Listening & Learning — A Devotional

Romans 1:24

God gave them up

God gave them up. Romans 1:24 Depravity is only a word; it is true, but it best describes how far away from the virtue God intended for men to display we have gone as human beings. When immorality goes unchecked, there is an inward corruption, a demoralization of a society. It knows no bounds as a whole generation of degenerate people abandon restraints and live shameless lives that lead to hardened people who have no fear of God.

When God-given restraints are ignored, the unclean hearts of men plunge them into the cesspool of bodily uncleanness and vileness. A society that lifts the restraints of God-given laws and defines and interprets the restrictions of moral law according to man's own will soon falls into all forms of sexual sin and claims it to be "natural." There have been, and still are, those who say society is in a "developmental stage," and we are progressing in our climb from the bog of our original evolution.

Instead of more happiness and peace, we have in society alarming increases in suicide, murder, and war all over the world. Some of the forms of entertainment exalt immorality and mock those who believe in purity, integrity, and virtue. The lusts of the hearts of men go far beyond the practice of homosexuality or other sexual sins. Flesh has desires that may or may not be yielded to. The heart's lusts are in the human being even after the body has decayed and turned to dust. Lust springs from within the soul and will never cease in the lost soul.

There is no slavery worse than the slavery to sin. It will never be satisfied, nor can it be controlled by the unregenerate person. The conscious condition of the damned will never be able to overcome the lusts of the heart. Those lusts will never cease to exist. When God gives people over to their own desires for impurity and the degrading of one's own body, that condition does not change. Man makes his choices and must exist with the consequences of his choices.