade, as a man who wasn't all that bad in a movie called Quills. True history, however, reveals this man was an 18th century pornographer who tortured women and molested children, but the movie played him as a champion of free speech. Our sexually inundated society is simply reaching for the same thrill, but it's taking more and more graphic stuff to get the same high. And in the process, sinful man is dishonoring his body, he is dishonoring the bodies of others, and he is pursuing the current that will lead him to ultimate despair and destruction. Another author wrote these words, as mankind goes further and further away from God, God gives them over to the consequences of their spiritual and moral rebellion against him. Instead of adhering to God's standards of moral purity, they attempt to simply remove the consequences of their impurity. They turn to counseling, to medicine, to psychoanalysis, to drugs, to alcohol, to travel, or to whatever hosts of other means to escape what cannot be escaped except by the forgiveness and removal of their sin. And all the while, sin destroys personal relationships, it destroys marriages, it destroys families, it destroys cities and nations. Sin degrades man, debases the image of God in which he has made, and strips him of dignity, peace of mind, and a clear conscience. The heart, the biblical writer said, of man is full of evil, and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. In other words, man left to himself, man who ignores God, man who decides to live life like he wants to live, is a life filled with insanity.
You want to see the insanity of lust? You want an illustration of how immorality deceives your intellect and darkens your ability to discern right from wrong, good from bad. All you have to do is look at the Bible. You know, there are a couple of ways that you can learn truth. One is through objective propositional statements, such as the one you told your little child some time ago, honey, if you touch this stove, it's hot and it'll burn you. That's propositional truth. And so your four-year-old evaluated the validity of that propositional truth and decided it would learn the second way, experience.
And so it touched it, thus proving that propositional truth was indeed absolute truth. Now, which is the best way to learn? By hearing it and believing it, not by experiencing.
You don't have to experience all of the dredges of society to know that the result of that activity is what exactly the Bible says it would be. The best thing to do is read in the Bible. Don't do this. Don't do it. Do this.
Do it. And when you follow propositional truth, you will be protected for those who ignore the word of God and run in their own direction will experience all the horror of truth. Sinful pleasure promises something it cannot finally produce, it cannot satisfy for the moment. And by the way, with the wayward son and with any sinner you know, it is producing pleasure and mirth and friendship. Don't ever tell a sinner, you're not having any fun. Well, of course they are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be living the life they live. But the point is, it ends. It ends. And there's the loss of roots, there's the loss of heritage, there's the loss of honest relationships, there's the loss of a clear conscience, there's ultimate pain and guilt and suffering.
You can learn it by hearing propositional truth now or you can experience it. According to Paul, sins against the body include not only those sins against your own body but against the bodies of others. The word translated impurity in that verse can actually refer to the decay that occurs within a grave. It could include actions of violence against the bodies of others for the sake of personal satisfaction or selfishness. I believe that these things can best be described as betrayal of one person against another. Our culture today is filled with unrestrained betrayal. One is abortion, that's the betrayal of the unborn by the mother and father and society at large that endorses it and encourages it.
Oh, the upside down logic of our world that's lost its sense. It is in this country against the law to crush the egg of an unborn eaglet and yet you can dismember the body of a baby in the womb. Infanticide is the betrayal of babies by their parents.
Now this step downward was being practiced in the days of Paul as he wrote to the Roman believers. The father had the right to decide whether or not the newborn lived. If it was weak, sickly, maybe it was a girl and he wanted a boy. He could put it out on the door stoop and at night gangs would come by and take the babies and raise them for prostitution. Priests could come by and get the babies for child sacrifice or the dogs would carry them away.
The early church we know was in the practice of at times going out at night and scooping up the babies and raising them within the community of the church. You might think that infanticide would never happen in our generation in any form. I wish it were so.
But it's not. Even today the voices are clamoring for the next step and other steps involved. One gentleman who is anything but a gentleman chairs the Department of Ethics at Princeton University.
His name is Peter Singer and he is creating a firestorm of protest but he is also gaining a hearing saying things that have already been said now for some 25 years. He writes, perhaps like the ancient Greeks, we should have a ceremony a month after birth at which the infant is admitted to the community. Before that time, he says, infants would not be recognized as having the same right to life as older people. This is, he argues, totally acceptable because it is not until weeks after birth that they gain self-awareness.
He's not alone. University of Colorado philosopher Michael Tooley, as far back as 72, said that infants are non-persons who do not have a right to life. A selfish, sinful, abusive man wanders further and further away from God's word, he loses the standard of human dignity, the preciousness of human life. Isaiah 44 2 says, Thus says the Lord who made you and formed you from the womb. Life begins there. David wrote in Psalm 139, For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst weave me in my mother's womb.
I will give thanks to thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Even now, ladies and gentlemen, in this country of America, there is a bill pending in Congress called, quote, Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which is simply trying to keep infants who survive abortions from being killed. There is another form of betrayal, incest. This is the betrayal of children by adults.
Again, like the rushing water going down a sewer, the further away it gets, the dirtier it gets. There are authors, there are people, there are intelligentsia clamoring to lower the age of consent, and what is called child abuse today should be reconsidered. One author said that much of what is called abuse between consenting minors and adults should be recalled, quote, Intergenerational relationships.
That's a lie. And it is betrayal. Another dishonorable action and betrayal of the human body is euthanasia.
It is the betrayal of older people by the younger people. Those who are too old now to contribute to society or to value or enjoy their own lives should be put to sleep like animals. Euthanasia is derived from the Greek prefix eu, which means good, and the Greek noun thanatos, death. You put those two together and it says good death.
But it's a lie. When you discard the truth from God's word that life is sacred and worthy of being saved, then the deformed, the handicapped, the mentally disabled, the old and infirm, the newborn, the unborn, the undefended child are no longer protected, but they are dishonored. Their bodies are mistreated. They are betrayed. Paul wrote in chapter one, verse 24, therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them. In other words, in the end, sinful pleasure betrays you. It deceives you. It defrauds you.
It will destroy you. Let me give you two principles that emerge from Romans 1 24. First, to abandon God is to be abandoned by grace. To say goodbye to God is to say goodbye to the grace of God. It is the grace of God that gives life meaning. It gives laughter that isn't hollow.
It gives joy that doesn't need a drink or a pill. Saying goodbye to God is saying I will live my life my own way and I will do without the grace of God, which is that very element that makes life worth living. Secondly, to reject the freedom of salvation is to embrace the slavery of sin. Paul, in writing to Titus, contrasted salvation with slavery. As he wrote to Titus, for we also once were disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, but when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us. Not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.
You know what I love about that? I love the fact that he says we also once were, but God has cleansed us. Let me add one practical warning to the believer here. If salvation provided some sort of vaccination against lust, if it provided some sort of armor against the sins of the body, then Paul would never have had to write to Timothy, Timothy, flee youthful lusts.
And would you notice he did not say, Timothy, now stand and here's how you fight it. He said, Timothy, flee it. Run from it. Lace up your boots and be gone. Don't hang around. Run.
Leave. Flee youthful lusts, he says, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with those who call on the Lord Jesus from a pure heart. There's that word again, heart. You see, in Romans 1, you remember the unbeliever loses the battle of lust where? In the heart. Now in 2 Timothy 2, the believer wins the battle for purity there, in the heart.
You see, you will never do anything with your body without first giving it permission by your heart. What's the best way for a believer in his heart to be ready to run, to be prepared in this society that is constantly going downward in its digression away from God and His holiness? Well, David gives us one of the most wonderful verses. He says in Psalm 119, thy word have I hidden where?
In my heart that I might not what? Sin against thee. You have evidently memorized that. Let me ask you, when is the last time you have memorized the verse of scripture? If it is scripture tucked away in the heart that keeps you and me from following these lusts, from a life of despair and being defrauded and being deceived, when is the last time you actually studied and memorized a verse of scripture? My friends, if you want something quick to overcome sin, I'm here to tell you, it does not exist. It is a matter of discipline. It is a matter of study. Ladies and gentlemen, holiness will never sneak into your life. Moral purity will never be a coincidence. Well, I woke up today and I was holy.
What do you know? No. It's a battle for purity that has fought in the heart of every believer. Paul called it a pursuit. In 2 Timothy 2, so is the word of God in your heart? Secondly, is the spirit of God in your walk? Paul wrote, walk by the spirit, walk by means of the spirit. Peripatoe, walk everything around you and about you should be inundated, not by the lust of the flesh, but inundated by the influence and the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
Walk like that and he says what? You will not carry out the lusts. Same word as in Romans 1, of the flesh. That was an important reminder for today, wasn't it? You're listening to Wisdom for the Heart, the teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Today's lesson, called Salt Water, is part of Stephen's series from Romans 1 entitled, The Banquet Table of Consequences.
We'll continue through this series all week. In the meantime, make sure and contact us to request your complimentary issue of our magazine, Heart to Heart. You can call us today at 866-48-BIBLE. That's 866-482-4253 and we'll add you to the list for the next three issues. You can also find information as well as a signup form on our app. Install the Wisdom app from the iTunes or Google Play stores. Join us again tomorrow for our next Bible lesson.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-02-06 12:52:24 / 2024-02-06 13:02:38 / 10