The Difficult Kind
January 22, 2012
Text: Romans 1:18-31
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.
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Suspicious timing or not, the Newt Gingrich story of three marriages is an interesting story . . . which I will not go into here. I just want to focus (for a moment!) on one statement he made last week in response to the interview with his second ex-wife Marianne. He said: I have asked forgiveness for my mistakes.
I’ve been down this mistake road before, and I don’t want to bore you with it, but we now routinely substitute mistake for a deeper concept. We excuse our behavior with little clichés like everybody makes mistakes.
Oops, I turned right instead of left. That’s a mistake.
Last week, I forgot my cell phone . . . twice. Two mistakes.
A friend of mine was so far along in her pregnancy that she couldn’t see her feet, so she came to a meeting wearing two different shoes (I’m not sure that’s even a mistake, really).
Everybody makes mistakes. Yes. Let’s just be sure what a mistake is. A mistake . . . or a choice?
We’re only human. That one I don’t buy at all. The fact that we are human is one of God’s great gifts to us. We’re just a little lower than the angels, the Bible says, and a lot higher than the rest of the creation (over which God put us in charge, remember?). We cannot excuse our behavior with only human.
. . . what may be known about God is plain to (human beings) because God has made it plain to them (but as Paul writes earlier, we just choose to suppress what we know to be true) – Romans 1:19
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse – Romans 1:20.
What are we looking at? We are looking at biblical proof that some things we call mistakes, we should be calling decisions, because humankind knows that God is real and God is true and God made us to be far more discerning than only human and I made a mistake.
I’ve spoken of my beloved cousin who took her own life a little over 20 years ago. Among us nephews and nieces, she was the most beloved. And yet I visited her in the intensive care unit of a Cincinnati hospital, brain-dead. I sat with her mother (my aunt) for a while after that visit, and my aunt said to me: How could she not have known how much we all loved her?
She did. She did know exactly how much she was loved, but her action to ingest pills and inject medications into her system was a choice. It was a decision. It was not a mistake.
Paul is building something here with these 13 very difficult verses; they’re not hard to understand, really. They’re just hard to hear. Look at the next one:
For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened – Romans 1:21.
I think of the countless times I have served families in grief and heard statements like: Well, he believed. She just never got involved in . . . anything.
I’ve become bold enough to say: Oh, you mean she never went to church?
“Yeah, nothing like that.”
But really, Paul’s statement is deeper than that, because people can sit in pews all their lives and still have this be true about them. Surveys still show all the time . . . 
the number of atheists in this country is infinitesimal. Almost everyone believes in God. But this verse is about relationship with God. Neither glorified Him as God or gave thanks to Him; in other words, people believe God is there, but never make Him their God or their Savior or their friend. It’s like a funeral I had the other day, a cold funeral at the grave. The ones who loved the lady who died the most were near the front. They were crying, or obviously grieving, or looking very contemplative. There were a lot of people there . . . you could see the serious expressions change until you got to the outskirts 2 or 3 rows outside the tent. That’s where two cell phones went off . . . and people answered them. Those folks knew the lady who died, but did their relationships with her mean very much?
A text note in one of my Bibles says this: Belief is one thing; saving faith is another. Almost everyone believes, but how many experience? And that, my friends, is not a mistake. That’s not just only human. To worship God, to pray to Him, to welcome Him into your daily life and decisions . . . or to exclude Him . . . those are choices.
I’ve discovered a song in the last month or so, a song by the rock singer Sheryl Crow. I’ve taken the title of this sermon from the title of her song . . . The Difficult Kind. I’m going to refer to it more deeply in a few minutes, but it’s a song about a relationship between a man and a woman. At one point, she sings something like: I can still hear your voice through the old screen door, asking “Honey, why are you treating me this way?” In a relationship like that, you can either choose to love the other person or you can choose to be unloving. In her song, Sheryl Crow calls the unloving person in the relationship the difficult kind.
Perfect.
God knows all about the difficult kind. In the Bible, we have the loving kind . . . like Mary, for example. The angel came calling on her to bear the Savior of the world, and Mary said: My soul magnifies the Lord. God loves that kind. The one willing to endure whatever comes because she not only believes in God . . . she knows Him. She decides to follow Him. That’s God’s easy kind. The loving kind.
Paul goes into great detail here about the difficult kind, the kind who are not just only human, the kind who do more than just make mistakes. They make choices. They make decisions that are contrary to God’s will, and because humanity knows who God is, these decisions are sins. Paul groups them, kind of, into three categories of the difficult kind.
The first difficult group, in essence, claims to be wiser than God; in other words, there really is no god to them. As an example, let me choose teachers and subscribers to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. I’m not threatened by Darwin because 150 years of study haven’t given us one shred of proof that he’s right. Let’s just look at DNA (I should preach a sermon on this topic, but you should do your own research, too). DNA. Evolutionists claim the more we know about molecules, cells and DNA, the more plausible Darwin becomes. But the opposite is true. Bill Gates (you know him, the world’s richest man, founder of Microsoft) says DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created. Evolutionists want us to believe that DNA – something vastly more perfect and powerful and complex than any Windows program (and Microsoft Windows represents the culmination of thousands of years of human progress) – are we to believe DNA came to exist by means of nothing more than a series of random accidents starting in a puddle of prehistoric goo? (Ann Coulter, Godless, page 212).
I don’t need evolution to be false, necessarily, but Darwinists need evolution to be true. What do you do with the difficult kind who insist on Darwin rather than deity?
The second difficult kind has to do with what relationships they decide to be in, and Paul describes all kinds here. The biblical fact is this: When Jesus Christ returns to 
this world to claim His Church in a rapture, how is He described? As a bridegroom, right? Which makes us, His Church, the bride. The historic wedding liturgy of the Church, which the pastor shares at the beginning of the ceremony, describes the wedding of a man and a woman as being like the mystical union between Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.
The other kinds of relationships Paul describes here are the difficult kind. And they are all decisions. They are choices. And Paul describes them as shameful, lustful, unnatural, indecent and depraved. The word depraved literally means not up to standard (that is to say, not up to God’s standard). I once visited a church, not far from here, on a day where (unbeknownst to me) celebrating cross-dressing was being observed in worship that day. Since I was in a coat and tie and not high heels, I thought it best to go find where God was being worshipped.
Do I need to spend a lot of time on the third difficult kind? It seems to be about personal behavior. Look at the difficult kinds that actually plague churches! Envious of each other (how come she’s getting all the attention?). Strife (amazing, isn’t it, how often Christians just won’t get along?). Gossip, slander, boasting, inventing stories . . . you can find it all in church (sorry to say).
What to do with the difficult kind? The kind that believes in God, but not enough to let Him rule their intellects, their relationships, their behaviors, and their hearts?
What can He do?
Paul says it three times . . . He gives them over. He gives them over to the sinful desires of their hearts. He gives them over to their shameful lusts. He gives them over to their depraved minds (not up to His standards).
I’ve told the story of a pastor colleague who led a retreat of which I was part. It was winter, much like today. We were in a downtown church, and she stopped in the middle of her talk (almost as if she was talking to herself). She said:
Our son is out there this afternoon, somewhere. He’s homeless. He wouldn’t stop stealing, wouldn’t stop lying, wouldn’t give up his habit. We tried and tried, but had to let him go. He’s somewhere out there until, hopefully, he comes to his senses. We had to let him go.
You could say that his parents had to give him over.
God is not a puppet master. He’s a Father, too. He will give His children over, let 
them go wandering until they no longer insist on being the difficult kind. If ever.
He gave them over. In Greek, that’s the same word that’s used later, in chapter 8 of Romans. Take a look:
He who did not spare His own son, but gave Him up for us all – Romans 8:32.
God the Father gave over God the Son. He gave Him over to give us forgiveness and salvation and a relationship with Him. In giving over the difficult kind to their behavior, the Father hopes all of His children will find that incredible gift He gave over for them.
In honor of my late mother, our Elders gave me two lovely books containing the stories of our greatest hymns. One of the stories is about John Newton, whose mother – a wonderful Christian – gave John the gift of Jesus from a very young age (as all Christian mothers should, without apology). But Mrs. Newton died and slowly, John sank. He deserted the British Navy, was captured, and flogged in front of everyone. He contemplated suicide. He became a slave trader and the captain of a slave ship.
But on a terrible night when his ship was in danger of sinking, John Newton prayed. The ship did not sink. John remembered his mother’s teaching; slowly, over years, John gave himself over to God and ceased being the difficult kind. He became the easy kind. He became one of the greatest Christian preachers in British history and wrote many hymns, including Amazing Grace.
We’re going to sing that at the close of the service today. But before I close this sermon, I want to return to Sheryl Crow’s song and a few words of The Difficult Kind. She wrote:
If you could only see
What love has made of me
Then I’d no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind
Cause, babe, I’ve changed
God gives us over to whatever we want to do, which we always seem to do whether we believe in Him or not. We have to give ourselves back over, and He has given us a way to do that. I’ve changed Sheryl Crow’s song into a prayer. Can you pray it?
If You could only see
What Christ has made of me
Then I’d no longer be in Your mind
The difficult kind; ‘cause, Lord, I’ve changed! Amen.
Andrew Hoover
Pastor, East Columbus Christian Church
