I'll be reading from Romans chapter 1 verses 16 through 32. I would ask you to stand for the reading of God's Word. And I'll lead us in prayer before I read. Father in heaven, this is your Inerrant, inspired, infallible word, we pray that by your grace and by your Holy Spirit, you would help us to understand what is written and that you by your spirit would apply it to our hearts and lives for your glory. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Romans. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I read now, right? I get confused when I'm in a different place. We do go to Romans chapter 1 verses 16 through 32. Hear the Word of God. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, For God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 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 forfeited 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. For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. 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 error, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil mindedness. They are whisperers, back biters, 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." Let's sing the Gloria Patri now. Please be seated. When I was here about five weeks ago, I preached two sermons related to a Christian worldview out of the Sermon on the Mount, the passage in the morning on the Beatitudes and the one in the evening on the Lord's Prayer, and wasn't aware then that I would be back to continue a series on Christian worldview. But I want to, as kind of background and introduction for getting into the passage that we'll be looking at in Romans 1 this morning, I want to start, and you may want to turn in your Bibles with me, I want to start with another part of the Sermon on the Mount. in chapter 5, right after the Beatitudes at verse 13. So if you will turn with me there, keeping your finger in Romans 1, because we've spent a lot of time there, but Matthew 5, 13. Where Jesus says, you are the salt of the earth. And if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, and nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven." Now, one of the keys in those verses is the idea of us being salt. and the danger of the salt losing its flavor or its savor, which basically means its distinctiveness. When Christians stop being distinctively different from the world, they lose their impact. When Christians fall into the mold of the culture, they don't help shape the culture. And in fact, are in many of the same dangers that non-Christians in the culture would be. And so, we have to be quite careful about maintaining our distinctiveness. A few weeks ago, when we looked at the Beatitudes on that Sunday morning, we saw that the ethics of Christians is distinctive, among other things, for the emphasis that it puts on character, which is what the Beatitudes describe. So, there's a part of our distinctiveness. And then, when we looked at the Lord's Prayer that evening, We saw that a part of our distinctiveness, if you will, and part of our Christian worldview and Christian ethics is our priorities. And our priorities are what shapes the praying that we do as Christians when we follow the model of the Lord's Prayer. And so it's important that we maintain our distinctiveness from the culture if we are to impact the culture. Now, before we get immediately into Romans 1, turn to Romans chapter 12. And verse 2, probably familiar to many of you. I'll just read the first half of it. And it says pretty much the same thing. as what Jesus says in Matthew 5, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So conformity to this world is the loss of our distinctiveness and the loss really of our impact on the world as well. Let's go back to Romans chapter one. You've seen in your bulletin that I titled the sermon Cultural Danger. And there are dangers to the culture that we live in the middle of. We see those all the time. Don't we? We see it in the political mess that our country is in. We see it in the loss far too often of our children who grew up in Christian churches. We see it most everywhere. Now, still in background for getting into the part of Romans 1 we'll be mostly looking at, I want to introduce the book of Romans to you quickly, and I will try indeed to make it quick. You find that the subject of the book of Romans is the gospel, which simply means good news. That's very clear in the introduction to the book, which is verses 1 through 17 of the first chapter, and clear throughout the book. And it's clear in the first two verses of our text, verses 16 and 17. For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, that is in the gospel from verse 16, in it, The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. So in the gospel, righteousness from God is revealed and something else is revealed according to the next verse, verse 18, which introduces a major section of the book. For the wrath of God, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Good news, verse 16, righteousness from God. Bad news, verse 18 and following. Wrath from God against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. Unrighteousness gets used a couple of different ways in the text, and so righteousness does in ways that correspond, but in verse 18, righteousness is listed alongside of ungodliness, and so the unrighteousness there is the narrower sense of sins, but the broader sense of the term is unrighteousness in terms of sins, but also ungodliness in terms of our heart attitude and lack of worship. Verse 18 interrupts Paul's teaching on the gospel. He makes his basic statement and thesis in 117 that the gospel reveals righteousness from God. And then he drops the gospel for a while and says, maybe I don't have your attention. So let's talk about the bad news. And then from 118 to 320, he talks about the bad news. And then in 321, he comes right back and restates and enlarges slightly verse 17 of chapter one. So Listen to how he does that in verse 21 and 22 of Romans 3. But now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. And then he starts to expand that whole gospel idea of righteousness from God. Now, I wanted to put that as an important part of the context because this morning we'll be talking about the bad news. And we've got to keep in mind that that bad news is, yes, part of why we need to hear the good news, but there is that good news which is very real good news and more real and more good in the sense of being good news because of its answer to the problem of God's wrath because of our unrighteousness. Now, one more thing. about the text in general, verses 18 through 32 anyway, before we look at some of the specifics. We often think of this passage in terms of individual immorality and ungodliness or impiety, but it's written in the sense and in the context of a cultural problem. It applies to individuals, but it applies to culture. If you pay basic attention, as we read through it just a few minutes ago, you remember how it lists lots of different sins, but verse 32 says, who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things, those things that were listed, are deserving of death, not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them. I know you've heard often that misery loves company. It's also true of sin, and that's what verse 32 is saying. It's referring to a culture. And in this case, Paul's referring to the culture of the Roman Empire. the Greek speaking world when he says that in general those sins are approved of by the culture, by others. They not only practice such things, but they approve of those who practice them. And so I want to talk a little bit about that culture. as a pagan culture. Its root problem, its root problem, and I'm going to just skip for time's sake those things that show how much they already knew about God. We can talk about that tonight. But the root problem is verse 25, It says they exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. And you see that they worshipped images, verse 23, like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. And they didn't like to retain God in their knowledge, verse 28. They pushed God aside. In the last words of verse 18, they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. That was happening in the Roman Empire. A book that I've been reading recently by a professor at Westminster Seminary in California, Peter Jones, that's entitled The Other Worldview says that the paganism of the Roman Empire is being repeated in our own day. To give a quick chronology that he gives in much more depth and extent, a quick chronology of what's happened in worldviews since the Enlightenment. Going back to the 1617's, 1500's, 1700's, Locke, Descartes, people like that. It moved in the direction of a secular humanism and materialism which saw reality as all being one thing, a material something. Things that we now say are made up of. atoms and subatomic particles like electrons and quarks and protons and neutrons and things like that. That's all there is. And that was the dominant worldview until the 60s. And Jones says that in the 60s, with the introduction of the age of Aquarius, you begin to see a shift in the direction of a different kind of one thing as the root of worldview, not matter, but spirit. But in the sense of Eastern mysticism, where we run into things, ideas and emphases that are common to our culture now, becoming one with the universe. And our world basically being God, we worship sometimes the goddess, which is the earth, or we're taught to do that. And people say, I'm spiritual, but not religious. And they mean that they're not following the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's religion. But they're spiritual. There's this spirituality Movies like Heaven is for Real and a couple of others lately that have people saying, oh, we know that there's more than just matter when people die and they come back to life and they've seen heaven and they've been to heaven briefly and come back and those kinds of things, something that the The Bible doesn't talk about people doing that way and reporting that way about heaven. And the heaven that they report is not the heaven of the Bible either. I watched this just this past week, Zootopia, a Disney movie, which like quite a number of Disney movies, brings some sort of new age emphasis and a new paganism a new sense of Eastern religion that goes to a utopia of we can all spiritually be bonded together and we can be one together and we'll have a utopia. That's the worldview of our day. Cornelius Van Til, you've maybe heard of. It's reformed an OPC theologian and teacher of apologetics at Westminster Seminary for a long time. Had a lot to say about worldview, but to me, probably the most important thing, different from some of the emphases that others take away from him, is his insistence that apologetics and basically evangelism has the nature of a head-on confrontation with the systems of the natural man. In other words, our worldview against the worldview of the culture. So, in Paul's day, but in our day as well, People are exchanging the truth of God for the lie and worshiping and serving the creature rather than the creator. And that has impact not just on, you know, a cerebral philosophy of life, but a worldview in the sense of impacting the way that we live. It did in Paul's day. It does in our day. And basically, we're told that when they chose not to retain God in their knowledge, verse 28, middle of it, God gave them over to a debased mind in their thinking. But in their practice, he continues to do those things which are not fitting. He's mentioned the exchange of the natural use of women and men in verses 26 and 27 for what is against nature. And then he goes on with this long list in verses 29 and 30 and 31 of things that result from refusing to acknowledge God. All the other things that Van Til emphasized a lot, and very appropriately, is what is called, and it comes right out of verse 25, the creator-creature distinction. Is there just The one thing that all revolves around outside of and ignoring God, whether it's matter or spirit that's not God, but is more in a New Age sense or an Eastern mysticism sense, or do we have God and creation as separate things? And there is that separation in the Bible. And it is to the world view of our culture that especially our children are subject to being influenced by. That they grow up hearing these things, you know, Earth Day, this is Earth Month I think, and it's all about the earth. And there's a spiritual unity that we should have with the earth according to that particular emphasis. And it gets to be in many cases a religious type of thing. Now the Bible teaches us that we should be and are stewards of the creation. But this gets to be a different emphasis and our children grow up thinking oftentimes that even though they believe there's a God, they're influenced by those things that say, but there's no God out there with absolutes for you in terms of right and wrong. And our culture influences the sense of right and wrong of our children. The bad news is that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. That's bad news for our culture, bad news for those who are shaped by our culture. We basically are facing a culture of ungodliness and unrighteousness. Our children are influenced by it. We ourselves may be too much influenced by it. What is liked in this world and approved of are things like those things in verses 26 and 27 and then 29 through 31. Those are approved of. And taking the stand that those things are wrong is considered the most horrible sin that there is. Not approving of everybody else and their choices? Why, that's horrible, our culture says. And we're intimidated by that sometimes. We want to be liked. And we as Christians want to be appreciated and approved of along with everyone else. But Paul is teaching us that this kind of culture that doesn't acknowledge God and His morality, and we're going to be looking tonight at that from the first half of chapter 2, is a culture that is a dangerous culture for us. My fear, some of you may have learned this as well, or learned to fear this as well, is that the next generation, maybe even those of us who aren't, even maybe those as young as me, may face persecution in this country. But our children, I mean, we already see that kind of persecution not in a physical sense very often, but in a sense of mocking, in a sense of disapproval, in a sense of people not getting into schools, professors not getting tenure because they hold to distinctively Christian positions. and kids in colleges and high schools and teachers who will make statements that are distinctively Christians get in trouble. But there are those now who are calling for the recognition that Christianity is the enemy and Christianity needs to be stopped. or at least those people who would speak about it, need to be silenced. We face a real danger. And so part of what we'll look at tonight is some of the answer and some of the optimism that we can have as we view cultural opportunity in light of some of these things. But we're Christians and we need to pray. And we need to hold to a distinctively Christian worldview and apply that in the way we live, living according to the Beatitudes and the law of God and with the priorities that God sets for us. And we need to do so even in the face of a culture that doesn't agree with us. Paul called for the Christians to do that in this book of Romans, but he lays out for us what the danger of this culture of his day and that of ours really is in opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Oh, how wonderful it is that we have the good news of righteousness from God over against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of this world. And we'll talk more about that tonight, but for now, let's pray. Father, Lord, help us to recognize what opposition our culture has to Christianity and what the dangers truly are. so that we can better embrace our own Christian worldview and seek not to be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our mind. Help us not to be those who ignore the renewing of the mind, ignore thinking about deeper things, ignore thinking about our culture. Help us to not just go on watching the TV shows that elevate and escalate the doctrines of a non-Christian worldview. Help us to take the gospel to our world and our culture. We thank you for Jesus Christ and salvation through Him. We pray that we ourselves would turn away from suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and from ungodliness and unrighteousness to the good news that is revealed of Jesus Christ dying for our sins and rising from the dead. We pray in his name. Amen. Let me ask you to stand now for the benediction. the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.