3. “The Evil of Disordered Worship” (Romans 1, Part 3)

Last week if you weren’t here with us, we began considering how Paul in Romans orients us to the story in which we are living. We are part of a big, transcendent, mysterious world; there is a cosmic battle that we are part of. And near the very center of this story, what you might call the key battleground in this cosmic conflict, is worship. 

Christianity teaches that the very way this world was designed revolves around worship—that our society, that creation itself only finds order and harmony and health and wholeness when we are united in worship of the true God. And beneath every one of society’s problems, beneath every one of our problems is the disorder of broken worship.

Just as a reminder, by worship I am not primarily talking about what happens in a religious service like what we do every Sunday morning. While that’s important, that’s only one element of a larger lifestyle of worship. Sunday mornings is practice, training of our hearts, orienting our love. Worship, as we have said, is what we do with our lives, worship is about spending our lives on what we value most.

The Bible teaches that our world is broken because our all-of-life worship is broken: racism and injustice, war and genocide, abuse of power and crime ultimately have their root in disordered worship. We, each of us personally are broken because our all-of life worship is broken: our addictions, overwhelming anxieties, failures have their root in disordered worship. And that means our hope, the pathway to everything being made right comes in our worship being made right.

This is an obviously significant and perhaps counterintuitive claim. If it’s true, it means that the central most important thing in your life is for you to bring your mind and your heart and your practices into right worship. For those of you who have kids and long for them to do well, the central most important thing in their lives is for their minds and hearts and practices be turned toward right worship. If this is true, it will affect how we view our work, our free time, our schooling, everything. But, is it true? It certainly feels counterintuitive. Our society doesn’t think much about worship. So let’s consider this further.

This morning’s passage focuses on how something has gone terribly wrong with us. That humanity has made a terrible choice and then buried it. Because that’s often what we do with terrible choices.

Some of you might be familiar with the terrible story of King David and Bathsheba. David abuses his power to have sex with his best friend’s wife, Bathsheba. And when she becomes pregnant, he does whatever it takes to hide what he has done: he is so horrified by the idea of his actions being exposed that he ultimately chooses to kill his best friend rather than letting what he has done come to light. As shocking as that is, what I find equally surprising is that when the prophet Nathan comes to David with a parable that with an analogy essentially what David has done, David has no clue. It’s as if he chose to bury the awfulness of what he has done so deeply that even he doesn’t know it anymore. Only after Nathan explicitly names his crimes does David feel guilt. 

And that often happens. When we act wrongly, we don’t just want to cover up our wrong in the eyes of others. We want to cover it up for ourselves. It is very hard to live with the knowledge that we’ve done something terrible. And so to be able to feel okay about ourselves, we bury it in our own hearts. We come up with excuses that deep down we know aren’t true. We choose to forget things. We make up new stories and try to convince ourselves. We never are able completely to make the coverup work, and living with a lie does a number on us—we become internally disintegrated. But it feels easier than allowing the truth to be exposed.  

Our passage tells us that humanity has made a terrible choice: to turn ourselves away from worshiping the true God. It’s a choice we know deep down is terrible, and so to be able to live with ourselves, we have chosen to cover it up, to bury it. And this lie, Paul tells us in this passage, has done a number on us. We have broken our connection with truth and righteousness. And we have degraded ourselves.

Broke with Truth and Righteousness

Verse 18 speaks of humanity in unrighteousness “suppressing the truth.” The first act in the coverup is to bury the evidence and forget it ever happened.

The evidence in question here is difficult to bury however, because it’s all around us. Verse 20 says that creation shows us God’s eternal power and divine nature. When we look at the world, if we truly allow ourselves to pay attention, it sings to us. It sings of a God who is greater than all that we see. We spoke a bit about this last week:

• When we experience beauty, like an ocean sunset, or a film that ends perfectly, there’s something in it that calls out to us. Artists will often speak of this. Rick Rubin one of the most famous music producers of the past few decades, writes of how in order to create, artists have to open themselves up to the unseen world and they discover that “you are part of something much larger than can be explained.” Beauty does that: it creates an awareness of a deeper reality, dare we even say, of a Creator that we long to know.  
• When we experience someone loving us, we sense an importance, a power that is immensely personal. Where does that come from, if not from a person who is himself love?
• In our relationships, we sense in other people something of extraordinary value, something mysterious and transcendent. We know that persons are much more than mere stuff. If souls are real, how can that be true unless there is a great Person who made all things?

This world, everywhere we look, declares to us the reality of God. 

And creation sings of a God who made and sustains all of this, that we owe everything to this God. In every way, you are dependent on what is given to you. You only are alive right now because you breathe air that you did not form; you are nourished by food and drink that you did not create—at most you gathered what this earth made and formed it into dinner or whatever. You only are because your parents gave you life, and even they can’t really take credit for that, in a sense they bore witness to a miracle taking place within your mother. 

And where does all of this come from? It all had a beginning; it all has a design that allows us to live. We know this deep down. Creation cries out to us that this being who is greater than us is also the one who made it all.

Every day, this world sings to us that God is and that he gave us everything, and it invites us to the only proper response, to join in this song by as verse 21 says, honoring God as God and with gratitude acknowledging that everything we have comes from him. 

This is what is true, and this is what is right, and we know it. And so, in order to feel okay about the choice we have made to remove God from the center of our lives, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance, it is this evidence that we must suppress, this song of creation we must silence in our ears.  

We do this in a number of ways. Most commonly we do this by pretending questions about God don’t really matter, they’re largely irrelevant—sure maybe there’s a god; but that doesn’t make much of a difference for my life. Which makes no sense. But it doesn’t have to make sense for us to be able to bury it for a time. 

We also come up with ideas that give us plausible deniability. Beauty and love, some people whisper aren’t real—they’re just synapses firing in our brains, the product of evolution, and people are nothing more than the accidental effect of primordial soup being struck with lightning. In fact this whole universe was an accident from a massive explosion. Does any of this feel persuasive when we really think about it? So there’s a big bang—but where did all of that come from? And do we really believe, do we really live like everything is an accident and that there’s no such thing as beauty, love, goodness, souls? You kind of have to squint for these to feel like they’re enough to explain things. But the goal deep down really isn’t a full knowledge of the truth—it’s actually just enough to keep the truth at bay. We can wave our hand at these explanations in order to avoid the truth we’re trying to avoid.

But what we often don’t realize is how damaging this is to us. We’re not very good at selective self-deception. Verse 21 says that we have become futile in our thinking, our hearts have become dark. When we choose to shut off the light of our minds, we stop being able to understand other things. When we choose to forget and suppress the truth about God, we also begin to forget that humans are sacred; we forget that everything we have is a gift; we forget that truth is real and important.

And in disconnecting ourselves from reality, we lose touch with what is right. When we forget God is who he is, we don’t acknowledge him or give him thanks. When we forget humanity is sacred, we begin to treat them like animals. When we forget everything is a gift; we begin to take; when we forget that truth is real, we begin to make up our own truth. 

Notice the connection of verse 28: since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. There’s the connection: a break with the truth leads to a break with what is right. And so we see the list that follows: all of the ugliest parts of human behavior “all manner of unrighteousness, envy, murder, deceit, gossip, and so on.” It all stems from our break from reality. Verse 32 says more about this: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Humanity has looked at the way of death and has called it the way of life. 

Imagine our soul having an internal compass that we use to know what is true and right. When we made the choice to turn from God, it’s like we took the compass markings and turned them upside down so that north becomes south and south becomes north. We caused ourselves to believe that truth is false and lies are truth; that good is evil and that evil is good. And we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. Our problems stem from our disordered worship.

Exchange of Glory

Paul says that in this choice to turn from God, we didn’t just shut our minds to the truth, as part of the coverup we also traded what our hearts are meant to revere for a cheap substitute. Verse 23 says we “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal creatures” and then 25 similarly says “we worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” 

New Testament scholar Tom Wright has made the point that when it comes to worship, nature abhors a vacuum. In our lives, we need to revere something. If you look at ancient religions, even as the knowledge of the true God is suppressed, we regularly see societies taking something in the created world that they value and elevating it to the status of a god. Think of Aphrodite, the goddess of love; or Mammon, the god of money; or Hephaestus, the god of technology. Each of these were examples of people seeing something good in this world and elevating it to be worshiped.

Which is weird right? Why would you do that? Living in a secular society makes so much more sense—I’m glad we don’t worship sex or money or progress. Except, of course, we do. We might not use the word worship, but isn’t that what we see? How many provocative ads do we need to see, how much money does Pornhub and other sites need to make before we’re convinced that Aphrodite continues to be worshiped? Think about how our culture responds to the idea of chastity, the idea that one would deny their sexual desires for the sake of some higher principle. It’s not just that people say that’s difficult—there’s a sense that it’s wrong—that of course we should seek to satisfy these desires. That is, we should submit to them. That’s worship.

My guess is I don’t need to convince any of us of the ongoing relevance of Mammon worship: it’s not just that we individuals are often driven by the desire for more money—our entire society is organized around maximizing profits, and the mysterious ups and downs of our economy is given almost religious status—it will determine whether or not our country is happy.  

And then there’s the faith we still put in progress. Even as we enter into an age of pessimism, each generation believes that what is new is better than the old; that a new way of living and thinking is better than the old fashioned, that technology will keep making things better and will eventually get us out of this mess that we’re in. We put a lot of hope in Hephaestus. 

We don’t give them names or make attractive statues of them, but a god by any other name is still a god. 

And so in this choice humanity has made and in the subsequent coverup, what we have done is made a trade. We have exchanged knowing and revering and serving the eternal, immortal Creator of the universe for worship of things of this creation.

And that has been an incredibly costly exchange. Because here’s the thing. What you most revere is also what most shapes you. At a human level, the people you most look up to will also be the people you imitate. That’s obvious, right? So also in worship, we reflect and become like what we most revere. We were made to have the dignity of knowing God and be creatures who become like him. And when we traded that for something far less, we degraded ourselves. 

Verse 24 says the result of this exchange of glory is the dishonoring of our bodies; verse 26 tells us the consequence of exchanging the truth for a lie was being subject to dishonorable passions. We degrade ourselves. The example Paul uses here to illustrate is sex: when Aphrodite is worshiped, we relinquish the dignity of wisdom and self-control. Paul specifically uses here the example of homosexuality, not because it’s the gravest of all sins, but because this sinful behavior is evidence of the grave consequences of idolatry. Giving in to homosexual desires turns us against the very way we were designed to be. As further examples we in our day might consider how our children are sacrificed to this goddess of sexual desire; think of the proliferation of child pornography; think families being torn apart by one person’s desire for a sexual affair. In the worship of Aphrodite, we become degraded.  

And what have people become in their worship of Mammon? What compromises are people willing to make? We even have a phrase for how Mammon worship degrades us. People “sell out.” They are willing to sacrifice some part of their humanity in their pursuit of wealth. We don’t just do it to ourselves: think also of how society is willing to degrade others in the pursuit of wealth, whether that was benefiting from slavery 200 years ago or from sweatshops today. In the worship of Mammon, we become degraded. 

And consider what has happened to us in the pursuit of progress. We are able to destroy entire populations with nuclear weapons, and we are able to clone embryos. We put IPads in front of our infants at restaurants and we give our attention to doomscrolling and social media. We stand at the dawn of an AI revolution, and many have questioned whether that will be good for our society. Yet we charge ahead—why? Because we must not stand in the way of progress! If we look and see what we are becoming, we might recognize that we are being dehumanized, degraded in our worship of Hephaestus.

We have made an exchange, and that exchange has been terrible for us. In turning from the eternal God and revering this creation, we become much less.

Conclusion

Do you see? Do you see how central broken worship is to all of our problems? When we turned from God, we chose to lie to ourselves, and from that point onward, we’ve been internally disintegrated, muddled and confused in our thinking, given over to what is wrong in our actions. When we turned from God, we exchanged the dignity of worshiping the true glorious God and becoming like him for the emptiness of worshiping things of this creation, and so we degraded ourselves. Because our minds and our hearts and our actions have lost their orientation in the worship of God, we have become broken and our society has become broken. Humanity has chosen the pathway of death. Do you see? 

If you do, you need to understand that your seeing this is itself a gift. 

Sometimes one of the kindest things a parent can do for a child as they are getting older is to allow them to experience the consequences of their bad choices so that they can see their bad choices for what they are and hopefully learn from them. And notice what verse 18 says, “the wrath of God is being revealed.” In other words, God is SHOWING us something. He is showing us that we have chosen the way of self-destruction. He’s doing this by letting us feel the effects of our choice to turn from him. Three different times we are told that God has given us up over to what we have become: to our lusts, to our passions, to our debased mind. And even as he does this, he continues to warn us—as verse 32 says, he continues to tell us that this is the way of death. Do you understand? These are not the actions of a God who is seeking our downfall. These are the action of a God who even though we have wronged him is still seeking to set us right. He is letting us see where this choice is taking us, he is exposing the emptiness, the terribleness, the dead endness, the deathwish of worshiping something else, so that we can turn back to him.

How can I say that so confidently? Well, remember how this passage begins. The gospel of Jesus that Paul proclaims everywhere, God’s glorious announcement to the world, is a gospel that comes with divine power to SAVE. It is a gospel that reveals God’s righteousness, that God is making right what previously was wrong. And this gospel is for EVERYONE—not everyone who got it right in the first place. But everyone, all those who refused to honor him or give him thanks; for the very people who chose to worship his creation and reject him. He exerted his power, he sent his Son to make things right for his enemies, for you and for me. It is for everyone who receives this glorious announcement with faith.

And the power of this gospel to save us is that power of restoring us to the worship for which we were created, the worship for which this world was created. A little later in this letter to the Romans, in chapter 12, Paul will say this. Here’s what this means: you can now, through the mercies of God worship him again. You can now offer your body to him as a kind of sacrifice. And though sin brought us into death, through the mercy of God, our bodies are now living; though we dishonored them, God has made them holy again; though we have wronged God, we are now able to please him as we turn to him.

This is what being restored looks like. It is God’s gift to us, and it begins with repentance, turning from our lies, and faith as we turn to Jesus.