SPROUL: This evening as we turn our attention again to Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, and as we continue to study the first chapter, I’m going to back up a couple of verses to where we ended last week and begin at chapter 1 verse 22 and read to the end of the chapter. And so I would like to ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the word of God. “Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals, and creeping things.
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness in the lust of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. And for this reason God gave them up to vile passions.
For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust for one another. Men with men committing what is shameful and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error, which was due, and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting, being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil mindedness.
They are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them. The word of God for the people of God, thanks be to God. Be seated.
Let us pray. Again, our father, as we direct our attention to this text of sacred Scripture, we pray that we will be duly persuaded of the weightiness of its truth as the verdict that it gives of our estate is that verdict that comes not from pollsters but from you, from your very mouth. And so give us ears to hear what your word is saying.
For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen. The passage that I’ve just read to you is one of the most grim passages that we find anywhere in sacred Scripture.
And yet for reasons I find somewhat strange when people look at the first chapter of Romans say tend to regard these verses that I read tonight almost as a postscript to the main body of the text and move over these verses rather quickly and somewhat superficially. But the assessment of our human condition that is found here is so radically different from what we hear every day in terms of humanity’s self evaluation, that we need to hear this again and again and again. So that we might be fully persuaded of our desperate condition apart from the mercy and grace of God.
I remind you that as we started looking at Romans 1, we saw that the thematic statement in the first chapter was the announcement of the revelation of the righteousness of God, which is by faith. And then I mentioned last week that Paul seemingly, abruptly detours from that central theme of announcing God’s revelation of the gospel, to speak now about the revelation of God’s wrath that is set forth against all humanity, who universally are guilty of suppressing and repressing that knowledge of God that he makes of himself, makes clearly in and through creation, which knowledge of himself as we saw last week, gets through, is received by the creature, enough knowledge to leave every person on this planet without excuse. And we are told that the fundamental sin of fallen humanity is to refuse to honor God as God nor to be grateful.
And then Paul went on to talk about this dreadful exchange, this swapping that we do as fallen creatures, that we trade the glory of Almighty God, the sweetness of his excellence, and exchange that truth for a lie that we prefer. And in this exchange, we began to serve and worship the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Now, when we looked at that last week, we noticed in verse 24 that Paul had said therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness in the lust of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God and so on for the lie.
And then in verse 26 we read again for this reason God gave them up to vile passions and so on. In verse 28, and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased or reprobate mind. Now last week, I emphasized in the closing verses of what we treated on that occasion that exchange of the truth of God for a lie, but I skipped over lightly for the sake of time that first reference that God because of this willful idolatry of fallen humanity, God gave them over.
And three times we read here in Romans 1 about God’s giving human beings over to their vile passions, to the lust of the flesh, to their reprobate minds. And we have to pause and look at this because, ladies and gentlemen, this is dreadful, dreadful stuff. Because when God judges people according to the standard of his righteousness, he has declared that he will not strive with mankind for ever.
There is a concept that we hear all the time in prayers, in hymns, and in sermons, that talk about God’s infinite grace and mercy. And I always cringe when I hear that expression of God’s infinite mercy. While God’s mercy is infinite in so far as that it is a mercy that is bestowed upon us by a being who is infinite.
But when the term infinite is used to describe his mercy rather than his person, I have problems with that, because the Bible makes it very clear that there is a limit to God’s mercy. There is a limit to his grace, and he is determined not to pour out his mercy on impenitent people for ever. There is a time, as the Old Testament repeatedly reports particularly in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, that God stops being gracious that people, and he gives them over to their sin.
The worst thing that can ever happen to a sinner is to be allowed to go on sinning without any divine restraints placed upon him. Again at the end of the New Testament in the book of Revelation when the description of the last judgment is set forth to us, we hear that God will say on that day of judgment. For those who are wicked, let them be wicked still.
He’s giving them over to what they want. He’s abandoning them to their own sinful impulses is removing his restraints and said if you want to sin, go ahead and sin. This is what we call in theology the judicial abandonment, when in God’s dispensing of his just judgment, he abandons the impenitent sinner forever.
Now, let me just talk a little bit about how people who experience in biblical history a sense of being abandoned by God and what it does to them in provoking the most horrific darkness in their souls. I think of Job for example in the Old Testament, who was not fully and finally abandoned by God at all. But for a season was exposed to the evil one.
You remember the story, how it opens in the first chapter, how Satan comes into the courts of heaven after having walked to and fro upon the earth and brags to God, how that everybody here on this planet belongs to him, they all willingly follow his devices. And God says by way of rebuke to Satan, but have you considered my servant Job, who is upright, who is devout, who’s faithful to me. And in his worst cynicism, Satan says to God, huh, does Job serve thee for nought.
Look at him. You’ve blessed him above all creatures. You’ve made him the richest man in the world.
He has everything that a human being can ever possibly want. And you’ve built a hedge around him. You’ve put away a hedge of protection, where I can’t fire my fiery darts against them.
Let me at him, and he will curse you. That’s how the drama begins, isn’t it? And so for a season, God removes the hedge, and he lets Satan at him.
Can you imagine being exposed to the unbridled assault of Satan with no protection from God? To be placed in that kind of vulnerable position, the worst expression of exposure to that kind of satanic subduction came to our Savior in the Judean wilderness where after 40 days of solitude and of hunger, He was for a season abandoned and exposed to the hostility of Satan. And yet our Lord withstood everything that Satan could throw him.
And after the 40 days and Satan left them for a season, the Scriptures tell us that the angels came and ministered to Christ. And then when Christ began his public ministry, called his disciples to himself, and they came to him on one occasion, and said, Lord teach us how to pray. He gave them the model prayer of the Lord’s prayer, and in the petitions of the Lord’s prayer, he said, when you pray say this, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
That’s a bad translation by the way because it’s a parallelism, and the word for evil there is in the masculine not in the neuter gender, and the proper translation would be lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. And what Jesus is saying, pray that you may never be placed in the arena where you are tested, where you are not protected from Satan. Jesus is saying pray that the father will never give you over to sin, because the worst thing that could happen to any person in this world is to experience judicial abandonment.
You know, there is a function in the church that mirrors that very predicament. And we call it in Christian history, the discipline of excommunication. To be excommunicated from the body of Christ is.
. . the only thing worse than that is to be sent to hell in the final judgment.
To be cut off from the body of Christ in this world is the worst thing that could happen to you in this world. And yet there’s only one sin for which a person is ever excommunicated, cut off from the body of Christ and the means of grace, and that sin is what? Impenitence.
There are many sins that can begin the process of church discipline, where you may be censured, you may be barred for a season from the Lord’s table. And all these different intermediate steps of discipline are designed to curb your sin, to bring you to repentance, to restore you to fullness of fellowship in the church, and to guard your soul from utter ruin. But if you remain consistently hardhearted and impenitent, after all the intermediate steps finally, the final step is to be excommunicated.
We don’t take that very seriously. I remember a case several years ago here in Florida, where a woman left her husband for another man, and improperly sought to divorce her husband so that she could be free to marry her lover, and church discipline was brought against her, each consecutive stage of that discipline, and every step along the way she refused to repent. And I remember going to see her on the eve of her excommunication.
And I pled with her. I said, please, don’t go this last step. Do you realize what it is?
If you get excommunicated, the church is delivering you to Satan, handing you over, in the name of Christ abandoning you to your sin. Don’t do that, and she said, well, I never thought about it like that. She said, that’s ghastly.
She says, I hope you’re wrong, but I’m in love with my lover. She divorced her husband, married her lover, and later on, divorced him. But what so terrified me was how cavalier that woman was about excommunication because in our culture and in the church today church discipline doesn’t mean much.
Last week we took in new members, and every new member made vows, and one of the vows that they take was to submit themselves to the discipline of the church because that’s one of the responsibilities that God gives to the church, as Paul makes it clear in his first epistle to the Corinthians. But here, God is for a season at least excommunicating the whole human race. He pronounces his judicial abandonment on all mankind for their refusal to respond to the clear revelation of himself that God gives.
And because by nature we repress that truth, God delivers us to our sin. Now here’s a thought that maybe you haven’t thought of too often, but one you need to be cognizant of, and that is that sometimes, in fact many times, if not most times, our sin that we commit is a punishment for sin. Let me say again.
Most of the time when we sin, we are working out God’s punishment for our sin. It’s not like every time we sin, we commit a new transgression, but the sinful impulses that we harbor, that we embrace, and that we experience in our actual transgressions, those impulses that we harbor in our heart are already the result of God’s judgment for our basic sin. That’s what happens in judicial abandonment.
That’s what happens when God gives us over to our sinful impulses, so that we become slaves to the very things that we want to do. Now again, Paul is not satisfied to speak here in generalities, but he gives a detailed description of how those sinful passions are manifest in concrete, human behavior. Let’s look, in verse 26, for this reason -- that is, for exchanging the truth of God for a lie -- God gave them up to vile passions, for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.
Here’s a text that you won’t hear very often on public television in this day and age. But there are two things I need to say about it. First of all, the apostle Paul when he describes this radical corruption of the human race, in order to paint that corruption as vividly as he possibly can, he sees as the sin most representative of the radical nature of our fall is the sin of homosexual behavior.
This is seen not simply as a sin, not as simply as a serious sin, not even simply as a gross sin, but it’s described here in the first chapter of Romans as the clearest expression of the depths of our perversity. But notice the second thing, that when he introduces the sin of homosexual behavior, he first mentions it with respect to females, rather than males. I find that somewhat interesting, and I have to ask upfront why do you suppose the apostle does it, when he says, even the women become involved in this sort of thing.
Because as long as there’s been human history, it’s always been the male who seems to be most brutish, most sinful, most without conscience and godliness, much more so than the woman who is always understood to be the fairer sex. But when Paul wants to describe the depth of the fall of the human race, he says, even the women. Even the women exchanged the natural use for what is contra naturum, not against culture, not against societal convention.
Paul is saying that these actions are contra naturum, against the created nature itself. So that when we become involved in homosexual practices, we’re not only sinning against God but against the nature of things. All the debates that go on and on today about whether homosexual behavior is acquired or if it’s inherent genetically can be answered in this text right here, that the word of God says this behavior is not natural.
This behavior is against nature as God has created it. Now, I realize that when I say that in our culture, I’m a voice crying in the wilderness. You know that as well as I do.
But we have to deal with this. You can’t just skate over this. But let’s go on, likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error, which was due.
Here Paul is saying is that when men and women engage in this kind of behavior, that there are n. . .
, excuse me, necessary, divinely appointed consequences. There’s a price to be paid when we go this far to defy the law of God that He’s established. They received in themselves the penalty of their error, which was due.
There’s a word there that again has all but disappeared from our culture and from our vocabulary. It’s one that has a very rich history in the history of ethics, going back to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and on down through Western civilization, where justice has been defined not only in the church, but outside the church, as giving people what is due them, what is owed them. And what God is saying here is that when people so act against his law and the law of nature, that he visits upon them their just desserts.
He gives them what is their due. Now, if you’re sitting here thinking about, oh, those terrible homosexuals, am I glad I’m not one of them, fasten your seat belts, because this is just one sin that Paul describes here. And if you can make it through the whole list without feeling any pangs of conscience, you’re a psychopath.
I said psychopath, Fred. Ask me. She can hardly hear.
Come on, Evelyn. So let’s go beyond this, and Paul says, and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, a debased mind, a mind that does not focus attention on whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, but a debased mind is a mind were the thoughts are filled with impurities, with the desires of the flesh, with lust, with jealousy, with hatred against people, with a mind that is in love with the lie and flees from the truth because your basic nature as a fallen human being, my basic nature as a fallen human being is, “I don’t want to receive the knowledge of God in the first place and when it does penetrate into my mind, the last thing I want to do is keep it there. ” I don’t want to retain it.
And so God again uses judicial abandonment. If you don’t want me in your thoughts, if you want a mind fixed on debauchery, you can have it. I’m giving you over to the mind of the reprobate who has no time for the things of God in his thinking.
Again, I mentioned earlier today that I spoke with one of you who are here tonight about this Sunday evening service this morning. And I said to the person, I said, I just can’t get over how many people are coming out to the evening service. I’m amazed.
. And that they will sit still for 50 minutes or so for me to give a sermon. I mean, most of the time, people don’t want anything more than 20 minutes.
That’s their attention span, and why would they sit here for 20 minutes. You know what he said to me. He said, I can’t believe they’re not five times that many people here, and he said, I really believe that if at the end of 50 minutes, you said, let’s take a 10 minute break and then come back for another 50 minute sermon on the word of God, that most of the people wouldn’t stay.
He said, I’d stay because I want to hear the word of God. Do you realize how rare that is among human beings, to have a taste and a love to hear the word of God. Do you realize that if you have any affection in your heart tonight to hear the things of God, that is only possible if God the Holy Spirit has already rescued you from this condition that Paul is describing that is basic to all humanity.
If you have a desire to learn the things of God, then something has happened to plant that desire in your heart, because at one time in your life, you had the mind of a reprobate and you didn’t want a knowledge of God to be kept in your head. Because they didn’t want to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to debased mind to do those things which are not fitting. Is that an understatement?
Being filled with all unrighteousness. Now notice this, if you go out in the street and you ask this question to your friends, do you think man is basically good or basically bad? Do you know what the answer will be 95 out of a hundred times because of the impact of humanism on our culture?
The answer will be this. Well, we’re basically good. Oh, nobody’s perfect, we know that.
We all, you know, do things wrong from time to time. But those mistakes that we make are at the periphery of our existence. They don’t penetrate to the core, to the heart of our humanity.
They’re external things, peccadilloes, as it were, nothing to be all that concerned about, and certainly nothing to seek religion over. I don’t know how many times people have said to me, I don’t need Jesus. Boy, I wish I could say I didn’t need Jesus.
There’s nothing I need more in all of the world than Jesus, and there’s nothing you need more than Jesus. But as long as you tickle your own imagination and say that you’re basically good, basically good people don’t need Jesus. It’s people who not only are tainted by unrighteousness who need to hear this gospel that Paul is going to open up to us in the letter to the Romans, it’s people who he says are filled with unrighteousness.
That’s how he describes us in our natural condition. Again, not merely mildly affected by error or bad habits or mistakes, but filled, saturated with unrighteousness. Would you describe yourself that way, that in your natural condition you’re saturated with unrighteousness?
Well, again unrighteousness is a general term, and he wants to get more specific here. So he begins to elaborate the kind of unrighteousness that fills us as fallen creatures. First of all, sexual immorality.
Elsewhere the apostle writes to the church. Let not fornication ever once be named among you as befitting saints. In a recent poll by Gallup, he said that the incidence of fornication and adultery among born-again Christians has no measurable difference from unconverted pagans in America.
And I remember John MacArthur when he heard that, he said, that’s just not true. He said, the only way you can come to that conclusion is by how you phrase the questions in the poll and how you define an evangelical Christian. Now, I know that true regenerate Christians fall into these sins, don’t get me wrong.
But when they do, it should be a radical exception to Christian behavior, not something that is just generally accepted. But you know where people get their cue today in terms of their behavior is not what God says is acceptable to him, but what the culture says is acceptable. And I say.
. . aren’t you a little old-fashioned, haven’t you lived through the 60s, haven’t you.
. . don’t you know you’re on the other side of the sexual revolution.
And so we have parents giving their daughters, Christian parents giving their daughters birth control pills. And what’s the message you’re giving there? That sexual immorality is okay.
But this is right at the top of the list to describe the degree of our corruption. Sex is a beautiful thing, of divine creation, given to God’s people. But he gives a context for it, and he’s jealous that it be reserved for that context.
And he goes on, wickedness, still general, covetousness. Covetousness is the sign of a person who doesn’t want God in his thinking. As I’ve said to you on Sunday morning, when you covet somebody else’s property or prestige or job, you are saying, God is not just in giving that person that benefit and not giving it to me.
You see, God’s not in your thinking. The minute you’re envious and jealous and covetous of another person, you’ve banished God from your mind. Recently, I read a book on the, this new phenomenon called the emerging church, which I hope is another passing fad that will go away as fast as it came.
One of the gurus of the emerging Church boasted that in the last 10 years of his preaching, he’s never once mentioned the word sin. He didn’t want to destroy people’s self identity and self-worth ego. Well, I’ve mentioned the word more tonight than that guy has in his lifetime, I guess, because you can’t read a page of sacred Scripture without dealing with the fundamental problem of our humanity.
I’m a Calvinist, and I read all of the raps against Calvin, how he was this sourpuss and had such a negative view of human being, teaching the total depravity of sinners and so on. And I challenge people about that. I say, you know, John Calvin, as far as any theologian I know in history had the highest view of human beings I’ve ever seen.
What? When he goes on and on about depravity, it doesn’t sound very high to me. I said, listen, the reason why Calvin takes sin so seriously is because he takes people so seriously.
The reason why God takes sin so seriously is not because he’s a bully or because he’s a killjoy and he doesn’t want his creatures to have any fun, but God knows how destructive sin is to this world, to your relationships, to your friends, to your family, to your marriages. And God has a better idea for what humans are to experience, in his ultimate plan of redemption will banish sin from his world altogether. Covetousness, maliciousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, liars, evil mindedness, they are whisperers.
They whisper their plans because they can’t speak out loud because even in a fallen world their plans are so evil that the world will reject them. So we whisper. Did you hear.
. . ?
Backbiters, anybody ever bite you in the back? Everybody, anybody ever talk about you behind your back? Anybody ever slander you?
Why shouldn’t they? Think of how many people you’ve bitten in their back, how many people you’ve slandered, how many people you’ve talked about behind their back and said things that weren’t very nice. You see, this is not a problem for pagans only.
This is our humanity. We are given to this sort of behavior. Look at the next one.
Haters of God. Who will admit to that? -- that they actually hate God.
Violent, proud, boasters. Here’s one -- inventors of evil things. As if there weren’t enough temptations and sins to arouse our vile passions, we like to think up new ways to sin.
Several years ago, when Bennett Cerf were still alive at Random House, he commissioned a series of books on the classics to have famous people write critical introductions to the reprints of these classics in literature, and the Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone was commissioned to write the critical introduction to Saint Augustine’s classic, his Confessions. And Serling was quite cynical about it, he said, I don’t understand how this book has ever been regarded as a classic because this man goes into great detail about how remorseful he felt as a grown up for being involved in a childish prank from stealing pears from somebody’s orchard. What’s with this?
, Serling says. What kind of a man would have conscience pangs as an adult because he stole pears as a kid. I thought, Rod Serling you’re in the twilight zone.
You’re from the Twilight Zone. You have no comprehension of what Augustine is talking about here. I can relate to it.
I was just thinking about it the other day. Somebody inadvertently put an onion on my plate. I hate onions.
Onions hate me. And when I was a kid I used to go to Nick Green’s orchard and watch Nick go down one row of harvesting his grapes. And if he was on that row, I made sure I was on the other row with a great big paperback stealing his grapes.
I could afford to go to the store and buy the grapes, but it was more fun to steal them. I stole grapes from Nick Green’s orchard. I stole pears from his pear tree.
I stole apples from his apple trees, but at least I liked apples, and I liked pears, and I liked grapes. But the first time I was grounded for two weeks was when I was caught raiding a neighbor’s garden and pulling up every onion from the onion patch that was in their garden, and she saw me, and she called my mother. And my mother grounded me for two weeks.
And I was thinking about it the other day when somebody put that onion on my plate. I said, I’m still paying the price for that, and I said, I understand why Augustine was so remorseful. Because he stole pears when he didn’t like pears, just like I stole onions when I didn’t like onions.
You know why I stole onions? For the hell of it. For the sheer pleasure of destroying somebody else’s property.
What kind of a person would do that? This kind. I wasn’t satisfied with the garden-variety sins.
I had to invent one by stealing somebody’s onions. Disobedient to parents. Young people, listen to that.
When you’re disobedient to your parents, you’re revealing that this is your natural condition. Undiscerning. Now notice all these negative terms.
Undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful. Now you know the scary part about this list. It’s only partial.
It’s merely representative of our corruption. If Paul were to enumerate all of the sins that the Bible spells out, he would have to take up the rest of the book of Romans and then some. So instead he gives us a representative list that should be enough to stop every mouth, to convict every conscience, because surely there’s something in that list that you recognize as a part of your own experience.
And if you want to have an interesting experiment, go home and write down this list, and then tomorrow morning, open up your newspaper and see how many of these things are featured prominently in the news of the day, as we continue to find ways to destroy each other as people. But the worst indictment in the entire chapter is not found in this list of heinous crimes against God, but in the conclusion of the chapter where Paul says, who -- that is, these people who practice all of these things, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death. Listen to what he says.
That we as has fallen human beings, not only do we do these things, but we know. If we’ve never read the Bible, if we’ve never read the Old Testament, and we’ll see this later on, probably next week, God willing, but God has planted in the mind of every creature made in his image a conscience that can discern the difference between good and evil. Even Immanuel Kant understood the universal character of the categorical imperative.
And we call people who have no conscience, sociopaths or psychopaths. That is, they’re sick. But a normal person, a normal fallen person, a person whose normal behavior is the abnormality of sin knows that those who do these things are worthy of death.
Young people, when you disobey your parents, do you really think that God would be just in taking your life for doing that? I do, because God commands you to honor your parents, and if you dishonor your parents, you don’t just dishonor your parents, you disobey God. God commands me not to covet, and if I covet, I am worthy of execution because I’ve committed an act of cosmic treason.
Every time I sin, beloved, I challenge and defy God’s right to reign over his creation, God’s right to impose obligations to me as a creature made in his image. Who am I to tell God that he has no right to restrain my behavior? But you see, we’ve declared our independence.
And because we declared our independence, God has abandoned us by nature to judicial abandonment, and we thought that was God’s setting us free. But we still know the sinfulness of sin. It gets worse.
Not only do those who do such things and practice things, know the righteous judgment of God that they deserve death for it, but not only do they do it, but listen to this. But they also approve of those who practice these things. There’s honor among thieves, folks.
Misery loves company. If I have a guilty conscience, rather than repenting, if I can entice you to join me in my sin and get enough people to join me in my sin, we can get rid of the taboos. We can then have a whole new ethic.
If you don’t think that this is really describing how human beings. . .
I challenge you to watch television for the next three months and listen to the rhetoric going on about that person who’s been nominated to be the next Supreme Court justice. Listen to the people. I listened to television the other night.
There was this lady there for one of the organizations favoring abortion. “This justice is going to take away our right for our own reproduction, our right to kill our offspring, our right to be involved sexually and not be concerned about the consequences. We demand our rights.
We’ll get the law to ensure that we have the right to sin when and where we please. ” The very word “right” has been redefined our culture to mean that everybody has a right to do what they want to do with impunity. God doesn’t give you that kind of right.
But when we act against him in defiance, we marshal all of the support we can get in the culture to lessen our guilt and gain allies in our revolt against heaven. That’s the word of God about our estate. And again thanks be to God, Romans doesn’t end at the end of chapter 1.
The gospel is coming. The good news is coming, and people who don’t care about the good news, perhaps will care if they digest the bad news first, and realize what it is that our Savior has done, what he has saved us from, what he has saved us for, and what he has saved us unto, to be conformed to his image, to love the things that he loves, and to hate the things that he hates. God willing, we’ll carry on with this next Sunday night.
Let’s pray. Our Father, the indictment seems harsh. It sounds severe, until we think about it for even a moment.
We know that we cannot escape this indictment. O, Father, don’t ever, ever abandon us to our sin or expose us to your judgment, for we ask it in the name of Christ. Amen.
