"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 “the 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 preacher replied to him, “Young man, you don’t have to swallow it, it is already in you.” This is true. The Bible teaches that we are all sinners, i.e., none of us can say that we have never sinned. 1 John 1:8 and 10 tell 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.” But the verse that gives us hope is verse 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 sins. In telling other people about Jesus, I have had to deal with this 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 get the idea 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 as 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 judging or 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 Romans 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
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"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
We know that it is a fact that we are all sinners. We who are Christians are "sinners saved by grace." But I'm not sure that we take the word "sin" as seriously as we should. What I mean is that we think of sin as adultery, murder, stealing, swearing, etc. There are at least two things that we need to take into account when we think that because we haven't done any of the above we are what I will call "soft sinners." First, there are sins of omission as well as commission, and, second, there are sins of attitude. Sin can also be what we have not done that we were supposed to do. Do you remember that King Saul thought he had done enough when he killed almost all of the Amalekites but left the king alive and took bounty from them. God told him to totally destroy everything and everybody. God took what he said seriously.By that sin of omission, Saul disqualified himself as king of Israel. To not obey is a sin of omission. As to sins of attitude, we can think of false pride. The Bible tells us over and over that God exalts the humble and abases the proud. A prideful approach to life is as much a sin as lying, cheating and stealing. We need to be aware that when we say "all have sinned," it means that we have sinned in every way possible. Just because you have not been a blatant sinner in the eyes of the community does not mean that you are free from what God can hold you accountable for. It is true that "all have sinned." Count you and me among "all." What we really need to be thankful for is that God is the God of grace and that He will forgive us. Bro. Joe |
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