God Running is a place for anyone who wants to (or even anyone who wants to want to) love Jesus more deeply, follow Jesus more closely, and love people the way Jesus wants us to.

In our last post from Romans, we saw how Paul was not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus, and we explored the benefits of living a life, unashamed, in the way Paul was unashamed. If you’re interested you can learn more here: Not Ashamed–Romans 1:16-17.

In today’s passage Paul shares a list of behaviors that are ungodly and unrighteous, according to Paul, including sexual practices that are approved and even celebrated in Western culture today.

Romans 1:18-32

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 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. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

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. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 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.

A Muslim’s Reaction to the Prodigal Son

Jacob Fareed Imam’s father was a Muslim. So when Jacob became a Christian, there were problems between them. In Jacob’s own words:

“There was immediate tension with my father. That was hard to push away, to be honest. There was a good falling out between us until he was diagnosed with lung cancer. And that was a great opportunity for reconciliation for us, on many levels.

“But I was also reading in Bukhari, in one of the Hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad, that he recommended, that Muhammad recommended, the sacred scriptures at one point. So I offered to my father. And so we did reunite. We had a time together. And we began to read sacred scripture together as well. Reading all of John’s Gospel, and then moving through parts of Luke, and Matthew.

“And I’ll never forget the night when we were reading the story of the prodigal son. And he was expecting a different ending. He had never heard it before.

“He was expecting that as the son was returning, the father would go out and kill him for his negligence.

“And so when it was quite the opposite ending, he just said, ‘That was the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard.'”

God or Muslim Culture

We shouldn’t be surprised Jacob Imam’s dad expected the father to kill his prodigal son. In Muslim cultures around the world, Christianity is often seen as lacking justice and structure. There’s too much grace and forgiveness. With Muslims making up almost one quarter of the world’s population, we can see that there’s a huge number of people in different places all over the world, that live in a culture with this attitude toward Jesus and his teachings.

God or African Tribal Culture

In Africa, there are cultures that look at Christianity as being too restrictive. These cultures are often found in rural areas among different tribes living there. Polygamy is common in these cultures and they don’t agree with the Christian teachings about marriage and monogamy. According to the Pew Research Center about two percent of the world population live in polygamous households. That’s around 164 million people. (Pew Research Center)

God or Ancient Roman Culture

Before Jesus came, Roman culture was all about power. That a more powerful human being, say a male Roman citizen, would put his advantage to use against a less powerful human being was just an accepted part of the culture. It was a horrible situation for women, slaves, and children.

But then Jesus came and he changed all that.

Consider this quote from Justin Brierley that I shared a few months ago: “The sexual revolution of the 1960s was not the first sexual revolution. The first sexual revolution was the sexual revolution of the first century. Because Greco-Roman culture was a very permissive culture. Now, it was different, the sexual relationships were sort of more socio-cultural and hierarchical in nature. But a Roman male could have sex with whoever he wanted, male or female. It was very liberal, you could say, but it was very bad: for slaves, and for women, and for children. And it was Christians who, when they said, actually we are going to constrain male sexuality, they changed the world when they did that. When they said, it’s really important that a man has one wife and he’s not able to simply divorce her just like that. And, he has to be faithful to her, and is not going to be able to sleep with the scullery maid, or whoever.”

It was Jesus who moved the ancients away from a culture of power worship, toward a culture of love and charity and concern for those on the margins of society.

God or Your Culture: The True and Living God or a Stepford God

In our text we see Paul very plainly describing a variety of behaviors as ungodly and sinful including sexual practices that are approved of, and even celebrated, in Western culture today.

What we have to ask ourselves is Who or what should we worship?

Maybe you’ve seen the Stepford Wives movie. It’s about these technical geniuses in Stepford, Connecticut who implant computer chips in their wives’ brains so they’ll think and behave precisely as each of their respective husbands want them to.

But is that what we really want?

Is that what we want in our spouses? In our children? In our friends?

Is that what we try to do with God?

Sometimes, inside our own heads, we try to tweak who God is. We try to conform Him to our own cultural norms, and our own opinions, and our own views and perspectives.

We create our own Stepford god.

I know I don’t want that in my wife Kathy. I don’t think it’s an accident that the Bible often compares our relationship with God to marriage. I don’t always understand my wife–in fact, I very often don’t understand my wife. But I love her. And I trust her. But I could never really love her if she was a Stepford wife.

I don’t want that in God either because in the same way, you really can’t love God if you make Him a Stepford God.

And if you think about it. Having differences with God and not understanding God is precisely what we would expect from the Creator of the universe and all that’s in it. It would take you 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy, but only if you were traveling at the speed of light. And that’s just the Milky Way. There are at least 200 billion galaxies, and maybe up to 2 trillion galaxies, in the universe. And then there’s DNA, and microscopic complex molecular machines, and quantum particles that effect each other even if they’re millions of miles apart. (Also, there are gamma-ray bursts in the universe that release more energy in ten seconds than our sun will ever release during its entire lifespan.)

Why would we think we would agree with everything the Creator of such a universe communicates to us?

And why would we think we would understand such a Being?

One thing we do know about such a Being, is that He loved us so much, He sent His only son, Jesus, to earth, to sacrifice himself, to die on our behalf, to save us from our own sin.

He is good. He is Goodness itself. And He is Love.

Which is why, what makes the most sense is to love Him back.

And to trust Him:

Even when I don’t understand.

Isaiah 55:8-9

Notes:

Jacob Fareed Imam, What will my Muslim father think?, Interview with Matt Fradd, 2020

Household Patterns by Region, Pew Research Center, 2019

Kurt Bennett, The Difference Jesus Made: Sex and Power before Christ entered the world–Acts 28:11-19, December 7, 2024

Justin Brierley, Christians vs The Sexual Revolution, YouTube short

Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Basic Books; Illustrated edition (October 29, 2019)

Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, Harper San Francisco, (May 9, 1997)

Joe Heschmeyer, How Christianity Conquered Rome (and How We Can Do It Again), Shameless Popery Podcast Video

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, Penguin Books, February 14, 2008

The Stepford Wives Wiki Page

Josh Dzieza, Friend or Faux, December 3, 2024

Image of Christ Crucified by Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, wikimedia commons

Available on Google Play Books and on Amazon!

Love Like Jesus: How Jesus Loved People (and how you can love like Jesus)

Love Like Jesus begins with the story of how after a life of regular church attendance and Bible study, Bennett was challenged by a pastor to study Jesus. That led to an obsessive seven year deep dive. After pouring over Jesus’ every interaction with another human being, he realized he was doing a much better job of studying Jesus’ words than he was following Jesus’ words and example. The honest and fearless revelations of Bennett’s own moral failures affirm he wrote this book for himself as much as for others. Love Like Jesus examines a variety of stories, examples, and research, including:

• Specific examples of how Jesus communicated God’s love to others.
• How Jesus demonstrated all five of Gary Chapman’s love languages (and how you can too).
• The story of how Billy Graham extended Christ’s extraordinary love and grace toward a man who misrepresented Jesus to millions.
• How to respond to critics the way Jesus did.
• How to love unlovable people the way Jesus did.
• How to survive a life of loving like Jesus (or how not to become a Christian doormat).
• How Jesus didn’t love everyone the same (and why you shouldn’t either).
• How Jesus guarded his heart by taking care of himself–he even napped–and why you should do the same.
• How Jesus loved his betrayer Judas, even to the very end.

With genuine unfiltered honesty, Love Like Jesus, shows you how to live a life according to God’s definition of success: A life of loving God well, and loving the people around you well too.

A life of loving like Jesus. (Kindle, hardcover, and paperback now available on Amazon and the ebook is now available on Google Play Books.)