of Romans 1, 28 through 32.

And just that they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer,

God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with

all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice,

they are gossips, slanderers,

haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents

without understanding, untrustworthy, on loving, and on merciful.

And although they know the ordinance of God

that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same,

but they also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Paul's teaching about why a society degenerates further and further into unrestrained debauched, destructive evil is unlike any analysis you will hear today.

And one of the reasons for that is that when a society is thinking into moral decay, it no longer has the categories or the framework to recognize what's happened.

So that the analyses from within aren't accurate.

They are symptomatic of the problem.

The social mind becomes so defective

that the moral decadence is reflected in it rather than being named by it.

Now we live in such a day in America and the inability to render sound moral judgments

abounds everywhere you look almost, which makes this passage of scripture incredibly relevant to us,

precisely because it is so foreign to us. Today, something that doesn't sound foreign,

something that doesn't sound strange morally or spiritually is probably an echo of the atmosphere we're breathing

and therefore of no use to us no matter how good it makes us feel.

We need a word from outside, our defective world and our depraved thinking, we need a word from God.

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