Month: February 2011
Michael W. Sullivant – A Victory Over Addictions
People and nations, even the covenant nation Israel can come to a point where they are abandoned by God. Jesus reiterated this in Matthew 15 when He confronted the Pharisees and then described them to the disciples. He said this, “They’re blind leaders of the blind. Let them alone.” When God lets you go, it’s serious. When Jesus pronounces over you abandonment, it’s serious.
Now I’m going to say something, you’re going to have to hold on to your seat a little bit. I’m convinced beyond doubt that in this same sense, God has abandoned America. I know that’s a strong thing to say and I’m going to show you why I believe you can see that clearly in Scripture.
The first thing you look for in a society you’re trying to discern whether God has abandoned that society is whether or not that society has gone through a sexual revolution so that illicit sex, adultery, every form of immorality is accepted as normal in that society. And we’re there.
Now how do we know when this has happened? Note the progression. Verse 24, “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them.” Impurity speaks of sexual sin. The first thing that happens in a nation when it is abandoned by God is a sexual revolution. Moral, sexual perversion, pornographic desire describes the general character of the culture. You can’t even count how many million pornographic web sites there are. When a society is abandoned by God, it operates out of its own perverse sexual passion without restraint. You can go back to the 60’s and the sexual revolution of the flower children, or Hugh Hefner in the Playboy world and it has gone like a flood since then. It is characterized by, as you look at verse 24, lust coming from inside as Jesus said, “What comes out of the heart of a man is what defiles him,” leading to impurity, this means sexual impurity, and to the dishonoring of their bodies. The heart is wicked and the bodies demonstrate it. The body follows the heart. Lust conceives in the heart, James says, and brings forth sin and sin brings forth death.
The second step in the progression, verse 26, “God gave them over, not just to passions that are explicable because they’re men and women, but to inexplicable degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.” You know a society has been abandoned by God when it celebrates lesbian sex. God has given them over…gross affections, unnatural, unthinkable.
So you follow a sexual revolution with a homosexual revolution, and homosexuality becomes normalized. Verse 27 adds the male part, “In the same way the men abandon the natural function of the women burned in their desire toward one another..” And by the way, it is a burning that is just hard to comprehend. There was a man named Halpern(?) who was the coroner for the city of New York and he did, I think, 26 or 28 thousand autopsies in his day. He said we can look at a corpse that had been murdered and tell you whether a homosexual killed that person by the multiple wounds. He’s not a Christian, he’s a Jewish guy and he just said, “There’s something about the passions of that kind of involvement that are not explicable.”
To read full article click here: http://www.oldpathschristianity.com/s…
To download audio sermons & christian hymns visit:
http://www.oldpathschristianity.com/d…
FROM THE PULPIT 