Ignore-ance

I was reading through Romans 1 this morning and came across the last paragraph of the chapter.  In the second half of the chapter, Paul talks about those people who know about God’s love and have even experienced it, but instead choose wickedness: “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)

They began to worship man-made things rather than God’s glory and Paul says they turned themselves “over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” (Romans 1:24)

In the final paragraph, Paul says that they did not feel it was “worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God,” so they filled themselves with wickedness, greed, evil, depravity, envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.  They became gossips and slanderers, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they disobey their parents and are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.  Paul concludes, saying, “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32)

It is amazing to me how we still do the same things today.  When we choose to sin, we are choosing to ignore the the knowledge of God.  We choose to seek after worldly things as though they will give us happiness, taking our attention away from the Lord.  It becomes easy to get caught up in the hustle of our world, and if we are not careful, we will turn our back on the Lord and take His knowledge for granted.  Our world tells us that all of those sinful desires are good, but His knowledge tells us otherwise.  The only way to know His knowledge is to make Him a priority and to seek after Him daily.  When we ignore His knowledge, we are just being plain ignorant, and that is our fault alone.