All Have Sinned

Alba 7-8-2021

ALL HAVE SINNED

Romans 3:9-26

I am so glad to have so many of our relatives with us in church today. These are people from Janine's family. I actually knew most of them quite well before Janine and I got together.

So now I am part of this family. And I love them all. But when I looked at the scripture for this morning's message, I realized something. I married into a family of sinners! Everyone of them!

In fact, the family I was born into were all sinners. And when I went to school, I was surrounded by sinners. As life continued, I was not able to get away from sinners!

Its true! Romans 3:23 says it very clearly. It says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That “all” means everybody... Sadly, even me!

Well the truth is, that part is not a surprise to me. I know who I am, and who I have been, and it has not always been good. No, here we are. We are all sinners.

This third chapter of Romans lays it all out there. Take a look at Romans 3:9-18.

9 What then? Are we better than they? Not at all. For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin.

10 As it is written:

“There is none righteous, no, not one;

11 There is none who understands;

There is none who seeks after God.

12 They have all turned aside;

They have together become unprofitable;

There is none who does good, no, not one.”

13 “Their throat is an open tomb;

With their tongues they have practiced deceit”;

“The poison of asp is under their lips”;

14 “Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.”

15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;

16 Destruction and misery are in their ways;

17 And the way of peace they have not known.”

18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Wow, that is not a pretty picture. The Bible says that sin has been committed by all of us, whether we are religious and irreligious. The street hustler, the crook, and the murderer are all short of God’s yardstick. But so are we.

God looks down from heaven and doesn’t see a single righteous person – not even one! You might ask: “But how can this be?” We look around us and see some pretty good folks.

But what we must keep in mind is that God judges by a different standard than we do. Most of us grade on a curve. We look at our neighbor and say, “Well, I’m not as bad as he is,” or “She’s better than me.”

When we compare ourselves with others, we can always find someone who looks better or someone who looks worse than us.

But God doesn’t judge that way. When God looks down from heaven, the standard God uses is His own sinless perfection.

God compares us to His own perfect holiness, perfect love, perfect wisdom and justice. When we are compared with God’s own perfection, you can see why there is no one, not even one person, who comes close to being righteous in God’s eyes.

That’s the difference between relative goodness and absolute goodness. Perhaps the most evil people stand at the bottom of a mine, and we are on the crest of a mountain. Yet, we are no more able to touch the stars that they are.

We are single sinners, married sinners, sinners with kids, male sinners, female sinners – but we have to face the fact that we are all sinners.

One day two men were sitting next to each other on an airplane, and one of them remarked, “Somebody around here’s deodorant isn’t working!”

The other man said, “Well, it’s not me, I’m not wearing any deodorant!” One of the realities in life is that some folks are oblivious to their own state of being.

That is true in the physical sense, but it is also true in the moral sense. When the Bible talks about sin, many people say, “Well, that’s not me.”

And their cluelessness of their moral state is just as unpleasant as their cluelessness of their physical state.

In this third chapter of Romans, Paul could not be any clearer. He says, “When it comes to sin, we all stink!”

There’s nothing we can do to rid ourselves of our sins. We can’t fix our sin problem. We’re too broken to fix ourselves. And there’s no amount of “good” we can do to fix what’s wrong.

So, the bad news is that our sin separates us from God. And we see that there’s nothing we can do about it. So how can people be made right with God? It is the most important question and the biggest problem facing all people.