Romans 3:10-11 As it
is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who
understands; there is none who seeks after God.”
I read that from the moment
Adam and Eve disobeyed their Creator in the Garden of Eden, humanity has attempted
to deflect conscious acceptance of guilt. Adam blamed God because “the woman”
was given to him by the Creator. Eve blamed the serpent—and you and I have
continued that reaction ever since. It’s the “Blame Game”. We all inherit
“Original Sin” from Adam and Eve. But, we sin plenty on our own also. Today,
psychologists would tell us that we have forgotten 99% of all those things we
have ever done wrong. We suppress then because we don’t like to think about the
unpleasant. Just suppose we sinned only 3 times a day. Imagine if no oftener
than three times a day did we think unkind thoughts, lost our temper, lust
after something or failed to do what ought towards God and our fellow man. Even
if we were that good, we would still have over 1000 transgressions of inequity
a year! Multiple that by our own age and we find tens of thousands of
violations of the Law of God on our record.
Romans 3:22b-23 “For there
is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God.”
Most merciful God, we confess
that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by
what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have
not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and
eternal punishment. That is precisely why repentance is a requirement for
salvation. In theology, repentance is the pain, regret or affliction which a
person feels on account of his past conduct. Real penitence; sorrow or deep contrition
for sin, as an offense and dishonor to God, a violation of His holy law, and
the basest ingratitude towards a Being of infinite benevolence. This is called
evangelical repentance, and is accompanied and followed by amendment of life.
Ephesians 2:12 “All men
have “no hope, and are without God in the world”.
When Adam rebelled, the
relationship between man and God was severed and destroyed. Romans
5:18-19 says, “By the offence of one, judgment came upon
all men to condemnation” and “by one man’s disobedience many were made
sinners”. The death that entered the world because of Adam and Eve not only
introduced physical death into the entire creation, but a spiritual separation
from the life of God, as well, that eliminated the possibility of our comprehending
God’s nature. For millennia God bore man’s ignorance of what God was going to
do through Christ Jesus at Calvary by faith in the promise of the coming Lamb of God, which takes away the sin
of the world. “And the times of this
ignorance God winked at; but now commands all men every where to repent” (Acts
17:30).
2 Peter 3:9 “The
Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness,
but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should
perish but that all should come to repentance.”
No comments:
Post a Comment