Title: You Must Die.. (Romans 1:22-32)
Contents
When I was in high school, there was someone who was my senior and taught me. This person has been a church member since childhood and has grown up in the church. But strangely, I couldn't shake the feeling that the core of faith was always missing from his education. The core of my faith was missing and I was only revolving around it, so my soul was always full and thirsty. Our souls are strange. If nothing touches the soul, you will always feel thirsty. Then you will hate him and hate him. Naturally, we came out against that senior. They don't deserve to teach us.
One day, the old man came to visit me. He said he wanted to talk, and he brought up this and that story, and then suddenly he asked me. “What kind of prayer do you have so much to pray for?” I answered naively. How many mistakes can we live without prayer? Then he said, "I have no sin, so I have nothing to say to pray." I was startled. Are you not guilty? But he was naturally saying, "What am I guilty of? No matter how much I think before God, I am innocent." I was surprised. I thought this man was not yet a believer. After that, he gradually left the church. And I lived as a free man. After that, I heard that he went through a lot of trials and is now back in the church.
In the old days, Korean toilets were called backgans. It is said that the word “between” is a Chinese expression and a toilet is a Japanese expression. In pure Korean language, it's a hindsight. In the back room, if you go to the countryside, there was a toilet where you could build a wall with mud walls, cover the roof with straw, and there was no door, and the wind blew through. Do you know the behind-the-scenes work where you put a large pot underneath, put two boards on top of it, and then sit down and do your work? How much does it smell when you first walk in? You have to cover your nose to get in. But when you go in and sit down, you just have to be there. Then, when I get used to it, I go in with a newspaper and sit back and read the newspaper. Even though there are all kinds of dirty things in it. Ham Seok-heon said that this is the nature of sin. It's scary and even scary at first, but once you get used to it, you can't smell the smell of sin. On the contrary, you can enjoy sin. So those who live in sin do not know that they are sinners.
When man was first created and lived in the Garden of Eden, man lived in the image of God. He said that it was the image of God, so it seems that his face was radiant. Just as Moses' face lit up with the radiance he had healed when he came down from Mount Sinai. It is said that Moses met God and restored the image of God as the brilliance of his cave. If humans had not fallen, we would have had the radiance of our faces. Without makeup, you will be handsome and probably have no wrinkles on your face. We saw it in the resurrected Jesus.
When humans fall and are cast out in the Garden of Eden, there are things that humans lost. First, they lost the brilliance of God's glory. Eternal life has been lost. I have lost my joy and peace. It has lost its luscious, sweet fruit that ripens as if it bursts on its own. What I brought out came with only one remorse. What Adam did when people kill us shows that only the fear of conscience is maximized. However, those who have lived in sin for a long time have now forgotten their remorse.
The human heart is not empty. Whether it is filled with God or Satan's, it must be filled. Originally, they lived with God. So there was peace, and there was true happiness. But the heart that had lost God and the knowledge of God was filled with dirty things. Do you know what it is? Injustice, ugliness, greed, and vice. The Bible says that these things will be full. Injustice is a lack of fairness. Ugly refers to evil deeds, such as rudeness, from the word murder. Greed refers to the desire to satisfy one's own desires without regard to the rights of others. Malice is a character that interprets only as evil as possible. The Bible tells us that we will be filled with these sins (verse 29). To be full means to be full. It means that you are full of these sins and you are overflowing with perfection.
When these four evils are established, 17 evils will follow. Envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, slander (slander), hating God, humiliation (indecent), pride (arrogance), boasting, plotting evil (schemers), disobedience to parents, foolishness, infidelity (faithfulness) nothing), ruthlessness, wealth. If counted as a whole, there are 21 crimes. Do you think that ordinary people have some of these sins? All the crimes recorded in the Bible are included. Everything is included without missing a single one.
The deeper the sin, the more sinful it will be. Verses 26 and 27 reveal the truth of that sin. “Women exchanged the right relationship with the man for the wrong one, and likewise the men forsook the right relationship with the woman and burned with lust for one another, and the man did the shameful thing with the man. They have been paid their due.”
It is that they break the normal marriage relationship, men do shameful things with men, and women do shameful things with women. Homo sex is a big issue in the US and Korea right now. What would happen if we climbed up to the beginning of sin riding on this line of sin? It is Satan and the devil who hold the end of that sin. Ultimately, living in sin means being led by Satan and the devil. That is why the Bible condemns such people to death. They are children of devils, so they only do what the devils do. Verse 32 says, "Knowing the ordinance of God that those who practice such things deserve death, not only do they do it, but also approve of those who practice them."
Here is God's problem. If you look at what they do, they should be charged with the death penalty, but the question is, how could God, who created humans, send them to hell? Yet, people who are actually going to die do not know it. That is why the saint Jesus Christ came to this earth in a physical body and carried the cross. He died for our sins and died to pay for our sins. And if you believe in this, your sins will be forgiven.
I am a person who experienced conversion while fighting one sin. It's nothing to other people, but it was a big deal for me. I want to do it and God hates it. So there was a fight with God. It got worse and worse, and after that, I couldn't even eat or sleep. To solve this, I started reading the Bible. I started reading Romans 1:22 and below. But the strange thing is, from the moment I started reading verse 29, I discovered that I had every single sin in me.
Injustice, ugliness, greed, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, hating God, reproacher, arrogant, boastful, evil maker, parents He was a rebel, a fool, a traitor, a heartless man, and a merciless man.
And then my tears started pouring out. I read and re-read this bible. Tears began to flow down the Bible. Here, I fell down before God. There was no single sin. There were countless sins within me. I deserved the death penalty. I was afraid. In order to live, I had no choice but to give up everything and choose God. I spent the whole night crying. And the day we met was a whole new day. It was brand new.
Professor Chun-geun Kim's testimony of faith is being serialized in Christian newspapers. It is said that he went up to the mountain to pray while suffering from cancer. It is said that the prayer was a prayer while blaming God. At that time, God revealed his sin, and he said that he discovered that sin was all in him. It is said that now he has lost his prayers to be cured of cancer and prayed for forgiveness of sins. It is said that he came down from the mountain with the forgiveness of sins from God and the conviction that cancer was born. After that, he wrote down his sins one by one and repented, and there were 52 chapters.
Paul was a man who lived proudly as a righteous man. But after he met Jesus, he confessed, "I am the chief of sinners." He discovered that all the sins were in him, and he realized that among the sinners on this earth, I was the worst sinner. All those who have discovered Jesus are those who have experienced the fact that all sins are contained within them. After experiencing the fear of this sin, you must experience forgiveness to experience God's grace. And you will live with gratitude for that grace for the rest of your life.
We talked about the back room, but those who have tasted the flush toilet cannot go to the back room. I didn't know that before, but now that I go, all the dirty things that are dirty are there. Sin is also frowned upon. Those who have been forgiven of their sins and have been set free from their sins know how full of evil things they were and how terrifying their sins were. So I will not go back into sin. But those who still live in sin do not yet know how many sins are in them. This is the problem.
He who lives in sin thinks he is the cleanest and wisest. Romans 1:22 says: People who live like this say they are wise, but in fact they are fools, Professing themself to be wise, they became fools."
Paul declares that such a sin “qualifies to death.”
There are two sins in Romans. One is singular sin--Sin in English, and the other is sins-sin in English. Sin written in capital letters is the sin of forgetting God and not giving God the glory he deserves. In other words, it is the sin of not believing in Jesus. And the plural sins used as sins in English refer to the 21 sins that occur when you do not believe in God.
Most people take these sins seriously. However, it is Sin that God takes issue with. Because other sins are sins that are caused by losing God.
The sin that God forgives to those who repent is Sin in the singular. When the singular sin is forgiven, from then on, these sins are rooted out and we lose their power. However, if there is an opportunity, these sins will fly away again, so we have to fight these sins to the death. Gradually, with the help of the Holy Spirit, you will live a sanctified life. Therefore, forgiveness for Sin is only once. But even though the sins of the flesh are forgiven, these sins are not so easily removed because the desire does not go away. That is why we need a lifelong struggle against these sins.
We must ask God for forgiveness and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. That way you can win. It is these sins that the forgiven person continues to repent of. Sin does not repent again.
Have you confessed all these sins to God? And have you been forgiven? Are you sure you have been forgiven? If not, please write your sins on a piece of paper. And I want you to put your sins aside and pray for forgiveness.
Now, our fleshly people must die completely. I must die for Christ to live. All sins must be nailed to the cross. Then the Lord will dwell in us filled with the Holy Spirit.