This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to our daily drive-time devotions to the book of Romans. Today we're
looking together at Romans chapter 1 verses 24 to 32. You might remember
yesterday we began to look at Paul's discussion of the devastating consequences
of sin in our lives and ended by talking about the choice that some of us make
to exchange the truth of God for things, for stuff.

In 24, Paul begins to talk about the results of that in our lives, Romans
chapter 1, 24 to 32. "Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of
their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one
another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served
created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised, amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. In their women exchanged
natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned
natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.

Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due
penalty of their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile
to retain the knowledge of God, He gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what
ought not to be done. They've become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil,
greed, and depravity.

They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips,
slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent ways of
doing things evil.

They disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
Although they know God's righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve
death, they not only continue to do these things, but also approve of those who
practice them.

" Well, about this time, you're probably thinking, "What in the world could be
inspirational about this devotion? " What a depressing list of sins. The truth
of the matter is, Romans chapter 1, verses 24 to 32, is a picture of what life
without God looks like.

And for me, the inspiration is, I don't have to live that kind of life because
of what Jesus Christ has done. What does life without God look like? We are in a
culture that often calls the immoral moral and the moral immoral, and it can get
very confusing.

If you take your cues from news magazines or public opinion polls or talk radio,
but God is clear. These verses that we just read show that. And the key question
we all have to answer is, "Who am I going to trust?

Am I going to trust the opinion polls or God? Am I going to trust what I feel or
what God says? " These verses are about sin, and as you read these verses, they
show us again and again that sin has a predictable pattern.

Even going back into verse 23 that we looked at yesterday, and then through all
of these verses, you see this predictable pattern of sin. Sin is our enemy. Sin
is our opponent, and it is good to understand the patterns of your enemy.

Paul goes over and over this pattern of sin. You see three specific things as
you walk through these verses. You see, the first thing that happens in this
pattern is that we ignore God.

It's not as if we don't know anything about God. Paul says again and again, "We
know about God. We can see it in creation.

We can see it in his truth. It's that we ignore what we do know. " In fact, he
even reminds us that we ignore God when we don't give him thanks, when we don't
give him praise.

Instead of being thankful for what God has given, man was willing to use God's
gift without worshiping the giver. Well that's true today too. Sometimes the
worshiper becomes the philosopher.

Instead of focusing on God, we focus on ourselves. The second thing that happens
in this pattern of sin is then we replace God. The word that's used again and
again in these verses is the word "exchange.

" We exchange the truth of God for a lie in verse 25. Back in verse 23, we
talked about exchanging the glory of God for images. We replace God.

Sin is a bad deal, by the way. It's a bad exchange. It's like exchanging a
jaguar for a pinto.

Oh, it's even worse than that. It's a very bad exchange. We make that exchange,
and why do we do that?

Why do we exchange truth for a lie? Why do we exchange glory for a thing? The
reason is we're all made to worship something.

When we try to ignore God and put God in a place out of our lives, our hearts
are going to be drawn to worship something. If we hold God at arm's length,
we're going to worship something else. It's going to end up being a thing.

It's going to end up being a lie. The Bible calls this idolatry. What does an
idol look like?

We all have this old picture of some kind of a stone idol, a figure of a person.
But an idol can also look like your car, or it can look like your golf bag, or
it can look like your favorite vacation spot, or it can look like some award
that you've been going after all your life, or the corner office. Some of those
things don't have to be idols, but they can become idols.

Someone said that there's a crude paganism and a cultured paganism. Some grovel
at the foot of an idol, others worship at the shrine of an ideal. Even some
great ideal, some dream that's only your own and you hold God at arm's length
from that, you want to do it yourself, that becomes an idol in your life.

Why do we make idols? Because as I said, we're made to worship something. We are
made to worship something.

And if we don't worship the true God, we'll end up manufacturing our own God. We
either recognize that God created us in his image, or we end up creating gods in
our own image. We replace God.

The pattern is we ignore God, but we need to worship something, and so we
replace God. And then the third thing that happens in the pattern is we reject
God. It's a very short step between idolatry and immorality, and I'm talking
about the kind of rejection that says, "I can live my life any way that I want.

" There's another exchange that is talked about in these verses. In verse 26,
they exchange the natural for the unnatural. They begin to live the kind of life
that they want to live.

Science and philosophy and even education and media are often confused about
homosexuality. The Bible isn't. God isn't.

God says homosexuality is sexual immorality. Not the only sexual immorality. So
is adultery.

It's not the only sexual immorality. So is pornography. But it is, God says,
immorality.

It's one of the ways that people say, "I'm going to live life my way rather than
God's way. " Now, let me just take a moment for parentheses here. These verses
are so clear about sin.

They're so clear about the sin of homosexuality that those who want to ignore
their sin try to explain away these verses. In fact, there are three popular
ways of doing that. Some people try to explain it away by attacking Paul.

They say, "Well, Paul wasn't perfect, and so he wrote something out of his own
opinion. " The problem with that is, yeah, Paul wasn't perfect, but the Bible
is. God wrote the Bible through Paul, and I'm an imperfect man, but it is a
perfect book.

To say that the Bible is imperfect because Paul was an imperfect human being,
that is as dangerous as saying that Jesus must be imperfect because his mother
Mary was just a human being. God wrote the perfect word through Paul. A second
attack that sometimes people use is to say that maybe a part of the Bible must
not any longer be true.

It's cultural. It's not binding on us today. Well, on whose authority do you
believe that?

Jesus Christ affirmed that marriage between a man and a wife is God's plan, and
I trust him. I trust him more than any other so-called expert. And then a third
attack is sort of an attitude that you hear sometimes where you act as if God is
out of date.

While the Bible says this, modern medicine has shown us that kind of a quote.
God wrote the Bible, and God is more modern and up to date than any of us could
ever hope to be. The problem that sometimes people have with these verses is
focusing on one sin as the only sin.

But as we finish out these verses, you're going to see that God lists a lot of
sins, our sins. And the key phrase in this verse about our rebelliousness is the
phrase, "God gave them over. " That's, by the way, an expression of God's wrath.

Sometimes we think of wrath, we think of thunderbolts falling upon us from
heaven. As Paul spoke here, he spoke of a wrath that involved the quiet decay of
the human heart. One of the highest and deepest expressions of God's judgment is
when God says, "Do what you want.

" One of the most sobering ways that God's wrath is revealed is when he removes
his influence and his protection from our lives. That is what hell is. And so in
these verses, God gave them over.

In verses 24 to sexual impurity, in verses 26 to 27 to shameful lusts, and
verses 28 to 31 to a depraved mind. Some people see these as progressive, some
as three expressions of the truth, whatever is what happens to my life when I'm
without God. One of the most challenging parts of this passage to me is the list
of 21 things that Paul talks about results from a depraved mind.

In verses 29 and 30, he talks about full of envy and murder and strife and
deceit and malice, their gossip and slanders and God-haters and insolent. The
thing that challenges me about these verses is that the so-called not-so-bad
sins are listed right alongside of the so-called really bad sins with no
distinction between them. Some of the ways that we distinguish sin from one
another to make ourselves feel better, God doesn't distinguish sin in that way
at all because he realizes that all sin hurts our hearts.

Gossip is right there alongside of murder. What do you do when you get to the
end of a chapter like Romans 1 and you realize it's about my sin and it's about
the hurt that sin brings to my heart and the heart of God? What do you do at the
end of this chapter?

Well strangely, I would say what you need to do is celebrate, celebrate. God
that you've escaped his wrath through Jesus Christ. Refuse to excuse your sin.

Celebrate by living the kind of life that God made you to live. Celebrate by
realizing he can break the pattern of sin in your life. Celebrate by realizing
you can live a life that encourages other people not to sin.

In fact, I would like you to pray with me a prayer of praise right now. When you
decide to praise God in the face of sin, you're deciding to have faith. You're
deciding that your life is going to be ruled by that faith rather than by sin.

So right now just say in a prayer of praise to God, thank you. Thank you that
because of Jesus Christ, I have escaped an empty life of ignoring the truth and
following after false images rather than the real thing. God give me the grace
to refuse to excuse my sin, but instead to look to you to break the patterns of
sin in my life.

I pray that my life would be a trophy of your grace, an example to the world of
the way that you can change a life. And I pray this in Jesus name, amen. In our
next devotion, we're going to start a look at Romans chapter two, we'll take
five days together to look through Romans two and see the truth that it has for
our lives.

And let me just give you a word of hope and encouragement. I know that Romans
one, it's sort of devastating. And you might feel like right now, well, maybe
I'll go study like Philippians or something, or maybe the book of John.

The book of Romans is very hard hitting at the beginning, but it also has the
ring of truth about it. And it also is filled with hope. The same hard hitting
truth about sin is also reflected in the hard hitting truth about hope, about
God's growth in our lives, about the spirit's difference in our lives.

So stick with me through the book of Romans. Enjoy the fact that God can take
what could devastate us and rescue us, and not only rescue us but begin to
change us. You see, Romans is a history changing book.

But first of all, Paul talks about the history that needs to be changed. And
then he begins to talk about how God changes history. We'll take a look at that
together as we look at Romans chapter two, next time we get together.