"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
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
All
Archives
September 2021
|