of romans 1 28-32 and just as they did not see fit to acknowledge god any longer god gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper being filled with all unrighteousness wickedness greed evil full of envy murder strife deceit malice they are gossips slanderers haters of god insolent arrogant boastful inventors of evil disobedient to parents without understanding untrustworthy unloving and unmerciful and although they know the ordinance of god that those who practice such things are worthy of death they not only do the same but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them paul's teaching about why a society degenerates further and further into unrestrained debauched destructive evil is unlike any analysis you will hear today one of the reasons for that is that when a society is thinking into moral decay it no longer has the categories or the framework to recognize what's happening so that the analyses from within aren't accurate they are symptomatic of the problem the social mind because becomes so defective that the moral decadence is reflected in it rather than being named by it now we live in such a day in america and the inability to render sound moral judgments abounds everywhere you look almost which makes this passage of scripture incredibly relevant to us precisely because it is so foreign to us today something that doesn't sound foreign something that doesn't sound strange morally or spiritually is probably an echo of the atmosphere we're breathing and therefore of no use to us no matter how good it makes us feel we need a word from outside our defective world and our depraved thinking we need a word from god and i certainly expect it to be very strange i expect a word from god outside this world outside this system outside this collapse i expect anything worth hearing to sound strange because if it fits this world it's already contaminated we are a self-absorbed decaying society now what we have in today's text is a list of 21 kinds of evil what i would like to do with these few verses is three things i want to ask where does this come from where does this list come from then i want to ask why is it here why did he do this why bother stringing out a name for 21 kinds of evil and thirdly i want to ask whether there's here a remedy for those kinds of things in my heart and in this society those are my three questions let's pray before we begin father i need your help very much and i ask you would come and give it to me because you are a god of mercy i have tried to study and think and prepare but unless you come now unless there is an anointing on what the old puritan's called unction on me and a spirit of listening and receptivity given to these people this will be a total waste of time in fact it may be harmful so in your mercy i ask you to draw near to help me and grant me to tell the truth and to be a faithful witness and i ask that you would give about 25 minutes of great seriousness to this people great earnestness great weightiness let us not be triflers with the word of god i pray neither in the speaking nor in the hearing i ask in jesus name amen so my first question is where does this come from where do these easels come from now this is review if you've been around for some weeks but we need to review let's let's remind ourselves that it all began back at verse 18 or earlier where paul explains why it is that we need the gospel we need good news of the gift of righteousness to us from god remember in verse 16 it says the gospel is the power of god unto salvation to everyone who believes to the jew first and also to the greek why is it that why is it the power of god to save believers answer verse 17 because in it the righteousness of god which is our huge problem because we don't measure up to it the righteousness of god in the gospel is being revealed for faith to faith which means as we tried to unpack in those six messages i preached on these two verses we tried to unpack that the meaning there is that the righteousness that god demands from us through faith he gives to us and that's the best news in all the world for sinners the righteousness that he demands from us which we cannot produce corrupt and depraved as we are he freely gives to us namely his own righteousness to be received by faith now in verse 18 which is the next verse after that glorious good news comes the reason why we so desperately need it because the wrath of god is being revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress hold down the truth we are by nature god rejecters by nature we don't want him in our head we don't want him in our heart we don't want him in our business we certainly don't want him in our computer room where you can get on the internet we don't want him in our bedrooms we don't want him in our kitchen toying with our appetites we don't want him in our life out of our lives and that's why we need the gospel that's why we need a power on us because by nature we are children of wrath and we spurn the glory of god we trade it off for images that we can control because self-exaltation and self-determination are our god i tell you if there was ever a time or group that needed the gospel it is us in america today so paul says starting back there that we need the gospel and he now unpacks the effects of this god-rejecting exchange that we have made and the effect is that god gives us over to the swamp we've chosen to sink in it now let me look at this one more time with you we've seen it it's repeated three times look at it verse 23 we exchange the glory of god for images result verse 24 therefore god gave them over to the lusts of their hearts second time verse 25 we exchange the truth about god for a lie result verse 26 for this reason god gave them over to degrading passions third verse 28 they did not see fit to acknowledge god or literally they didn't see fit or they didn't approve to have god in their knowledge they didn't want god in their knowledge result god gave them over to a depraved mind to do things which are not proper now that's what paul meant back in verse 18 when he said the wrath of god is being revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness the wrath of god is being revealed in these three phrases verse 24 he gave them over to lust verse 26 he gave them over to passions verse 28 he gave them over to a depraved mind that is the wrath of god god's response to worldwide disloyalty and treason against the creator is not first to cast us into hell that comes later if we refuse to repent the first outpouring of wrath is to give us over to sink in the swamp we choose that's the first work of wrath so when i said back at the beginning of this message that paul's analysis of what's happening in america is different from any analysis you will read today that's what i had in mind you might hear an analysis today that goes something as profound as this you might hear someone say okay america you have built your bed of relativism and secularism and ah morality now sleep in it and all its fruit you might hear that but paul doesn't say that paul says something far more horrifying than that about us and he says it in four steps now in verse 28 and all of this is still review just showing you the origin of these 21 sins where do they come from what do they mean let me give you these four steps as he unfolds his analysis of our situation number one the root of our problem is that we don't want god you see that at the beginning of verse 28 they did not see fit to acknowledge god they didn't approve to have god in their knowledge this is our fundamental problem as a human society human not just american human beings by nature don't want god we don't like him just witness the amount of time we give him witness the amount of time he gets on radio the amount of time he gets on television the amount of space he gets in the newspaper or newsweek or time or u.s news and world report witness the amount of space he gets at the university witness the amount of attention he gets in leisure or entertainment we hate god we treat him like dirt though he is the most important reality in the universe and should get the most attention of all realities in the universe it is sheer grace that any of us is breathing right now every one of us has committed treason against almighty god and deserves to die now and the fact that five seconds have passed is sheer grace and that you may live out your life today is grace upon grace and if you don't live it out today you didn't deserve to live it out anyway and god has done you no wrong nobody on planet earth deserves to live one more second we treat him like dirt when he should occupy all our love all our affection all our trust whatever you do whether you eat or drink do all to the glory of god and he comes into our minds once a week a month once a day heresy treason all of us so that's the first observation in paul's analysis we don't want god in our knowledge number two second step in his analysis is that therefore god withdraws his common restraints and lets us sink into the swamp we have chosen now this is what i meant when i said today you're not going to hear this analysis you're not going to hear it on the radio you're not going to hear it on television not going to read it in the newspaper you are not going to hear this analysis because somebody might rise to the god-centeredness of saying america has become so debauched and so immoral and is sunk so far in decay that we deserve god's judgment well that is not a very profound thing to say but this text says something different than that this text does not say our immorality deserves judgment this text says our immorality is judgment that's what the text says he handed them over to a depraved mind because they did not want him in their knowledge the sinking in the mire of our immorality is judgment not that which later deserves judgment merely that's theocentric or god-centered realism that's the analysis that you need to have of your own soul and this society if you're going to appreciate the gospel which is so gloriously sufficient for it that's his second observation in his analysis here's the third observation from verse 20 8 in his analysis of our condition the effect of giving us over is that we have depraved minds god handed them over to a depraved mind our minds some of us tend to think yeah there is there's a real problem with my lust there's a real problem with my greed there's a real problem with my heart and my mind is a kind of neutral objective observer that can make proper judgments about that struggle wrong as the heart goes so goes the mind the mind stands like a lackey in the servant of the heart justifying with clever scholastic schemes all of its desires believe me the mind is not a neutral observer in your battle with sin the mind is there convincing you that this one glimpse on the internet site will do good for you the mind is so depraved this little dishonesty on your tax form is warranted we have a rotten government anyway why should they get my money the mind can do almost anything to justify what the heart wants there is no neutrality here in this head it is pulled around like a leash by the lusts of the heart i picture us like people who have forsaken god and the glory of god as our treasure and have fallen in love with the african black fly that has in it a little round worm that causes river blindness and god in beholding our choice of the little black fly over the glory of god gives us to the fly and the worm and the blindness so that now all we can do is fondle this fly in our blindness and persuade ourselves at all costs to reason it's a tough to velvet it's a tough to velvet that's our condition that's our condition in sin and the last observation paul makes in verse 28 about our condition is that it yields 21 kinds of evil so now we're at question number two why this list we know where it came from now why does he do this why does he pause here to give 21 sins let's read them again starting verse 28 he gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper being filled with all unrighteousness wickedness greed evil envy full of envy murder strife deceit malice they are gossips slanderers haters of god insolent arrogant boastful inventors of evil disobedient to parents without understanding untrustworthy unloving unmerciful objection i hear objection the objection goes like this wait a minute wait a minute i know lots of unbelievers who don't ever go to church and don't by your faith who are not like that they are moral and decent and law-abiding and philanthropic and courteous people and that's true and paul knew it was true for example he he knew the stoics of his day seneca was a contemporary of the apostle paul i have no doubt that he knew the writings of seneca a few years later comes epictetus and then comes marcus aurelius that many of us read in our literature courses in college high moral standards among the pagans like the stoics or the platonists knew this so what's he doing what's he saying as he tabulates the kinds of sins that flow like a river from the rejection of god he's doing the same thing he was doing in verses 26 and 27 we spent two weeks talking about the moral sexual disorder of homosexuality paul says because we have exchanged the glory of god for images like ourselves he has handed us over to embrace sex like ourselves and the point is not that everybody who hands over god for something like ourselves struggles with homosexual desires the point is to say some do and the more god gives us over as a society the more do and it is emblematic of what we've done at the spiritual level that's what's going on in these verses and it should cause all of us pristine heterosexuals to be very careful about pointing the finger because we're all over the place in verses 29 31 and it's the same stuff that's going on here that went on back in verse 27 exactly the same flow of thought exactly the same reasoning exactly the same indictments are going on here that went on there and this is us we're all together in this i tried to make that plain in those sermons and i hope those of you who struggle with homosexual sin do not feel isolated here because more people millions more people will be damned for the sins in verses 19 to 31 than people will be for illicit homosexual relations what's going on here is not an exhaustive list of sins what's going on is a range and an array of the kinds of things that flow out of the human heart when god begins more and more to give us up to the swamp we have chosen when we leave the fountain of living water called god and his glory and i think the reason it is extensive like it is 21 sins why not 5 or 15 why why such a long list paul i think paul's point is that he wants us to know every kind of evil relates to god that's the point every kind of evil is a god issue it's connected to god in two senses if we forsake god this is what we sink to eventually if god doesn't restrain like he did abimelech in genesis 20 verse 6. you remember that [Music] abraham turns over his wife to the harem of abimelech the king to save his skin the thing you do with a new member of your harem on a good night is to have sex with her [Music] something holds him back in the morning he spies jesus wife and god says to abimelech i kept you from sinning that's happening in every one of your lives every day every hour and it's happening in our society which is why it still exists but it need not happen we don't deserve it to happen and any day god could remove his hand to restraint and we would sink almost instantaneously into chaos and anarchy and no courts no police force would ever be able to contain it all he wants us to know that's a god issue every sin is a god issue america [Music] has the highest murder rate of all the countries in the western world that's a god issue if our executives are greedy that's a god issue if politicians are deceitful i'm getting these words out of the list here that's a god issue if we gossip here behind people's back that's a god issue if our talk show hosts are insolent and arrogant and boastful which almost all of them seem to be that's a god issue if our children are disobedient that's a god issue if we are untrustworthy and do not keep our marriage vows that's a god issue and if we are so blind we can't see obvious wrongs and therefore become unloving and unmerciful with each other that's a god issue that's the point of this list it's all about getting right with god and having a reversal of that terrible exchange that we've committed which leads us now very briefly to the last point is there a solution for us types no fingers being pointed here just as is there a solution for john piper for his heart for his mouth for his tongue for his attitudes for his proneness to wander their solution for me and you and then is there a solution for our society and there is that's what this whole book is about indeed that's what this whole book is about that's what this church is about and let me close quickly by telling you from this book that there are three reversals needed here the reversal of the wrath of god for the righteousness of god and the reversal of a depraved or the handing over the handing over to sin we need a new handing over back to righteousness and third is the depraved mind for a renewed mind i'll just give you a key verse for each of those three reversals number one is romans 1 17. the righteousness of god is revealed from faith to faith as it is written the righteous shall live by faith so what we need first of all this has to be settled first god is angry at us in our sin to avert that wrath is the most important thing in the world because if god stays angry at us it doesn't matter how clean we are doesn't matter how we vote doesn't matter how faithful we are to our marriages or how well we bring up our kids if almighty god is angry with us we are destroyed in the end we must have the anger of god averted from us and there is only one way god must in his mercy provide to us a righteousness that he demands from us and we call it the glorious doctrine of justification by faith alone romans 1 17 so you right now sitting in your pew can lift your heart to god and say i am so desirous of getting right with you i know i'm a sinner and i hear this awesome offer that in jesus christ you purchase for me a righteousness that is yours not mine and i can have it for the trusting i trust you that's an awesome thing that's the gospel the second reversal that we need is god to stop handing us over to the swamp we've chosen and start handing us over to truth and purity and that's found in chapter 6 verse 17. i want you to see the word it goes like this thanks be to god that you though you were slaves of sin became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were handed over i translated like that because it's exactly the same word in greek as those three terrible words in chapter one he handed us over to a debased mind he handed us over to lusty handed us over to debauchery and now another handing over is happening and it's all of god notice the first words of the verse thanks be to god not me not my will not my brilliance not my moral powers but thanks be to god that he stopped in my case in the case of everybody who believes he stopped handing us over to sin and began handing us over to truth and purity we need that reversal and you may have it by faith and lastly what about the depraved mind that we got what about this mind that is so prone to twist and distort the bible and twist and distort god and turn him into somebody that i like to get along with a chum and a pal and he has no wrath and he has no standards and he's all forgiveness and there's no consequences what about a mind that creates a phantom like that to be destroyed by what are you going to do with that mind and the answer is romans 12 2 do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind you see that be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what is the will of god good acceptable perfect here's the way we'll end god has ordered and provided a reversal righteousness for wrath he's ordered and provided a reversal no longer handing over to sin but handing over to truth and purity and in that wonderful provision of righteousness clothing us and the work and power of god's spirit within us handing us over to truth our minds gradually become renewed so that the list of 21 sins becomes 20 and 19 and 18 and each one begins to lose some of its power and we get the ability to fight to the end with measures of triumph that shows we are born of god let's pray oh god in heaven i know that in a room this size there have to be people who came in here for whom this message is like a bombshell of unspoken truth that they've never heard the likes of and i ask that the bomb would not be destructive it could be it could be the aroma from death to death if they walk away spurning but oh god it could be the aroma from life to life if you would be pleased to humble the heart and quicken life and open the mind to receive so i ask that you do that for all of us help us to trust you help us to receive you help us to believe in you so that we have righteousness and not wrath a handing over to truth and not sin and a renewed mind not a depraved mind i ask this in jesus powerful name amen [Applause] would you stand for a benediction and now the lord bless you and keep you the lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you the lord lift up his count and it's upon you and open your eyes and shower you with righteousness and hand you over to truth and renew your mind and all the people said amen you're dismissed