My mom told me when I was
younger, “if you keep lying you will eventually believe yourself.” Those words are ringing true today as I read
CNN’s headline, “Gays receive two victories in their fight for equality”.
We get to see the Word of God
play out right in front of us these days.
Romans 1 speaks about the depravity of mankind, and how it is revealed
through our sexual desires. Not only
that, but that it is only by the Lord’s grace that we are not worse than we
are.
In Romans, God tells us that he
releases us to the desires of our hearts when we do not acknowledge him as God
and trade the truth of God for a lie.
When you read an article title,
such as the one I read yesterday, it proves to me that God’s Word is alive and
that God is at work daily.
Read this passage from Romans 1:
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. 29 They were filled with all manner of
unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder,
strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty,
boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know
God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they
not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
The end result of lying to
yourself (saying there is no God, even though at one time you knew of God’s righteous
decrees and what he expects of you) is he allows you to do what you want, by
handing you over to your debased mind.
Romans 6 says that the wages of
sin is death. When I read the above
passage I see a lifestyle of death and bondage that is a result of not
acknowledging there is a God. Words as
haughty, boastful, slanderers, haters, insolent, strife, murder, malice, and
evil are not words that scream life, conversely, they are words that describe
everything I don’t want to be in life.
Let me ask you, are you stuck in
sin? Is there a specific sin that you
cannot shake? Maybe there are multiple
ones and your life is better described by saying it’s a life of death, you have
lost all joy in life. You constantly
long for more and more, never finding the right quantity of sin to satisfy your
desire, so you consume more, gossip more, hate more, all in hopes that you will
be satisfied, but you’re not. You can’t
wait to get on the phone again and share the latest news, there is a constant
longing for stuff, never finding an attitude of contentment. You love to stir up strife, finding any
little morsel of fuel to fan the flames of dissension. And as we are seeing in the public eye today,
sexual desires are not able to be fulfilled in the way God designed us to
fulfill them so we step out of God’s design in hopes to find sexual
gratification through people of our own gender. These are mere examples of sin
leading to death.
God’s answer to this, stop lying
to yourself and acknowledge him. It’s
that simple. Realize that you are on a
path that leads to death because you are, as I am, sinful and in need of a
Savior. Acknowledge God, by confessing
to him your sinfulness, and by embracing the gift of grace that he freely
offers to anyone who believes in him.
Then get ready to really live.
