Theology for Everybody: RomansSample

After teaching the Bible almost every week for over half of my life, I have come to believe that the two most important questions we must ask before we learn anything else are:

1. Who is God? 2. Who am I?

In Paul’s opening chapter of Romans, he says that when sinners suppress God’s truth and choose their own lies over it, they come to completely wrong answers to both questions.

First, we tend to think God is not worth honoring, thanking, or obeying because He is wrong and repressive. We can only do this if we make the conscious choice to disobey the Bible and by philosophically arguing away whatever God says, or we can use religious reasoning to create our own ways of being spiritual without God’s consent. Second, we will tend to think we are smart, our opinions are right, and we should be free to do what we want with our minds and bodies as highly evolved animals with rights.

Paul moves forward to talk about how for most of us, the real test of Jesus’ lordship in our lives is in matters of sexuality. When we ignore God’s design, His wrath is poured out, and the truth of God is suppressed. Ultimately sex replaces God and becomes the new religion. As a result, in our rebellion, we worship sex rather than God. Every person worships something. The question is not if you worship but how and who you worship. Paul clearly says there are only two kinds of worshippers:

1. There are worshippers who worship the Creator while they enjoy and steward His creation. They accept the sexuality, gender, and lifestyle the Creator designed for them.

2. There are worshippers who worship creation rather than Creator, which is idolatry. They create new ideologies, different gender identities, and diverse sexual activities as they become re-creators, thinking they are fixing the errors the Creator made when He designed them.

The reason people worship sex as God rather than worshipping the Creator through holy sex within heterosexual marriage has a simple answer. Everything God made, He said, was “good.” When God made the human body and its passions and pleasures, He called it “very good.” The human body is the most beautiful and enjoyable thing our Creator designed. But when we lose sight of Him, we start worshipping our bodies, which becomes demonic worship. Later in Romans 12:1, Paul says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Worship is not merely the songs we sing but also the decisions we make about what we do with our sex lives. When people worship themselves, they will treat sex, gender, and sexuality like a religion with intense devotion, “evangelizing” and encouraging others to join them. They make their views the entire source of their identities instead of God.

Today’s Reflection

What created thing (parent, spouse, friend, child, hobby, job, beauty, ideology, cause, etc.) are you most likely to worship instead of the Creator?