When We Exchange God We Lose Ourselves

A few years ago, in one of the big universities in England, a Christian student group, much like the Griffith Christian Society, the GCS group at Griffith University here, they were seeking to present the gospel to the students on campus. But they chose to do it in a way that was very confronting to their fellow students. They had the words of Romans 1:18 printed up in large font with no Bible references given at all, just the quote. These words were distributed amongst the whole university. Not long afterwards, the student leaders of this Christian group were called before the university authorities, and they were told in no uncertain terms that they would be censored for their offensiveness.

The authorities demanded that they produce the author of these offensive words. The Christian group simply pointed them to the Bible, to the starting verses of the passage that we are about to read this morning. Turn with me, please, to Romans 1:18. And we will read until the end of the chapter. Romans 1:18, these were the words printed on that particular university campus.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honour 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 lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies amongst themselves. Because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonoring passions.

For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. So far, the reading. This is God's word. Now, just like those university authorities and perhaps the university students having heard some of these words, you might come to this passage either uncomfortable or deeply offended.

You might cringe at the thought that these words were distributed on a university campus to young and influenceable young adults, teenagers perhaps. But God's purpose, through the words of the apostle Paul, is precisely to shock us out of our spiritual dullness, to yank our lazy minds, minds lulled by all the little distractions of this life, and to force us to confront things of eternal consequence. We'll see that Paul has no intention here at the beginning of his letter to the Romans of saying to us as readers, but saying to the whole human race, that humanity is on a great course, that we are building and building towards something amazing, that humanity has a great future ahead of ourselves and all we need to do is work hard to accomplish it. Instead, Paul is saying that the driving logic, building here in these opening verses of Romans from verse 18 all the way through to chapter 3:20, Paul's aim is to shut up proud mouths and to demonstrate to all of us that we, without exception, stand guilty and condemned before the righteous judgment of God. Paul will conclude in chapter 3, "There is none righteous, not a single one."

And Paul categorically explains that until the truth of Romans 1:18 has penetrated our consciences and our hearts to the point where our mouths are shut up and we cease to make excuses for ourselves, not before that point where we are willing to raise our hand and say, "I am guilty before God." Not until that point will the Christian gospel continue to remain completely perplexing to us. Not until we have reached that point will we ever be able to understand why people will want to be Christians, not until that point will we ever know why people say they love Jesus. Well, Paul's aim is not simply to end at the end of Romans 3, but he will continue on as you may continue reading.

But as he desires to bring us the good news of the gospel, Paul's concern in these opening verses is to help us to understand the reason why the Christian gospel is good news. Notice the tense of that opening verse in verse 18. It is present tense. The wrath of God is revealed. It's a present continuous tense.

It is being revealed. The wrath of God is being revealed. Now, the average man or woman in the street thinks that where God reveals His judgment is at the end of time. Remember, everyone thinks about the pearly gates and standing before God as the Maker, and we will experience and we will sense and we will see God's judgment then. And while we wait until then, we live our life completely separate to God's intervening judgment or involvement.

But what Paul is saying is that against the unrighteousness and ungodliness of men and women everywhere today, God's wrath is now being revealed. God's wrath is now being revealed. And before we get to the question of how do we see that wrath being revealed, let's talk about what leads up to God's wrath coming in the first place. As we look at these issues, I want to say that I'm indebted to the work of Doctor Sinclair Ferguson and how he has laid out the structure I want to share with you of this passage and understanding the building blocks of how Paul mounts his argument. As of first importance, we see that the wrath of God is being poured out and will be poured out most fully at the last judgment because of a series of exchanges that humanity has made.

There have been three exchanges Paul mentions that humanity has made. Firstly, we will see in the passage that three times Paul uses the word "exchange." First in verse 23, mankind has exchanged the glory of God for idols, for images, he says, made in the shape of man, of birds, of animals, or of creeping things. Now, at first thought, as a modern Aussie reading this, we think this must be Paul speaking to his pagan audience two thousand years ago, the Greeks or the Romans of his time.

Modern Australia doesn't look like this anymore. We don't have statues of Zeus or Odin, the Norse god, or whatever. We don't have these idols anymore. But our hearts, as Calvin once said, are perpetual idol factories. We bounce from worshipping one idol to the next.

Indeed, if you go and look at some Gold Coaster's gardens, you'll see that even though we say idolatry isn't a thing anymore, go and have a look at all those little Buddha statues in people's gardens. Now, whether they will consciously believe that these are things to be worshipped or whether they are simply there for good luck or protection in some vague sense, even today we worship idols. But even for secular people today, Paul is making this claim that there is a heart issue that sits behind the worship of things that are not God. Idolatry, in essence, is the worship of something other than God. Idolatry is essentially the thing we desire far more than God and His glory.

And so Paul begins by saying that the first reason the wrath of God is being revealed in our current lived experience is because we have exchanged. Humanity has exchanged God and His glory in order to worship things other than the true God. We have exchanged the Creator for the creature. In other words, if you don't worship God as God, you are inevitably an idolater. You worship something else.

But notice there is a second exchange mentioned in verse 25. Paul says that humanity has exchanged the truth of God for a lie. When you don't worship God, you take the ultimate truth of His existence. Remember, God is the purest truth there is. You take the ultimate truth of His existence, and you don't simply ignore it.

You proactively swap it out. You have to fill it with something else. You exchange truth for a lie. And when you believe this lie after a while, the reality is you can't discern the truth anymore. When this exchange of truth for a lie happens, then a third exchange occurs, and that is seen in behaviour changing.

And we have that example in verse 26, where we are told that God gave them, these human beings, up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise. Now, this third exchange is specifically talking about here as an example, same-sex intercourse. But notice the flow of these three exchanges. They build on top of each other.

They're interconnected. Beginning with the first, the main exchange, the exchange of God's glory for created things, and then God's, the truth of God for a lie, and then natural relations to unnatural ones, natural actions to unnatural ones. In other words, this third exchange of men and women giving up natural relations for unnatural ones is a result of the first and the greatest exchange, the greatest swap out that has happened. That's why there is another refrain that runs through these verses.

That is, at least if not more, a solemn explanation of the first. Paul says that in response to humanity's exchanging of God to the worship of things that are not God, God Himself offers a divine response to this human action. God gives a response in response to human action. Verse 24, 26, and 28 tells us what this response is, and that is God handing us over or God giving us up to certain things. It was C. S. Lewis that famously said that the most horrible words that you and I will ever hear uttered in the universe are when God will say in holy judgment to humanity, "Your will be done."

And that is what essentially is happening here as part of God's revealing judgment. God allows us to feel, to witness the terrible decisions here and now. Our passage describes as being it describes this as being given up. I think it's the NIV that says, "handed over." God hands people over to these desires.

Let's have a look at the first thing that God has handed rebellious people over to. Firstly, God gives people up. He hands people over to the lusts of their hearts. Contrary to popular opinion, greater freedom for promiscuity, greater freedom to be promiscuous is not a greater freedom. How often do you hear people argue that society needs to break away from the stranglehold of our Christian past, the straight jacket of Christendom?

We need to break free, and then we will be truly happy, finally happy. Some of the things we hear about in this passage is almost uncomfortable to talk about in a church building. But notice how these actions, when humanity has exchanged God for a lie, these acts lead to a form of enslavement, which is absolutely and totally totalitarian. While people think they are pursuing a freedom in escaping God, the lusts of their life, the lusts of their heart is a form of dictatorship. Paul is saying God's active judgment, the revealing of His wrath right now, is to remove His common grace that constrains sin and its effects.

It's God lifting His hand and letting those things run their natural course. God's active judgment, in other words, is to let sin consume and destroy the people who gleefully pursue it. What's the result? Well, verse 24 says, their hearts become impure and they dishonour their bodies. In other words, you feel God's judgment in your deepest emotions, and you feel it somehow even physically in your body.

By giving people over to their lusts, God is simply giving them over to the effects of their religion, the effects of the idol that they are pursuing. God is allowing them to experience the consequence of worshipping the thing they want to worship. And the consequences of that handing over moment is that this religion demands what all religions do, total commitment, total commitment. If you haven't given your soul to God, your soul will be given to whatever else you choose to worship instead.

So the first consequence of a heart that exchanged God with something else is that God gives that person over to the deepest desires of their heart, which is a form of enslavement to that desire above all else. Now this is tied with the second handing over which happens, and that is when God gives people over to dishonourable passions. In verse 26, we are given the example of men and women handed over to desires exemplified by the exchanging of natural relations with unnatural ones. Now, like I said, the error here that Paul is highlighting is one of a sexual nature, but we shouldn't read these words as saying or indicating that homosexuality is the greatest sin there is. We'll soon see that Paul lists it as one amongst many, but Paul uses this graphic example of how sin begins to impact even the things that seem logically to be the most natural, the innate function, in other words, of reproduction and the basic pleasure of it, takes something so natural and you see how complicated it gets by sin.

So the example of sexuality is simply used as a map to show the process of how God's handing people over to sin works. First, people are consumed, he says, by the lust of their hearts, and that is a bad start. But then they commit shameless acts that lead to a bad lifestyle. And then through this lifestyle, Paul concludes that they receive in their bodies the due penalty for their sin. Now, the language there is very interesting and I wish Paul was a little bit more clear about what that due penalty entails. But the language here is starting to hint at something.

It's the idea that when we think we have licence to do what we want, that we somehow can write God out of our lives and the history books, or the assertion that we just need to silence the Christians enough, or that we should just aim to discredit the Bible as much as possible and its words will go away, Paul is pointing to the reality that when you are enslaved in your religion, your heart and even your body will never know peace. The very language he uses here in verse 27, he says, "they receive in themselves the due penalty for their error," is Paul's way of saying, "If you shake your hand in God's face and say, 'My will be done,' then God will say to you, 'Okay, let your will be done, and I will give you over to that will and to all its consequences for your life.'" But just know this, you won't find any rest. You won't find any rest. Now, today's sermon is not a message on sexuality because this passage, like I said, is a universal passage that speaks about the awful results of all sin, but as an aside and given our cultural moment, Romans 1 partly explains to us why the LGBTQI suicide rates are still just as high as they have ever been.

Even as bullying is being stamped out by law, we are not seeing a downward trend in suicide rates amongst trans individuals. We aren't seeing a downward trend in things like depression and anxiety. This is a tragedy. Our hearts should be sore about this. But I think from our passage we come to understand that all the depression, which is a condition of the heart, all the anxiety, all the aggression, all the self-harm, and so on is not simply the remnants of Christian guilt still tied to society.

It's the active taste of God's judgment, allowing people to feel the discontentment of sin. Paul says in verse 32 that humanity in this state will attempt to add their approval to all of these things. Humanity will seek to reinforce it over and over again. But the truth is, this isn't freedom. It is corruption.

And no amount of lawmaking will change the effects of sin on the human soul. Now, this passage is not simply talking about human sexuality. It's talking about all of sin. You can see here adultery. You can put in here greed or dishonesty or anger or anything, and the results are the same.

You won't find peace if this is your idol. And so secondly, in the exchanging of God for a lie, we are handed over to dishonorable passions, which are the physical actions and the feelings of our hearts and our bodies, and we don't find peace. And then lastly, Paul says in verse 28, a third handing over happens, and that is the handing over to a debased or a depraved mind. In order to prove that Paul isn't simply cherry-picking a favourite sin to punish, we see him giving us a long list of acts associated with a soul that has exchanged the glory of God for a lie. And we see that in verses 29 through 31.

In God giving up people to a debased or depraved mind, the following behaviours result. Paul says, envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossiping, slandering, being haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. In other words, when the human soul has exchanged God and His glory in order to worship something else, anything else, eventually the mind will be so consumed and corrupted by that religious pursuit that it inevitably begins to unravel any good thing in life. Think about it. Every Sunday we come here and we read God's law in some way, whether that is Jesus' teaching to us or whether we go to Exodus 20 and we hear the Ten Commandments.

We hear God's will for human life, and we are encouraged to be humble. We're encouraged to love. We're encouraged to be generous and all those things. The worship of God lends itself to those actions. It brings us to those actions.

Meanwhile, the worship of any other idol, Paul says here, results in haughtiness or pride when God calls us to humility. The worship of any other god brings us to gossip and slandering when the worship of God results in honourable speech, words that build up and edify. The worship of God will cause you to be gentle, but worship something else, and you will murder, and you will strive, and you will be heartless, and you will be ruthless. These are all results of God's active and present judgment when He hands us over, when He hands people over to debased minds. He allows your mind to be fully and finally convinced that a life full of hatred and anger and bitterness is a good thing, is a normal thing.

And friends, the sad thing is I know people that live that way. Hate or be hated, and if you can hate more than the other person, you win. And friends, as we read these words, perhaps you're hearing them for the first time or they're simply hitting you with a clarity that you have never considered before. And perhaps you can't help but feel the hopelessness of the picture that is beginning to be painted here. And even as you hear these words and your heart becomes sensitive to them, to this idea that perhaps these words are speaking about you or speaking about someone you love, our hearts can't help but ask the natural question next.

Is there any hope? Is there any hope? In a world with a mindset so firmly against God, an entire world. We read a world that God sits over with people in it like grasshoppers. So many people against God.

Is there any hope? Well, there are two answers to that question. The first answer is this, from 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. Maybe you want to turn to that with me and keep that open.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10. This is also Paul speaking to a different group. He says to them, he asks this hypothetical question, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." I ask you again, is there any hope?

And the first answer is no. None of these kinds of people in that condition will enter the kingdom of a holy and righteous God. And so this morning, if you, with sobering clarity, recognise yourself in any of these examples this morning, if you recognise yourself as a slanderer and as a gossip and as someone who pursues drunkenness or the abuse of substances, if you have ever stolen or been caught being deceptive or even thought that being deceptive in business is clever, if you have been sexually impure, committing your body to something outside the pure and the simple life of monogamy with a God-given husband or wife. If you have said yes to any of this, the truth is the wrath of God is being revealed in our day and age against you. The wrath of God will stand against us and we will not seek God.

That is the first truth. But thankfully, there is a second truth, and that is found in Paul continuing in 1 Corinthians 6 with the next verse. And even in the book of Romans, as we work through Romans 1 and we work our way past through Romans chapter 3, as Paul paints the first picture of God's plan to save us, Paul continues with the same thought in 1 Corinthians 6, and we read it in verse 11 as he finishes that thought, "And such were some of you. So drunkards, revilers, swindlers, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. Verse 11, and such were some of you, but you were washed. You were sanctified.

You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." Is there a hope for sinners? Firstly, in and of ourselves, no. Because we are the ones who will refuse our own access to God's kingdom. God's wrath is not simply the actions of a vengeful God against innocent people.

We lock ourselves out of heaven through our exchanges of God for lies. Is there hope for a sinner? No. But then to some of us, Christ will be revealed. For some of us, God will pull open our eyes to see the delusion of our exchanges and we will come to know Christ upon the cross and we will see Him bearing the guilt of our adultery, bearing the guilt of our slander, of our idolatry.

Some of us were like these people, but you have been washed. You have been sanctified. You have been justified in the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. And so friends, we have to finish this morning even as we celebrate a special light service and we think about those in our orbits, the world we live in needs to know clearly and unapologetically, even if we are dragged before university authorities, that God is right now pouring out His wrath against all unrighteousness, that no amount of societal or legal change will change God's law. And so when we speak to our friends of these things, don't shy away from God, what God's will is for them.

But then realise that we also could never live up to that perfection. That we, just like them, and only through the grace of Jesus Christ, can be washed, can be sanctified, made holy, and can be justified, made right with our God so that we may enter His kingdom. Let's pray. Lord, who of us can do any of this saving? What other power, what other hope, what other idol can save us from our own destruction?

Will my greed save me? Will my lust save me? Will my pursuit of success, my desire to be recognised, my hope for comfort and leisure, will these things save me? And God, we've just heard again and again today that there is only one God, the Lord God Almighty. And that You will share Your glory with no other.

And that You are the only one that has spoken ahead of time before we have even realised these truths. You have said them, and now, by Your revealing grace, we understand them. Help us, God, to see these things, to recognise them in our own lives even as we profess that You are our Saviour and that we cling wholly and solely to You. Help us, Lord, to understand the sanctifying power of Your grace to crush and kill the idols in our lives. And then for some of us who have never seen it, have never believed it, and are only now coming to realise it, Lord, please give us the intervening grace to exchange a lie for the truth and to exchange our idols for the glory of the one and only God.

Father, for those in our lives that are still wrestling with these things and seemingly are very far from this understanding, please give us opportunities to bring Your word to them in clear ways. Lord, help them to find Your word preached and proclaimed in clear and compelling ways. And, Lord, extend to our loved ones, our friends, and our family the grace that we have received. And through that grace, Lord, help us to never ever be proud and haughty and divisive and bitter and murderous and licentious and loose and ill-disciplined ever again. Help us to live lives worthy of the grace we have received.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.