Romans 1:21–24Scripture
Well, Brook and I have been traveling this last week, and so we had a wonderful time. Missed you guys, of course.
And I just want to show my appreciation for Pastor Bruce. I actually haven't had time to listen back to the message. I did chuckle on the air flight to where I was going. I chuckled on Sunday morning and I chuckled on the way back, because he had to deal with the wrath of God. And so I just appreciate that. I'm sure the word was wonderful. I look forward to listening back to that today. So we're going to continue on today in Romans, Romans chapter 1, and we're going to look at verses 21 through 24. And then I have a parallel text that I think will help us as we try to extrapolate some things out of this for our edification, right? Romans 1:21-24 says this: "For the wrath of God," well, I actually did 18. I did verse 18 and then I did 21 through 24. I was only supposed to do 21 through 24, but I think it's important for us to go back and read 18, and then we'll go to 21, because I think 21 through 24 is building on why God is wrathful and kind of what's going on. So, verse 18: "for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness." Now, if you don't mind marking in your Bible, or you have a notepad, I really want to zero in on this ungodliness. Now, I did a little bit of a word study on that to see where else in the Bible it was used, particularly in light of this text, and I have another Scripture I want to talk about that's in Chronicles. We look back in
Introduction
Chronicles, we can see the ungodliness that was happening in that time and the way that God responded to that ungodliness. We get to see how he dealt with that, specifically with the people in Israel, the Israelites. Now, I thought this was really fascinating, but that word ungodliness is important. We think of a lot of things when we think of ungodliness. Here's a few of them: sinners, or we think of people who don't love God, or we think of people who maybe don't come to church, don't value the community. We think of all of those things, but there are some things in regards to ungodliness that we do not ascribe to that word, so I'm going to try to open our understanding to that, because I think in some way, in some part of our life, all of us have a tendency to be ungodly.
First John actually says that we should not continue to habitually practice sin, but then it also warns us that if you say you're without sin, you are not of God. So I think today it's important for us to understand we're not perfect, even post receiving the Holy Spirit. There are things that we wrestle with and parts of our lives that, quite honestly, we have not committed over to him. Would you agree? All right, God wants to help us with that, I think, as well. And it goes on to unrighteousness. Now, unrighteousness is what it sounds like, you know, right living before the Lord. People aren't living right before the Lord. I think we really ascribe unrighteousness to ungodliness, and they're not the same. Actually, ungodliness leads to unrighteousness. That's really important. And so when we think about this today, we need to zero in on these two and understand that it's progressive. It's a progressive problem that kind of builds on itself. Now, verse 24, which is my assignment for today, or 21 through 24: "For
Point 1Knowing God is not the same as honoring him
Although they knew God, they did not honor him." Isn't that the way we are with people that we first meet? It's easy to honor someone that you just met. It's hard to honor somebody you've become common with. In the church today we run the risk of being so common with God and the things of God that we no longer honor him. We don't honor him with our worship, we don't honor him with our time, we don't honor him with any of those things sometimes. And I was almost on time today. I was almost on time today. The printer wouldn't print, but I was almost on time. But let's just talk about this morning. Most of you weren't here, and the reality is, when service starts, the reality is that is a sign of what we reverence in our life. Some of us, like, I'm on a roll this week, so let me just make everybody mad, right? Some of us value what our face looks like more than we value God, and so we would rather be late so we have good makeup than come and worship our Lord and King, right? Some of you are like, well, you don't understand, you don't have makeup, right? Well, I have a beard and it's work, and I got to get ready. And honestly, my notes, and I'm talking about myself, my notes weren't printed out, so it isn't because of the printer. That's not an excuse worthy. It's not a worthy excuse. The printer didn't work, that should have been printed out earlier. The reason it wasn't is because I don't honor God's time.
This is important. Many of us would never be late to work, but we're late every Sunday. You know why? Because we don't honor God. It doesn't mean that you don't love God.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying you don't honor him. And so it's a choice, really. So now I'm going to drill down and I'm going to get personal, because if we don't get personal with the word, then what's the good of the word? Now, so when you think about your time, do you honor God? When you think about the energy that you expend in your week, do you honor God with your energy? When you think about the love that you give your children or your spouse or your friends or your family or your coworkers, do you honor God with your love? How do you deal with God? Now, it's easy to go, "Of course I honor God." But then when you evaluate your life, we see there are many places that we do not honor God. Amen. This does not mean you're horrible. This is a warning, because God doesn't want to be withdrawn from you. He doesn't want to turn you over to your dishonor. He wants to talk to you about your dishonor so that you will then turn back to him, so that he doesn't have to turn you over to your dishonor. Because the more we dishonor Christ, the more he turns us over to dishonor, and the more dishonorable we become. So the word, what it does is it wakes us up in some behaviors so that we might be and do what he's asked us to be and do.
"For although they knew God, they did not honor him."
Many of us know him, but we don't honor him as God or give thanks to him.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 7:31
Notice this, they did not honor him as God. Now, there are many people who have many definitions of who God is to them. Mormons have an idea who God is, right? There are people with all types of religions in the world that have an idea of who God is, but it says they didn't honor him as God or give thanks to him, "but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened." Stop calling me names! You know what I mean? Like, you ever feel like the Bible's just giving you one black eye after another, right? It is rough. And Lord, I'm not heartless, I understand, like, we get beat up by life enough, and it just feels like you come in and just get tapped in the corner over and over again by the truth, and it's hard, but God does it for our good. Verse 22: "Claiming to be wise, they became fools." Claiming to be wise. You know the most unwise thing you can do is say that you're wise, because you just show that you're a fool. It's crazy. "And exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." In other words, let me translate this for you, because I've thought about this for a lot. Let's read it, and then I want to translate it for you. "And they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling man, birds, animals, and beasts or creeping things." Literally translated, beasts of the earth, creeping things on the earth. So in other words, we began to worship the creation over the Creator. That's how I would translate that today. We do this. We worship the creation over the Creator. We do. Think about it in the American culture right now. You think about what most debates are about. Most debates are, we worship ourself to the jeopardy of God. We worship our agendas to the jeopardy of God. We worship our desires to the jeopardy of God. Some of us, some of us, some of us love and fight more for turtle eggs, like, it's crazy, than a baby in a womb. What is that? What is that? I mean, just look at the penalty for hurting a turtle egg.
Just look at the penalty for that, and then compare that penalty to everything else in the earth. It's great. We're crazy. It's crazy nowadays. It's crazy. And we worship the creation more than the Creator. "Therefore God gave them up." Now, this is the scary part, right? God, because of that, because we do not honor God, because we worship the creation, because we think we're wise in our own minds and our own eyes, "therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves." It's interesting, because if you want to worship man, he'll turn you over to man, and ain't none of us in here want to be turned over to man.
None of us. It is fascinating. This is one of the most fascinating scriptures in the entire Bible. I cannot, listen, I have set my face like flint to end
Point 2We mop up messes instead of unclogging the sink
Early today, but I feel like I could preach on this for 24 hours and not stop. It's fascinating. Let me tell you a story. Some years ago I was reading about, in Europe, attached to a prison was a sanitarium. Not an aquarium, a sanitarium. Now, when I read that, I didn't really know what a sanitarium was. It wasn't a plot of land that they went in to sanitize. It's not a room they sanitized.
I was thinking that's what a sanitarium was. A sanitarium, it's many things, actually, but it is really a facility for people with long-term illnesses and they care for them there.
This particular sanitarium was attached to a prison, and if a prisoner or an inmate had some illness that was going to be long-term, they moved them from the main area over to the sanitarium, and they would stay in the sanitarium until they became well enough to go back into general population. In this particular thing I was reading about, this article I was reading about this sanitarium, one of the strategies they would use to know their cognitive state of mind and whether they were ready to go back into general population was to put them into a janitor's closet. This is crazy, this really happened, right? Put them into a janitor's closet, and what they would do is they would clog up the sink, and then they would turn on the faucet, and this sink would begin to fill up and fill up and fill up until it overflowed.
And then the psychologist that was evaluating the cognitive state of the person who had been in the sanitarium, of whether or not they were ready to go back into general population, they would give them a mop and they would leave the room, and they would tell them as they left, "I want you to mop up the water until you get it all mopped up." And then they would come back, like, 10, 15, 20 minutes later, and if the inmate was there mopping up the water still and the water was still overflowing out of the sink, they would know that the cognitive state of that inmate was not very good. Why? Because they never dealt with the root of the problem. And cognitively, most persons who are well would try to stop the water from pouring over rather than constantly mopping to try to clean up.
This is the way it was. It's a beautiful story, because this is the way that many of us live our Christian lives. We are so busy trying to make excuses for our life running around rampant when God has identified the problem, points it out to us in our life through the word, but we refuse to unclog it. It is amazing. We would rather be busy doing things than actually remedying the real problem. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, you're the clog.
Until a believer gets to a point where they realize that they're the problem, we never really have victory.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 15:17
I know people who have been in church for 20, 30 years. They are just as anxiety-ridden, just as stressful, just as sad, just as depressed, just as overwhelmed, just running around with their hair up in the air, you know what I mean, and just freaking out all the time. Why? Because the problem, the root of the problem, is not dealt with, and their life remains chaotic all the time. There is no reason that if we come to Christ that we should not get some relief. If we would admit and repent and say, "There is some wicked way in me," and we would repent, our life would be unclogged and we would not be running around frazzled all the time. That's the goal. That's the goal. But self-preservation often is the thing that prevents us from our breakthrough. We are so content with how we are that we would rather live miserable than admit we're wrong. We will fight to the death over our beliefs, all of us, to the point that we will never grow. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Insanity in a sanitarium is never fixing the real problem but being busy looking like you're actually trying to do something about it.
That's insane. There are a lot of crazy Christians nowadays, a lot.
And the way that we get to a place where our life is released and peace falls in our life, I truly believe, is repentance.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 17:01
They were trying to mop up the mess with the stopper still in the sink. That meant all the effort put forth to resolve the problem was ultimately in vain.
So I'm going to do this. I want to spend my time this morning getting to the root of the problem in this verse in Romans, and I'm going to try to do that by extrapolating a few things in a parallel verse in Second Chronicles. So I'm going to give you a moment to turn to Second Chronicles, because I want you to follow along with me. And if you have time this week, I would encourage you to go back and look at the verses before and after this text and begin to get an understanding of what's going on, and then I would like you to try to do some personal study this week on the parallel expression we see from the apostle Paul as he writes the church in Rome in our text today. Second Chronicles chapter 15, verses 3 through 6.
I still see some people looking. We'll give you a few more seconds. Second Chronicles 15:3-6 says this: "For a long time Israel was without the true God, "and without a teaching priest, and without law." People hate truth nowadays. People hate absolute truth nowadays. Listen, if you cannot see similarities between America and this, you're missing it. It should concern us. "For a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest, and without law." Those are three things that I would want you to mark, because we're going to talk about them. They're the cause of God's passive wrath in our world. Now, last week Pastor Bruce talked about the active wrath of God we see in the old Testament and we're going to see in Revelation when we stand before him and the wrath of God falls on all the sons of disobedience. We learned about that. We learned about the importance of God's wrath, the beauty of God's wrath. We learned those things, but listen to the three things that are the problem: they were without the true God, without a teaching priest, and without the law. Today a lot of evangelical churches hate the law. They hate it.
They will do everything to try to reconstruct the gospel in a way that abolishes it. But listen, God, Jesus didn't die to abolish it. He came to uphold it that we might be set free from the bondage of it, right? So it's really important that God's presence leaves a place when we don't value the law.
We've still got to value it. We've still got to value it. Matter of fact, the Holy Spirit helps us not murder people. I mean, you know that's true right there.
There are just some times that I feel stabby. I'm going to be honest with you, and it is only by the grace of God that I don't do that.
There are some times where I want to give someone a really good tongue-lashing, and it's only by the grace of God and through the power of the Holy Spirit that I hold my tongue. There are some times that I want to sit and pout for months, but I get up and I go to work, and I love my wife, and I love my kids, and I cook dinner when I don't want to. I just want to curl up in a ball in a dark room and disappear. Have you ever been there? But by the grace of God and through the power of the Holy Spirit, he gives me strength to do what I don't feel like doing in my flesh. Only by the grace of God, only by the grace of God. Now listen to this. In verse 5: "In those times there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in." Now think of this in parallel with God wanting to bring his Spirit into actual dwelling places. In the New Testament, when God sends out his apostles to go, and the disciples to go into homes, he says when you go into homes, you speak peace over the house, that peace may fall on the house, and if you are not received, leave and remove peace off the house. Now, I love this. Why? What is he saying?
Those who reject me don't have peace. Those who accept me and receive me, and he says when they receive you, they receive me, and if they receive me, they get peace, but if they don't receive me and they reject me, you see, like, this Old Testament shadow and type of what is happening in the New Testament as Jesus commissions his disciples to go out. So here's what we learned from this, and this is important, and it's pertinent when we begin to talk about passive wrath, in the world in which we live, God rolling that out, what that looks like. We need to understand that
The absence of peace is evidence that God is turning us over to ourself.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 23:21
It's just in there.
So because they had no true God, because they had no teacher, because they have rejected teaching and teachers, because they had no law, "but when in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them." In those times, sought him and found him, meaning that he was away from them. Now, so peace is resident presence, and absence of peace is the removal of it. Now, you can sense this in the spiritual realm when you walk into a place and you just have a kind of feeling about the place, and then you walk into a home and you feel like peace falls, because there is a resident presence that happens. Now, we know in the Bible that God is in all places at all times. He is omnipresent. But then in the Old Testament and in the New Testament we see the resident presence of God fall in specific places where God shows up. He moves as a pillar of fire, he moves as a cloud, he falls as literal fire in a bush. There is a resident presence that happens. So God is present all the time, but then he is residently present certain times, and wherever his resident presence falls, his peace remains. In those times, there was peace to him who went out, and there was no peace to him who went out and to those who came in, "for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. They were broken in pieces, nation against nation and city against city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress."
There was no peace to those who went in and went out. That disturbed me. "Great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands." Then we are hit with this phrase that should shock you and knock you back on your heels, because I would have thought that if there was no peace, that the enemy must be present, or I would think that if there were no peace, the enemy must really be on and messing with people at that particular place. I mean, most people, when they have problems in their life, they blame it on the devil. The devil made me do it. The devil's really been working on me this week. I have a lot of problems in my life, but the devil is just really trying to attack me. Listen, many of us never really have the devil mess with us, because we're still sons of the devil, so he doesn't have to mess with us. That was maybe too much, but that's what the Bible says, right? So there are times where we're blaming it on the devil, but we are really the problem. It sounds real spiritual when you say the devil this, the devil that. It actually makes you look like you're special, because the devil can only be one place at one time, and he's evidently chose you out of the whole earth to pick on. It is an issue of pride, really.
When we blame him for our problems, then we're hit with this phrase in verse 6. When I thought the devil causes problems, verse 6 says, and look at it: "God troubled them with every sort of distress." The devil didn't do it, God did. Now, why is that important for us this morning? Well, firstly, because we don't like thinking about the sovereignty of God and his sovereignty in issues like trouble. We don't like to think about God sending a storm to swallow Jonah. We're okay thinking about the fish that swallowed up Jonah, but we don't understand, it's great that God sent us a fish, but he also sent the storm. So we will relegate God's movement down to good things, and we will excuse him from what we label as bad things. Notice that our view of good and bad is not a true, accurate view of good and bad, because sometimes God will do what we think is bad, but he understands is actually good, and
What looks bad in our life might be the goodness of God working in our life for our benefit.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 27:52
All right? Sometimes the best thing that can happen to an addict is they go to jail for five years, because outside of jail they can't get clean, but in there they have to get clean. So sometimes God will allow us to suffer things for a little while so that he might set us free from what enslaves us. Like, it doesn't seem good. So as a church we're praying, oh Lord, help them not go to jail, oh God, help them not have to go there, God, deliver them, God, we believe that you have the power to do that, and then we're blown away when God doesn't. Here's the thing: he knows better.
He knows what that guy will and won't do. He understands the heart, and he does what is right by men. Now, that should encourage us, because we can trust God to do what's right. So then our prayers are, thank you, God, we know your character, we know you're holy, we know you're good, we know that you care about people more than we care about people, so, Lord, we just want to, in advance, thank you for whatever you do in your sovereignty, because you know what's best for so-and-so better than I do. Now, does that mean that we can't ask for whatever we please? Yes, but it should be followed up by, "but thy will be done."
Oh, even Jesus asked, but he follows it up with "thy will be done," because he knows that God's will sometimes is the opposite of our ask.
That's the way it works. Prayer is us chasing after God's heart that our heart might line up with his heart. Verse 6: God sends the distress. The world is in a hot mess, nation is against nation, city is against city, man is against man, and instead of blaming the devil, God says in this text, blame me, because "God troubled them with every sort of distress." God is saying blame me. So that leaves me with this consideration today: if God is your problem, then it doesn't matter who you elect as your president.
Oh, this is good. Don't, this is good.
If God is your problem, then only God is your solution.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 30:29
You see, the problem today is you have a problem, and the problem today is you're turning to all the wrong people to solve your problem, but because they are not your problem, they can't solve your problem. But when God is your problem, then if you would turn to him, your problem might be dealt with, because he's your problem, because "God troubled them with every sort of distress." We spend a lot of time trying to mop up our messes and distresses, but the stopper in the sink in this passage, in this passage, is God. He is causing the problem. That's crazy. That's crazy to me. But it was manifesting itself in society.
The spiritual, in other words, was behind it, but the physical was manifesting it. So I would like in this point to submit to you for your theological
Point 3Passive wrath: God gives us over to ourselves
Consideration that sometimes God's wrath is passive. We're going to work our way back to Romans from here, that what we've been going through is really the passive wrath of God. Why do I call it that? Let me break this down for you as easily as I can. In the Old Testament we see the active wrath of God in big things, like God dealing with sin very actively, like killing the whole earth except for Noah and his family. Like, that's wrath, just straight out, just flooded the earth. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, like sending road tar from the sky to blow it into smithereens.
Like, that's his active wrath displayed in the earth. Or parts of the Bible where the earth actually opens up and swallows and kills a bunch of people. Or about this, when they make a golden calf while Moses is meeting God at the top of the mountain to get the law.
You know the three things that are the problem that we just listened to earlier? Like, they didn't worship the true God, there was no teacher, and the law, lack of following the law. So they go up, and one of the things in the law is, make no graven images, right? Idolatry. Moses comes down and sees the people had made with their jewelry a golden calf, and they were dancing around it in a fire. So God tells them to grind it up and for the people to drink the gold, and many of them died. So that's the active wrath of God. It's messed up. It's messed up, I know.
Like, that's the part of God we don't like to look at. But in the New Testament we begin to see the passive wrath of God. Now, in the end Jesus will return. He will judge the living and the dead, and God's active wrath will be implemented again upon the whole earth and everyone who dwells upon it or has dwelled upon it. So that's the active wrath of God: in the Old Testament, floods, Sodom and Gomorrah. Let's not forget Jesus' death.
All right, let's not forget that, because we think of being saved, we think of his blood, but we don't think of the fact that he endured the active wrath of God unrolled out on Jesus for all mankind. Like, that is active wrath. In the New Testament, the world has been, in what the Bible says, reconciled to God.
That is a very common phrase used by the apostle Paul in all his epistles, right? That the world has been reconciled to God. So we now see what I refer to as the passive wrath of God. It is expressed in Romans 1:18: "For the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness."
Then he says in verse 24, 26, and 28, and you need to read it. I know it was 21 through 24, but you've got to read all of it. 24 was one of them: 24, 26, and 28. Here's the phrase that is used over and over again: "Therefore God gave them up." Or in other translations it says, "God turned them over." I would like to refer to this as the passive wrath, because God is not actively bringing down the thunder, but he removes himself, and where God removes himself, peace no longer rests there. So it is a passive response to the unrighteousness of men in the earth. I love this. I love this because we are able to gauge by our life and the activities in our life whether God is with us or has been removed from us.
It is passive wrath. It is God saying, since you don't want me, I'm going to let you experience life without me.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 35:54
Passive wrath of God is not fire and brimstone. It is God releasing you to spin life without him since you want to so much. It is, in other words, his final attempt to try to get you to come to your senses, like the prodigal son. Come on now, come on. Listen, the prodigal son goes out, he spends his father's inheritance. He asks his father for his inheritance. In other words, he basically says to his father, I wish you were dead. He asked for the inheritance and then he goes and he squanders it in wild and crazy living, and then things began to happen. He has no food, he has no, what, he has no peace, he has problems, and he is actually trying to sneak in between pigs and eat the slop out of a trough, because his life is gone in total disarray. Can you relate at times in your life? Until he comes to himself. So, in other words, God will release you to yourself since you don't care for him, so that you will come to yourself and realize you're the problem. God will pull himself back, and we don't realize in our life how much of the things that are happening for the good in our life are really because God is there. You want to talk about guardian angels? I say where his presence is, we are protected. But when he pulls back, watch out, brother and sister. It's rough. And by the way, he doesn't do this like a sniper rifle, he just sends it. Thank you. So I would say this is why the Bible says, if you see somebody who's rebellious, who won't come to repentance, who is rebellious in the church, you go to them by yourself, you talk to them, you take a brother, you take the pastor and the brother, you bring him before the church, and if they still don't, put them out of the church like a pagan. Why? Because that is the last attempt to try to help them. Give them over to themself without the protection of the house.
The goal of God is that we would come to ourself and realize we can't do this alone. The goal is not to punish. The goal is passive wrath for the sake of winning a brother. I got to say, be careful about hanging around people who neglect God and don't value him, because when his passive wrath comes, it hits everyone connected to that person. That's the way it works. Some of you have problems not because you don't love God and don't trust God, some of you have problems because you hang out and you've given your life to people who don't love him. I'm not saying we shouldn't witness to people, I'm not saying we shouldn't love people, but even Jesus was careful who he gave himself to. Come on now, listen to me, this is important.
The closer, so what you are seeing in our culture, our country, this is what I wrote down, and even in your home or life, is what it looks like when there is distance between God and the people.
The closer the God of the Bible is to a situation, the more ordered the situation will become. The further he is, the more
Pastor Shawn Gray · 39:35
chaotic the situation will be, for "God troubled them with every sort of distress." That is the root of the problem.
Listen, sophisticated mops won't help you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 39:47
Better mops won't help you. Well-funded mops won't help you. Only God can help you. Now, the question this leads to is this is my question, because I use questions to cut through the mystery of Scripture. Here's my question, just giving you my devotion: what was it that caused God to bring the distress? Because I think we should know that, right? Because we don't want to do this in our life, because we don't want to be distressed with all kinds of distress from the Lord who distresses, right? So let's learn from this. What are some things that we can do? We see this both in Chronicles and we see this in Romans. You can see the correlation between the true, let's look at Chronicles and let's break this down, and I want you to know it gives a list of sins and it gives a list of attitudes, and Romans as well, but let's look at Chronicles because I feel like it does it in one sentence. It's
Point 4No true God, no teaching priest, no law
Easy to do, and you see it repeated over in Romans. First, there was no true God. That's the first one. First we see in verse 3 that "for a long time Israel was without the true God." It did not say there was no religion. There was belief in God, just not the true God. He did not say there was no God, he said that there's no true God.
Many people today have fashioned a god in their mind that they can worship and get behind, and I'm afraid that for many people that God is not the true God of the Bible.
And we worship at the throne of our imagination rather than the throne of our God.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 41:58
We give more honor and credence to that God we fashioned in our likeness than the one who is in the word.
It's concerning. Therefore the god they were worshiping was not the same God of Scripture they were following, in other words, a false religion. Listen, when you are worshiping a false god, it doesn't matter how often you use his name in prayer. Okay? When you're worshiping a false god, you can call his name all day long and fire won't fall on the altar. Only when you worship the true God. So some of us are really good at saying his name. We worship in his name, we pray in his name, we speak in his name, we do all these things in his name, but is the name of a God we fashion in our imagination, and we stand back and wonder why God isn't moving. It's because we aren't worshiping the God of the Bible. We are worshiping the God we want in our imagination. Now, listen, some of you may be thinking today, this is not an issue today. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an issue today, and it is a massive one. It is a massive issue today.
This is why the world wants so much to say there is no absolute truth, and we have a world that, listen, world and pagan people who fashion, they don't reject God, they'll pray to God, the god they fashioned in their mind, the god that is true to them.
That God doesn't respond when you use that name, because that is not who he is. That is your idol or graven image you dance around in the fire.
Sunday morning in America, in my opinion, is the greatest hour of idolatry in the whole week.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 44:06
Oh my goodness, man.
Sometimes I don't want to preach my sermons. Why? Because most people who are even worshiping God are worshiping a god they don't even know. They're worshiping a God that looks more like Santa Claus than the God of the Scripture. They're worshiping a god that is a figment of their own imagination. They created a God in their own likeness and they worship the god they've made, and it's idolatry.
It says they were without the true God. If you go to the city, and I've been to several recently, I did a wedding up in Miami, it's nuts. Like, just to get five miles it may take 30 minutes to get five miles. I'm gonna get out in this city. So most cities have what is called a business loop, right? Or it has a loop that goes around the city but not through the city, and what it does is it prevents you from ever, you get to enjoy the view of the city without having to deal with the traffic in the city.
You get to see the city and appreciate the city, but never really get in the city. There's a loop around the city that allows you to see the city without having to be bothered by the traffic in the city. That is, I believe, what a lot of Christians want.
We want God close enough to see him but far enough away to not be bothered by his demands.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 45:51
We don't want him downtown where decisions are made for the city. We don't want that.
I hate Walmart. I hate it. I know I should not hate stuff, but man, I just don't like it. Walmart makes me want to lose my mind, lose my mind. Just, I mean, it's just bad. My family though, during Christmas and during certain parts of the year, what day is Black Friday on, right, the day after Thanksgiving? Yeah, don't go to Walmart then. Have you seen the videos? People with straight clothesline, DDT, pile driver, it's crazy. Running people over with carts. People will actually sit outside of Walmart when a new game system comes out. They will camp outside of Walmart and different GameStops and places like that for days. They will wait for days in the parking lot for a sale. The more I think about this, that is how many Christians are. We want God, we just want him on discount, and the only time we show up early, show up expecting, show up eager, is when we got a deal for ourselves. Oh, come on now, come on now. If God's gonna give us something, I'm there early. If he's going to ask for something, i'm gonna come late. And let me tell you, we've been in a God's-asking-for-something kind of season for a little while. People don't like that.
They don't like that. I get it. You want a deal, just give me a deal. But we love God most when we feel like we're going to get something, and the reality is we want God but we want him cheaply. I want God on Blue Light Special.
I want him cheaply, but I want you to know there's no portion of the gospel that you get cheaply. It will cost you everything and it will be worth everything.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 48:26
The reality is many people in America want a dumbed-down version of God, and the Bible actually calls this idolatry.
Idolatry is when you become the source of your own joy.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 48:52
Think about that for a second. Think about that. A lot of choices we make are, what makes me happy, or, I used not to be happy but now I found happiness in myself. Idolatry. The only source of your joy should be God, period. That's it. That's the gospel. That's the gospel. You don't get him on discount.
It will cost you the life you've been trying to save. There were things that existed for the purpose of doing things for you.
There were idols that were literally built in the Old Testament, that people built idols for the specific purpose that those gods would serve them in a specific way. Let me name a couple really quick. Like fertility, like, this is the god that helps for good weather, this is the god that brings health, this is the idol who does that, this is the idol who means families, this is an idol that brings this. And when we worship at that idol, we hope to benefit in that way from that idol. We have created idols that will serve us in specific things that we want. Now, that seems crazy. Why would you worship at a fertility idol that you've made with your hands? Don't you know that God is good? Ladies and gentlemen, we do no different on Sunday oftentimes with how we worship God, because we fashion a God who is not the true God, who is a mere idol that is there to serve us in our wants. Oh, we're guilty.
He'll give you a better life, that's how, listen, if you want to follow Jesus because he'll fix your marriage, if you want to follow Jesus because he'll give you a better life, that's idolatry.
Follow Christ for the sake of Christ, and for the sake of Christ alone.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 50:59
You don't follow Christ so your marriage will be healed. You follow Christ and make him Lord and he'll heal your marriage. That's a natural outflow of that. But I came here today to tell you, if you follow Christ for your marriage, you're not worshiping Christ, you're worshiping your marriage, and he is simply the thing that gets you what you really want. That's idolatry. That's idolatry. You're like, oh, well, that's good, we should want our marriage to be healthy and all of that. That's idolatry.
We do it in the church. The reason there was no true God was because there were false gods, and where there are false gods, God is jealous and he won't hang out there. He will give you over to that false god. We don't have graven images like third world countries, but we have sophisticated idols. Let me give you a couple in our country right now, all right? Because there's a lot of social justice issues centered around idols. That's why when I hear the word social justice I get triggered. I'm not saying it's necessarily all bad, I'm saying the way we use it in America is bad, and in the church is bad.
It's idol worship. For instance, here's something that's more current, not like third world country idols that you can see and not bow down to, but in America we feel it's sophisticated. So here's an idol: race. We idolize race. Our identity is tied up more in our skin color than in our identity in Christ. That's good, that's good. You're like, Shawn, you're white, you can't talk about that. That is a race, and there's a lot of white people in here that we worship our race more than we do God, and we find our identity in who we are racially rather than who we are as a child of God. And here's another idol: sin. We idolize certain sins. We idolize them.
People's identity is tied up in the sin of their life. I can name a few. Could you?
Entire media industries are built around specific sins, and they worship at the altar of that sin, and they celebrate it because it is the idol of this nation.
That's all I need to say. Self-worth, that's an idol. Don't mess with me, don't come at me. I'm telling you, this is the worst one.
We idolize ourselves. We talk about ourselves, we think about ourselves, we invest in ourselves, and we forsake Christ in the process.
It's concerning. Political position: we idolize politics. There are many of us that say way more on our Facebook page about politics than we do about our Lord, because politics is our lord and God is our servant, and we got to get this thing right. Why do we got to get it right? I'll tell you why, because his peace leaves us and we experience the passive wrath. Listen, this nation is experiencing the passive wrath of God, and in a lot of ways he's turned us over to ourself. God help us. I don't want him to do that. So as far as me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord, because if there's peace in the nation, there's going to be peace in my home, all right? That's important. And you can choose, you can't control the nation, but you can control what you do. You can say, hey, in my house race is not going to be a god, an idol. Hey, in my house sin's not going to be an idol. Hey, in my house self-worth is not going to be an idol. Hey, in my house I'm not going to care more about political positions than I do God. We have people who are more Republican than Christian, we have people who are more Democrat than Christian, we have people who are more neither. What is that position called? Independent. Than Christian.
So that's the first one, right? The first one is the first problem. When we ask the question, what was it that caused God to bring the distress, the first one is there is no true God. And I don't even have time to talk about the rest because I'm out of time, but I'm just going to give the other two to you and you go think about it. Here they are. There was no teaching priest. You know why you come to church?
Because it is God's establishment for the community of believers where we break bread together, where we hold each other accountable, and where we hear the foolishness of preaching by which men are saved. That word saved there is not a one-time event. It's present, it's active, and it continues to be present and active, meaning that we are continually being saved by the foolishness of preaching. It's God's plan. It's his plan.
There was no teaching priest, where you do not submit yourself to teaching or to those elders that God has assigned. When you don't submit yourself to that teaching and you're not being taught, it will lead you to God removing himself from you and giving you over. These are the reasons that he gave them over and caused distress. So first, there was no true God. Number two, there was no teaching priest. Number three, they were without the law.
Oh man, oh come on, man, listen to me. Jesus came to fulfill the law. It's still, listen, you're not justified by the law, through Jesus Christ, because of Jesus Christ, you are not justified by the law, but it does not mean the law does not have value, because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and he gave it because it is a mandate of how we should live our lives. It is instructional, and to abolish the law and not value it, I'm not saying that we are justified in the same fashion we were in the Old Testament. We are only justified through Jesus Christ, nothing that we do, but it does not mean that the law has no value, and when we cast off the law in our evangelical churches in the world today, we are opening ourselves up to the passive wrath of God.
That's important. God help us, right? God help us.
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