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.
Throughout history people have been trying to answer that question and deal with that problem. Unfortunately, so many people have tried all kinds of wrong ways to make themselves right with God.
Some have offered their children on an altar, hoping to appease their god. Some have cut themselves with knives, hoping to win the approval of their deity.
Some have laid on beds of nails, walked on hot coals or hit themselves with whips. Some have killed chickens and placed the carcasses on their makeshift altars.
Some have prayed toward Mecca and recited their prayers. Some have prayed the rosary or said the Our Fathers. Some have given huge sums of money.
The point in this long list is to help us to see that none of these things, whether they are bad or good things, will ever make us right with God, or earn us our salvation.
Scripture tells us this. Look at Romans 3:19-20.
It says, 19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.
20 Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
Have you ever heard of an Escape Room? When our son Kevin had a bachelor party a week ago, they went to an Escape Room.
The concept is this: You and your team are locked in a themed room where you have a certain amount of time to find clues, solve puzzles, and discover keys and combinations to escape the room before your time is up!
Once the door is locked you can’t get out until you solve the puzzle, or until the time is up. To be honest, it would not be my choice about how to spend my money to have a good time.
But, imagine being in an escape room that literally has NO WAY OUT. No matter what you do, or how hard you try, there is simply no way out.
You work on the puzzles, you go step by step . . . and it is never ending. You can’t get out. Sin is like an escape room that has no way out when you make that attempt on your own.
We can’t escape sin on our own. We can’t do it on our own terms, in our way. We don’t have the ability or power to do it. There is no escape from sin in our own power.
So, if none of these ways can make us right with God, then what is the way we can be made right with God? Let’s turn our attention to Romans 3:21-26.
“21 But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe.
“For there is no difference; 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
The apostle Paul has spent most of the first three chapters of his letter to the Romans convincing us that everyone of us is a sinner.
He has clearly said that there is no difference or distinction between people, especially between Jew and Gentile. All have committed sin, and all “fall short of the glory of God.”
But there is good news! The good news is that God’s cure is just as universal as the disease. It is available to all who will put their faith in Jesus. It is a salvation offered to all by God’s grace as a gift.
Paul uses three crucial words in these verses that provide illustrations of how we are made right with God. The three words are: justification, redemption, and propitiation.
Justification is a legal term which means “to be set right” or “to declare not guilty.” And so, Jesus is our justification. In Jesus we are declared innocent. Even though we are guilty sinners, we are acquitted.
Redemption is an economic term that means to “buy back” or “to set free by the payment of a price”, as when a slave was able to buy back freedom.
Jesus is our redemption. He paid the price for our sins. Forgiveness may be “free” to us, but not “free” for Jesus. He had to pay the price for us, through Christ we have been freed.
Propitiation is an old word that describes something that happened at the temple. The New International Version uses a three-word phrase “sacrifice of atonement,” but in the original Greek language it is a single word.
The word means “to turn away wrath by the offering of a gift.” Wrath is God’s settled opposition to all that is evil. This rises from God’s very character. Sin profoundly offends God.
Jesus is our propitiation – our atonement. Jesus is our High Priest, and He sprinkled His own blood (not animal blood) on the mercy seat to make atonement for our sins. God’s wrath has been turned away, and in Christ we are made acceptable.
The apostle Peter described it this way in 1 Peter 3:18: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.”
Lee Strobel once wrote “As we say around here, other religions are spelled “D-O” because they teach that people have to DO a bunch of religious rituals to try to please God.
But Christianity is spelled “D-O-N-E” because Christ has done it all on the cross — and we just need to receive Him.
Then Strobel tells about a story found in Buddhist literature. Its much like the parable of the “Prodigal Son” that Jesus tells, but there is a dramatic difference.
Both stories involve sons who became rebellious and left home, but who then saw the error of their ways, and decided to come back and be reconciled with their families.
However, in the Buddhist story, the errant son is required to work off the penalty for his past misdeeds by spending years in servitude.
But you know how the Christian parable of the Prodigal Son ends — with the repentant son being warmly welcomed home by his loving father and being given undeserved grace and forgiveness.
So, how does Jesus take our sins away? Here it is in simple words. Jesus was born into the world. He is righteous and never sinned. He lived a perfect life, yet He died a sinner’s death on the cross.
Jesus kept the law perfectly but died in the place of us who couldn’t keep the law. He is completely righteous, and He credited righteousness to us.
The sin Jesus died for was ours, not His. His death paid for all the wrongs that we commit.
And it is through Jesus’ sacrifice for us that we are declared righteous by faith in His blood that was shed for us.
II Corinthians 5:21 proclaims, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
At the judgment seat, we will kneel before God. And then He looks in the book of all that we have done that is labeled as sin. God says, “I can’t let you into my heaven with weight of sin that you have.”
Jesus steps forward and says, “Father, I paid the price for him, I paid the price for her.” And then God says, “Because of what my Son did for you, I now count you as righteous. Enter into my heaven.”
God won’t declare anyone righteous without dealing with our sin. Insert Jesus! Jesus gave His life to bring us back to Himself.
We were hopelessly lost and utterly incapable of fixing our own problems. But while we were still messy and broken, God gave us the incredible gift of His Son, Jesus Christ.
No matter who we are. No matter what family we are from, or become part of, what Jesus did has given us the opportunity to have a right relationship with God.
THAT is what has saved us. JESUS SAVES!!!
My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On Christ, the Solid Rock, I stand; All other ground is sinking sand.
CONCLUSION:
In the spring of 2002, Denise Banderman was taking a class in Youth Ministry at Hannibal-LaGrange College in Missouri.
When it came time to take her final exam, it unexpectedly turned into less of a test and more of a learning experience all its own, one she would never forget.
She writes: When I got to class, everybody was doing their last-minute studying. Dr. Hufty, the professor, came in and said he would review with us before the test.
Most of his review came right from the study guide, but there were some things he was reviewing that she had never heard.
When questioned about it, Dr. Hufty said those things were in the book and that they were responsible for everything in the book. The students couldn’t argue with that.
Finally it was time to take the test. (He placed a test on each desk, then instructed), “Leave them face down on the desk until everyone has one, and I'll tell you to start.”
When the students turned them over, to their astonishment every answer on their tests was (already) filled in and their names were even written on the exam in red ink.
The bottom of the last page said: “This is the end of the exam. All the answers on your test are correct. You will receive an A on the final exam. The reason you passed the test is because the creator of the test took it for you. All the work you did in preparation for this test did not help you get the A. You have just experienced…grace.”
Dr. Hufty then went around the room and asked each student individually, “What is your grade? Do you deserve the grade you are receiving? How much did all your studying for this exam help you achieve your final grade?”
Then he said, “Some things you learn from lectures, some things you learn from research, but some things you can only learn from experience. You’ve just experienced grace.
“One hundred years from now, if you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, your name will be written down in a book, and you will have had nothing to do with writing it there. That will be the ultimate grace experience.” [Source: www.preachingtoday.com]
