The Great Exchange | Romans 1:18-25

All right, again, welcome. My name is Paul Stiver. We like to joke here and hope that we are a duct tape church, but we need the duct tape to hold. So I'm glad we got the sideshow fixed. Keep it professional around here, people. All right, we are in our Romans sermon series, and we are now all the way into week seven. Can't believe it's. Flying by only two more years. Years, no, but this is going to be a two year long series. We are in chapters one through three, our first of four kind of subsections of Romans that we will be going through. And we've got this image of a broken tombstone, because this section is called the Good News. We have four sections going all the way into spring of 2024, with some breaks for summer and Christmas in between. But we've got the good news. We've got how should we then live that image of the dove there the rock. Did God's plan fail? And then finally living in community together. So why those spend why spend two years looking at one letter from the apostle Paul? And the only thing I can say is the reason we're doing this is, as Martin Luther says, romans is pure gospel. We need this news from one of the most influential things ever written in humankind. And so today we're going to look at what is called the great exchange, what we're calling the great Exchange. And so we are kind of taking Romans one eight through 32 and preaching it through a series within a series four weeks. And this will be the second week looking at verses 18 through 25. If you need a scripture journal, we still have some copies in the back. They're pretty cool. You can kind of make notes on the text and on the side and study along with us as we go through this book. But we're looking at specifically in week two, verses 18 through 25, last week, Brian touched on wrath and the cup of wrath that that is shown as this picture of wrath throughout the storyline of scripture that ultimately Jesus drinks. This week we're going to be looking at what is the greatest problem facing humanity. Even when we think of that, we might think of some different things that we see as these huge problems facing humanity. But what is the greatest problem facing humanity? And just to get us in the mindset of problem and solution thinking, I have an Aldi shopping cart. If you guys are familiar with Aldi, it's the best. And we actually just shopped there with my dad on Friday. Okay. No sidebars. All right. So if you know Aldi, you see that little thing there? You put your quarter in, you got to bring a quarter, and that gets you the shopping cart. And Aldi looked at a problem that they were seeing. There was kind of two fold problem. They were seen. One was shopping carts go missing. People just take them. And two, you have to pay someone to bring shopping carts in from the parking lot. Because if you've ever noticed, people don't put them back. All right, so not always some people, the good people. Just kidding. All right, so people don't put shopping carts back. So what was the solution? Aldi said, we're going to create this quarter system where you put the quarter in, you get the shopping cart, but then you want to get your quarter back. So you return the shopping cart all the way to the store. At the end, you pop the little key in, and it gives you your quarterback. That was their solution. It's a brilliant solution. It works. Except for when somebody cuts you off. You ever have this where you're like, all right, I'm bringing my cart back. And someone meets you with their quarter, and they're like, Here, just take my quarter, and I'll take your cart. And you're like, I wanted my quarterback. Now I have this foreign quarter. Anyway, all right, that's just me. But we swim in problem solution thinking all the time. Now, bear with me. This was the only image it wasn't the only image. I searched canva for environmentalist, and this was a picture that came up, a guy hugging a tree. And forgive me, I had to put it I just thought it was funny. But environmentalist, I love the environment. I just thought this was funny. Blame canva. All right, canva put this on there. I did choose it. All right, but but an environmentalist might say the biggest problem we have is we don't care for the environment. We're not thinking about what we're leaving to the next generations. We're not considering all of what life is about. And maybe the problem is just greed or corporate greed. So the solution maybe then, for someone who sees the greatest problem as we've got to care for the environment, might be we've got to act. We've got to educate people. We've got to understand the science, apply the science, live this out. We are surrounded by problem solution thinking. So much so that we might not notice it. So this is a coexist bumper sticker. If you have one of these, don't hate me. I'm just using this as an illustration. This bumper sticker itself, we might forget, we might overlook when we see these. But this bumper sticker itself is advocating for a problem and a solution. What's the problem? We don't coexist. We have different beliefs, so we don't coexist within those different beliefs. What's the solution? Coexist? Have you met people? That's my question. All right, sidebar. But the bumper sticker is laying out a problem and a solution. In fact, the things on the bumper sticker, those symbols represent other ways of thinking about the greatest problem and the solution. For example, moralistic religions, which I mean when I say moralistic religions, I mean do good works, don't do bad works and in the end you want your good works to outweigh your bad works. Therefore you can be accepted into heaven. If your good works outweigh your bad works on the scales of justice, in the end you can be accepted into heaven. That's a moralistic religion. It's based on moral behavior. Moralistic religion might say the biggest problem with humanity is we don't obey God's law, we don't seek God's guidance. The solution then we need to obey God's law. We need to seek God's guidance. We need to be better people, we need to be more faithful. We need to be the people that return our shopping carts. Also represented on there is new age and or eastern religions that might say things like we just got to tap into the laws, the principles of the universe. When we can better understand the universe, we can better understand right practice and we'll have a more symbiotic relationship with ourselves and with the world. Maybe we need to let go of desire altogether. Maybe we just need to have right thinking and right practice. We just got to do better. Maybe a secular would maybe not represented there, but a secular person might look at the greatest problem of humanity and say the problem with humanity is religion. We've got to get rid of religion and kind of the escapism and irrational thinking that religion produces and we've got to expand science, expand the power of human potential, get science into more things, apply reason to more things. As we move away from superstition and as we do that we will solve the greatest problems plaguing humanity. And so here's the uniqueness, that last symbol, the cross is where Christianity comes in. Because all those other solutions, all those other problems and solution models, whether it's religious or irreligious, end up shaking out to be we've got to do better, we've got to try harder. We've got to look within ourselves for the resources to understand what's going wrong and then apply that and apply our own strength to figure this out. In short, we're looking to behavior modification. No matter what those worldviews might say, the problem and the solution ultimately is we've got to do better. Only Christianity says what if we don't want to look within ourselves? What if the problem is actually coming from within? What if the issue goes deeper than simply behavior modification? What if it's a matter of the heart? What if it's a matter of worship? What if the problem is within us? And that's what we're going to see today in our passage. Romans 118 through 25 is going to articulate what the Bible, what the apostle Paul, what the Gospel is going to say about what is the greatest problem plaguing humanity. Scripture is going to answer right here. Why are the question, why are things so messed up? So I'm going to read the passage and we'll come back and make some comments as we go. So Romans 118 through 25 says this for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. That could also say people. It's just a translation thing, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to Him. But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen. So that is our section for today. But we got to get into it by getting into the context. Brian preached on this a couple of weeks ago. That this, Romans 116 and 17 is the thesis statement of the entire letter. Paul says this for I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek, for in it in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. So through the Gospel, God's righteousness is revealed to anyone who believes, and it becomes our righteousness through faith. That's the context of this this revelation of the Gospel. But then within that we get this language of verse 18 for the wrath of God is revealed which Brian preached on last week. We could see this reality, the wrath of God is revealed and hear it as the bad news. But I think it's much better to understand it as the diagnosis, a sobering reality, a wake up call. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of human beings of humanity, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. So there's something about unrighteousness which is just a big word for sin, which is just a short word for wrongdoing that creates this wrath or that causes this wrath to occur. Sin is causing this truth suppression. One way to think about it is if you ever have a beach ball, you're in a pool and you take the beach ball and you hold it under the water. This idea of sin suppressing the truth is like holding a beach ball under the water. What does the beach ball want to do? It wants to emerge. It wants to pop out of the water, but we are suppressing it. This language is active. It's a restraining language that we are holding this beach ball under the water, keeping it from doing what it wants to do, akin to suppressing the truth about God. This truth about God is everywhere we look, but we hold it under. We suppress this truth because of our sin. Why? Martin Lloyd Jones says this you will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner because there's a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves. Even if we try to make ourselves feel that we are sinners, we will never do it. There's only one way to know that we are sinners, and that is to have some dim, glimmering conception of God. And that is what Romans is telling us we are suppressing. We're suppressing who God is, the truth about God. And because of that, there's actually something in us that can't understand this truth. We can't convince ourselves we're sinners. It's like asking a goldfish to describe the taste of lasagna. It can't be done. So we're holding this beach ball of truth about God under the water, this undetected illness that we shouldn't have. If we look around at the creation, Romans One continues, for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, clearly seen ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse. So what is this truth that we are suppressing? God's eternal power and divine nature? We look around at the creation and we say, yeah, this is here. We don't say, who made this? Wow. God has look at the language here. God's made it plain. God has shown it to them. It has been clearly perceived, clearly seen. There's something about us that looks at the creation, though, and forgets God. Actually, just this week this came out, this story came out. This web telescope is just discovering more and more things. And they looked deep into the web telescope, they found six new early galaxies. Quotes from this article about this said it upends what we thought was settled science. Another quote we found something so unexpected, it creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question. Something that was assumed, something that we thought we understood, has now been blown up by new discoveries. Is it possible that that's because God is there, god is behind any inquiries into science? Is the Creator who made all things? In a sense, science, as it uncovers more about the world, more about the universe, is just thinking God's thoughts after him, trying to learn how he made and wired things. But we forget God in that picture. Romans one is saying, it's so clear when we look at all things to see God as Creator, that there must be something wrong with us if we're missing it. Continues for although they knew God, there's something, we know something. Verse 21 for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Futile just means ineffective. Thinking processes were ineffective. Like when you try to navigate somewhere without the GPS. Foolish hearts darkened. The Bible's picture of the heart is not just one of a ticker, right? It's about all your desires, your will, your thinking, what you really love in the world, what you treasure. In Romans, one says, our hearts became darkened, that our thoughts, our desires, our actions are all escue. We are lost in the corn maze of life because we have rejected God. Continuing on, then it gets worse. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. Verse 22 here. The more we claimed and claim to have it all figured out, the more lost we become. I was trying to think of, like, an illustration for this, and I could only think of this one. So this is cilantro. This is a picture of Cilantro on a cutting board. And I had a roommate, kind of college, post college guy by the name of Mike who me and him just butted heads on every have you ever have dumb roommate arguments? I mean, like, just pointless roommate arguments, but this is the best one of all. He and I were arguing what ethnicity more often cooks with cilantro. And I was taking Italian classes at the time in college, and for some reason I was like, well, it ends in a vowel. It's an Italian herb. He's like, no, I'm pretty sure a lot of Mexican cuisine, asian dishes. Cilantro is more popular there. So here we are, and we're arguing about I'm like, no, Cilantro is Italian. I don't think Italians use cilantro at all. I'm arguing. Cilantro is Italian. He's like, I'm telling you, it's in Mexican food. All right, so I looked up an La Times article yesterday described I was just looking it up. I now know, but I was looking it up anyway. Describe cilantro as herb that defines Mexican cuisine. I couldn't have been more wrong in this argument. And I was dug in and actually to the point that he was like, let's just agree to disagree. I was like, no, you're wrong. This is what it means to claim to be wise and actually be a fool. And this is what Romans one is the saying about our hearts. And how do we know that? In verse 22, claiming to be wise, they became fools, exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and creeping things. We make this great exchange of the immortal for the temporary, the vertical for the horizontal, if you will. This great exchange is described as exchanging the glory of God for images that Creator and all the good things he provides for the good things. I was singing about an example. We were playing some music earlier, beautiful singer Michael McDonald, if you know him. A little yacht rock and this exchange would be like worshipping Michael McDonald, the singer, for his beautiful, beautiful voice, incredible voice, that's kind of a joke. He's got a unique voice. Anyway, it'd be like worshiping Him instead of the God who created Him. This is the exchange that we make. We exchange glory for something in the creation. And so it says therefore, God gave them up, verse 24 in the luts of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie. So we've exchanged the truth about God for a lie, but we got to look at this Word therefore. And when we study the Bible, and you're tired of hearing it, when we see the Word therefore, we have to ask why is the Word there? What is the word, therefore? Therefore. Right. I want to see something here. The Word therefore is a response word. God is acting in wrath, giving us up to the lusts of our hearts, as it says, in response to rejection of Him. In other words, he's acting on his wrath in response to our rebellion. Some theologians describe God's wrath as his strange work, in contrast to what just flows out of Him, what comes naturally, what does he want to always do, which is bless and show mercy? Again, we see this response language because God is allowing this, because it's what people wanted. So God gave them up. You want dishonor? Here have dishonor you've dishonored me, and now you will be dishonored amongst yourselves. So again, the great exchange is the glory of God for image is the Creator for the creation, the truth of God for Allah. This is what Christianity is contending is the greatest problem. It isn't our behavior, it's our hearts that we've rejected our Maker. This is why, by the way, the Gospel is Not Behavior Modification, the title that the sermon was given to me, but if I would have titled it, I would have titled it The Gospel is Not Behavior Modification. Why do I say that? Romans one is telling us that our biggest problem is not that we aren't trying hard enough. It's not that we're not trying hard enough. Romans one is telling us our biggest problem is that we live for something else other than God. And we don't have the resources within ourselves to change that. We need to be rescued from that. In verse 25 says because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen. Romans one is telling us we make good things, god things. It's okay to enjoy good things. Good things are good. God created them, but it's not okay to worship them. And idols always demand our worship. They right here that we worship and serve. They demand our service, our compromised convictions. So again, to sum up four elements of idolatry, and I'm stealing a little bit from verse 28 here as well. We didn't look at that, but we suppress the truth about God. We don't honor God. We don't give thanks to God for the good things that we have, and we don't even acknowledge Him. You might ask nobody's. That foolish. Yes, we are. This is our problem. Isaiah 44 isaiah is a prophet, and he touches on this the foolishness of idolatry. And he kind of uses two examples that maybe will land with us. Might not be our modern context of iron smith. A little more carpenter. We understand carpenters a little more. But Isaiah says this the iron smith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry and his strength fails. He drinks no water and is faint. Look at this picture of this guy who's going to fashion a god, but he doesn't even have the energy to be God. Verse 13 the carpenter stretches a line. He marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man with the beauty of a man to dwell in a house. He makes his own idol. He cuts down cedars or he chooses a Cyprus tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Look at all this energy he's putting in. Then it becomes fuel for a man, all this service. He takes part of it, this tree, and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread. Also he makes a god and worships it out of this wood. This man makes a god and worships it. He makes it an idle and falls down before it. Idols always demand our worship. Half of it he burns in the fire over the half, heats meat. He roasts it and it's satisfied. Also he warms himself and says, AHA, I'm warm, I have seen the fire. And the rest of it again, the rest of this wood he makes into a god his idol and falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, Deliver me, for you are my god. We see in this passage emotional investment, devotion. He gives his heart to this thing. Well, what do we notice? Verse 16 the rest of it he makes into a god. He made it. He's worshiping the work of his hands. Romans one is saying God made us to worship Him. This is the exchange. We can't fashion God with our own hands or even sometimes comprehend everything about God. He's other. He's bigger than us. He sees and knows. He's eternal. His power is divine. But we are so quick to exchange the truth of God for a lie. Another classic example of this is the story of the golden calf. God delivers people from Egypt, and as they walk out, they plunder the Egyptians. They take jewelry and gold, and then they're in the wilderness. God's on the mountain with Moses, and it's taken too long. So they take what God had given them, the gifts he'd given them, the jewelry and the gold, and they melt it down and fashion a golden calf, a work of their hands. And they say, these are your gods, O Israel, who delivered you out of Egypt. This is like right after God delivered them out of Egypt. This is the emblematic of our hearts. This is our ongoing struggle. We are made to worship. And so often we exchange God, who we are made to worship for things in this world. This is our ongoing struggle. This is why, by the way, the gospel is for Christians. Why we need this good news, because we have this struggle with idolatry. We treat things as our functional savior. Yeah, okay, I believe the gospel. But really, this thing, our greatest problem is we look at life, we say, my life isn't right. I'm not okay because I don't have right now. Maybe you're thinking about that thing, I'm not okay because I don't have this job title, more money, a relationship. I don't have stability. I just want a free evening. I don't have more me time. We fill in this blank with so many things. Or maybe we go even further and we say, God's not good. God's not good unless he gives me this thing. God, you're not good unless I can have this in my life. I guarantee you, the thing that fills in that blank is your idol. When we start thinking, god, you're not good if you don't give me this. That thing is our idol. So the solution then? Get what you don't have. Do whatever it takes. Idols demand our worship, and they cause us to compromise our convictions. For example, if you live for approval, other people's opinion of you, you will lie. You will tell lies about who you are, about what you do so that other people think you're impressive, so that other people think you have it figured out. Because what matters most is not what God thinks of you. What matters most to you is what other people think of you. So we'll compromise a conviction. I would never want to lie for our God approval. We have a worship problem, and we all worship. I've used this quote before from now deceased author skeptic named David Foster Wallace. But he really taps into something here. This is a commencement speech at Kenyan College from 2005. I like to keep the cultural references fresh here, so I went back only 17 or 18 years. He says this he taps into exactly what we're looking at in Romans one in the day to day trenches of adult life. He says there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice, he contends the only choice we get is what to worship. And now he kind of takes the tangent, he says, and an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship. Be it JC, he means Jesus or Allah or be it Yahweh or the wicked Mother Goddess or the For Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. He continues if you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. He continues On I don't know why he said this to students, so it feels like a little bit of a downer, but all right, I don't know, maybe he's setting them up. Worship power and you worship power. You will feel weak and afraid and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out and so on. Look, he says this the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. Now, we would disagree and say that this actually is what Romans one is saying is sin. Romans one is saying these default settings are sin. But he's exactly right. These are default settings we worship every day without noticing it. Romans one of those revealing to us that the creation, no matter how good it is, is not God and that when we give our lives to something that isn't God, it will never fully satisfy. So again, keeping with the fresh cultural references, again, 2005 a 60 Minutes interview with Tom Brady. At the time he had won three Super Bowl rings. Top of the world, top of his profession, famous, wealthy, successful. In a 60 Minutes interview from Five, he says this why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, hey man, this is what it is. I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think God, it's got to be. More than this. This can't be what it's all cracked up to be. Even when we get the thing that we say, if I just have this thing, I'll be okay, even when we get it, if it is not God, we lose. So what about us? What's something we face? What's something we wrestle with? I want to just touch on one, the idol of knowledge. How easy it is for us to worship knowledge. I put up there ask Jeeves. Does anyone actually remember Ask Jeeves, the search engine? I got a couple. Alright? So ask Jeeves, right? We are living in the search engine era, right? We live in the search engine era. What's the first thing you do if you don't know something? Google how to I actually looked up the top ten howtos from the last year. Number six, how to make pancakes. Isn't that whimsical? That's kind of fun. How to make pancakes. But we live in the search engine era. We are eliminating mystery from life by our own understanding. All the information we could ever want is at our fingertips for us to figure out. But there's something about this endless accumulation of info, this endless accumulation of knowledge that quickly can become, for us, an idol. We might just constantly be going back to the news app to see, okay, what's more news I want to know in case I run into someone. Yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah, I know that thing that went on. I'm in the loop. There's something about the gaining of knowledge that gives us a sense of power, a sense of control, a sense of being in the know. There's something about feeling more educated on an issue than someone else that our heart craves. You haven't read that? You're not aware of what's going on. I'm so guilty. I put the Netflix one up there because I am so guilty of graduating. I have so many degrees from Netflix University where I watch a documentary and say, that's it, this is the truth. I got to live this way. I got to treat my health this way. This is the problem with the world. We pursue the illusion that we can know it all, that we can figure it all out. We worship the idol of knowledge, and here's how we know. Because the ultimate knowledge idol is us putting ourselves in authority over God. Say I know better than you, God. I'll tell you what is good and what is right and what is true. I'm wiser than you. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. This is the Romans one grand problem plaguing all of humanity. It is sin. It is our rejection of God, our idolatry. This is the great exchange. So what is God's response? Let's go beyond Romans one, the greater context of the New Testament. To see what is God's response, we're going to look at one Corinthians 118 through 31. Another letter from the apostle Paul. Because god is going to give us the Gospel. He's going to give us the news about Jesus, the Word of the Cross, which has the power to save us by revealing the Savior for sinners. Verse 18 says for the word of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe that God overturns all of our best thinking with a message about a crucified Savior. That's the power we need to be rescued, to be saved. Continuing on, it says for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ's crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. This word of a crucified Savior, this word of us needing rescue from outside of ourselves sounds foolish to the world is exactly the foolish message that God uses to save God gives us the Gospel, and it is the power of God for salvation. Paul continues for consider your calling, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. Verse 30 and because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. Oftentimes when there's a message on idolatry, what you walk away with is the message repent. But the Apostle Paul doesn't do that here. He says instead, remember. Remember this news, remember this message. Remember what God has done. Believe that. Believe the gospel. Because the solution is far deeper. If the problem is deeper than behavior modification, the solution must be as well. And that's where we have to see verse 30 again. We need rescue to come from outside of us. And here's how it's described. Here's how the Gospel is described because of him who god. Because of God, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord. What does God do about humanity's greatest problem? He sends his son. What is wise to God? What does God think is wise? Sending sinners or saving sinners through the sending of His Son? God says, do you know what's wise? You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to save sinners who reject me through the wrath quenching death of my Son on the cross for all who believe. Jesus in John 14 describes himself this way. He says this I am the way in the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. And Jesus comes and says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. This is how God pulls us out of our foolishness. This is how he saves sinners. Because the one who is the way will go to the cross unacknowledged. The one who is the truth will himself be suppressed on the cross to die for liars. The one who is the life is killed so that all of us who choose death can be brought from death to life through faith in him that we can. Now fools and liars like us who reject God can now be accepted by God, rescued from idle worship and given the gift of eternal life. That we who exchanged that we exchanged the truth of God for a lie. So God exchanged his son's life for ours. That's who God is, and he's worthy of our praise. He knows better than us. So as we continue on in Romans and in life, might we remember that? How do I know God knows better than me? Because he thought it would be fun to save me. He thought it was wise to give His Son for me. What would it look like if we started framing our lives that way? Remembering that God gave his son for us. So as we close in gospel response, there's two things turn to God through faith. In the gospel, God is holding out this offer have eternal life in me. Be set free from worshiping things that eat you alive. Believe in me. Receive Christ as wisdom from God. Receive Christ now in the gospel as your righteousness. I'm okay in Jesus as your sanctification. God looks at me as holy as your redemption, and let the cross be your boast. As one poem says, I have no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me. We're going to move now into a time of communion. And what a great opportunity to remember Christ, to believe this news afresh. Or maybe for the first time, this offer of the gospel, that is for all of us, to set us free from our false worship, bring us back to God. Here at Hope, we practice open communion. We don't ask that you be a member of this church or any church. All we ask is that you do believe in Christ, that you put your faith in Him. And if that's the case, we'd love to have you take these elements the wafer that represents his body broken for us, the juice that represents his blood shed for us. These things that remind us that God has seen fit to save us through the gospel, because that's who God is. So we're going to play a couple of songs. Feel free in that time to take communion and sing. Join the band and sing. And we'll continue on with this service. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, you are God. You have all power. You have all control. You have created us and God, we thank you today for the word of the Cross. We thank you for the sobering realities in the Gospel that tell us of how we reject you. God, we pray you to awaken our eyes, our hearts, our understanding, to see that we reject you. We pray that you would apply the Gospel of fresh to us, that even despite our rejection, you have redeemed best. You have given us your son. You've covered us with his righteousness. We are accepted in you because of your goodness. We thank you for that word today. We pray that we would rejoice in that gospel this week. So continue to work on our hearts. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.