From first Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, here's Dr. Michael Milton. Whenever families are going through difficulties or trials or individuals going through trials, particularly the trials of a divorce or a relationship problems or problems with their children or with their work, I say Satan is going to tempt you to stay away from the body of Christ. But I want you to focus on the Redeemer who loves you and just know that in the Word he's going to meet you and you stay close to him in prayer because he's going to meet you in prayer. Don't float off in the midst of your heartache and your burden. Stay close to the Lord even when times are difficult and times are hard. Stay close to the Lord. You grab hold of the creed, the creed that we know, the I believe statements that come from the Word of God. The Bible declares faith comes from hearing and hearing through the Word of Christ. Welcome to Faith for Living with Dr. Michael Milton, the radio outreach ministry of first Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, a ministry with one great passion and belief that faith comes from proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ as found in God's Word and that faith in Jesus Christ is faith for living. This week Dr. Milton brings to us a message entitled, When Your Creed Cracks Your Code Crumbles. The Bible text for today's broadcast is from the Book of Romans chapter 1, verses 26 through 32. Here again is Dr. Mike Milton. Romans chapter 1 says that when you forget God there is a downward spiral that degrades human beings and will destroy society. Remember that in Romans we have seen after Paul's win some introduction and Paul's laying out the whole book and, verses 16 and 17, I'm not ashamed of the gospel as the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written the just shall live by faith. Paul then proceeds on an indictment of human culture both Gentile and Jew. What he is doing now is talking into the church at Rome and he's saying the Gentile world, the European world, the world apart from God looks like this. First of all they knew there was a God they knew it externally because of the heavens. Paul will also say in chapter 2 the law is written on their heart. They know it internally. Ecclesiastes says eternity is written on our hearts. So denying God Paul says the Gentile world began a downward path. When I was in Albania a couple of weeks ago in a mission trip for our church. I went to a museum of Roman antiquities in duress, duresses on the Adriatic Sea on the coast. Albania doesn't have a lot of money to to spend on museums but they had a pretty nice museum of Roman antiquities and you could go through the Elyrian province of Rome and there were even pre-Roman antiquities there. Then there were various relics from the other empires. Albania has been ruled by one empire after another, later the Ottoman empire, then of course for many years at World War II under the communist regime. I saw these relics and these antiquities but there weren't that many of them because they couldn't afford it. But we walked outside and as I walked outside I looked and there was this yard, this fenced in yard. And it looked like a cemetery. And in this place there were Roman antiquities. There were statues which would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in any of our museums I would think. Statues from the Roman era there were architectural pieces of temples that had been destroyed. There were the heads of dictators through the years or provincial rulers. It was a veritable cemetery of empires that they couldn't afford to prop up in their museums or just had them out in this yard. I took a picture of it. It was just amazing to me. Well I thought about that picture, that snapshot as I began to study this passage. Because if you look through human history, human history is also a graveyard of empires. Babylon was a great empire but Sinekurib and Syria came along and destroyed them. They were full of wickedness and evil and along comes Egypt and destroys them. Rome destroys them. On a certain day August the 24th AD 410, someone opened the gate of Rome and the Visagoths and the barbarians of Europe flooded Rome and destroyed it and Rome was gone. In the middle of all of that we have what may be called the first great church historian Augustin. He writes a book called The City of God. In the city of God he says there are two kingdoms that work in the world today. One of those kingdoms is the Kingdom of Man and in that kingdom empires rise and fall. Beneath that and underneath that and through that is the Kingdom of God which is growing in which will never go away in which will one day the Bible says come to a place where the kingdoms of this earth become the kingdoms of God and of Jesus Christ and that kingdom is at work. Augustin said. Augustin said though of the falling city of man, the Roman Empire. He asked this question. Why were their gods so negligent as to allow the morals of the worshippers to sink to so low a depth? Why didn't those gods lay down moral precepts that would help their devotees to lead a decent life? Augustin was saying that there is a link between decency, morality and greatness. There is a link between indecency, human degradation and the decline of empires. This is exactly what Paul is giving us in Romans chapter 1. It is a history lesson for the Gentile world as he is speaking into the church and as he is saying there is no righteousness except the righteousness of Christ. He is pointing into the church that was divided between Jew and Gentile and he was saying that Gentiles this is the way you lived. This is your ancestry. This is where you come from. Now he's going to reserve some other comments and he's going to bring an indictment against his Jewish ethnic, Jewish brothers and sisters and how all of their knowledge of the Covenants didn't do him any good because they weren't faithful to God. But here he's focusing on the Gentile world and what Paul describes here is a picture of a downward spiral that begins with saying there is no God despite all of the evidences of God. And when that happens the human mind and the human heart becomes such that they are hardened and begin a journey on a downward spiral which leads to finally the society that they are in unless there is some transforming power to intervene in that society, the society itself will begin to approve of the human degradation that they are involved in. And this is what I mean when I say when your creed cracks, your code breaks. Now what is the creed? What am I talking about? From the Latin Crado I believe. The creed that Paul is talking about here is the essential creed. There is a God. There is a law Paul says in Romans chapter 2 written on the Gentiles heart and that law condemns me. I am in need of salvation. Paul is saying that this is an apologetic we can have when we encounter human beings on this earth. They know there is a God. They may have suppressed it in order to sin but they know that there is a God. But what we see in Paul's writing is that the creed, this basic creed here of the existence of God was cracked and destroyed in order for them to sin. 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. One time I knew of a situation in Kansas City where I lived where there was a man who was killed late at night and he was found out he was drunk. What was so sad about it is he had to break through a barricade that said bridge out in order to go and to fall off the road into the water. Paul is saying there is a barricade. It is the creed that says there is a God. When you go through that and deny God and deny those parameters and those barriers which God has placed for us beginning the essential faith that there is a God and I am a human being and I am not God. And how can I stand before only God unless God himself provides for me to stand before and how can I enter into that relationship unless he makes the relationship right himself to deny that creed is to break through the barrier and to head to certain destruction. Jesus said you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free and here we see that the truth is set aside. In fact Paul uses the word exchanged. It is exchanged in order for personal pleasure which is temporary which will finally lead to certain destruction. Whenever families are going through difficulties or trials or individuals going through trials I particularly the trials of a not illness necessarily but divorce or relationship problems or problems with their children or with their extended family or with their work or with some scandal in their lives I say Satan is going to tempt you to stay away from the body of Christ. But I want you to focus on the Redeemer who loves you and you come and just know that in the word he is going to meet you and the sacraments he is going to meet you and you stay close to him in prayer because he is going to meet you in prayer. Don't float off in the midst of your heartache and your burden because you are sure to be attacked. Stay close to the Lord even when times are difficult and times are hard. And I would say that as the people of God what do we do when we live in a country which looks like Romans 1. Stay close to the Lord. You pray. You just stay close to the Lord as you are doing today in worship. What do you do? You grab hold of the Creed. The Creed that we know that I believe statements that come from the Word of God. I believe statements that our children are learning in Scripture as they memorize the Word of God in rich your soul on the truths of the Word of God all the more as we see the day approaching all the more the writer of the Hebrew says all the more we meet together.
There is a passage that I think about in relationship to this and Isaiah had a tremendous challenge. His challenge was to go preach to a people who were going to meet certain doom. That is a hard one. You go preach to people but they are not going to listen to you. You go preach to people, preach what I tell you to preach but they are not going to do what I tell them to do. But then Isaiah learns that it will remnant will and the way they do it is this way from Isaiah 820 to the law into the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word they have no light of dawn. The Church of Jesus Christ living in an era that looks like Romans 1 where there is an abandonment in large parts of our public square of God. Therefore darkness begins to cover that part of the square where we deny God. Christians become like miners with a headlight the light of God's Word on crawling in through the trenches seeking to save people seeking to bring the light to other human beings in this kind of society. I believe because of the light of the gospel that we can be the most optimistic people ever. I believe it is the most exciting time to live in all the history of the world. We live in a tremendous country, a great country and a country that has got tremendous problems right now. But we as the people of God have been given the light of God's Word and we stand with the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, the grace of Christ, the hope of eternal life, what an exciting time to be alive. Even if you are in the midst of Romans 1 Paul was writing to a church and he is going to encourage them and build them up. But he is saying this is the condition of the world in which you live. Now my beloved this can happen in your life and it can happen in mine, the creed can crack. As we turn away from the Lord as seasons of life come and we do not follow the leading of the Lord. Our credo, our what we believe begins to be shaken by the storms of life. May God bring you healing. May you know God's grace. May you sense the presence and power of Jesus Christ even this morning leading you to Him, leading you to His wounded side where you see the righteousness that you need He provides at the cross. Until you say with Thomas my Lord and my God, I believe. Well what about the code crumbling? The code of course is how we live. This is what Paul is talking about. Their creed was what they believed. Their code was how they lived and their code just began to crumble, disintegrate. Someone talked about the troubles and the difficulties that are happening in some of the mainland denominations of America in terms of some of the immorality that is now being legislated and allowed. But in every one of those cases there was a time in history generally in the late 1960s where you no longer had to take vows to your creed. Whether you were a Methodist or whether you were a Presbyterian or Episcopalian, the 39 articles are religion or a tremendous creed. But if you say well I don't have to believe those it is inevitable that your code will crumble. It is inevitable. It is unavoidable. Your code follows your heart. What you do with your hands and with your mind follows what God is doing inside of your heart. And so Paul is saying here that the code is crumbling and he brings the indictment. First he shows that God is judicially allowing the rebellion that is taking place and this is his form of punishment. Look at the passage in verse 24. Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity. Look at verse 26. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. In verse 28 and 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. God gave them up. How many times have you heard someone say maybe you haven't but I have people to say the worst thing that could ever happen to me is that God would just leave me alone. That would really be bad or God would really give me what I wanted. Well this is what happens in Romans 1 except what they want is comes out of a debased heart, a heart that is deny God. God wants to minister to you as your heart is for him. David talks about giving to the Lord the desires of our heart and the Psalms. But here the desires of a heart that denies God or wicked desires, even unnatural desires the Apostle Paul says. And we need not get into those, delineate those. We all know what they are and it's quite clear here. But it becomes a form of judgment. Well again, what does this say to the Christian? I think of 1 Thessalonians 5.19, do not quench the Holy Spirit. We can quench the Holy Spirit by ignoring the leading of the Lord by disobeying his clear commands. Now God is not going to judge you the way God would judge someone who hasn't trusted in Christ but God will discipline you and maybe you will get what you want. Don't quench the Holy Spirit. If God is leading you, if God is speaking to your heart this morning that you need to go to Him and ask His forgiveness, don't quench that. To quench that Holy Spirit begins to take you down a path of discipline. If God is calling you to go to another believer and say, I'm sorry, then don't do it. If God is calling you to take a stand, if God is calling you in your vocation, if God is calling you to a new level of love and servanthood in your marriage this morning, if God is calling you, if God is leading you, speaking to you in your heart of hearts this morning and something and you know what it is, do not quench the Holy Spirit. Walk with the Lord, bless we fall into discipline. My beloved, this is a warning for those of you who haven't trusted in Jesus Christ do not go on putting off God because you will face Him soon. And it is a call for each and every believer to listen to the Spirit to what God is saying to us. We see here that the code crumbled in a second way because men begin to sink into a moral cesspool and that's about the only way you can put it. What a mess and how much it looks like our own country. Carnal sensuality that defies nature itself and you know what I'm talking about, so I go no further. gutter minds, violent hearts, wicked mouths, the inhumane treatment of other, in other words moral anarchy. We live in a bad day but we don't have to live like that ourselves. As a pastor my concern is not only to speak into and draw attention prophetically if you will to the cultural deals but to talk about the infection that happens in our own lives. We live in this world and we can become contaminated by what we see and what we hear. We can begin to think it's normal to use trashy gutter language in front of women and children and men for that matter at a ballgame in a public square that's normal to use language that would have embarrassed some of the sailors on you. That's just normal. We've become infected and think that's normal. Well thank god we don't have to live like that. My aunt Eva used to say that we may be poor and live among the poor but we can live with honor and dignity as poor people. She didn't have much food in the pantry but she had a lot of manners in the public. Not much money but she had a lot of generosity. We had an old house but you could eat off that floor. My beloved we live in a culture that has abandoned its creed in many ways not totally thank god but in many segments has abandoned its creed and the code is crumbling. But because of the presence and the purifying power of the Lord Jesus Christ we can live in the midst of that you know Jesus prayed for us. He didn't pray that we were to be taken out of the world but that in the world we would have him and his truth. And that we would be protected. Let me tell you here's the last thing I want to say about this. This is not only about a creed cracking and a code crumbling it's about a crying out to Christ. Paul is making the case that they need what he talked about the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And I think of the words of Fanny Crosby rescue the perishing care for the dying snatch them in pity from sin and the grave. Weep or the airing one lift up the fall and tell them of Jesus the mighty to save rescue the perishing care for the dying Jesus is merciful. Jesus will save that's what we're here to do. Verse 32. They know of God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die but they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. We need to be crying out to Christ because the end of the downward spiral is society itself begins to approve of the wickedness that has taken over. But in the greatest times of sorrow in the greatest times of wickedness there have been a gust and standing talking about the city of God. Joel gave a word that I love to tell people who come to me and they say I'm in the spiral. How do I get out or I'm in the spiral and maybe I have to tell them you're in the downward cycle of sin because you can't get out by yourself. How in the world are we going to change a culture? How in the world are we going to change our own lives when this mess gets in our mind and soul? Always bring them to the book of Joel and I go to chapter 2, verse 25. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten. I'll restore. I will reverse what has happened. And then Joel says my people will never again be put to shame. Joel says you don't have to have shame. In Jesus Christ whatever is in your past you may have gone through that downward cycle of sin in your own life. You may be at some point now maybe your mind is darkened or you're in the grip of lust or you're in a relationship that you read about right here or you're contemplating it or you're struggling with it. And you feel shame on the inside trusting in Jesus Christ leads you to a place where there is no shame and I'm going to tell you why because the cross is shameful. What a wicked place to be and that's where Jesus Christ went for you. He tasted shame so you could receive his purity and you can receive it today. You can receive his new life and go out of here a new person and those of you who are believers and as you're following the Lord and you say I've been contaminated by some of the very things that we're talking about here in my heart or in my mind. You can be clean and God will restore to you these things. When I was a little boy I used to love to go get lost. And I would just go off into the woods looking for lost civilizations like 100 yards behind my house. One time I went looking for one of those lost civilizations and I just thought it was more fun to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the woods as a little fellow until it started getting dark. And I couldn't see and let me tell you that is a frightening place to be in your life. To be so far from home to be so deep in darkness that it grips you and the fear the lostness possesses you. When all of a sudden I heard my call is the way she called me and I began to move in the forest according to the voice and pretty soon she had a flashlight I could see light. And I found my way out of the forest out of the darkness and I did it by following the voice and following the light. The Lord Jesus Christ says in John chapter 8, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness. He says I am the light of the world. What's the way out for our culture? There's no way out other than the light and the voice. What's the hope for your life today? The light and the voice of the one you know is speaking to you today. If you like an audio copy of today's teaching be sure to call or write and ask the message entitled when your creed cracks, your code crumbles. Call 423-648-7914. You can also hear today's teaching on our website at faithforliving.net. This program is now available for downloading onto your iPod through iTunes.com. Faith for Living with Mike Milton is an outreach ministry of first Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga. To learn more about the ministry visit us on the web at faithforliving.net. Your generous gift sent to Faith for Living would be of great encouragement and would help us to get the broadcast out to more people. You're invited to send your gift of support to Faith for Living. 554 McColley Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 37402. Now until next time on behalf of Mike Milton and first Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga may you grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ with a living faith and a faith for living. I'm Dan Parker and this has been a presentation of first Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga. Thank you very much.