If you were here this past week, you know that I just began a new sermon series entitled “Do Not Conform. Be Transformed.” It was based on Romans 12.1. Today we are starting to dig in to that series. We are going to look at a different section of Romans. We are going to look at Romans 3:10-12 in a sermon titled “Not Even One”.
As I mentioned last week, the goal of the series is to begin to take a serious look at the various patterns that we see in the world, particularly the negative patterns that tend to shape us and the rest of society. As I said before, if you are in the world you are either being shaped by culture or you are being shaped by God. There is no in-between. Our goal is to look at those patterns, the consequences of following them, and hopefully find a biblical response to keep us from yielding to them.
But before I just dive into those patterns I want to step back and give you a little bit of the big picture. Because although there are negative patterns in the world such as dishonesty, sexual immorality, drug addiction, violence, and bad behavior, underneath it all or over it all is this overarching pattern of sin. I could begin discussing the patterns of the world before talking about the overarching pattern of sin, but what might happen if you can’t connect a pattern to the overarching pattern of sin you may just dismiss it and tune it out. Or you may begin to isolate sin to a few pockets or segments of culture. Again, we have a big problem in the world and that problem again is called sin. What I want to get across today is sin is a universal problem that affects us all and the negative patterns we see in the world.
What I am going to do today is hit the idea of sin pretty much head on. I am going to start with the definition of sin from a theological dictionary. “Sin is the unbelief, distrust, and rejection of God and human displacement of God as the center of reality. It is expressed through concrete thought or actions. As an inherent part of the human condition, sin is universal and it is both corporate and individual.” I know that is a complex definition of sin. Some people prefer more of a simple terminology or a simple definition of sin. Some have actually suggested sin simply means “missing the mark” which although it may not be the best definition it is not totally wrong. As I have mentioned before, the word sin is actually an archery term that basically means missing the bulls-eye. The idea is that, when we sin, we miss the mark of God’s perfection. That is a good definition but to me it is inadequate. Think about archery. I haven’t engaged in archery in a number of years, and when I do it, I am not very good. But if you pull the bow back and you let the arrow fly and you are going for the bulls-eye and you miss it. But if you still hit the target at 100 or 200 yards, you feel pretty good about yourself, maybe saying to yourself “I didn’t hit the bulls-eye but I feel pretty good about my archery skills since at least I hit the target”.
Unfortunately, that is how people begin to view sin or immorality. I am not perfect but generally speaking if I weigh my good and my bad, I generally have more good than bad. I come pretty close to that mark. But again that is really an inadequate view of sin based on this lengthy theological definition. The definition speaks of the idea that when a person sins he or she is replacing God on the throne. In other words, they place themselves in the center of reality. At a minimum, that is insanity. At a maximum, it is blasphemy. Especially when you consider who the God of the universe is.
This definition also suggests that sin is universal. In today’s passage, we see that Paul is pretty clear about the fact that sin is universal. He writes in Romans 3:10-12 “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” As a side note some people like Paul and some people don’t like Paul. I suspect the people that don’t like Paul are thinking when they read this passage “there goes Paul again just being negative. He needs to see the good in people. He needs to focus on the positive.” Many in this camp would agree that there are bad people in the world. There are people out there trying to trip us up and take advantage of us, but generally speaking, people are pretty good. But according to this passage, that is simply not true. Paul doesn’t mince any words. He says there is “no one who does good, not even one”. Do you think he is trying to make a point? Yes, and his point is that there is no one that can be technically referred to as good.
Some of you are thinking, surely, there are some good people. Think of Mother Theresa. She was good. They made her a saint. But Mother Theresa herself, before she passed, wrote a book that was basically very telling about her own demons in her heart and the things that she struggled with. You think what about Billy Graham. Surely he is a good man. From the world’s view he is a good man but he would be the first to admit that he is not a perfect man. He had his own flaws in life. Maybe some negative thoughts or actions or whatever. You think I have this dear, sweet 99-year-old grandma. God love her. She is just perfect. Not a mean streak in her. Surely, she is sinless. Probably old grandma would admit that even she has had a mean streak in her heart maybe feeling some bitterness back toward Aunt Mabel that she has held onto since 1962 or something. Everybody, if they are honest with themselves, they know that sin is very pervasive. What we want to do is we want to hide from that. We want to believe that sin is out there and it relates to a certain group of people and that generally speaking everyone else is pretty good. What we are doing when we do that is putting the blinders on. We are failing to see the truth of the situation and the truth that it is bad out there. We see enough indication that things are bad by the television, the news, or the internet, or that sort of thing. But again we just think, come on Chuck, it’s not that bad. I say I’m like Paul and I think it is awful. You say Chuck you are being negative. Maybe, but maybe I am just teaching what was taught to me in seminary. We live in a world that is full of sin. Sin is part of the Christian belief system and not just sin, all pervasive sin. There is actually a term theologians like to use that they call depravity. I will give you a theological definition of depravity. “Depravity refers both to the damaged relationship between God and humans and to the corruption of human nature such that there is within every human an ongoing tendency to sin.” That’s a tough concept. Some people don’t buy into this definition. I don’t buy into what they call total depravity, but I buy into the fact of enough depravity. There is enough depravity in the world to give some evidence that there is something foundationally wrong with the human soul.
As a side note, when I was getting ready to do this sermon, I often search for sermon power point slides and I have one source that I go to and I pay the annual subscription and I put in the Bible verse and it gives me some ideas as far as graphics. For some reason, I typed in depravity and I typed in Romans 3 and didn’t get anything. I said what I will do is just create my own. I went on the internet and made the mistake of typing in depravity and hitting images. What was I thinking? Then I actually looked at the images. When I was looking, I thought these aren’t very good. These are disgusting. These are vile. These are gross. These are blasphemous. As much as I didn’t need to have those images in my mind, what it confirmed is the idea that there is total depravity out there. Someone could actually create these photographs that are so vile, so disgusting, so humiliating, so defiling of God and of people that there has to be depravity down there.
I became a Christian 25 or 30 years ago. Once I became a Christian, like many of you, I wanted to distance myself from all the negative stuff in my past. From all the yuck and the muck and the movies, what I was reading, whatever it was. The problem is sometimes we end up in a Christian bubble where we oblivious to what is happening. We forget how vile the world is. Sure, again, we see it through television, the internet, streaming services, and or when we drive down the street and for no reason someone decides to display an inappropriate hand motion. You see that every day. But those things are just the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the larger problems of sin. If you really want to begin to explore sin, you have to go behind closed doors. You have to go behind your heart. You have to look deep into your own heart to begin to see how evil and depraved humanity can be.
Paul, in his second letter to Timothy, begins to give us a laundry list of how bad things are and really how he predicts how bad things are going to get. In 2 Timothy 3.1-4 he writes “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” He says during the last days. Some believe that we are in the last days now. Paul didn’t think he was in the last days. He knew he was close to the end but he had no idea. But based on this description it is a good indicator that we might be in the last days. When we speak of the last days, we speak of the last days before the second coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is going to come back and take his people home, and there will be judgment on all the world. That is what we are talking about the last days. These are the things that are going to be characterizing the last days. While saying that, I acknowledge the fact that there has been bad all throughout history. But there is something about the period we live in now where sin is just rampant. It is just open. There are all sorts of platforms for expressing sin. All these different ways. Sin is becoming just totally acceptable.
Paul goes on here and describes no less than 18 vices that we can expect to see in the culture during the last days. What I thought I would do is quickly go through this list, expand on a few of the items, and while I do this what I want you to do is just kind of think about what images come to mind. Maybe it is people. Maybe it is situations. Maybe it is actions. Whatever it is. Originally, my plan was to attach an image to every one of these items, but I thought it is very difficult and it could get pretty bad. So I decided rather than do that I will just allow your mind to wander as I speak through it and see if you can associate these things with any person in this particular culture.
The first one being quite simple and quite broad is that there will be people that are lovers of themselves. Basically people who are self-centered. They believe the world revolves around them and their whole goal in life is to satisfy all their desires.
Then there will be people who are lovers of money. If we are honest, most of us here like money and we all like to have at least some of it. But there are many people who not only love money, but spend their entire life just accumulating money as a mission and not even being able to spend it all. They just love money. They just cannot get enough of it. I suspect that some of us know people like that.
Then there are people who are boastful and arrogant. These are people you meet the first time or after a few times and every time you meet the person what are they doing? They are talking about themselves. They are talking about their accomplishments. They are not even listening to you. They don’t really care about what you have accomplished. They just want to boast about their accomplishments.
Then you have people who are proud in a negative sense. It is the idea that you have people that are so proud that if anything would come against that pride or anything threaten that pride what they will do is they will go on the attack. They will go and try to squish that person. They will try to stop that pride.
Then you go on to the idea of abusiveness. This actually is translated in the King James as the word blasphemy. Really as I look at the original Greek blasphemy is closer. It is the idea of speaking evil to someone. It would include speaking evil about someone, including God. We hear all the time God’s name taken in vain. Hopefully nobody here is doing that but there are people that are just speaking out blasphemous thoughts about others. They are speaking about God.
Then you have this idea of being disobedient to their parents. Now because I know all our kids here are just excellent, I am going to skip by this one and let you decide whose image you want to put in your head there.
Ungrateful. As I said before, there is just a general lack of courtesy in the world. You don’t hear the word please very much and you certainly don’t hear thank you very much. We live in a rude culture. People that are ungrateful to others and particularly then that makes them ungrateful to God.
The idea of unholy. Here it means basically being in a situation where you have somebody who has no connection to the spiritual world or to the God of the universe whatsoever. There is no physical connection. They live totally in a secular lifestyle. God doesn’t even enter into their picture. We know people like that.
We know others who are without love. I looked this up and it has to do with it said “without family affection”. I think it means your immediate family and some of your extended family but it basically is someone who has the inability to love or receive love from others. Consequently, they are outside of community. We know people like that. They have no love of themselves. They have no love of others and they can’t give any love out. People that are without love.
And unforgiving. We know what unforgiving means but in this sense it also speaks of the idea of an inability or an unwillingness to make a truce with someone. People that have made up in their mind whatever this person says, no matter how much they apologize or whatever it is, I cannot forgive them. I cannot forgive them for what they did to me. That is an unforgiving spirit that has the idea of not being able to make a truce.
Then you have this word slanderous. If you were to look up slanderous in the New Testament, especially in the gospels, you would see that the original word is the word where we get devil from. Diablo I believe it is. Where we get the word devil from. We refer to Satan as what? The great accuser. The great slanderer. What does he do? He speaks lies. He speaks falsehood into the lives of the people. There are people out there and their whole intent is to speak falsehood about others. We know that there are people out there that live their entire life full of lies. In fact, I think our court system is tied up with people who are just committed to speaking falsehood about others.
Then he goes on to say without self-control. This goes back to specifically about in relation to your lust, your personal lust. There are people out there that have no control. This actually means without strength. The strength to resist. There are some people that are so used to just giving in when they have been tempted that they just give in every single time. We have read the newspaper. We have seen the news stories about people like this. People in public positions of power that just cannot control their personal lusts. They are without self-control.
Brutal has the idea of fierceness, brutality. Watch a sporting event. See how brutal and competitive people can be. I think it was recently I was watching the news where teenagers are bullying each other and girls are beating up on other girls and just beating them to a pulp. We have become a society that is just full of brutal people.
Then he says not lovers of the good. Basically that means that their whole inward man or woman is bent towards the bad. So much so that they despise anybody or anything that is good.
Then he says people are treacherous. This word treacherous is how the Bible describes Judas in the gospels. Judas was a betrayer of Jesus Christ. I suspect some of us know people that have betrayed a trust. Even people that have been close friends or possibly even spouses that have betrayed a trust. That have turned on a person. Or possibly even work mates or employers or employees. People that have just betrayed a trust of someone.
And he says rash. Behind this idea, which is interesting, is the idea of headstrong. Which is basically the idea that no matter what somebody says, you are going to go forth with your mission no matter how much havoc you wreak around you. It is the idea of just moving forward. The idea actually behind it is reckless. We have people that are just clueless to their actions and the results of their actions. They don’t think about how it is going to affect family. They don’t think about how it is going to affect fellow employees. They don’t think about those things. They just go because they are headstrong and because they are rash.
Conceited. The interesting thing behind this word is conceited actually means puffed up kind of like smoke, but actually it has more of an image in the form of a cloud. It is like someone who is conceited basically lives above the cloud, which means they are totally absent from any sense of reality. They have no sense of self-awareness. We all know there are people like that out there.
Finally, he says lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. What this last phrase brings us back to is again the idea of sin. What is interesting, and I just noticed it this morning, is that all these vices are bookmarked by two key phrases: “lovers of themselves and rather than lovers of God.” Again, sin. That is what we are talking about there. When you have placed yourself on the throne, when you became a lover of yourself rather than a lover of God, you can guarantee that you are in the midst of sin.
As I went through this list, I suspect that some of you were thinking of people you know. Maybe some people you don’t know. Maybe celebrities or pop stars or politicians or whatever. But I also suspect that some of you might have been thinking about people that are close to you or maybe were one time close to you. You are beginning to be reminded of some things that they did to you. If you are doing that, again, that is not totally wrong. But what you are doing is limiting the scope of sin to people that are out there; to the people that are outside of you. Again, as Paul said in the original passage, he said there is no one who is righteous, not one, which means that includes everybody in this room, including yours truly. There is not one righteous. If we were honest with ourselves and willing to lay down and open up and expose our heart to God and filter our heart through these 18 items, I suspect we would bump up against some of them. If you are like me, I suspect that if you go through it you may see times that maybe you were a little bit too much in love with yourself. Maybe you were too filled up with your accomplishments. Maybe you got caught up in loving money. Maybe because you didn’t have it or you have too much of it. Maybe you were caught up in this idea of pride and you didn’t even realize it until suddenly somebody did something that seemed to jeopardize your pride. What did you do? You began to think and scheme how can I cover myself? How can I preserve my pride? That is very common for prideful people. Maybe you have been abusive. Maybe you have said things. Maybe you have said evil things to another person. Maybe you have used the Lord’s name in vain. I suspect there are some people in here that have. Maybe you have been disobedient to your parents. Maybe you have shown disrespect for your parents. Maybe you have shown disrespect for your kids. Again those are things that I think, if we were honest with ourselves, we would begin to see that those are happening. Maybe we haven’t been thankful to others. To the waitress in the restaurant or our spouse for serving us a meal or just taking care of us. We haven’t frequently used the word thank you. Maybe we have been actually unholy in the sense that, although we are Christians and we come here on Sunday, we live a life that basically might as well be completely absent of God because that is the way we are living it. It is as if God just is here on Sunday and the rest of our lives we might as well just be living as practical atheists. There are people that are without love. People that just don’t know how to love other people. They don’t know how to receive love and they don’t know how to give love. People that are unforgiving. For whatever reason, even if the person has apologized to them, they just can’t let it go. They refuse to put out their hand and have that truce with that person. There are people maybe that have been slanderous in the sense that they have knowingly made false accusations against someone at some time. There are people that can’t control their lusts. They are so out of control that they finally just give in and say, you know what, I am just going to do it. I am not going to think about it. Again there are people that are just brutal towards each other. Brutal towards the people around them. Brutal towards their employees. Brutal towards their kids. There are people that have no sense of the good. Not lovers of the good but simply are bent towards bad. I suspect there are people like that here. I suspect there are people who have maybe possibly been treacherous to somebody else. Maybe have betrayed a confidence. Betrayed a trust. There are people that have made rash decisions just because that is what they wanted to do without any consideration for how it will affect those around us. Of course, there are conceited people. People live with their heads in the cloud that have absolutely no self-awareness so they live in a false reality. Again, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
In closing, I was thinking about maybe taking a poll here to see if anybody can relate to any of these by a show of hands, but I didn’t want to do that. But I suspect that if we are honest with ourselves and we took our heart through this filter here, we would probably be able to examine at least some point in our past where we can identify with one or more of these things. Paul says later in Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” As I thought about this passage today, this is the first time it really came to me, falling short of the glory of God means that you are excluded from the community of God. Falling short you might as well just be as far away as you can be. When you are outside the glory of God that means you have absolutely no chance of being in communion with God. Which pretty much means you are going to be outside communion with God for pretty much all of eternity. I know some people in the past say that is not fair. What about the people that just never heard the gospel? What about those poor natives in the deepest, darkest part of Africa or wherever? What about them? They never heard about Jesus. They might not even know who God is. My response is let God worry about them. What we are worried about is the people who have heard the gospel and yet refuse to believe. People in here who have heard the gospel and yet, for some reason, there is a hardness of heart that says, you know what, I like my life the way it is. I like God. I like a portion of God but you are not coming into my house. Don’t get too close. I really don’t want you in the room. I really don’t want to open up my heart to you and I especially don’t want to open up my life to you. There is just not enough room in there. What does God say? He says, you know what, I will keep trying on you but eventually I am going to get to the point where I am just going to let you go. I am just going to let you go and have your way. C. S. Lewis, when he described hell, he said “hell is when God finally gives people what they want. Separation from God”. If you want separation from God, don’t be annoyed when you get hell. God is just giving you what you want. If you don’t want God now, why would you want him for all eternity? Either decide now that he is going to be a part of your life or decide that he is not for all eternity.
I have to admit this is kind of a bummer of a sermon and on such a sunny day. But the good news is we have Blue Grass and Barbeque on the back lawn tonight. I have to put a positive spin on it. Amen. Seriously, though, the world is in a heap of trouble. It is a mess. Not to say that there is not some good out there, but there is a lot of bad. Again, the taint of sin weaves its way through every aspect of culture. The culture doesn’t know how to deal with it. In fact, I was thinking the culture can’t even define it. The culture does not have a name for all this stuff and what is going on in the world. They can’t give it a name. Christians call it sin. There is not a better definition for what sin is. Again, it is when you place yourself on the throne and take God off it. That to me is a perfect definition. It is a perfect illustration. The world cannot deal with it, the world cannot identify it, and the world cannot label it, but the world tries to fix it. When you have issues like violence in the schools, kids shooting kids or whatever, what is the solution? Gun control. That is a Band-Aid. You have teenage pregnancies. What is the solution? Give out more birth control. That is a Band-Aid. We have too much crime on the streets. What do we need? More police. Bigger prisons. That is a Band-Aid. The problem is what the world tries to do is it tries to take a spiritual problem and fix it with earthly solutions, and that is impossible. You can’t do it. Because again the overarching problem is sin and that is a spiritual thing. A spiritual thing needs a spiritual solution. Of course the answer to the spiritual problem is Jesus. Again, it’s Jesus. Christians believe that sin entered through one man, Adam, but basically through another man, Jesus, we all became right with God. He writes in Romans 5:19 “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” If you wanted to replace these words “one man” you could say “For just as through the disobedience of Adam the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of Christ the many will be made righteous.” That is the solution right there. It is so simple. People really struggle with that. I know some people struggle with the idea that we somehow trace our sin all the way back to the first man. My response, and you have heard me say it before, although we can’t trace sin back to the first man, we can definitely trace it back to the crib. Because I know most of you know and most of you have had little kids and as cute and snuggly as they are, within a matter of about couple weeks or a month or so, they are ready to have a little bit of an attitude towards you. They get a little bit demanding. What do we do? The rest of their life we teach them what not to do. Don’t smack your sister. Don’t do this. Do your homework. Don’t be sassy. Don’t steal. We constantly tell them what to avoid. It’s funny we never have to tell them don’t be good. We always have to say don’t be bad. Why is that? Because inherent in every human being is this thing called sin. It is a seed. That can be traced back to every single person. We have this tendency to sin.
But again, the solution is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is the one who came in and made us righteous which is right with God. Through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, we know that the sins have been removed. We have been given freedom from the guilt. More than that, behind that core gospel message, is the deeper message of love; of God’s love for us. And you know what? God’s love is so powerful and so potent that it can penetrate the darkest, vilest heart as long as that heart is open. When that heart is opened up and God’s love pours into it, transformation starts and starts happening. Although I am unrealistic to believe that if people get out there and begin to share their faith and other people begin to open their hearts, I am not idealistic to think that the whole world’s problems will be solved, but I am naïve enough to think that it will make a dent in it. We will begin to impact our world. Not only that. As we think about the second coming, we will be able to participate with Jesus Christ as he ushers in the second coming of Christ. As we begin to see people step into their identity as children of God, we will see not only lives transformed but we will see all of creation transformed and we will get to be a part of that.
Again, people, the world is a mess. The world is a total mess. It is a world of depravity and in some sense total depravity. That is the world that we are called into. Christ came down. Christ became one. The word was with God but the word became flesh and made his dwelling with us. He walked in our neighborhood. He walked within the midst of the chaos. Within the midst of the depravity. Again, that is our calling. Our calling is to allow ourselves to be transformed by the love of God through Jesus Christ and then through the gospel of Jesus Christ take that transforming power into the world and partner with God as he continues to transform the world back to him. As we begin to call the world back to him. That is our calling. My prayer for each of us, including myself, is that we would not neglect that call. Let us pray.
