Many women were talking about power, sex, and Hollywood from Romans 1 and today I want to
talk about the unnatural passions that's mentioned in verses 26 and 27.
Kind of bring you up to speed on the other episodes. I've been talking about how God gives
us over. He lets us have what we want and it always begins with suppressing the truth.
It leads to futility in our thinking. It also then leads to images in our life, lusts of our hearts.
Talks about worshiping the creature rather than the creator in verse 25 and this is what Hollywood
is built on. Hollywood is built on image. Everything's about image. I was listening
to a broadcast yesterday and one of the leading comedians in Hollywood was saying how everything
in Hollywood is basically fake. I remember listening to a podcast with a producer,
a Hollywood producer, a very famous producer, probably a year ago and he was saying look
everything that we do in the movies is fake. Everything is false. If we gave you the real
thing it'd be too boring. So we always have to make stuff up to make it interesting to people.
Life's boring basically and we're creating movies that are exciting. So everything about
Hollywood is about image and so that's what Paul's saying here. He's saying look,
you suppress the truth, you're going to start to have futility of thinking,
you're going to start going toward images and the lusts of your heart. You're going to start
worshiping images and people and that's been true especially in Hollywood now for years and years.
Really starting in the 40s, I would say the 40s is when the motion picture industry really took off
and kind of this idolatry of image became a part of America. But what I want to talk about today
is unnatural passions. Verse 26, 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 unnatural use of the woman burned in their lusts for one another,
men with men committing what is shameful and receiving in themselves the penalty of their
error which was due. So to use a psychological or sociological term we're talking about
homosexuality here or some would say same-sex attraction. God's design from Genesis 1 and 2
Ephesians 5 and so many other passages is that a man would fall in love with a woman, a woman
fall in love with a man. God's guardrails with that they would fall in love and have a family.
That's the biblical worldview of marriage and sexuality that sex is between a man or woman,
a monogamous relationship who are married. But now we're talking about unnatural passions,
that's the word he uses and he talks about this way in which the natural is taken over
with an unnatural passion because of the futility of our thinking. Augustine the great philosopher
and patriarch of the church said and by the way Augustine admitted that he had a homosexual
relationship with a man before he got saved he said quote I contaminated the spring of male
friendship with the dirt of lust. Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century said the vice of homosexuality
is against nature and a slap in the face of God end quote. Rosaria Butterfield former lesbian
and professor at Syracuse University has said quote homosexuality is not the core
of our rebellion against God, a desire to be like God is. So what she's saying is homosexuality is
not the worst sin, the worst sin is our desire to be God in and of ourselves. A desire to be the one
who gets to declare good and evil, play judge rather than be judged, a desire to use God's
creation for our own gratification rather than with the pleasure and for his glory.
So it's with a heavy heart that I share some of these statistics because God loves all people
but God so loved the world everybody that he gave his only begotten son and he loves the homosexual
and he loves him or her who are caught in the grip of this unnatural passion.
The American Psychological Association
and acknowledges, quote, higher rates of anxiety, mood,
and substance abuse disorders, and suicidal thoughts
among people ages 15 to 54 with same-sex partners,
and higher use of mental health services in men and women
reporting same-sex partners.
One study showed that 40.2% of homosexual men
consider suicide compared to 7.2%
of the heterosexual population.
Men and women, that's incredible.
Six times higher rate of suicidal ideations
among men who are involved in homosexual relationships.
I will share statistics we have from the Alliance
of Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity
in Researching Homosexuality.
It consists of a strikingly greater incidence
of a wider range of mental health disorders
among homosexual men and women, specifically
substance abuse, depression, and suicidal ideations,
but also extending to pathological risk-taking,
high breakup rates of relationships,
and sexual addiction.
Here's a census of the data.
So I have pages and pages of information,
but I've tried to synthesize what
I've found into just a few parts as it
relates to these unnatural passions of homosexuality.
Despite the AIDS risk, homosexuals repeatedly
continue to indulge in unsafe sex practices.
Homosexuals represent the highest number
of STD, or sexually transmitted disease, cases.
More than one third of homosexual men and women
are substance abusers.
Homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals
to have mental health concerns, such as eating disorders,
personality disorders, paranoia, depression, and anxiety.
Homosexual relationships are more violent
than heterosexual relationships.
This is really, really interesting.
Catch this.
Societal bias and the discrimination
that's involved with homosexual men and women
do not, in and of themselves, contribute
to the majority of homosexual maladaptivity.
Lesbian women are 19% greater risk
of getting syphilis than heterosexual women.
San Francisco, one of the most openly gay cities in America,
compared to the national average,
have twice the rate of infectious hepatitis A,
three times the rate of hepatitis B,
and 22 times the rate of venereal disease.
The British gay lifestyle magazine called Attitude
recently discussed the worrying high rates
of mental health and dependency problems among gay men.
The gospel message is not, let the gay become straight,
but let the dead, and that's all of us,
become alive in Christ.
So the statistics show that suicidal ideations
among gay men and women has very little
to do with the societal views.
Because if we look at society today,
and I don't have all those statistics here today,
but the incredible number of acceptance
within our culture toward homosexuality
over the last 10 years is amazing.
And yet, the suicide rates have only increased.
Because it appears from the studies that have been done
that men and women, as we all know,
are longing for relationships.
We're all longing for connectivity.
And yet, within the unnatural passions of homosexuality,
those relationships are short-lived.
They just are.
The average relationship for a homosexual man
is less than three years.
And for lesbian women, it's just a little over three years.
So the breakup rate is astounding.
And that most of the suicidal ideations
in homosexual relationships are due to the breakup rate
within those relationships.
In the introduction from a book called Heavy Burdens,
Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience
Harm in the Church, author Bridget Rivera,
who describes herself as a lesbian who
follows what's known as a traditional sexual ethic,
choosing celibacy as a vocation instead of marriage,
describes some of the pain the gay community often experiences
in overt and subtle ways within Christian churches.
From the introduction, she writes,
the people of God represent.
the hands and the feet of Christ to a broken world, bringing God's healing touch to you
and to me and every person we meet.
As the body of Christ, we incarnate the goodness of the gospel.
We represent a life-giving Savior who doesn't rest with the 99 sheep out of 100.
He goes out, He searches, and He rescues, saving the smallest and most insignificant
members of His flock.
He isn't happy with saving most of the flock.
He works until every last one of His sheep experiences the love and the care and the
mercy of His fold, Matthew 18, 10 through 14.
He'll ask us about the one, and He'll want to know how we treated the one.
And on that day, He will declare, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers,
you've done it to me, Matthew 25, 40.
LGBTQ people are the one, but how exactly have Christians treated them?
What is it like to be LGBTQ in the church?
Why is it like that, and how can we change?
So men and women, this is a struggle.
If you're a Christian here, or if you are struggling with same-sex attraction, that's
the question.
We are called by God to reach out.
We are called by God to go after the one, even those who have same-sex attraction.
And in our church, we have a number of men and women that struggle with this.
We have a number of men and women that have come out of the same-sex attraction world,
some of which were actually prostitutes, prostituting themselves actually in Hollywood.
And so they're set free now.
They're walking in a new freedom that they have in Christ.
But this is the battle, right?
This is the fight that we have.
And so I want to say to all of those that are listening that have that struggle, I ask
for your forgiveness for the church.
We haven't done a great job in loving you.
And yet Romans 1 is also clear that God gives us over to the lust of our hearts, even to
unnatural passions, but there's hope.
New life comes in Christ.
That's the point.
We're all in this power, sex, and Hollywood because the reality is the first word I use
is power.
And the power of the gospel is this, 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, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the
just shall live by faith, everyone.
So whether we come with opposite sex attraction, whether we come with same sex attraction,
whether we come as one who is a thief, a liar, a fornicator, one who struggles with jealousy
and strife in our lives, all of us are born with sin.
All of us are born natural adulterers.
So when I hear men and women say, well, I was born this way, I say, well, I agree.
So was I.
I wasn't born with the same struggles that you have, but I'm still born with, I think
you could say unnatural passions of adultery because God's natural passions is for us to
fall in love with one person, get married, have a sexual relationship and intimacy within
that marriage.
That's why it says, and he created them male and female.
And in that creation, he gave us his guidelines.
He said very clearly, therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined to
his wife, they shall become one flesh.
And they were both naked, the man and his woman, and they were not ashamed.
So a shameless marriage is a marriage where we're walking in the truth of God under the
guard rails of the kingdom of God.
And so we all are born sinful.
That's the whole book of Romans.
That's the best, the Bible, man.
And I've been, and I've had my struggles too.
And if I'm not careful in what I look at, if I'm not careful in who I talk to, who I
hang out with, I can get myself in a whole lot of trouble for sure.
But walking in the truth of God and walking in the abundance of God, that's the power
of the gospel.
And it's by faith.
We walk by faith.
So that's the point today is that walk by faith.
Don't find yourself in those unnatural passions, but go after the supernatural way.
Jesus said, I am the way and the truth and the life.
The way, the truth and the life is following hard after Jesus and going after him.
I pray you'll do that.
And in our next episode, we're going to talk about one more aspect of this journey.
And that's what I call the dopamine fix in a debased mind.
So check us out in the next episode.