Romans 1:27-32 is a passage that compels us to read human ethical collapse not as "a mere list of individual acts," but as "an ontological collapse born from the collapse of worship." Pastor David Jang (Olivet University) persistently presses into this very point in his sermon. He does not stop at enumerating the phenomena of sin; he traces why human beings tear themselves down, the inner sequence by which that breakdown progresses, and-at the end of it all-what the gospel restores, all in one sustained breath. In other words, this text is not simply an indictment of the moral customs of an ancient city called Rome. It is a spiritual diagnostic addressed to every age: to all who push God aside and still try to "fill that place with something else." Pastor David Jang reads that diagnostic in today's language.
Even the sentence structure of the passage reveals Paul's logical framework. "Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God... God gave them over..." is not emotional lamentation, but a cool linkage of cause and effect. As Pastor David Jang repeatedly emphasizes, "ungodliness" is not one item on a moral checklist; it is the root that produces moral disintegration. When a pillar collapses, the house collapses with it. The moment God is pushed out from the center of the heart, the human person loses the center of value, loses the ground of any standard, and slips into an order where desire becomes master. What matters here is that the corruption Paul describes is not "an external storm that suddenly descends," but something that begins with "an inward loss of direction." To borrow Pastor David Jang's phrasing: when human beings fall into idols, they become subordinated to idols. And subordination is not merely the growth of a hobby or fixation; it is a condition in which the soul loses the ultimate One it was meant to cling to, and a compulsive drive to patch the void with substitutes takes the steering wheel of life.
That is why the sermon squarely confronts the paradox: "Why do people reject God and yet simultaneously long for God?" Human beings do not want to keep God at the center of the heart. Yet strangely, when that refusal becomes strongest, spiritual emptiness sharpens into its keenest edge. Pastor David Jang treats this emptiness not as a simple psychological lack, but as a structural lack of the soul. When a person is severed from the source of his or her being, something becomes hollow. And a hollow soul tries to be filled. The problem is not merely what we try to fill it with; the very manner of filling becomes distorted. Attempts to replace God with "not-God" always generate excess. Stronger stimulation is needed, faster satisfaction, shorter pleasures. Not fulfillment but numbness sets in-and numbness demands still greater stimulation. This vicious cycle is precisely the shadow of what Paul calls "a depraved mind," and what Pastor David Jang describes as "a process that accelerates toward destruction."
Paul says that this process erupts outwardly as the destruction of ethics. The sin list of Romans 1:29-31 is as dense as a pathological encyclopedia of human society: unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, malice; envy, murder, strife, deceit, spite; gossip, slander; arrogance, boasting; inventing evil; disobedience to parents; faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness.... The terror of this list is not that it only names "extreme crimes." Rather, it binds together in a single line the sins of speech that fracture everyday relationships (gossip, slander), the sins that collapse communal trust (deceit, faithlessness), and the sins that directly destroy life (murder). It shows that sin is not a stain confined to one sector of life, but a total corruption-a comprehensive rotting of the whole person when God is removed. When Pastor David Jang says, "religious corruption inevitably brings moral corruption," the word "inevitably" is not moralistic intimidation, but a tragic observation about the human condition. When worship collapses, values collapse; when values collapse, relationships collapse; when relationships collapse, society collapses.
Here the sermon corrects a commonly misunderstood point. In response to the question, "Can't people still do respectable good deeds without God?" he answers, "It may appear possible, but it does not reach the glory of God." This is not an insult to human goodwill; it is a theological question about the ground and direction of goodness. What is good, and why is it good? Where does the ultimate standard that allows us to call something good actually come from? When God is erased from the horizon, goodness is easily reduced to preference or consensus. And when consensus shifts, "good" shifts with it. In that moment, human beings can mistake "doing whatever I want" for freedom, while in reality falling into another form of subordination-being swept along by the tides of mood, desire, and crowd psychology. Paul's phrase "God gave them over" can be read not as indifferent neglect, but as a mode of judgment: allowing people to experience what the direction they chose ultimately turns them into. Pastor David Jang likens this to a spiritual law mirrored in nature: when sunlight disappears, cold follows; when wind stops, decay begins. The farther one moves from the source of life, the more life dries up and rots.
He does not avoid the controversial theme around Romans 1:27. But the first thing to hold onto when approaching this text is not, "Is Paul targeting a particular minority?" but rather, "What does Paul identify as the root of sin?" In the passage, Paul speaks of humanity, having turned away from God, overturning the order of desire. Pastor David Jang's sermon likewise interprets the phrase "natural relations" in light of the premise of creation order-that God made human beings male and female and gave a framework for relational life. Yet at the same time, this cannot become a pretext for mocking or hating anyone. The sin list that immediately follows is, in effect, a mirror held up to all. Biblical diagnosis never divides humanity into two camps to establish one side as a safe zone. Instead, it says, "You, too, are one of them," turning the accusing finger back toward one's own chest. The same must hold when applying Pastor David Jang's sermon today. Even if discussion of sexual ethics is necessary, that discussion must always remain rooted in repentance, humility, and responsible love toward those who are wounded. If we speak of morality while crushing people, we may end up standing in the very center of the sins Romans 1 lists-malice, heartlessness, ruthlessness.
Another axis Pastor David Jang emphasizes is "the order of love." By contrasting agape and eros, he explains why love, when divorced from God, so easily degenerates into a transaction of desire. Agape is not the love that seeks to possess, but the love that gives life. Eros can be beautiful in its proper place, but when it loses spiritual foundations it can quickly be reduced to a tool for self-satisfaction. Here the sermon does not treat human sexuality as a mere list of prohibitions, but as a question of restoring the source and direction of love. Sexuality touches something deep in the human person, and what is deep can be set healthily only upon a deep foundation. Keeping God in the heart is not simply adding religious ritual; it is re-laying the foundation of love. That is why Pastor David Jang says, "When godliness is restored, moral restoration follows." This is not a sentence any era can cheaply consume. Morality is not "corrected" by a single sermon. Yet the testimony of faith across history repeatedly affirms this: when the center of worship is restored, the order of life gradually realigns.
Reading this passage amid today's landscape also reveals how refined and sophisticated the forms of "idols" have become. Ancient idols were visualized in temples and statues; modern idols are more internal, and they wear more polished language. Meritocracy that deifies achievement; advertising that promises consumerism as salvation; self-worship that absolutizes the self; hedonism that crowns instant pleasure as the highest value; collective aggression that disguises rage as justice.... These idols function exactly like ancient idols in one crucial respect: they become "the center of life that replaces God." When Pastor David Jang says, "You can't cover the sky with your palm," the proverb goes beyond a critique of atheism. Human beings cannot erase meaning and ultimacy. Even when we think we have erased them, the soul keeps asking: Who am I? What am I living for? Why do I need love? Why won't guilt disappear? The more those questions are ignored, the more the heart tries to drown them with stronger stimulation. And then what Paul calls "a depraved mind" is not merely a decline of intellect; it is the loss of courage to face truth-a condition in which the soul begins lying even to itself.
Paul's diagnosis becomes even sharper at the end: "They not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." Sin becomes more stubborn not when it remains a private mistake, but when it enters communal applause and social permission. People fall deeper not merely by being sinners, but by reaching the point where they can no longer call sin "sin." That is why Pastor David Jang uses the phrase "a tsunami of moral decay," warning that corruption does not end in a person's hidden room but spreads into culture and institutions-into language and jokes, into the criteria by which we judge what is valuable. The point here is not an order to expel and condemn others, but a summons to examine ourselves: What do we call normal? What do we call beautiful? What have we surrendered by saying, "That's just how it is"? This self-examination also guards against another temptation: the desire to manage other people in the name of faith.
There is a famous painting that visually compresses this entire argument into a single scene. Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights moves from Eden's calm through a festival of human desire and then into the gloom of hell-like a visual sermon showing what desire becomes when it loses order and reverence. The figures in the painting revel as though their pleasures will last forever, but the revelry is a freedom without direction, and it ultimately converges into images of ruin. When Paul says, "they received in themselves the due penalty for their error," that "penalty" is not always lightning from outside; it can also appear as self-destruction-desire devouring desire, exhausting the human being from the inside. As Pastor David Jang says, no "something other than God" can fill God's vacancy. In Bosch's painting, that truth surfaces as hollowness behind brilliant color. And that hollowness is not unfamiliar to modern life: the irony of being more thirsty the more we possess, and more empty the faster we consume pleasures, testifies to the same void.
Yet if the goal of preaching Romans 1 were only to pile up despair, it would be a sermon that has lost the direction of the gospel. The point Pastor David Jang presses toward is this: by letting the weight of the word "death sentence" be felt, the grace of salvation shines more clearly. If we make light of the reality that "the wages of sin is death," the cross becomes a decoration. But if we look honestly at death, the cross becomes not a religious symbol but a real "way of life." Pastor David Jang cites the line from Hebrews-"It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment"-to confront the fact that every human life will ultimately stand before a reckoning. This is not fear marketing; it is spiritual language meant to awaken seriousness about life. Even those who say death is the end become strangely anxious before it. The soul knows: it is not the end. There is accountability. A life that betrays love does not simply vanish.
Re-reading this sermon, the core is not "an amplifier of accusation," but "a road to restoration." The gospel is the road by which those who did not want to keep God in their hearts come to keep God in their hearts again; by which a depraved mind is renewed; by which a body that had become an instrument of desire becomes once more an "instrument of righteousness." This road does not open through self-improvement advice. As Paul says at the beginning of Romans, the gospel is the power of God. When God lays hold of a human being, the person is finally freed from the false grip by which he tried to hold himself together. That is why moral restoration always grows as the fruit of spiritual restoration. You cannot bring life back by tying up branches. Water must reach the roots for leaves to unfold and blossoms to appear. This is why Pastor David Jang says, "First restore your relationship with God." Before solving problems with people, before correcting habits and desires, re-establish the center of worship.
As today's reader engages this sermon, two temptations must be resisted. One is moral superiority: "The world is corrupt, so I'm safe." The other is resignation: "Everyone's the same anyway." Romans 1 dismantles superiority and rejects resignation. The diagnosis that all are under sin is not written to condemn everyone, but to open the same door of salvation to everyone. Even when Pastor David Jang uses strong language to confront the age, his aim is not to drive people into despair, but to clarify the reason to return to God. Suppressing the voice of the soul to the end is the most dangerous choice, and the more that suppression repeats, the more numb the heart becomes. The gospel, then, is a call: "Return now." Keep God in your heart now. Call truth "truth" even when it is uncomfortable. Repent instead of hating now. Stand in God's light instead of rationalizing yourself now.
In the end, Romans 1:27-32 shows the abyss of sin, but at the same time it logically demonstrates the necessity of the gospel. Paul shows how far humanity can fall, and he reveals that this fall is not merely a cultural problem but a worship problem. Following that structure, Pastor David Jang's sermon binds together psychological language-"the emptiness of a person who has lost God"-and theological language-"idolatry and a depraved mind"-leading the reader into self-examination. And the conclusion is simple. Freedom without God eventually produces a deeper bondage; obedience within God restores the human being to true humanity. The moment a person keeps God in the heart, that person can finally love the self rightly, treat the neighbor not as a tool but as a person, and handle love not as a transaction of desire but as a gift of life. This is the path Pastor David Jang ultimately points to through Romans 1-the most fundamental starting point for recovering the sense of direction our age has lost.
