All right, so let's read Romans chapter 1 and verse number 26, and I'll read verse 27 so that, again, you can know what I'm talking about if you don't know this passage. It says, for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error, which was meat. All right, let us pray. Father, we thank You and praise You, God, for what You do. We pray that Your watch over us helps to serve You. I pray that, God, You speak to us through this message. Pray, God, You help me to have the boldness to preach. I pray, God, You put aside any distractions or hindrances or things that might get in the way of Your Word. And I just pray, God, You stir in the hearts of each and every person, Lord. We ask it in Your Son Jesus' name. Amen. Now, of course, like any verse, we're going to take this step by step. And so we're going to start with this first idea of verse 26, where he says, for this cause, God gave them up to vile affections. And so this message has actually taken... I started with a clickbait title at first, that not all love is love, because I was going to play off of a phrase that's used in the world, that love is love. And that way people coming into this online would automatically know what they're getting into. And however I change, because I don't like clickbait, and I like to be straightforward and also like to try to incorporate the phrasing that's used in the passage in the title of the message. So ultimately, the title of this message has changed to love that is vile. That's what he means by vile affections. He says there are some things that you can be affectionate towards, you can love these things, you can care about them, but it's not good for you, or not that they're necessarily right for you to love them. And that is something that flies very much in the face of society and the world we live in, because in this day and age, we are taught many times this idea, love is love. And what they mean by that is not just that it's okay because love is love. You know, if you love somebody, you love somebody. They mean by that the idea many times that if it's love, it must be pure. That's what's being taught to you and you don't realize it. You're being taught this idea that all love must then be pure. Because if you're being told you must accept something on the grounds that it's love, and if it's love then it must be okay, then in the background what you're being taught is that all love then must be pure. It's okay, anything you love. And that is an incredibly dangerous standpoint in doctrine when you actually think about what that means and where it leads to. And of course, as I said, in the next few weeks, we'll be getting more and more into that. I will give a very quick thing if you don't understand this, that this passage is getting ready to go pretty deeply into homosexuality. And it's going to use that as the example. that when it comes to homosexuality, that once a person has reached the point that we've been talking about, we've been going verse by verse through this passage, and so once they've passed all these other steps we have talked about, that in their mind they know there's a God, but they don't want to believe in Him and so forth, that one thing that that can lead into is homosexuality. I want to emphasize that's one thing listed in the passage, simply on the grounds that There is a group out there that calls themselves Baptists that thinks that that's all the passage is about. And so just to not be confused with them, we don't think that's all the passage is about. That's one of the examples that are given. In the next few, probably sometime beginning of next year, we're going to get into a list of things by the time we get to that part of the passage. But there's a whole list of sins that when you reject God, your life goes towards this because you no longer have what... what God wants for you as the priority. No longer is God's Word the priority for your life. And one of the places you see that you become affected in that is in your affection. The things you love, the things you care about, are affected by whether or not you care about God and His Word. As soon as you give up on God and you give up on His Word, you open yourself up to love anything. and not in a biblical sense wherein we love all lost people. We want all lost people to be saved. We believe Jesus Christ tasted death for every man. We don't believe there's just anybody on the face of this earth that he didn't die for. We don't believe there's anybody that he wants them to go to hell. He says he's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. So we love everybody in that sense, that we want everybody to be saved. We love everybody in the sense that we want them to have the gospel, we want to help them, we don't want to see anybody's life ruined. Even people who would consider us to be their enemy, we don't want to see their life ruined. Even considering this group that I mentioned that believes this whole passage is only about homosexuality. I am glad in some parts right now that they're going through a hard time because a lot of people who've blindly believed whatever that group, it's the new IFB if you don't know who they are, they've blindly believed anything that they have said are finally waking up and saying, okay, maybe we shouldn't have just drank all of the Kool-Aid. Maybe we should have drank that first cup. And so they're getting away from some of that. But I am not remotely happy for the fact that what took, what had to happen to make the people do that, was to finally see their leader for what he was, and what happened to cause that was that he was accused, I won't say he did it or not, because nothing's been proven, but he was accused of beating his children with an electrical cord until their backs bled, and beating his wife with the electrical cord, too. And his only defense he could give is, I didn't do anything wrong, and the Bible doesn't say you can't beat your wife. So, that sounds like he did it, but that's according to his testimony, and I won't get into it. I'm not happy for a man's family to fall apart because I do care about them and I don't want to see people hurting or suffering. I don't want to see families falling apart. I don't want to see somebody falling in sin or any of this kind of stuff. I can at the same time though rejoice that he's losing some of his cultic control that he had over people. Those are two different things. And I'm using that as an example before I get to the thing that's the more clear example in the passage so that you can see it from a different perspective. that caring about you doesn't mean that I have to accept everything that you care about. Caring about you doesn't mean that I have to say that everything in your life is good and pure, and that God would be well pleased with it, or that it's beneficial or helpful to you. In fact, everybody in this room, you have stuff in your life that if you were to ask me as a pastor to come and sit down with you and try to help you, I would very plainly tell you that that's not God's will for you. The Bible condemns this. You shouldn't do that. helpful to you, or expedient, or any of those kind of things. I'm not saying everything you have is a sin or that kind of stuff. But I'm saying every person in this room, if you were to let me come and help you, there's plenty of stuff I could help you to cut out of your life because it's not good for you. And honestly, you could do the same for me if you know my life. It's fine. I'm not trying to pick on you and say I'm better than you. I'm saying that each of us has things in our lives that are not good for us. They're not expedient, or sometimes even they are sin. And just because I love you doesn't mean that I have to pretend like that's okay. It doesn't mean that I have to pretend like it's not there. And while I hate to use this example, given that my parents are currently going through this and we have people in the church going through it or people who have gone through it, but it is no better example that I can think of than this. If you have a doctor who says that he cares about your life, he took an oath to value your life and care about you and protect you as a patient. And you come to him and he finds that in your life there is a cancerous thing, something that is going to kill you, a destructive part of your life if nobody does anything about it. And he says, well, I love you and this is part of who you are, so I just have to accept it. That's not a good doctor. You go and find another doctor, one who's willing to treat the problem and deal with it. Not someone who's just willing to say, well, you know, this is part of who you are. We'll get you some psychology and some therapy to help you learn how to live with this and treat it like it's not an issue. When there is an actual issue in somebody's life, a real doctor will try to deal with that and try to heal them and help them get away from it. A pastor should also do that thing. Families should do that thing. Everybody should do that. Everybody should do the same thing in that we care enough about one another to try to help one another get away from the things that are destructive, to get away from the things that are hurting or killing or any of that kind of stuff. And so coming back to the verse and this idea that he said God turned them over to vile affection, God means by that there are some things that you can be affectionate toward. You can have an affection for that. That you are affected by your love of that. You are affected by your care of it. There are things you can care about or love that are vile according to God. So not all love is pure. Not all love is love in that sense of what people mean by it. Not everything that you love personally is good for you. I mean, I'm overweight, so you can assume that I love food. I probably, there's quite a few people in this room that are bigger than me, that are smaller than me, sorry, that eat a lot more than I do, so I would beg to differ as to whether or not by that standard, but by some of your standards, like Daniel. Daniel's, I think, he eats like the children's portion compared to me, but no. No, I'm just picky on him, but the point is that There are things that I love, sure. I mean, you understand love, there is a spectrum to it. Then when you talk about love that in the Bible, in Genesis chapter 27, you have, I think, three different verses where somebody refers to Isaac as loving venison stew, that he loves deer meat. He likes to eat it. He loves it so much. Now, we can all agree, I don't think anybody would ever read that passage and say, OK, well, that love is the same kind of love with which he loved his wife. That love is the same kind of love with which he loved his child. You know, we all understand that that's a different kind of love, that it's a degree of love. I mean, he is affectionate toward it. He's affectionate enough that he asked for it for what is essentially a last meal for him. Like this is one of the last things he's expecting to eat. And he says, if I can get one more thing from my son before I die, I want him to go kill a deer and cook some stew for me and I want to eat it. So he does like it. I mean, he likes it a lot. And if you ask me, my favorite food is something Lori makes. It's called sesame chicken. I love it, but would I sacrifice my life for it or kill myself for it? No. If I was told tomorrow that I have to stop eating it or I'm going to die, no problem. We'll cut it out. We won't eat it anymore. It's not a problem for that. So you understand that there are different degrees of love. There are things you love, but here's the truth. Can I say that in a reality that that food that I love is healthy for me? I mean, it's chicken that's been glazed in honey and cooked in sugar and everything else. I cannot remotely say that it's healthy for me. It tastes really good, but it's not remotely healthy for me. The difference between its effect on me and the stuff we're talking about in this passage is that yes, it's unhealthy for me. Yes, if you indulge in that too much, you do damage to yourself. And obviously by my weight, I am indulged in things more than I should. Honestly, most of my problem is that I don't work an outside job anymore. I work mostly in my office and homeschooling kids and on pastoring and all that kind of stuff. But I'm not here to talk about myself. I'm just saying that When it comes to things like, OK, coffee can be destructive to you because you get addicted to it. Sugar can be destructive to you because you get addicted to it. Yes, all that stuff can hurt you. And if you love it, it can be a problem. But the word addicted is usually when it becomes a problem, when you start being addicted to that thing. But the stuff he's talking about in this passage, when he talks about homosexuality, it's not something that you can merely say you are addicted to. You've went beyond that once you identify as a homosexual. See, the issue with homosexuality, when you compare it to any other sin, is this. there's somebody in this room that you struggle with alcohol you don't walk up to people and introduce yourself as hey I'm John I'm a drunk you know this is I'm just alcoholic that's who I am and I'm using it that way because I couldn't think anybody right off the top of my head in the service they got a few of your names are close to that one but You know, if you are struggling with pornography, you don't walk up and introduce yourself. Hey, my name is so-and-so. I look at pornography all day. You don't introduce yourself by those things. Now, you may talk about those with somebody when you're talking to them about things you struggled with. You may share that as a testimony of things you went through, but you don't identify yourself as that I am this. This is who I am as a person. This is my identity. But when it comes to homosexuality, you do. Like, have you ever met somebody who's a thief that the first thing they tell you about themselves is, hey, I'm a thief? The first thing they tell you about themselves, hey, I'm a drunk. Hey, I'm a thief. Hey, I'm a liar. Nobody introduces themselves with those sins because they understand that this is something I do. It does affect me greatly, but it's not who I want to be nor define myself as being. And so even people who struggle in those sins don't define themselves that way. But when somebody goes into homosexuality, always that's what they do. First thing they do is go on social media, they put their pronouns, they introduce this stuff, they put flags everywhere, rainbows, all this kind of stuff because it becomes their identity. And so the issue with homosexuality and the reason why God uses it to illustrate what he's saying in this passage is so that you and I can understand what exactly happens when somebody rejects God. When somebody doesn't care about God, when they don't care about His Word, when they reject the truth like we talked about in the last verse. And in case you missed the last verse, let me read it. It's verse 25. It says, Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. The last step we talked about was when people get to the point where they don't care about the truth anymore, and they worship creation, they worship the creature, they worship themselves, they worship things around them. And so homosexuality is a tremendous example of that. Because when you go into that sin, I mean, literally, it's a sin that defines itself as being proud. I mean, it's Pride Month. Somebody who is an out homosexual is referred to as a proud person. And so somebody who worships themselves, that's what pride is. I mean, it's self-worship, in part at least, not entirely necessarily. But pride is in large part self-worship. And the people who participate in this sin identify themselves as being worshipers of self. worshipers of their own lust, worshipers of their own flesh and their own carnal desires. People who, again, identify themselves that this is who I am. And at this point, we live in a day where the changing of truth can be very evidently seen. I mean, when you live in the day we do and you think that homosexuals are not changing the truth, you'd be crazy. You almost have to be hidden in the brain somewhere to not see that. I mean, you understand that the biggest argument, I understand you maybe don't face it as much here as you do in the U.S., but the biggest argument going on in the country where I come from is should we acknowledge the pronouns people want to be called by and reject all rules of language and logic, or should we realize that just because you want to be called something doesn't mean that I have to violate the rules of my language and call you that. And what I mean, let's use the easy one, when somebody wants to be referred to as they as referred as a and instead of he or she, so in contrast to being called he or she, which is what language would dictate you are a he or a she, You could be an it if you would like. That one I could probably go along with in terms of language. But normally it should be a he or a she. That's the two choices. They doesn't work. Like I'm saying it you might could get by with because it is a singular thing. It is an individual. But when you're an individual and you want to be referred to as they them, that's what you want to be called. That doesn't work. That's not how the words work. Those words are plural. So unless you're two people, that's not the right pronoun for you. That's not language. And so when you're talking about people rejecting truth, it's pretty evident in front of you that people at this point have rejected the reality that they can see with their own eyes and accepted what they feel. And that's what we've gotten away from the fact that who you are, like as a male or female, is encoded in your DNA. Like so much of who you are, it's inside of you and in your DNA and cannot be changed. This is who you are on a molecular level. And yet, because you feel a different way, because this is your personality. And you think about like the craziness of some of this, and some of this I'll get to next week, so I won't try not to get too deep into it right now. But like this craziness going on in the U.S. about what is a woman, and you think about that kind of stuff, and it's like somebody will define it as a woman is someone who feels like a woman. It's like, but that doesn't work, because if you said, what is a pastor? A pastor is someone who defines himself as a pastor, or feels like a pastor, but then what are they feeling like? What are they defining themselves as? If your logic is you are what you feel like, but you can't define what that thing is, that's nonsense. Like this is the kind of argument I would have with one of my children, you know, three, four years old, because they don't understand how words work. This is not conversations we should be having with adults on college campuses. And yet every day in the country I come from, that's what's happening. And we are some sheltered from it here because maybe you just don't talk about it as much in the news as they do there. But it still goes on here. In fact, this country, I think, spends more money on transgender stuff than I think just about any other country. I could be wrong on that. It could be the Netherlands. But somewhere in this area is the country that does that. And so I'm not trying to criticize or attack you. I'm just saying that it's more evident in the news than here where I come from. But my point that I'm getting at is that you want to see in practice, right in front of your eyes, what He's telling you. To the point, it's almost like you're reading prophecy being fulfilled in front of you. When you read Romans chapter 1, just cut on the news. I don't normally promote looking at it, but in this case, you can see the Bible being lived in front of you. that you live in a world where the vast majority of society has said, I don't care about the truth anymore. I don't want to worship God. I want to worship myself and my feelings. And so they have changed the definition of words. They have changed logic. They have changed everything so that now it's getting beyond the point of just saying, OK, somebody doesn't feel like a man. So we're going to call him a woman that now we have to call him plural. He's a they now. He's they them. He's more than one person. Or we'll just make up new words that are completely you know, don't mean anything, zay zim, whatever it is. We'll just make those things up as we go, because that's the society we're living in today. And you are seeing exactly what is described. When somebody reaches that point that they do not care about the Word of God, God gives them up to vile affection. He allows them to love whatever they want to love. And this is where the problems really start to come in, because they don't stop at the first step. And you see this evident in front of you right now, too. Because God warned Israel, and this is where, again, I don't want to get into some of my future messages, but God warned Israel all the way back in the book of Leviticus that if they started to learn and indulge in the abominations that were practiced by the Canaanites, that they, too, would also start to go deeper and deeper into those things, that they would become overtaken by them. And so he said, you may start off by being a pervert. He said, you may be the kind of person who uses a position of authority to uncover the nakedness of women around you. That's what the first half of that chapter is about. But you'll get to the point where you become adulterous and not caring about society. And I didn't clear up the children, so they're clearing out themselves effectively. It's working out already. But you will get to the point where you go from one perversion to the next. And so he says, by the time you get to the point where you don't care about marriage anymore, people, adultery's not a thing, you can go be with whoever you want to and all of that, the next step becomes homosexuality being embraced, which is where we're at now. We passed the marriage one a long time ago. That's what free love and all that was about. And so now you're in this point where homosexuality has become accepted, embraced, so you gotta move on to the next step because man's flesh is never satisfied. The heart of man is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. And so it is never satisfied and it will always go to the next step. And so a man who gets addicted to one thing will always look for the next drug that's bigger. He'll always look for the thing that's stronger and going to affect him more. And so what you see with society is we went past free love to homosexuality, and now we're to the point where we are twisting the truth of what is a male, what is a female, does biological sex matter, does it matter who you are in your DNA, or does it matter how you feel? Because once you get rid of that, once you get rid of facts and science and all this kind of stuff, and you start getting to where feelings determine everything, there are no rules. Everything's out the window at that point. And that's what we talked about really last couple weeks. But I want you to understand that in that same passage, he says it will not stop with homosexuality. He said the Canaanites went past that into beastphilia, necrophilia, all that kind of stuff. And while they're not crying for that in the streets yet, there are people in the corners of the internet who are crying for those things already, that it's okay, that it's just another form of love, because love is love. It's another way of love, that if you want to love someone who's dead, you want to love someone who's inanimate, that it's not a real person, it's your car or something, you want to love something that is an animal, it's okay, because love is love. And so before we said you can't do that because it violates the laws of consent and that was our logic because once you removed God as your authority you had to find another authority. So before we had the Bible we had God and we had a clear-cut authority to tell us what is right and wrong. Society removed that. That's where it began. Remember it goes all the way back and if you keep going back in the chapter. And so once that was removed we tried to use our own human logic and the best we could come up with is consent is what determines the rules of what's right and what's wrong. And if you don't have the capacity to consent, then it's wrong. If you do, then it's not wrong. And so that allowed you to say that you can't participate in necrophilia, bestophilia, pedophilia, all those kind of things, because those people could never possibly consent. They can never say it's okay to you. but we're reaching a place where that's going out the window because feelings are all that matter. Consent is not because you got rid of the Bible. So then logic was next to go away and logic is going away. And so now we're getting to feelings. And that's why you may not feel like it's an important battle. You may not feel like this matters very much. But the reason why the LGBTQ are fighting so desperately hard with all of their strength to make society accept that you're going to bow down. And if I identify as a cat, you're going to call me a cat. If I identify as a female, you're gonna call me they, them, she, whatever I want to be called. You're going to throw away your definitions, you're gonna call me whatever I want to be called. The reason they are fighting with all their strength for that is because this is what needs to be thrown away to open the gates. And once that's thrown away, once there is, you know, Bible's gone, logic's gone, then it's feelings. That's all that matters is feelings. And the only thing that's stopping pedophilia is that. The only thing that's stopping that from being an accepted thing in society is that. and you want to see the proof of it, they're already fighting for it. In fact, I can't speak for here how it was done, but in the U.S., you notice now it's LGBTQ+. It wasn't always LGBTQ+. They started off LGBTQP for pedophilia. You see, they added pedophilia to the list, and people backed up on that and said, no, no, no, we were OK with you loving people who could consent. We were OK with you going after people who could say it's OK to do that to them. But we're not OK with doing it to children. And so they said, oh, OK, yeah, we'll take the fee off, no problem. And so then they switched it to LGBTQ+. So if you don't know where the plus come from, that's where it come from. And if you weren't watching the news when it happened, I'm sure you can go back and find it if you look for it. But I've been around long enough to have noticed that when it happened. That that's what happened before the plus. And so you understand that they tried it and saw it didn't work, so they realized they had to back up. And we have to get rid of logic and follow feelings. And once everybody says feelings can be the standard by which we measure all things, there is nothing that is forbidden anymore. Because whatever you feel is good, whatever you feel is okay, that's what's accepted in society. So what I'm saying to you now is this fight that they're fighting is not simply one of, I want you to respect me. It's one of getting you to get rid of logic. Because once society says, oh, I respect you more than I care about logic, then there is no gate holding back anything anymore. And you can see, again, the proof of that in front of your eyes if you just look for it, because it's all around you. The indoctrination of children, all that kind of stuff is all around you. The grooming of children is all around you. You can see it. The fact that they have gay pride parades where men walk around in the most vile things you can imagine and simulate sex on each other with children present is enough proof for you that it's already there and evident. And if you don't know about that, it's because I guess you are very sheltered from the news. Because that's not even news, that's just a normal practice in the US. Every year they have them throughout the entire month of June across the country, especially in cities like New York. So you understand that that's the goal here, that's what's being pushed for, and the Bible's warning you that. If you don't believe me, at least believe your Bible, that that's why he's using homosexuality as the example. It's not that God specifically targets them and says, oh, I hate them more than the others, no. It's that of any sin on this list, this one illustrates what he's talking about. That when you give up on God, you don't care about the truth, you rejected the creator, and you begin to worship yourself, this sin shows you what happens more than any other. that you become identified in your sin, you become engulfed in this, that this is who you are as a person, and the floodgates are open, the limits are gone, because now you are open to go do whatever you want to without God to convict you, without the truth to tell you not to do that anymore. So it's not a battle for the truth in their case, it's a battle against the truth. It's a battle against the Word of God. And all these things are coming to this world if you follow even history, even if you don't follow the Bible. You look at any society or culture that has raised up in the past and fallen, any great empire, the Greeks, the Romans, all of them, and you'll find the same pattern. They rose up, morals and decency were part of the rising, even though they may not have had good morals. I mean, Greeks never had good morals, so don't think I'm saying they did. But they rose up with some level of morals, decency, truth. Philosophy was usually at the heart of the ones before Christianity or religion came along. It was some form of, hey, what is the truth? We would like to study the truth and try to understand it, built a society. And then that society that was built was some desire to know truth. then became corrupted with the desire to feel what feels good, to do what feels good, to follow after my lust and after my flesh. So that you living in today's age, if you don't know about empires of the past, you probably don't think much about this. But in the Roman Empire, families are pretty much done away with by the time the empire collapsed. Homosexuality was common. Most every man was just assumed to be homosexual or bisexual in that case. He had a wife for producing children and he had a 12-year-old boy for his lover. That was pretty typical in Rome. in the time of the Roman Empire fail. If that doesn't sound like the direction that the United States is going in at least, then evidently you don't pay attention to the state's news, and that's fine, you don't have to, you don't live there. But if you just cut it on for about two minutes, you can figure out that that's the direction it's going, that that's becoming produced, promoted, endorsed, everything, to where now it's not even considered that big of a deal when you find out that somebody's already doing those things. That's, you know, you did something 10 years ago that offended somebody and you can lose your whole life, but they find out you molested a 12-year-old boy and you were a movie director, you just moved to France and you can start your career all over again, it's no problem. And if you think I made that up, that's a real example. And it happens all the time in the world. In fact, the vast majority of movies you probably grew up liking were directed by men who've been accused or proven to have been pedophiles who molested little boys. And nobody cares. They still get to work and do their job. But somebody who made a joke that offended a feminist ten years ago loses everything. Because we don't care about the truth. We care about how people feel. That's where we're at in the step. If you want to know where society is as a whole, that's where we're at in this process. And so this whole thing that love is love is a lie to teach you to accept that if I say I love something, it's OK because love is pure. But God says not all love is pure. Some love is vile. He says there are things you can love that is filthy. It's disgusting in the eyes of God. And you have to be aware of that. So let me give you some scripture to support. I should have dove straight into it, but let me give you some scripture to support what I'm trying to say to you. Psalm chapter 52. Psalm chapter number 52. And verse number three says, Thou lovest evil more than good, and lying rather than to speak righteousness, say La. Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue. Now, this is David singing about Doeg, the man who killed the city of priests, and he says of Doeg that he loved evil more than he loved good, and he loved lying more than he loved truth. So according to God, you can love things that are evil, and you can love things that are lies and wrong and bad. Just because you love something doesn't make it good. God says also in Psalm 4 and verse 2 that you can love vanity. You can love things that are empty and mean nothing, that have no value or profit to them whatsoever. Psalm 4 and verse 2 says, O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? How long will ye love vanity and seek after leasing Selah? So God says that they love vanity. That means that not everything they love is good for them, because vanity is something that is bad, because it's empty, it's pointless, it's not helpful in any way, it's bad for you. When he says you love evil, evil in the Bible doesn't necessarily mean something that's morally reprehensible. Evil means something that is destructive. It means something that is harmful. So for example, the Bible talks about God doing evil, and if you think evil means something that's morally reprehensible, then you have a problem because God can't do anything that's sinful or morally reprehensible. But what God can do is harm somebody. So that's why you have to understand that evil, the word in the Bible, means harm more than it means anything else. Now it can refer to something that is harmful because it's morally bad, but most of the time it's referring to something that is harmful to you. And so he says, you love things that destroy you and you love things that have no profit for you. There's two verses to prove to you that not all love is good, not all love is pure and not all love is decent. Now, somebody who's using a wrong Bible has not got the King James will go to first Corinthians 13 and say, oh, love is pure and love is patient and love. No, it's not love. That's charity. That's a sacrificial love where you care more about others than yourself and your feelings and all this stuff. It's literally the contrast to what we're talking about now, this very selfish love. So, the Bible teaches very plainly you can love things that are bad for you. In fact, I'll give you some examples of people who love stuff that were bad for them. The Bible says in Judges 16 and verse 4 that Samson loved Delilah. Now, can you tell me it was God's will and it was okay for Samson to love Delilah? No. It was certainly not. Delilah was a prostitute that he was going to and seeing more or less was what their relationship was. She was his destruction. She destroyed his life. There was no way on this earth anybody can read that story and say that God wanted Samson to love Delilah. That was his own selfish flesh that loved her. He loved her for what he was getting from her, and that's all that he cared about. He didn't care about her in a sacrificial way or any of that stuff that would be pure. 1 Kings 11, 1-2 talks about Solomon and says that Solomon loved many strange women. And you may say, OK, well Solomon is just a very loving guy. He had more than 900 wives and concubines in total, so he just was full of love, and he had all the love to give. That may be your opinion of Solomon, but the truth is God had already told Solomon throughout his whole life not to marry strange women, meaning women from other countries and religions. Because He told him that they would corrupt him. In fact, I'll give you a reference if you never paid attention to it. Deuteronomy 17 is talking about the law for kings, and especially that passage. Verse 17 is the one I'll reference to you, but you can read the ones around it. And you'll notice that Solomon broke every law that God made for kings. Every law where he said, don't accumulate horses and all this stuff, don't accumulate wealth, don't marry strange women from other countries and religions and stuff. All those things that God told a king not to do, Solomon broke every single one of those rules in surplus. Like, I mean, he went way above breaking them. And one of the ones and what we're referencing is that God told him plainly he was not to he was the king of Israel. He was not allowed to marry women from other countries and religions. He was not allowed to marry women who were not Jews following God at that time. And so you understand that that was the rule that was set upon him. But he rejected that. And if you go read Psalms, you'll find that his dad told him over and over that David told him not to do it. If you read Proverbs, you'll find that his dad and mother both told him not to do it. Don't chase after women. You find you a good wife, you marry her. And God gave him a good wife. It seems like it's what Song of Solomon's about. So if I believe the Bible, Solomon, very young, got a good wife and got started off just fine, had everything he needed, but he wasn't content with that. And you may look at it and say, oh, he just lusted after strange women. God said he loved them. So it was a type of love, whatever he felt for them. It was an affection where he cared very deeply for them, but it wasn't pure and it wasn't good and it wasn't of God. In fact, it was adultery, it was sin, and it was everything against God. Because God said very plainly that Solomon was not to go after those women, he was not to chase after them, and he rejected the godly woman that was given to him to chase after all the women of the world, so that even two, three, twenty, fifty, hundred were not enough, it had to be nine hundred plus to make him satisfied. And even then he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes and said, I'm still not satisfied, that I've come to the conclusion finally that you can have all the wives you want, and it's not good enough. And I'm very much paraphrasing, but that's one of the points he makes, that family can never satisfy you, you only can be satisfied with God. So you can see very plainly that Samson and Solomon both are men, and I could give you a lot more, but those are both men who loved things that God did not want for them to love, things that were not pure. It was not right for them to love those people. It was sin, especially in the case of Solomon. In Solomon, in the case of Samson, it led to sin. His affection for Delilah led him into sin, and Solomon's affection was sin in its essence, because this is a married man chasing after multiple other women. It was a sin for him to do that. Now, saying that, you also understand that love can change over time into things that are not good. And my example I'd give you of that is 1 Samuel 16 and verse 21. I'll give you two. But Saul in 1 Samuel 16 and verse 21, we're told that he loved David. This is before David and him became related and all of this. This is before he really knew who David was, but he just saw David as a young man who could play the harp real good and all this stuff. He just saw something in him that he loved him. The same way any of you, like when you see the kids get up here and quote Bible verses, you're affected in your heart by that. You have a care for those children. It's not the same love you may have for your own children, it's not the same love you may have for your own family, but you care about them. So Saul had a care for David. But that care eventually turned into bitterness and hatred, so that at some point his whole life purpose became killing David. So just because you love something doesn't mean that that love is pure, and it doesn't mean that it's going to stay something good. And I think probably the greatest example of that in the Bible is Amnon, which is 2 Samuel 13 and verse 15, where we're told about Amnon, the son of David, who fell in love with his own half-sister. And he just, he saw something in her that she was beautiful, he loved her. And the Bible says, like, you may not agree with, you may say, oh, no, it was lust. He didn't love her. Well, you have to talk to God about that, because God said in 2 Samuel 13, 15, that the hatred by which he hated her was greater than the love with which he loved her. So God says that he did love her at some point in this relationship. The some point where all this came from was that he loved her, but that love transformed and corrupted and became perversion and lust because he didn't love her. He loved what he wanted from her. He began to love and care about his affection was not towards caring about her and helping her with a sacrificial love that's pure, but about what can I get from her? And that's what his love became. And that's what he tried to take from her. And he did, and he ruined her life and his, and he was murdered, and her brother died because of it, or their other brother died because of it, and their whole lives were wrecked because of this one man's selfishness and sin. And you can't tell me that that was pure, and God was happy with that, and God smiled down from heaven and said, oh yeah, that guy who just forced his sister, I'll say, because there are still children here. That guy who just forced his sister, that love he had was really pure, and I'm really pleased with that. You'd be an evil, wicked person if you tried to justify that and say, well, love is love. Because if you're going to go down that road and say, well, love is love. If it's love, it must be pure. That's what that means. If you're going to say love is love, and so I have to accept it, and I have to say it's OK no matter how destructive, no matter how evil, no matter how much against the way God designed you this is, then you have to say that's also love, and love is love. Because God says that Amnon loved Tamar. God says that Samson loved Delilah. God says that Solomon loved all of his strange wives. God says that Saul loved David, the same Saul who tried to pin him to a wall with a spear more than once. So if you're gonna say love is love, then all that's love, so it means that Solomon, it's okay if he had 900 plus wives and concubines, because love is love. It's okay that Amnon raped Tamar because love is love. It's okay that Saul wanted to kill David because love is love. I mean, that's the direction you're going with all of that. If you say love is love, and that feelings are all that matter, and if you love something, it must be pure, then what you're teaching is that anything is okay as long as you care really deeply as the motivation for doing it. As long as you really like this is why you're motivated to do this. And that is a very evil and dangerous thing to the point where very soon anything becomes acceptable. To the point where, well, they love a child, so why can you tell them that they can't do what they want to with that child? They love that animal, so why can you tell them they can't do what they want to with that animal? It's disgusting. They love I mean, all this is disgusting. It's a different kind of disgusting. They love that dead body over there. Because again, that's one of the things mentioned in Leviticus, you and I don't typically jump there with our minds. But it's something that was happening. They love that dead body over there. You know, their wife's dead. They really loved her for 50 years. And they want to have a little bit more time with her. Who are you to tell them? No, if love is love. I mean, it's vile. It's disgusting. But it's true. That's what the direction you're looking at is going for. I mean, they love this thing, so why can't they do what they want to do to it if love is love? If everything that's love is pure and everything that's love is good, why couldn't Samson chase after Delilah? Why was that wrong in the eyes of God? Why couldn't Solomon have 900 wives and concubines? Why was that wrong in the eyes of God? I mean, you understand, Solomon not only had 900 wives and concubines, Solomon got to the point where he began to worship their gods, And while the Bible never explicitly states that he did it, it is very heavily implied that he sacrificed his own children on the altar to those gods. Because we're told that he built altars to Moloch and all these different gods to worship them. He married wives who worshipped Moloch and all these different gods. And how was Moloch worshipped again? Well, it was that they took that bronze bull and they had the inside hollow so they could put fire inside of it and heat it up so it's essentially a frying pan. And you would take your child, your infant child, that baby, and lay that baby in his hands, one of your baby sons. It had to be a son, I think, typically. You'd lay him in the hands of that bull. And as he's burning and roasting and crying out in pain and agony, you consider that worship to your God. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, the man who God gave him wisdom himself, worshiped that God. So whether he sacrificed his children or not, he sat there and listened to other people's children cry out in the streams of terror and agony. And how did he get there? Because he loved something God said you shouldn't love. He loved something God told him not to. Not all love is pure. Not all love is kind and patient and good. Charity is, but not all love. And so what I'm saying to you today is you have to understand this. There are things you can love that it is vile. You love somebody else's spouse, that is vile. You love somebody you have no business loving, that is vile. You love something that goes against the very nature and design that God has for you as a person, that is vile. You love someone who is a child who can't consent. That's vile. You understand that when talking about the love they're talking about. I'm not talking about a good, pure, sacrificial charity love. I'm talking about this kind of selfish, perverse love where you're trying to get something from somebody. I'll be honest with you, you love your own wife with that kind of love, and it's vile. You can love your own spouse with this selfish love where you just care about them for what they have to offer you, and it's still vile. Even though it's in the bonds of marriage and the marriage bed is undefiled, you are defiled because your love is vile. You don't love them. You love what you get from them. It is lust in its essence. It's still care. You still care. God still defines it as a type of love, but it's a love that has been polluted and corrupted and filthy because of lust. It's a selfish love, not a sacrificial love. And so it's not pure, it's vile. And so what I'm saying to you today is very simple. Not all love is love. Not all love is pure. Not all love is these things that are good that they try to imply when somebody says something like that. God says that when you reject Him and you reject the truth and you don't care what the Word of God has to say, then you are turned over to vile affection. And so those things you love that are destructive to you, God says, OK, you can go do them, because if you don't want him, he's I mean, he was telling you it's wrong. It's going to harm you. It's going to destroy you. You may not believe that, but any statistical study will very quickly show you that everybody involved in homosexuality and transgender movement are way, I mean, more than three times likely to be depressed, suicidal, alcoholic, drug abusers, any of that kind of stuff. And you can say it's because they're not accepted in society and they feel bad because people look down on them, but that hasn't been true since about the 1980s. Everybody you know who's a homosexual is openly celebrated. Their family have to change their events to make them feel happy. Society has changed their language to make them feel happy. They have an entire month to celebrate them. You are a liar if you think that any homosexual is oppressed in modern times. You are oppressed when you are against homosexuality in modern times, not for being a homosexual. That has been over for 30, 40 years by now. So you can drop the lie and be honest with ourselves. that people who are involved in homosexuality who have went that direction, you can't blame it on society as to why they are depressed and alcoholic and drug users and all this kind of stuff, statistically greater than any other portion of society. Like it used to be the highest denominator, the thing you could determine whether somebody was gonna go into this kind of lifestyle, usually more so for crime, is that they didn't have a father growing up. Like the biggest thing, like you can know somebody's life is gonna be ruined, they're gonna have a bad life is they don't have a father. At this point, I would say it's probably statistically more true that if someone's a homosexual, their life is going to fall into depression, alcohol, drugs, and all this kind of stuff. Why? Because it's not society's not patting them on the back hard enough. I mean, we can't pat them on the back any harder. Like, which one of your countries get to fly their flag at the embassy of everybody else's country? I mean, I was just at the American embassy, and I didn't see a Romanian flag, didn't see a Ghanaian flag, didn't see Nigerian, didn't see, I didn't even see a Belgian flag, if I remember right, at the U.S. Embassy in Belgium. Certainly didn't see a Tanzanian, I didn't see, Congolese, I didn't see English, I didn't see Colombian, I mean, a lot of people represented here. I didn't see your flags at the embassy, but I saw more than one gay pride flag. I saw more than one of them hanging up there. So which one of your flags get flown at everybody else's embassy? Which one of your flags get flown, I mean, outside of government buildings and everything else? Which one of your countries, which one of your lifestyles, which one of you as a person have an entire month to celebrate you? We're in every store in the country, sell stuff just to celebrate you. I mean, I don't know of anybody else that that's true of. So you cannot blame it on society. It's because when they went that direction, they chose a lifestyle that is destructive to them. It is killing them. And anybody who's been all the way through the process without committing suicide and come out the other side, will always tell you that the worst thing that ever happened to them was going through the surgery and being transgender. That's the worst thing that ever happened in their life. And some have even said the people who allowed them to do it should be locked up and put in jail for doing that to them. And that's the testimonies of people who went through the process. The people who died on the way can't be here to tell you what happened to them. But every person who lives through it and makes it out to the other side will tell you the worst thing that happened to them was going into that. Most of them die in it, though, because they never make it to the other side. They destroy themselves in it. And I would not be a fit pastor if I saw a man who was destroying himself in alcohol and I said, it's OK, God doesn't care because He just wants you to be happy. I would not be fit to stand here as a pastor if you came to me and told me that, pastor, I'm struggling because I have some addiction, something that I'm dealing with, some sin, that it's just corrupting my whole life and destroying me, and I said, it's okay, God just wants you to be happy. Doesn't matter what sin you put in that spot, it will not change the fact that I am not fit to stand in this pulpit and call myself a pastor if I'm gonna tell you it's okay because God just wants you to feel good. And yet we have a whole portion of society we just step back and say it's okay because God just wants you to feel good. And even churches are flying the flag inside of it now. So if you don't believe that this matters, it does. And God's trying to use this to illustrate for you something that you may not be as open to seeing as you would think you are, or you should be. But God is trying to show you that this is the symptoms. This is what happens when somebody says they don't care about God and they don't care about the truth. That's what all these verses have been leading up to. He's been building up from around verse 18 or so to make this point that when you reject God, the next thing you'll reject is the truth. And at that point, your God is your feelings. You worship the creature. You worship yourself more than the creator. Creature just means the created beings. So you worship yourself, you worship someone else, you worship some philosophy or something more than you worship God who is blessed forever. Amen. And so not all love is good. God says he turns people over to affection or love that is vile. He turns them over to love things that is destructive for them, harmful for them. It's not because he wants them to do it, but because they choose to reject him. They choose to reject the truth. And at that point, he washes his hands and say, OK, you can do what you want to. And one of the things he says you can do what you want to is you can go love whatever you want. You don't want to love God. You don't want to love the truth. You don't want to at least be held up by standards of decency and truth. You don't let logic and facts hold you back from sin. Then you go do whatever you want to, is what he's saying in that verse. So that's what he means when he says he turns them over to vile affection. Father, we thank you and praise you, God, for what you do. We pray that you watch over us, help us to serve you. Thank you for your blessings, your goodness. I pray that you watch over us, Lord. Help us just to be faithful to you in all things. I pray that, God, you would just bless today and help us, Lord, each. to see the importance of learning to love the things that you would have us to love, to set our affection on things above, as you talk about later in the chapter. We thank you, God, for all of this, and we ask it in your son Jesus' name. Amen.