Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: We are going to begin reading in verse 26 in just a minute, and we will actually read through the end of the chapter so that we get a feel for everything that the Apostle Paul is trying to say before he moves into some of the next things that he wants us to deal with. As we start this passage and this topic, I want to think through it in these terms. Friends, you and I did not inherit the moral world of the Romans. We inherited the moral world of our Christian brothers and sisters who came before us for the last 2,000 years.

It may be tempting for some to think that we are the inheritors of the Roman world, what is left of the Roman Empire and their world, their values, and the Greek philosophers. While there is some of that inside of our culture, when we dig down to the moral things that we hold to be true, even broadly true inside of our culture, we benefit from the Christians who have gone before us and how they changed the worldview of the world around them.

So much of what we simply assume to be true morally, even in very broad terms, comes to us through our Christian heritage. Things like basic human rights, even the notion of universal human rights—it is not Roman, it is Christian. The showing of compassion every time we are able to do so, and the value of liberty over tyranny—even political things like this come to us through the Christian tradition.

Did you know that hospitals are a Christian invention? Public education—the idea that we should be able to educate everybody, especially the poor and women—is a Christian idea. On and on this story goes. The basic moral structures of our culture, whether they are eroding now or not, have been with us for a long time and came to us from the Christians who went before us.

Right at the very top of that list of social structures that we have inherited from Christians is the structure of the family and human sexuality. The biblical view of who men and women are, who gets married, how families are built, how kids are cared for, how eventually parents and grandparents are cared for, and what sex is actually for—the Christian view of all of that utterly transformed the Roman world.

The world that Paul was writing to, the world that these Christians were saved out of, was one they were becoming distinct from. Let's make sure we understand a couple of things about this world. For the Roman, high-status men were able to sexually take anyone they wanted, except for the wives of other high-status men. This meant especially slaves and young slaves, boys and girls. It was common, understood, and believed to be normal. If you were a male of high status, this is the reason you had boy and girl slaves—to satisfy yourself sexually.

There were roughly no cultural protections for women and children. Unless you were married to another high-status male, there were almost no cultural or legal protections for you or for your kids, especially if you were part of one of the conquered nations or slave classes in the Roman world. Women and children were less than people in this way.

The notion of family for them was not at all what we think it should be today because our worldview has been transformed by the Christians who went before us 2,000 years ago. When Christians recaptured the biblical view of family and sexuality, things changed. It was such a powerful moral advance in their world that we inherit the Christian worldview and not the Roman.

The reason this is such a big deal to me is that it gives us context for the things that Paul says specifically. There are large parts of our culture right now who have decided the Romans were right and the Christians were wrong. A lot of what we see in this moral and sexual degradation, the destruction of the family, and the danger that children are in right now inside of our culture are from individuals and institutions who have decided the Romans were right and the Christians were wrong.

That means that we are back in this position of the Christians who read this book originally. The living out of our lives the way that God designed them to be inside of marriage, family, and human sexuality bears witness to our world. This is an incredibly important thought for the church right now, for us to be encouraged and to become light to the world in this way specifically. Sexual integrity is again a witness to the world around us.

In our passage of scripture, a couple of thoughts will help hold all of this together. First, exchanging the truth for a lie results in unnatural desires and behaviors. Paul gets specific in this passage of scripture. By the time he ends Chapter 1, your head is just spinning because this is quite a list.

Our hearts and minds—remember the image last week? Paul uses the phrase "God gave them up" three times. It is the letting go of the leash of a dog who yanks and yanks and wants its own way. God just gives them up and lets go of the leash. When our hearts and minds are let off-leash, the desires of our hearts become entwined, twisted, and full of sin.

This is universal to the human heart. We are not picking on anyone in this passage of scripture; we are taking a look at the human heart when it is captured by sin. Later on, the Apostle Paul is going to talk about the difference between being a slave to sin and a slave to righteousness. As much as this passage is about enslavement to sin, Paul moves on and begins to talk about how our hearts get out of this. What is it about the power of the gospel that changes these things in our lives?

In this passage, Paul is going to talk specifically about our sexuality and then much more. But we also have to see this: God's design for us is good for everyone. The way God designed humanity is the way God designed all of us. It is good for all of us. God's design in marriage for sexuality is a moral advance compared to how human cultures tend to behave and treat people with less social and economic power.

One of our jobs as Christians right now is to live out and defend this design with compassion, wisdom, and courage. Let's read our passage of scripture. We are in Romans Chapter 1. We will start reading in verse 26 and read through the end of the chapter. Friends, this is the word of the Lord.

For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable 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 they give approval to those who practice them. Let's pray.

This is quite the list. It is good for us in this context to read all of the rest of Chapter 1 because reading the whole passage makes it clear that Paul is trying to describe the result of sin as it runs amok inside of the human heart. Those last few verses where he just lists one thing after another—there are lists like this throughout the rest of the Old Testament. They are often called vice lists.

The Apostle Paul will walk through these things, and sometimes he will introduce them by saying these are the things that will not or cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Before he gets to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians Chapter 5, he says the works of the flesh are these things, and he goes through another list. The Apostle Paul is clear that there are things that the human heart does when it is locked inside of sin, slave to sinfulness.

It is all a rejection of God. In Romans 1, he says it begins with our suppression of the truth, with our denial of God, a refusal to acknowledge him, and to thank him. He said when we do that, God just lets us off-leash, and this is what happens to the human heart. But for the gospel of Jesus Christ, right?

One of these lists happens in 1 Corinthians Chapter 6. He says the Kingdom of God will not be inherited by these people, and then he gets to 1 Corinthians 6:11 and says, "And such were some of you, but now you have been saved and justified and transformed. You know this was you, but Christ saved you and changed you."

The saved and transformed Christian, especially if you became a Christian later in life, remembers things like this inside of your life and your soul. The self-aware Christian still sees some of these things inside of our own hearts. One of the more enjoyable chapters in Romans is Romans Chapter 7. The Apostle Paul puts himself in our shoes and says, "Look, the things that I want to do, I discover I don't do. The things I don't want to do, I discover that I am doing. I see inside of myself two laws that are in war with one another."

Paul says at the end of that chapter, "Who will save me from this body of death?" Chapter 8, verse 1: "Thanks be to God our Father, who changes all of this and gives us the mind of the Spirit instead of the mind of the flesh." You see, friends, what we read here is just the foundation of the argument. There is more hope than we could ever imagine, and it only comes through Jesus Christ.

We have to recognize in a passage like we have just read that the condemnation is universal. We are lost in our sins. This again is why Paul begins with: "But I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes." This is God's divine power that changes the human heart and saves it. The gospel's power is small if I think my sin is small and I can fix it anyway. The gospel's power is gargantuan if I realize that I am locked and lost in my sin and I cannot change it unless God does it for me. This is the power, the depth, and the magnitude of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Before we get to this long list of things that the Apostle Paul talks about, Paul deals directly with human sexuality. Paul says in that opening verse that God gave them up to dishonorable passions. The sin that comes out of our lives, as he speaks here of sexual sin especially, we need to recognize are dishonorable passions. He is speaking about what starts inside of the human heart. Our activity and our sin begin in our hearts and in our minds.

In fact, this is where all of our behavior one way or another comes from. While we rightfully work to stop the activity of sin—the things our hands, our eyes, and our tongues do that are sinful and destructive—we discover that there is something else. There is a fountain and a spring in our hearts that becomes the river of my life because this is where it all begins. They have been turned over to dishonorable passions.

The Book of Proverbs Chapter 4, verse 23, is a wonderful way of remembering this truth. Solomon tells us: "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life." Keep your heart. Watch what is happening inside of you because what happens inside of you is going to start coming out of you. All of these things listed at the end of the chapter begin inside of the sinful human heart. The sexual behaviors that are listed in those first two verses do as well.

Paul begins by saying women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. Paul is in this passage and the next, inside of the context of all that Paul is saying and the vocabulary that he uses in the Greek, referring to sexual license and especially homosexuality. He probably begins by talking with women first because in their culture, this would have been more of a surprise than the men.

They knew it was common, especially among men with some version of social or economic status inside of their world. But Paul says it happens among women as well, and it is a sin among women as well. Then he says, likewise, men give up what is natural—what God designed them to act like. They burn with passion for other men. Again, this is an internal thing that turns into an external act.

They commit shameless acts and end up harming themselves physically as a result of their behavior. Paul pulls no punches. Paul could not care less about politically correct vocabulary because he is talking about the way our hearts are broken and the things that God can fix. If you read this in the English for the very first time, you are thinking it sounds really sexual. You are right. That is the vocabulary that the Apostle Paul uses.

When he says the phrase that is translated "consumed with passion," the word passion means craving or lust. He says they commit shameless acts with other men. The word shameless implies nudity. This is very straightforward in Paul's language. We are going to rip the first band-aid off right now and then we are just going to keep talking about the word of God. Homosexuality is a sin against God and against his design for us.

The behavior and the desire are also part of our sin nature. It is one of the ways in which some of us find this brokenness inside of our souls. There is this thing inside of me that is at war with the law of God. For some of us, this is where that tipping point and pressure point is. But it is the behavior and it is the desire. This is part of the sin nature, but remember where Paul started all of this: all of this can be subject to the power of the transforming work of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As we talk about this kind of issue, I want to get at it from another angle. God's design for human sexuality is chastity or marriage. This phrase "chastity or marriage" comes from C.S. Lewis right out of his book, *Mere Christianity*. C.S. Lewis has this wonderful way of putting things very straightforward, sometimes in a very simple and memorable way. And he is absolutely right.

From beginning to end, God's design of the human being is the way we are designed to behave sexually and what marriage and family are for. He says here is the Christian ethic: chastity or marriage. We go all the way back to our creation in Genesis Chapter 1, verses 27 and 28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with lots of other human beings."

Subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, and every living thing that moves on the earth. The only creatures in all of creation that have been given the image of God are made male and female. It is very specific and very biological in that sense. But it is not just our biological creation; it is our theological creation as male and female. It is sociology, psychology, and biology. God infused us with his image as men and women.

In Genesis Chapter 2, verse 24, before the fall and the expulsion from the garden, the text says this: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." It is an incredible teaching to be given before there was even a mom and a dad. It is just Adam and Eve, but you see our theology being given to us. This is why we pair up like this, male and female. The New Testament is full of both the assumption and the teaching of this doctrine.

In our culture today, we might need to clarify a few things as we walk through the biblical teaching on this. Chastity or marriage is true. God's design for marriage is heterosexual, monogamous, and lifelong. This is God's design for marriage, and this culture has attacked every single one of those in powerful ways.

We also see at the very beginning that God's primary building block for all of human civilization is marriage and the family. That is the first institution that God creates. The biblical view of marriage was an advance in the Roman world. It did good things for people and it is a bulwark now, something that we should live to defend and proclaim.

The Christian view taught in the New Testament and lived out in the early church was radically different from the world around them. Because of its moral advantages, it raised the lives of those who followed the standard. Eventually, the Christian view outlived the Roman Empire and all of its debauchery. We now follow in those footsteps in our debauched culture.

We do not have time to dig into this deeply, but we need to see how rich and beautiful God's design truly is. Christian marriage is infused with theology and meaning. It is full of the image, design, and purpose of God. Christian marriage and human sexuality are filled with God's design for all of it—for how male and female love works, procreation, safety, and holiness. It is an ethic that is infused with moral and divine meaning.

The two, male and female, becoming one flesh turns the sexual act into an expression of mutual love, commitment, and procreation instead of self-serving lust and physical gratification. God has given us something powerful and beautiful that becomes a reflection of his covenant with the church. That is how full of God's good design these things are inside of marriage and family. It mirrors God's very covenant with us.

Contrary to what we hear a lot, we need to see the opposite is true. God's design is not random, it is not oppressive, and it is not fungible. It is not changeable, but it is shot through with divine power and meaning. It was attractive. We do not often think in these terms. We think about the growth of the early church and missionaries like Paul and Peter spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But as historians look back, they also see that the Christian ethic became attractive to people who otherwise would have been walked all over in the Roman world. They saw safety, stability, meaning, and a future in the way Christians built their homes and their communities. One historian, Rodney Stark, in his book *The Triumph of Christianity*, very simply puts it like this: women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.

Does the church still live this way? Can the church still be this kind of witness to a world that is growing more and more confused all the time? At some point, someone can turn around and see their local church and the Christians who live beside them and think that is so much better than what the world is offering me. It is the message that Jesus Christ saves, but it is also the message that this is the goodness of God's design for us.

Thinking in these terms, I want us to see this about what is going on in our world. Are you guys still with me? It is a little quiet out there. Some of you did not realize what you were in for this morning, but here we are. Let's recognize this: our current culture denies our creation and affirms our rebellion in very specific ways.

Our creation is male and female. Everything from the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle to the trans issue denies the goodness of God's creation of us as male and female for each other. Male and female does not determine our sexuality; we get to, or something else determines our sexuality.

I want you guys to at least be a little bit sensitive to the word "gender" because this is the word that is often thrown out more than sexuality. If you sign up brand-new on Facebook, there are still something like 52 different genders that you can choose from. The word gender, especially the way that it is used now, was injected into our culture by some feminist thinkers and philosophers 60 years ago. The phrase they liked to use was "gender is performative."

That is a very powerful phrase because what they were injecting into this conversation was that your gender is not part of who you are biologically. It is not a part of you male or female; it is however you want to perform. It is however you feel, how you want to act, or how you want to be called—it is performance. That term was designed to inject confusion and breakdown into this very conversation.

Our culture denies our creation and affirms our rebellion. If you disobey God, you can become God, right? We now determine our own identity apart from God, creation, and reason. Instead of God's good design, we have been set adrift. It is this contradictory combination of "I was born this way" versus "I feel this way today." It is a combination that again just sows pain and confusion in so many lives.

Paul highlights homosexuality because it is a unique denial of God's creation of male and female. But to understand the larger topic, every one of us needs to understand this: every sexual sin breaks God's will for humans, marriage, and the family. Are you married? Then I cannot harbor lust in my heart toward my neighbor. I need to realize that adultery is sin. Exodus Chapter 20, verse 17: "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife." Covetousness is a sin that starts here and then turns into physical behavior.

Am I single? I need to guard my heart against lust toward others and realize that fornication is a sin. This part of the conversation is important because there are a lot of Christian organizations like Revoice and others who will tell you that it is okay to identify as a gay Christian as long as you don't do certain things. They fill in the blanks with arbitrary rules. They say because that is how you were made, you cannot change that, so you are gay and a Christian as well.

Well, can I identify as an adulterous Christian? That is just who I am. It is in my DNA and I cannot stop it, but I am still a Christian. I am a greedy Christian; I just need more money and stuff. I do not care what this vice list says about maliciousness and gossip; that is just how I am made. Can I say any of that? No, I cannot. The Apostle Paul is saying there is something that happens in our disordered passions that breaks our own lives, dishonors God, and harms others.

I know that the sin that is in my heart is harder to deal with. Many of us know how to hide the sin that is in our hands, eyes, or tongues. But that does not give me the right to say then what is in my heart is okay. The power of the gospel is the power to change everything from the outside to the inside. Every single follower of Jesus Christ is called by him to take up our cross, to deny ourselves—meaning deny our sin—and follow him instead.

In Mark Chapter 8, verses 34 and 37, Jesus says: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Every one of us has a cross to carry. Every one of us is going to have a different cross to carry depending on what it is that is at work inside of my heart that I need to give up for Christ.

For whoever would save his life—if you would rather hang on to all of those things—Jesus says eventually you are just going to lose all of it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? Let's flip the coin just a little bit here.

Christians who live faithful lives refill family and human sexuality with God's divine purpose, goodness, and love. We have an opportunity to put God's meaning and purpose back into what it means to be male and female and what it means to be married and have a family. We walk in the way of Jesus Christ and refill it with meaning. Our culture is busy sucking all of the meaning out of what all of these things really are, leaving us as these spiritual zombies trying to create our own identity. None of that in the end works.

The faithful church has an opportunity to tell the world and to tell each other that we can refill all of this that the world is trying to take away. We can refill this with God's goodness and it can be beautiful and powerful. Doing these kind of things sometimes means making difficult decisions. I believe that we have gotten to a point now where everybody in this room—our lives are touched by either homosexuality or the trans issue in our immediate or extended families.

The emotional tug inside of this issue is very difficult for us sometimes. I get that. But this is one of the reasons why we gather and renew our faithfulness to the truth and the goodness of God. As we bear witness to this world, it just means sometimes we are going to have to make difficult decisions. That is going to look different for everyone depending on who it is in our lives, our relationship with them, and what pressures are on us because of work or friends.

Nonetheless, our Christian forebears 2,000 years ago refilled family, marriage, and human sexuality with Christian meaning, and we can do the same. I have got a handful of pieces of practical advice. The first is this: love but do not affirm. Love but do not affirm. In its most fundamental form, this is what good parents do when they raise kids. You love them, but you do not affirm them sticking quarters in their sister's ear.

You do not affirm the selfishness or whatever it is inside of their hearts that we are trying to fix and train into followers of Jesus Christ. We love them, but we know that their behavior is not their identity. This is one of the life hacks to understanding why this is such a sensitive topic. 30 or 40 years ago, our culture began to decide that if you disagree with my behavior, you hate me as a person.

If you disagree with how I want to behave, that means you hate me. It is a powerful lie of the enemy that identifies behavior with identity. I get reduced to a behavior. But learning how to love someone without affirming everything they do is critical. I want to think in this context of the parable of the Prodigal Son. This younger son decides that he wants to squander the inheritance that his father wants to give him.

The father gives it to him and he squanders it in sin, running away from his father's household. He wakes up one morning in a pigsty and realizes it would be better for him to be a slave in his father's house. He took everything and squandered it in sin, and one day woke up and realized he ruined everything. When he comes home and the father sees him, the father runs after him and pulls him back into the household.

The father did not follow the prodigal son into his sin and end up in the same pigsty affirming his lifestyle. If the father left home, the prodigal child would not have had a home to return to. If the church or Christians affirm lifestyles that we know to be sin against God and eventually destructive to the people that we love, then we are in the same pigsty with them, and they will believe the church and God affirm this. Someone has to stay home so that there is a home to come back to. Love but do not affirm.

You still with me? Amen. Use the pronouns that God gave. Using anything else is living by lies, and we should not live by lies. I know in some of our contexts, this is complicated, but use the pronouns that God gave. If we affirm lies, then we are people of the truth who are doing what we should not. If we use chosen pronouns, we are actually affirming deep and profound emotional and psychological hurt instead of hanging on to what is right and true.

Do not affirm any amount of trans confusion. Gender dysphoria is a recognized issue and it has been for a long time. There are some folks who genuinely have this disconnect between their biology and their psychology, between their bodies and how they feel. For a long time, it has been a known issue, and the percentage of a culture has been very small and steady.

In the last several years, the reports of gender dysphoria or the desire for transitioning have skyrocketed well beyond what is traditionally the case statistically. Why has that skyrocketed? Right at the top of that is social media and the confusion that already broken and confused young kids and teenagers have. They open up social media and a lot of other confused and broken people—some groomers as well—are ready to tell them that if you identify as something else, you are going to fix everything about yourself.

It is a lie if someone tells you, "Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?" The data does not back that up and that is emotionally manipulative. Social transitioning will eventually cause psychological damage. Hormones cause lasting biological damage. Puberty-blocking drugs will eventually sterilize teens and create lifelong pharmaceutical dependence.

The Orwellian phrase "gender-affirming medical care" is permanent genital mutilation. It is nothing short of barbaric and demonic. The church cannot walk into this world. The church has to stand outside of this world and say even if you have genuine confusion about this, there is hope in the gospel and the power of Jesus Christ because God created you in such a way that you can find unity between your biology and your psychology. God has built you and he wants you to flourish.

My last practical thought: pray, pray, pray. Becket Cook will tell you the story of how his mom and his family prayed for him for decades. Christopher Yuan had an older Chinese mother who all she did day in and day out was pray for him. Pray, friends. Confused and hurt people are God's sons and daughters as well, and all of them are made in the image of God. Until the soul leaves the body, we want to pray for the health, healing, salvation, and transformation of these people.

If the church follows the prodigal into the pigsty, there is no home to come back to. Salvation and transformation only come through the repentance of sin, not the affirmation of sin. Our Christian witness relies on both truth and love. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul told the Ephesians in Ephesians Chapter 4, especially verses 14 and 15.

Paul is telling the church that God gave a bunch of gifts so that the church could be grounded in truth, know who Jesus Christ is, and be encouraged. Then we are not blown back and forth by every idea that comes blowing through the church or through culture. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we grow up into Christ.

There is truth and there is love, and as individuals and as a church, we need to learn how to hold both of these things together. The future of the church of Jesus Christ belongs to the faithful and the courageous. Those who bend to emotional manipulation of the world will find themselves adrift over time, and if they are not careful, they will eventually find themselves away from the true church. There is no witness there.

The future of our neighbors and the people that we love belongs to a church that loves them enough to be clear about God and his good will for our lives. There is true witness and power in this kind of love. This is where the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ does its work. Let's pray.