Community & Discipleship

Encountering the Love of God in a Culture of Lust (Romans 1)

2011.07.31Benjamin Nolot

Human trafficking grows where a society takes its eyes off God and fixes them on one another. The answer is to encounter the love of God, which protects the vulnerable, feels with the heart of God, and waits for what is good.

Our eyes must return to God (vv. 25)

Human trafficking is rooted in a society that has exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Since the Enlightenment, ideas such as naturalism, humanism, Darwinian evolution, Freud, and Alfred Kinsey removed the sense of an absolute moral authority. That shift prepared the way for the sexual revolution, and today a spirit of lust saturates the nations through media and the internet. The answer is to fix our gaze again on Jesus, in whose face the knowledge of God shines.

Lust exploits, but love protects

Lust thinks only of itself, and its end is always someone being taken advantage of until trust is destroyed. Love does the opposite: it sees the weakness and vulnerability of another person and fights for them. Every one of us has needed someone to fight for us when we could not fight for ourselves. Helena Evans was abused as a child, lived in prostitution for 26 years, and was dying of liver failure and heroin addiction when Jesus appeared to her in a dream. Over six months he healed her body and delivered her from addiction and prostitution, because he fought for her when she could not fight for herself.

Love feels, but lust numbs the heart

Lust shuts the heart down until it becomes callous and unfeeling. A woman who had been in prostitution for over twenty years in Amsterdam wept and kept saying, I could not love, I could not love. Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, asked his lover whether he had ever loved one of those boys for their own sakes, and when the answer was no, Wilde said neither had he. Love, by contrast, lets us feel the heart of God. Jennifer Miller described a weeping room in which Jesus listened to every cry of injustice in the world, and in that place her selfish ambition faded and her heart grew tender with compassion.

Love waits, but lust demands instant gratification

Lust seeks to get what it wants, when it wants it, without thought of consequence. Abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, and adultery all grow from that spirit. Love is held in the tension between longing and waiting, as God, our heavenly bridegroom, longs for us and patiently waits for the day of love's consummation. Arnold Fiennes found a wallet in 1985 containing a letter dated 1924, in which Michael was told that Hannah's mother would not allow them to see each other. Through persistent searching, Arnold brought them together again, and Hannah and Michael married in their late seventies after 61 years.

The fragrance of Christ breaks through lust

A former porn producer who worked nine years at adult industry conventions described how, at the end of each day, many of the scantily clad women who had been groped and exploited made their way to a booth handing out Bibles marked Jesus loves porn stars. They wanted to fellowship there and to take a picture with the pink bunny. He was captured by this, because the fragrance of Christ was being released into an atmosphere of lust and drawing even the most defiled toward a desire for Jesus. The church needs a power encounter with God's love that transforms us and releases that fragrance.

Apply to Life

  • Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the root answer to the crisis of human trafficking.
  • Let us stand against the things that exploit us and turn away from anything that drags us into objectifying others.
  • Let us fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.
  • Let us wait for God's perfect plan and live lives of purity.
  • Let us allow the fragrance of Christ to be released through our lives into a culture of lust.

This summary was made automatically from the sermon's captions and may differ from the sermon.

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