The World is Bad
Romans • Sermon • Submitted
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· 2 viewsThe people of the world (aka YOU) are in a mess of their own doing
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Introduction to Romans
Introduction to Romans
Who knows the Romans Road? This was a thing I was supposed to memorize but never did. Romans is an intense book, and it’s the subject of lots of debate. You can buy a book by NT Wright called Paul and the Faithfulness of God, which is about Paul, but does a lot of talking about the book of Romans, and it’s only 1700 pages. Or you could buy a commentary on Romans by Tom Schreiner, which is only 950 pages. And people argue and argue and argue about the details of Romans, which can seem overwhelming.
But that misses how GOOD the book of Romans is. My favorite verse in the whole Bible is in . So, instead of getting bogged down in the details, we want to spend some time understanding the big picture of Romans. But, first, we have to know a few things.
It’s how we tell people about Jesus sometimes. Which is great, because it boils it down to make it easy to remember. But here’s the problem. We miss how these verses fit into the bigger picture of Romans. So, what we want to do is help you see the big picture.
So, a couple big things to remember when reading Romans.
1. Christianity comes from Judaism. All the first followers of Jesus were Jewish. This made things complicated, because for literally thousands of years, the Jews had seen themselves as separate from the rest of the world, God’s chosen people. And the easy way to tell that they were separate was because of the rules. All the sudden, after Jesus, everybody gets invited to the party. But whose rules should they play by? And how does God connect with both groups? Those are big questions in Romans.
2. Romans is mostly concerned with “righteousness.” Righteousness is a churchy word, but really it just means doing the right thing toward a certain person, usually God. There’s this saying, to do right by someone. Like, if you’re showing a new kid around school, and they point out one of your friends and say, “Hey, that girl was mean to me on the way in.” You might say, “That doesn’t sound like her. She’s always done right by me.” That’s righteousness.
So, the questions we’re going to be asking in Romans are how do we do right by God? and how do we do right by people different from us?
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PRAYER
The World is Bad
The World is Bad
Here’s what Romans wants you to know. The World is Bad. You know this, right? When we were in New Mexico with the high school camp, I missed one of the lunches and stopped to get a quick lunch at this place called Lotta Burger. It sounds fantastic, right? So, I order a lotta burger, get in my car, open it up and my lotta burger had no cheese, and instead was loaded with onions and mustard. The world is a bad place.
In truth, there is bad everywhere. There is bad in across the world in Asia, where unwanted babies are often left out in the cold. There is bad here in the United States, where people destroy their lives and the lives of others to get more stuff. There is bad in your school, where kids are left out and made fun of, where kids argue and fight their friends, and where kids serve themselves instead of others.
The question is: How did we get here? Has the world always been this way?
The Christian story begins with God’s perfect creation, and with Adam and Eve living in perfect relationship to God. They are righteous, they do right by God and each other. But it falls apart. Why? Because Adam and Eve chose their own way instead of God’s way.
Maybe it’s Adam and Eve’s fault. May
The World Chose to be Bad
The World Chose to be Bad
And every single person since then have chosen to do wrong as well. We looooove to blame others for our issues. But Paul makes it clear. No, it’s their fault. They chose it.
It’s not even a matter of them not knowing the right thing. If you get in trouble for, you can always plead ignorance and maybe avoid the consequences. This happened to me all the time in school. “Oh, you mean that assignment was due today? I thought it was due next week! Can I turn it in tomorrow for full credit?” The people of the world can’t get away with that. They know who God is, they know the right thing to do, yet they choose to do something different.
CS Lewis: “Everyone has heard people quarrelling…They say things like, How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?— That’s my seat, I was there first—Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine—Come on, you promised…Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about…quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.” (Mere Christianity, 1).
They know who God is, they know the right thing to do, yet they choose to do something different.
Lewis is basically saying that as humanity, we have a general sense of what is right and wrong that is built into who we are. Most people haven’t taken a class on why it’s right to keep your promises. We just know. Even in vastly different cultures that would disagree on the details, the general shape of right and wrong is the same.
But if people know right from wrong, why is the world so bad? Because they have chosen wrong.
The World is Bad because they Worship Bad
The World is Bad because they Worship Bad
But it’s not just that. There’s actually a deeper answer that Romans gets to. It’s not just about the world’s bad behavior. It’s about worship. The people Romans is talking about knew God. They could see him in the sunset and hear him in the melody of a song and taste him in a cheeseburger (with ketchup, not mustard). Yet, instead of worshiping the God who made those things, they began to worship the things themselves.
And this is where the world has gone wrong. Because bad things happen when we worship creations instead of the Creator.
God created gold. And it’s an awesome creation. But when we start to worship gold (aka any kind of money), all of our decisions now revolve around money. We refuse to share any of our money with people in need. We steal a few dollars out of dad’s wallet. We choose friends based on who we can get stuff from.
But when we start to worship gold (aka any kind of money), all of our decisions now revolve around money. We refuse to share any of our money with people in need. We steal a few dollars out of dad’s wallet. We choose friends based on who we can get stuff from.
God created dating relationships. But when we start to worship a dating relationship, we settle for a girl or a guy who doesn’t push us closer to Jesus. We give away more of ourselves than we are ready to. We reject and ruin our friendships in favor of the boy or girl that we are dating.
God created you and he created your personality. But when you start to worship yourself, you try to make yourself better than you are. You put on a fake face and no one ever really knows you. You’ll talk bad about others or talk down to others. You’ll like and cheat to get ahead.
All that’s wrong with the world starts with people choosing to worship the wrong thing. If the world worshipped God perfectly, there would be no sin.
YOU are part of this bad world
YOU are part of this bad world
But that’s the problem. The world doesn’t worship God. And even the people who claim to follow Jesus don’t always worship God the way that they are supposed to.
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If was a joke, this would be the punchline. If it were a sci-fi movie, this would be the plot twist. Remember how we talked about how we need to remember that Christianity comes from Judaism and how that would be important to the book of Romans? This is where that comes in!
The Jewish people knew the world was bad. They knew that the world chose bad. They even knew it was because the world had bad worship. They looked at everybody else and saw them worshipping idols and things other than God, and how that messed up the world. But they thought they were exempt from all that. They thought that since they believed in God, they weren’t like the rest of the world. But Paul tells them here that they do the same things as all the bad people in the world.
And Paul would say the same to you. I know some of you have grown up in church. You’ve always known and believed in God. Your parents and their parents believe in God. You sing in worship to God on Sundays and Wednesdays. But that doesn’t make you exempt from this bad world. You have chosen bad. You have chosen to worship things other than God. Even as Christians, we chose the wrong thing all the time.
So, what do we do?!
There is Good News
There is Good News
This is not the end of Romans. The rest of the book goes on to explain what Paul talks about in verse 16, the Good News about Christ. Listen again to what it says.
You (& the world) can be fixed
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God’s power saves everyone. It saves those lost in the world, worshiping the wrong thing, who have never known God—the Gentiles. And it saves those who know God, who have grown up in the people of God—the Jews. And it saves us by making us right with God. And the goal of all of it is life in God.
You know how a lot of times we want something, but that thing actually isn’t all that good for us in the long run? Like, growing up, I wanted to be professional golfer. I spent so much time and energy working hard to become a professional golfer and praying that God would make me a professional golfer. But if I had become a professional golfer, I would have missed out on being your pastor, which is far better. I also dated this girl that I wanted to marry. Like, I was convinced that we were going to get married. I prayed that God would make it happen. But if I had married that girl, I wouldn’t have married Karly, and, let me tell you, that is FAR better.
The Good News of God is that God wants to give you life, real life. Not always the life you want, but the life that he wants for you.