Please open your Bible to Romans chapter one. Romans chapter one. Last time we focused on verses 18 through 23, which describe a culture suppressing the truth. And tonight we're gonna focus on just two verses, verses 24 and 25, which describe a culture consumed by lust. Now I'm going to begin the reading in verse 21, but our focus tonight is verses 24 and 25. So verse 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. 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. Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. Let's pray together. Our Father, as we look into this sobering passage of scripture written by the hand of the Apostle Paul through inspiration of your Holy Spirit, we are just struck by how accurately it describes the culture in which we live. And Lord, I pray that you would help us in this hour to gain insight from this passage, to understand the signs of the times, to be able to take a stand for what is right, to reject what is wrong, to be identified as Christians in a culture that is decaying day by day. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, how did we get here? By that question, I mean, how did our culture get here to its current state of boundless immorality, sensuality, and moral depravity? I'm sure you can see it. Our culture is rotting. Well this is the question that this passage really addresses. Paul is tracing the downward spiral of a culture that rejects God and thus opens itself up to the wrath of God. Now last week we discussed the fact that God has given enough general revelation through creation for people to see and observe His power and divine nature. That is to say, God has made himself knowable, even to the common man. But fallen humanity has suppressed this revelatory truth. They've suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. They've rejected their creator. They've robbed him of the honor that is due unto him and the gratitude, the thanks that is due unto him. And so it goes. Fallen humanity turns its back on God. They occupy their minds with godless thoughts, and they turn to the darkness of a godless life. To satisfy the innate sense of eternity that God has placed in their hearts, they rob God of His glory and instead give it to idols. Idols that they make with their own hands or idols that they erect in their own hearts. And so it is that society, our culture, is in decay. How did we get here? It started with a culture that abandoned God. And the shocking truth that we see in Romans 1 is this, when men persistently abandon God, God abandons them. Sobering. Let's start with observing the degrading decline that is taking place as Paul is describing in here in Romans 1. I want you to see the progression of thought in this passage. Paul describes a degrading step-by-step decline in the spiritual and moral condition of humanity. And this goes contrary to what humanists would have us to believe or evolutionists would have us to believe. They would have us to believe that humanity is evolving and getting better and better. But the reality is it's actually getting worse and worse. And the Apostle Paul warned Timothy of this very thing. If you want to hold your place here, turn over to 2 Timothy 3, and we see this warning here, 2 Timothy 3, in verses 1 through 5. But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, perilous times, it says in the King James. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power, avoid such people." So it is that Paul warned Timothy that as time progresses, things are going to get worse and worse, worse and worse and worse. Now, when we come back to Romans 1, what we see here is that humanity has suppressed the truth of God's self-revelation, and then they turned away from God and they turned to idols. Verses 24 and 25 describe then the next step down, the next step in this downward progression into the slime pit of sin. I want you to notice the word, therefore, at the beginning of verse 24. Therefore, this word informs us that actions have consequences. When a culture turns its back on God, there are going to be consequences. When a culture turns from God and turns to idols, there are going to be consequences. You see, this culture that Paul is describing here has suppressed the truth and turned to idols. They're culpable. for what they did. God is going to hold them to account. And the word therefore alerts us to the fact that their actions provoke a divine response. So we have the human action, we have then a divine reaction. You see, nothing escapes God's notice. We know this. God is an all-seeing, all-knowing God. Proverbs 15.3 says, the eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch over the evil and the good. He sees everything. He knows everything. He even knows what's in the human heart. He knows when his truth is being suppressed. He knows when people are bowing down to idols, even if they're only doing so within their heart. He knows it all. He sees it all. So verse 24 says, therefore, God saw what was going on, therefore, God gave them up. He gave them up. This is the divine reaction. The Greek verb here, gave them up, is a rather intensive word. It's used in reference to, in other occasions, to giving oneself up to die. All right, to give oneself up to die, that's pretty sobering. It's used on other occasions of a judge that's incarcerating a convicted criminal. He's giving him up to go to prison. Here it means that God withdrew his restraining and protective hand, and he allowed them to pursue their downward descent into the abyss of sin. He allowed them to fulfill their lusts. Douglas Moo writes this, the meaning of hand over demands that we give God a more active role as the initiator of the process. God does not simply let the boat go. He gives it a push downstream. Like a judge who hands over a prisoner to the punishment of his crime, his crime is earned, God hands over the sinner to the terrible cycle of ever-increasing sin, end quote. It's a terrifying thought, isn't it? To realize that God has a restraining hand. He holds back even worse evil, even worse sin. But when people reject Him and they suppress the truth and they turn their back on Him, He says, okay, okay, I'll let you pursue that desire of yours, that evil desire, that sin, that lust that you have. Okay. So that's what's pictured here. This is the divine reaction. I want to say this, and I'm going to say it twice just so it sinks in. It is an act of divine grace for God to restrain sin in a culture. It's an act of divine grace. It is an act of divine judgment for God to remove His restraining hand and abandon a culture to its own evil desires. I'm going to say it again. It is an act of divine grace for God to restrain sin in a culture. It is an act of divine judgment for God to remove His restraining hand and abandon a culture to its own evil desires. So what we observe here is the culture took a step away from God and so God took a step away from the culture. And if we zoom out and we look at the broader context here in chapter one, we realize this is but one step in a downward progression when things just keep getting worse and worse. It's like a downward spiral. We see in verse 24 the words, therefore God gave them up. In verse 26, we see God gave them up. In verse 28, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up. The same verb is occurring three times here. And each step of the way, humanity sinks deeper into their sin. God removes the restraints of his providence and grace and abandons them to the senseless and self-destructive pursuit of their own sin. Senseless. and self-destructive. So it is when men persistently abandon God, God will abandon them. We can observe here in this passage the degrading decline. I want us to also observe the new low that is reached at this stage. The pagan culture that Paul is describing reaches a new low in verse 24 that is really described in three different ways. First, it's described as a people who have lustful hearts. God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts. Lust refers to the driving urge and strong impulse to desire what is sinful. It's that desire to pursue sin. That's how that word is used here. And what we see is that lust is embedded in the heart. It is part of mankind's depraved nature, his fallen nature. It's in the heart. One of the older commentaries says this, Robert Haldane writes, the impurities into which the Gentiles were plunged sprung from their own corrupt hearts." It came right out of their hearts. Because all sin originates in the depraved human heart. In fact, Jesus declared in Mark 7.21, for from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness, all these evil things come from within and they defile a person. All of that yuck, all of that filth, all of that lust is inside the human heart. James writes in James 1.14, but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire, his own lust. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death. Well, you can see right there the downward progression, isn't it? You know, lust, sin, death. That's where it leads. And we come back to Romans 1.24. It indicates that the lust was already there. in people's hearts. God merely removed his divine restraints and he allowed them to pursue their lusts with unbridled abandon. So we see this new low described as people who have lustful hearts. We also see it described a second way. It's described with the word impurity. The Greek word here literally means uncleanness. And Paul is using it here in a figurative sense as a euphemism for sexual impurity. This step in Romans 1 and the decline that we see here pertains to sexual sins. And I'm going to call them out because I think we have to in the day in which we live, we just as a Christian people need to be honest and open with these kind of sins. So this would include sins such as sex outside of marriage. It's called fornication or in some cases prostitution. It would include infidelity in marriage. We call that adultery. It's not having an affair, it's adultery. This would include illicit relationships, forbidden in the scriptures, things like incest, polygamy, polyandry, forced intercourse. So all of these are sexual sins. All of these begin as lust, the lust of the flesh. Paul describes it this way in Galatians 5.19, now the works of the flesh are evident. Listen to his list, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality. Well, that's like the top three, first three things he mentions. And he goes on to say idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, and then he adds the word orgies. And things like these, I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. That's a wake-up call, isn't it? People who live those kinds of lifestyles are not in the kingdom, no matter what they say. It is a fact that the Roman culture of Paul's day was highly sexualized. I want to quote from an article written by Kevin D. Young. He writes this, prostitution was part of the official public face of Roman life, not something hidden or in the background. Prostitution was considered a social necessity, an important safety valve. Rome in the fourth century had no fewer than 45 public brothels. It was thought that if you remove prostitution from civic life, you would overturn the whole social order and lust would conquer. And then he quotes from a book entitled, From Shame to Sin, written by Kyle Harper. And here's the quote, the commodification of sin was carried out with all the ruthless efficiency of an industrial operation the unfree body bearing the pressures of insatiable market demand. You know, what he's saying is there were people that were doing human trafficking back then. And it's very sad, but the culture had declined to that level. Well, that was Rome. Folks, our culture has fully embraced all manner of sexual impurity. How did we get here? Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, in 1850. But a story is set back in Puritan, Massachusetts Bay Colony. If you know the story, Woman gives birth to an illegitimate child. And as punishment, she is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter, the letter A, for adultery for the rest of her life. Oh, how far the culture has come. Until the 1960s, Infidelity and premarital sex were viewed as shameful and sinful by our culture, the United States of America. But a major change took place in what is now called the first sexual revolution. That's the one of the 1960s. Maybe there are people in this room who are old enough to remember those years. A hippie counterculture arose that cast off all societal restraints and as part of that sought to legitimize sex outside of marriage. Judeo-Christian standards no longer mattered. They didn't care. What a person did with their body was their own business. Now you can see where that thinking has led. If it feels good, do it was the motto of the day. And so everyone was free to do whatever was right in their own eyes. Boy, isn't that a recurring theme. The founder of a modern pornographic empire is said to have made this comment, quote, sex is a biological function like eating and drinking, so let's forget all the prudery about it and do whatever we feel like doing. I think that very aptly expresses the thinking that came about as a result of this so-called sexual revolution. Today, it's a fact that more couples live together without first getting married than those who do it the other way around. And casually hooking up, as it's euphemistically referred to, is commonplace. The perspective in our culture is everybody's doing it. I don't want to miss out. But let's come back to the Bible. Let's come back to what God says about this. Sexual impurity in all of its forms is corrupting sin by God's definition. Turn over to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. Now, this is written to believers, but I think it just expresses so clearly God's view on this topic. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and verse 3. 1 Thessalonians 4, 3. For this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness. and honor, not in the passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness." So here is God speaking to his people and saying, you need to maintain sexual purity. This is what I require of you. This is the biblical standard. And so we come back to Romans 1, the new low that's reached by the culture is described in three ways. First, as people who have lustful hearts, as sexual impurity, And thirdly, it's described as dishonoring the body. Look again at verse 24, it says, therefore God gave them up to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. Now earlier, I read from 1 Thessalonians 4.4, which says we're to control our bodies, literally to possess our vessels, referring to our physical bodies, in holiness and honor. Well, when we come to Romans 1.24, this verse is describing the polar opposite. The pagan culture pollutes and dishonors their bodies. They expose themselves to all manner of filth and perversion. And we might add, they risk the threat of venereal disease in pursuit of their pleasures. Now the word dishonoring here has the idea of debasement. They debase themselves. Instead of respecting and honoring their own purity and the purity of others, people lose all self-respect and mutual respect. And so they look at somebody else as an object, a sex object, to fulfill their own lusts, for their own gratification. And they debase themselves in the process. John MacArthur writes this, the way of fallen mankind is always downward, never upward. The more he exalts himself, the more he declines. The more he magnifies himself, the more he diminishes. The more he honors himself, the more he becomes dishonored. When people persistently abandon God, God will abandon them. We've looked at the degrading decline. We've looked at the new low that's described in three ways. And we come to verse 25 and we see here the pagan exchange. The pagan exchange is described in two ways. First of all, exchanging truth for a lie. It says in verse 25, they exchanged the truth about God for a lie. They substituted a lie for the truth. Now truth in this context is the truth that they suppressed in unrighteousness back in verse 18. It's the truth of God's self-revelation through his creation, namely his divine power and divine nature. It's indicated in verse 20. So that's the truth we're talking about. This pagan culture exchanges all of this for a lie. That is to say they substitute a false God for the true God. And as it turns out, idolatry and temple prostitution go hand in hand. Isn't that interesting? John Stott says this, the history of the world confirms that idolatry tends to immorality, end quote. So again, whether we're talking about idols that are made with hands or idols that are erected in human hearts, we see that idolatry tends to immorality. Now the other exchange here is they exchange the creator for the creature. It says in the last part of verse 25, they worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. Now in this context, it would seem that creature here refers to the idols that they had made in the likeness of mortal men and birds and animals and creeping things. The pagan culture substituted these objects made out of wood and stone for the creator who made all of those living things, for the creator who is to be esteemed above his creation forever. Paul may also here be thinking of how the Romans idolized the human body. I mean, it would be fair to say that they actually worshipped the human body. They served it as if it were divine. And the gratification of the body was of utmost importance in their culture. That's what really mattered to them. So the pagan exchange substitutes a lie for the truth and the creature for the creator. It trades the authentic for cheap substitutes. It is senseless, is it not? So as we reflect upon what Paul is writing in the first century and he's describing the pagan culture that he's been called to minister to, to share the gospel among, what we realize is that the pagan culture of our day took this downward step decades ago. I would say at least as far back as the 1960s. Our culture took a step away from God and God took a step away from our culture. He gave them over to their sensual lusts. He allowed them to gratify their own sensual desires and he let them go down further, sink down further into the abyss of their sin. Well, where does that leave us as Christians? What would be the application of this to us? Well, as Christians, we belong to Christ. We're not to live like the world. We don't live for ourselves, we live for Christ. What God says matters to us, His Word matters. His standards that He has expressed through His Word matter to us. And we ought never to compromise on those standards, no matter where the culture is headed, right? And so we must be careful to guard ourselves, to guard our Christian testimony, to keep ourselves unspotted from the world, to come out from among them and be separate. I want to close with a passage in 1 Corinthians 6, if you would turn there. and then make some closing applications. 1 Corinthians 6. Now again, Paul is writing here to believers, so I think this is instruction for us today. 1 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 15. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never, he says, God forbid. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. My closing thoughts are all applicational here. I want to urge you, do not go with the flow. Do not be carried about by the currents that we have in our culture. I want to encourage you to adhere to biblical standards of morality. And what that means is you call sin, sin. Don't use euphemistic terms. It's sin. It's sin. It's filthy, rotten sin against a holy God. Number two, renounce the sensuality of the culture in your own heart. Renounce it in your heart. Number three, establish boundaries and safeguards to protect yourself from temptation. Boy, the temptations are all out there. I can't tell you how many people I've counseled who have struggled with those temptations. So establish boundaries and safeguards. And number four, be salt and light in a tasteless and darkened world. Be salt and light that they may see Christ, that they may come to faith in Christ, and then have the power to overcome their bondage to sin. When you do that, keep yourself pure and holy unto the Lord. Our Father, we thank you for this passage that gives us insights into the decline of a culture, the downward steps that a culture takes as they suppress the truth and unrighteousness and turn from you to worship idols. And then they pursue their own lusts. They gratify the lusts of the flesh. They abandon all of the standards that you have established. They erase all of the boundaries. And they say, anything goes. And Lord, I pray that we would take this as a warning personally, individually, but also as instructive as to what is happening in our culture. And I do pray that you would protect us from the evil that is all around us. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.