“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God…”
The Bible is plain and simple about one thing: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” The Bible also declares that there is no one who can say that he or she is good in every sense of the word. Jesus even told the rich young man not to call Him good. If anyone could have been called “good” on this earth, Jesus could have been. I think that Jesus reprimanded the young man because He did not want anyone to use that word “good” loosely. We should all strive to be good people, but when we think that we have reached a satisfying level of goodness, we are only fooling ourselves. We can really become complacent in our “goodness.” So we all need to realize that we “have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” There are different ways that we try to excuse our sinful behavior, and that is what this article is about. There are what I will call “excusers.” These people know that what they do is wrong, but they excuse it on the basis of the reasons for their situations. Their common excuse is that their parents are to blame. If their parents had been better role models, they would not have given in to certain sins. Another excuse is that other people prodded them to do wrong. This reminds me of Adam and Eve after they sinned. When confronted with his sin Adam said “It was the woman’s fault. She gave me the fruit and I ate it.” Eve, in turn, blamed the serpent. What both of them said was true, Eve did give Adam the fruit, but she didn’t make him chew it and swallow it. The serpent did beguile Eve, but he did not pluck the fruit and put it in her mouth. They stood without excuse. There are other things that provoke excuses, but these two illustrate the point for us that we should not make excuses for our sins. There are what I will call the “deniers.” These people deny that there is such a thing as sin. Anything that we do is alright, because there is no God to Whom we will have to answer. There are some things that they see as wrong, like mistreating other people, but that is not called sin. To the “deniers” we don’t have to answer to a higher power for anything that we do. I guess that these are the people who say that anything goes as long as we don’t feel bad about it. Whole industries are built around that supposition. “Deniers” do not believe that the Bible has any authority in the lives of people and that we can just ignore it. There are what I will call “self-righteous sinners.” In the sense of living moral lives, these people are straight as an arrow. Their problem is that they have a shallow view of sin. They think because they don’t swear, lie, drink alcoholic beverages, smoke, chew, dip, etc. they are not sinners. There is one sin that these people overlook, and that is the sin of pride. The Bible does not go easy on pride. There are a lot of references to the sinfulness of pride, but I will use one to illustrate the point. Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” The elder brother in what we call the “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” is a good example. He took great pride in the fact that he had not wandered off into the “far country” as his brother had, but in his pride he could not rejoice in the fact that the younger son had come home. He refused to go to the party because his pride had been hurt. We who are involved in church really need to heed this lesson. Finally, there is what we will call “the truly repentant.” These people are truly sorry for their sins, and they seek the forgiveness of God regardless of the causes of their sins. They don’t make excuses, deny, or look down on other people, but they go to God for forgiveness and get forgiven for their sins. It is just a simple matter of forgetting our pride, confessing that we have sinned, and getting God’s forgiveness. Let this last person be characteristic of us. Bro. Joe
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“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God…”
The Bible is plain and simple about one thing: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” The Bible also declares that there is no one who can say that he or she is good in every sense of the word. Jesus even told the rich young man not to call Him good. If anyone could have been called “good” on this earth, Jesus could have been. I think that Jesus reprimanded the young man because He did not want anyone to use that word “good” loosely. We should all strive to be good people, but when we think that we have reached a satisfying level of goodness, we are only fooling ourselves. We can really become complacent in our “goodness.” So we all need to realize that we “have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” There are different ways that we try to excuse our sinful behavior, and that is what this article is about. There are what I will call “excusers.” These people know that what they do is wrong, but they excuse it on the basis of causes for their sins. One common excuse is that their parents are to blame. If their parents had been better role models, they would not give in to certain sins. Another excuse is that other people prodded them to do wrong. This reminds me of Adam and Eve after they sinned. When confronted with his sin Adam said “It was the woman’s fault. She gave me the fruit and I ate it.” Eve, in turn, blamed the serpent. What both of them said was true, Eve did give Adam the fruit, but she didn’t make him chew it and swallow it. The serpent did beguile Eve, but he did not pluck the fruit and put it in her mouth. They stood without excuse. There are other things that provoke excuses, but these two illustrate the point for us that we should not make excuses for our sins. There are what I will call “deniers.” These people deny that there is such a thing as sin. Anything that we do is alright, because there is no God that we have to answer to. There are some things that they see as wrong, like mistreating other people, but that is not called sin. To the “deniers” we don’t have to answer for anything that we do to a higher power. I guess that these are the people who say that anything goes as long as we don’t feel bad about it. Whole industries are built around that supposition. “Deniers” do not believe that Bible has any authority in the lives of people and that we can just ignore it. Finally, there is what I will call “the truly repentant.” These people are truly sorry for their sins, and they seek the forgiveness of God regardless of the causes of their sins. They don’t make excuses or deny, but they go to God for forgiveness and are forgiven for their sins. It is just a simple matter of forgetting our pride, confessing that we have sinned, and getting God’s forgiveness. Let this last person be characteristic of us. Bro. Joe “And the serpent said unto the woman, “You will not surely die.” 5. For God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes will be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
The serpent approached Eve and asked her if there was fruit in the garden that she should not eat. She told him that they were not to eat from the tree “in the midst of the garden,” because they would die. Then he started his temptation in earnest. He told her that she would not die. In other words, he was calling God a liar. This is one of Satan’s favorite tricks and he just does it over and over again, and people still fall for it. Jesus said of him: “When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (John 8:44) Jesus was probably referring back to this original temptation when he called Satan “the father” of lies. The liar was lying about calling God a liar. No matter how devastating the results of sin are, we brilliant human beings just keep falling for it. Like Eve, we just don’t believe God…… He told Eve that if she would eat the forbidden fruit, she would “be as gods.” Why? Because she would know both good and evil. This is exactly what God warned them would happen. Satan made what God forbad look as if it was really something beneficial. We haven’t learned a lot since the Garden of Eden…..Have we! That is when the forbidden fruit began to look good to eve, and she plucked it and ate it, and was joined by Adam. There is an old adage that forbidden fruit always looks good. I don’t guess that there is a human being, outside of Jesus, who has not experienced the pleasure of tasting forbidden fruit. We read about the devastation of this forbidden fruit throughout the Bible. The original couple did not die right away, but die they did. Satan lied….sin is a killer. “The wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23a) Thank God, that in His grace, that is not the final answer. The conclusion of Romans 6:23 is: “But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Satan was defeated at the cross, because by His blood, Jesus made forgiveness for sin possible. Satan tried all of his lies to keep Jesus from the cross, but it did not work. Jesus drank all of the bitter dregs of pain and suffering in order to rescue us from the liar. Satan continues to lie, but through faith in Christ, we do not have to give in to his lies. The answer is lined out for us in Romans 3:23-24: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. 24. Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” We are redeemed by our faith in Jesus Christ, Who died for our sins, rose from the grave, ascended to heaven, where He intercedes for us, forgives us and gives us eternal life. Bro. Joe “The Lord is near unto them that are of a broken heart; and saves such as be of a contrite spirit.”
Who would want to read something with a title like that? If you are one who would, you have gotten this far. Stick with me and the title will make sense and will leave you in a better mood than the title promises. This is not a condition that we would normally want, but there are times that we need this condition to move on to joyfulness. We learn here that God draws close to those who are broken-hearted and contrite. (At least we draw near to Him and find Him already there.) The point is that the Lord responds to our repentance. He does not want us to go merrily on our way in our sins, ignoring our sinful condition. Sin is a big deal to God. We need to frankly feel sorrow for sin in our hearts. These are the moments that we feel close to God because we realize our need for Him – especially at these times. Sin should break our hearts. For example, when we feel such hatred for a person that we rejoice when they fall on hard times, or when we get back at them in some way. There is really no joyful satisfaction in any sin. Our sin should cause us to… well… feel guilty until we surrender our hearts in repentance to God. David, who wrote this psalm, fully understood this sorrow. Our sins should cause contrition in our hearts. It is in this contrition that we feel closer to Christ, and when we experience His love on the deepest level. Sin does not draw us closer to Him. I like the interpretation of this verse in the Amplified Bible: “God is close to those who are….crushed with sorrow for sin and humbly and thoroughly penitent.” I know that there are many causes for depression, but I think that sin that has not been repented of is a root cause of a lot of depression. Maybe it is time in your life to be “crushed with sorrow for sin and humbly and thoroughly penitent.” Sin pulls us down and causes self-loathing. This is not how the Lord Jesus Christ wants us to live, because He gave His life on the cross to relieve us of this sin burden. We need to feel sorrow for sin that will lead us to repent and seek the forgiveness that Jesus so readily gives. David gave us guidance for this in Psalm 51:16-17: “For thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. 17. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou will not despise.” God is not looking for outward religious devotion on our part; rather, He wants us to really experience sorrow for sin and come to Him for the only place that forgiveness is found. Do it! Bro. Joe “Therefore to him that knows to do good, and does it not, to him it is sin.”
We often hear testimonies of what people have given up since they were saved. It is important to give up sinful habits and sinful ways when we are saved, but that is not the end of the story. There is sin that is called the “sin of omission.” James put it as succinctly as it could be put in the text: “If you know to do good and do not do it, it is sin.” (my paraphrase) It’s not just a question about what we have given up for Jesus that is important. The question is what we are now doing that we did not do before Jesus changed our lives? Let’s begin with what I call “sins of the tongue.” It might be that we gave up gossip when Jesus changed our lives. Knowing of the destruction of this sin, I would think that it would be a good thing to give up. It would be good if all people would stop gossiping. The important question here though is what good things are we saying about people instead of negative things. If it is a sin to say bad things about people, whether they are true or not, it is a sin to fail to say good things to and about people. I really don’t like to think of all the times that I have thought about something good that I should have said to someone and didn’t say it. I don’t think we realize how important it is for us to say good things to people. The Lord only knows that after all of the negative things that we hear, it is important that we hear good things as well. Think of all that would change in our churches if we decided that we would say good things about people whenever we felt the impulse to do so. There are times when negative things need to be said, but saying good things is equally important. I try to remember this when I am preaching. There are times when we preachers have to “step on toes,” but there are also times when we need to “touch their hearts.” I love it when people say good things to me. People have asked me if I get tired of people saying “enjoyed the sermon.” My answer is always, “Heavens no. Do I want them to tell me that they hated the sermon?" James wrote that it is a sin to know to do good and not do it. If we know that it is a good thing to do something for someone else, just for the sake of doing it, it is a sin if we don’t do it. For example, there might be a lonely person in our community who does not get along well with people. Our tendency is to leave these people to themselves, but that is not what Christians should do. It would be a good idea to visit this person and take him or her cake. This person might think you were crazy at first, and he or she might even refuse the cake, but you have done the right thing, and God would be pleased and look on that gesture with favor. I know that this seems like a silly thing, but doing the Christian thing seems to be silly to the world at times. One time when Jesus visited Jericho, he spoke to and went home with the most hated man in town – Zacchaeus. He was the local tax collector and had gotten rich at a lot of other people’s expense, but Jesus befriended him and changed his life for the better. We might not change a cantankerous person for the better like Jesus did, but it would be worth a try, and it would be the right thing to do. Let’s at least be aware that there is something called “sin of omission,” and stop omitting. Bro. Joe “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us."
“Sin” is a little three letter word that people do not like. In fact, some people hate it so badly that they will not even use the word and think that you are an old fashioned old fuddy duddy if you use it. However it is an inescapable word and must be dealt with. People deal with it in different ways. Let me show you what I mean: People deal with it by denying that there is any such thing as sin: “If we say we have no sin…” What this means is that literally anything goes. It can go to great extents. If there is no such thing as sin we can kill people for any reason and we will not be guilty before God. We may break man’s law and have to pay for it before the bar of man’s justice, but we will still have to deal with God. “Thou shalt not kill” is not a suggestion, but a commandment. If there is no such thing as sin, we can do anything that we want without guilt. This is postulated today as truth, and we are paying a big price for it. God is not blind to the breaking of His laws and He is not blind to our personal sins. He knows when we do not honor Him as we should. He knows when we have crossed the line of morality and flaunt His word. We cannot deny the reality of sin and get by with it. People deal with it by saying that sin is really no big deal: “If we say that we have not sinned…” This is not a denial of the reality of sin, it is just a confession that sin does not matter to the individual. “Okay, so I committed adultery, what’s the difference, everybody is doing it.” (Everybody is not doing it, but it is used as an excuse.) The severity of sin is not measured today by polls. If a majority of people think something is alright, then it is alright no matter what the Bible says. This is giving human beings a lot more credit than we deserve. History is fraught with the dangers of this philosophy. In Nazi Germany it became alright to murder Jews because that was the prevailing opinion in Germany at the time. People believed Hitler’s lies and were led to devastation. For a more modern example, do we really think that killing a baby and selling its body parts is alright? What biblical text would we base this on? Sin is a big deal – even my sins and your sins. None of us can judge others, but God has already judged sin and He will deal with it. It is a big deal to Him and should be to us. People need to deal with sin by confessing it: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We cannot deny the reality of sin, nor can we take away from the seriousness of it. What we can do is realize our own sins, repent and confess them before our Holy God. It is said that, “Honest confession is good for the soul.” This is literally true, particularly if that confession is made to God. We just need to come clean with our sins, and allow Jesus Christ to cleanse us from them. I am certainly not writing this to judge you or anyone else. I am painfully aware of my own shortcomings and sins, and I deal with them daily by confessing them. My salvation does not depend on this, but my effectiveness as a Christian witness does. I was saved when I gave my life to Jesus by faith, but that did not mean that I no longer needed to confess my sins. In fact, John used the little pronoun “we” in this text. Even the great apostle John had to confess his sins and be cleansed by Jesus. I do not know how you are dealing with sin, but I know how you need to do it. I base this, not on my opinion, but on the Bible. You need to get honest with yourself and with God, then repent and confess your sins and be cleansed. Right now would be a good time to do that. I just did! Bro. Joe “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in the lust thereof. 13. Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. 14. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for you are not under law but under grace. 23.The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Sin is one of those facts of life that we have to deal with every day. (As though you didn’t already know that.) In fact, it is the major thing that we have to deal with, because God hates sin. He hates it because it is disobedience to Him. He hates it because it drags us down. God knows that sin is sin and that because we do not commit adultery, or something like that that we consider a “big” sin, we have no problem with it. God hates all sin – let’s just rejoice that He loves us in spite of it. Let’s look at the seriousness of sin: We will begin with the last verse written above: “The wages of sin is death…” Sin kills!!! When people are in the throes of sin, they do not feel like it is sin because it brings physical and mental pleasure. But the inescapable fact is that sin kills: "for the wages of sin is death.” Go back to the Garden of Eden. What did God tell Adam and Eve would happen if they ate the forbidden fruit? He told them that they would die. We know that they did not die immediately, but they did eventually die. In fact, the rest of their lives became what we can call “the process of dying.” All we have to do is look at our aging bodies and realize that we are dying. Sin has killed everyone since Adam and Eve, for the Bible tells us in Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Sin is serious because it not only kills us, it ruins our lives if we let it have control of our lives. Paul wrote: “Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin.” “Members” means parts of our bodies. For example, we are not to use our hands as instruments of unrighteousness. With just a little imagination, you can recall ways that you can use your hands to sin. (Don’t get too carried away.) Another example, and perhaps a more pertinent one, is our brains. Since the thought is the father of the deed, we need to be careful where we let our thoughts go. In fact, sin is a thought before it is a deed. That is why the Bible reminds us time and time again to be careful what we think about. Satan is aware of all that I have just written, and he is always at work on our minds, trying to sidetrack us from wholesome thinking. How do I know so much about this? Well, I have a brain – enough said, or written. We know that sin is serious because of what it cost God to deliver us from it. Romans 6:23 tells us: “The wages of sin is death: but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It is not our own righteousness, or our own will power, that delivers us from sin. It was/is Jesus who delivers us from sin. He did it by His death on the cross. He paid the price for our sins on that cruel cross. 1 John 4:10 tells us: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” “Propitiation” means that Jesus took the wrath of God that was rightfully ours, upon Himself on the cross. That is why Jesus cried out: “MY God, My God, why have You forsaken me….” Jesus paid the price that we owed in order to give us the salvation that we can only have by faith in Him. I hope that you have already taken God up on His offer of Jesus to save you from sin, from its penalty and its doom. Sin does not have to rule the day, because God has made it possible for us to defeat sin through the blood of Jesus Christ. Either rejoice in the fact that you have trusted Jesus to save you, or do it now. Bro. Joe "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."
A young man heard a sermon by an old preacher on what we call “original sin.” (This means that we are all sinners because Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden.) He approached the older man and said to him that he could not swallow that old idea about original sin. The old preacher replied to him: “Young man, you don’t have to swallow it, it is already in you.” That is true. The Bible teaches that we are all sinners, i.e., that none of us can say that we have never sinned. 1 John 1:8 and 10 tells us this about sin: “8. if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 10. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” It seems a hopeless case, but it is not hopeless. Why? The verse that gives us hope is 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In other words, we are not hopeless sinners, because God has provided the perfect sacrifice through His Son in order for us to receive forgiveness for sin. In telling other people about Jesus, we have to deal with the problem of sin. If we say to a person, “You are a sinner,” they will usually misunderstand what we mean. They think that we are saying, “Compared to me, you are a bad, bad person.” They think that we are looking down our noses at them. They accuse us of judging them. But wait, we understand that “all have sinned” means that we have sinned as well. We are not looking down our noses at them; rather we are trying to give them the good news that the same Savior who forgave and forgives us for our sins will forgive them as well. We are asking people to leave their status as “sinner lost in sin” to “sinner saved by grace.” 1 John, verses 8 and 10, cover the entire situation. Verse 8 tells us that we can never say that we have no sin in our lives. If nothing else, we have pride in the fact that we do not sin. Pride is one of the deadly sins, and the Bible tells us that it “comes before a fall.” Verse 10 tells us that we cannot say that we have never sinned, because we have. If we deny that we have to deal with sin in our lives, we are calling God a liar, because He tells us that we are sinners. Now, I want to be careful about calling anyone a liar, and that especially applies to calling God a liar. To live in this world is to encounter sin, and sin we will. We might not commit adultery or steal something, for example, but we will sin by omission if not by commission. In other words, we can sin by not doing what we should do as well doing what we should not do. The best thing to do with sin is to seek forgiveness from Jesus by confessing it. Allow me to give a little advice here. If you are witnessing to someone about Jesus, make sure that you qualify that when you say they have sinned, you do not mean that they are bad people and that you are better than they are. If they think this, your witness will fall on deaf ears. If you are being witnessed to and the witness tells you that you are a sinner, keep in mind that he or she is not belittling you, but telling you the first thing that you must do to become a Christian, i.e., confess that you are a sinner. The Bible is not kidding when it says that “all have sinned,” and it illustrates this fact all through the Old and New Testaments. We see the great King David sin with Bathsheba. We see Moses lose his temper and strike the rock. We see Peter, the great apostle, deny His Lord. Indeed, the Bible illustrates Roman 3:23 throughout. The only One to whom this does not apply is God, and the only perfect person who ever lived is Jesus. We just have to deal with sin and the only way to deal with it is given in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He (Jesus) is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” Believe it and practice it! Bro. Joe “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. 2. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. 3. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.”
These verses are the heart-cry of a man grieving over his sins. The man is David, and the sins are those pertaining to Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. You probably know the story of how David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and when she told David that she was pregnant, to make a long story short, he had her husband killed in battle. I think that you will agree that David had a lot to be forgiven for. He committed adultery, he committed murder, and then he tried to lie his way out of it. Thus, we have these verses in our Bible. I was thinking about these verses this morning, and it occurred to me that David wished that this had never happened. As the old saying goes, “If wishes were horses, we would all take a ride.” There was nothing that David could do to undo what he had done, and he, just like us, was not allowed “do over’s.” When David asked God to “blot out (his) transgressions,” he meant for God to help him forget, to blot it out of his mind. All David could do, and all that we can do, is to seek God’s forgiveness, accept forgiveness when it is given and move on. David did what we can do, and that is what will follow in this article. In seeking God’s forgiveness, David asked for God’s mercy. “Mercy” and “grace” are two words that we do not want to be taken out of the Bible. Since we can’t undo past sins, the only thing that we can do is to throw ourselves on God’s mercy. One thing that strikes me about these verses is David’s sincere sorrow over what he had done. When we seek God’s mercy, we need to be sure that we sincerely know that we need His mercy. This was no empty plea that David was making to God. If we want to experience the mercy of God, we must have sincere sorrow for what we have done. I remember when my parents caught me doing something that I should not have done that I would plead for mercy, not because I was really sorry, but because I had been caught red-handed. (Don’t think too harshly of me, you probably did the same thing.) After we get a little more mature, we learn that being sorry for getting caught is not enough. I sense in David’s plea in these verses a sincere need for God’s mercy and forgiveness. You can’t undo anything from your past, but you can sincerely seek God’s mercy and He will give it – as He did for David. We have to remember when we seek God’s mercy and He gives it that this does not erase the consequences of what we did. David could not uncommit (I know, computer, that this is not a word, shut up, I just made it up.) adultery; he could not bring Uriah back to life, nor could he unlie. (Shut up computer, this is my article.) David’s kingdom was never the same again, and he had to face many hardships after his adulterous fiasco. Another thing that we have to do is to accept God’s discipline in our lives. But that is not a bad thing. We find the answer to that in Hebrews 12:6-8: “For whom the Lord loves, He chastens (disciplines) and scourges every son whom He receives. 7. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father does not chasten? 8. But if you be without chastisement, where all are partakers, then you are fatherless children and not sons.” If you have been disciplined for sin rejoice you are a child of God. The best thing for us to do is to beware of the temptations that we face daily, and refuse to succumb to those temptations, and then there will be no need to “undo.” Let us rejoice that our God is a God of mercy, and that He will not let us off, but that He will keep us on! Bro. Joe “Therefore to him that knows to do good, and does it not, to him it is sin.”
We often hear testimonies of what people have given up since they were saved. It is important to give up sinful habits and sinful ways when we are saved, but that is not the end of the story. There is sin that is called “sin of omission.” James put it as succinctly as it could be put in the text: “If you know to do good and do not do it, it is sin.” (my paraphrase) It’s not just a question about what we have given up for Jesus that is important. The question is what we are now doing that we did not do before Jesus changed our lives? Let’s begin with what I call “sins of the tongue.” It might be that we gave up gossip when Jesus changed our lives. Knowing of the destruction of this sin, I would think that it would be a good thing to give up. It would be good if all people would stop gossiping. The important question here though is what good things are we saying about people instead of negative things. If it is a sin to say bad things about people, whether they are true or not, it is a sin to fail to say good things to and about people. I really don’t like to think of all the times that I have thought about something good that I should have said to someone and didn’t say it. I don’t think we realize how important it is for us to say good things to people. The Lord only knows that after all of the negative things that we hear, it is important that we hear good things as well. Think of all that would change in our churches if we decided that we would say good things about people whenever we felt the impulse to do so. There are times when negative things need to be said, but saying good things is equally important. I try to remember this when I am preaching. There are times when we preachers have to “step on toes,” but there are also times when we need to “touch their hearts.” I love it when people say good things to me. People have asked me if I get tired of people saying “enjoyed the sermon.”My answer is always, “Heavens no. Do I want them to tell me that they hated the sermon”? James wrote that it is a sin to know to do good and not do it. If we know that it is a good thing to do something nice for someone else, just for the sake of doing it, it is a sin if we don’t do it. For example, there might be a lonely person in our community who does not get along well with people. Our tendency is to leave these people to themselves, but that is not what Christians should do. It would be a good idea to visit this person and take him or her a cake. This person might think you were crazy at first, and he or she might even refuse the cake, but you have done the right thing, and God would be pleased and look on that gesture with favor. I know that this seems like a silly thing, but doing the Christian thing seems to be silly to the world at times. One time when Jesus visited Jericho, he spoke to and went home with the most hated man in town – Zacchaeus. He was the local tax collector and had gotten rich at a lot of other people’s expense, but Jesus befriended him and changed his life for the better. We might not change a cantankerous person for the better like Jesus did, but it would be worth a try, and it would be the right thing to do. We are not expected to succeed in everything that we do in Jesus' name, but we are expected to try. I have heard testimonies about people giving up drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and numerous other things, and this is important, but I would like to hear a testimony where the person told about all of the good things that they are doing now that they didn’t do before. This would not be bragging it would be a declaration that we are not just saved from some things, but that we are saved to do some things as well. Let’s at least be aware that there is something called “sin of omission,” and stop omitting. Bro. Joe |
AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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