The self-in-control nature of sin always does the same thing.  Whether you are not a Christ follower or if you have been a Christian for a long time, personal rejection of God’s leadership will take you down a very predictable path.

Exploring the forbidden is heady, adrenaline-pumping adventure.  It feels like freedom.  It always feels like “the answer”.  Sin is usually fun, at first.  The riskiness and the wrongness are like spice.  They stimulate the palate of the heart.

Cindy once had a husband and three children.  She went to a Bible-teaching church and claimed Christ as her Savior.  Her life was predictable, routine, and bland.  She wanted more.

One evening after the kids were in bed and her husband was watching a late-night sports event she discovered romantic chat rooms on the internet.  In short order she went from curiosity to full-blown obsession.  It was all so wild and racy.  Within a month she was spending hours every day talking about sex with men she had never met.

Finally, one day she found herself in a Lesbian chat room describing her sexual fantasies to another woman.  When the smoke of her passion finally cleared she had left her family and moved in with the woman she had connected with on her computer.

Now she misses her children, sometimes her husband, and occasionally her church.  She tells herself it’s too late to go back.  Things would never be the same anyway.  Her new sexual partners draw her ever deeper into their lifestyle of perverted sex, drugs, and alcohol and she sees no real option.  She’s lost.  Addicted.  Trapped.  She has completely lost control of being in control.

Cindy’s story is being lived by millions of people today.  They start out with disobedience to God and end up in a world that is totally upside-down.  What used to be darkness is now light.  What used to be light is now darkness.  God’s label for that mixed up condition is a depraved mind.

What Cindy now realizes is that the path she chose did not lead to freedom.  She is enslaved.  The bondage she has submitted herself to is far more confining and boring than her previous “picket-fence” life.

Perhaps you have assumed that because you prayed a prayer of faith and been baptized and involved in a church you were immune from the process that Romans 1 describes.  Please hear me.  Whoever chooses to begin a process of disobedience will descend the ladder of degrading behavior – no exceptions.