What's Your Problem?

If you are visiting us, we are currently in a series entitled This Grace In Which We Stand, and we are looking at some of the foundational truths that the Christian faith is built on, and over the last two weeks Matt has taught us what the Bible says about who God is, and what He’s like. Several people mentioned to me how refreshing it was to consider how great and awesome God is. Well, if we were climbing the peaks of God’s goodness last week, we’re going to be descending the depths of man’s badness this morning. In fact, yesterday I mentioned to Janice and Jenn that contemplating the condition of the human heart is kinda like scuba diving in a cesspool. So please put on your mask and snorkel and let’s dive in! So turn with me to a chapter that takes us into the depths of the human heart, Romans chapter 3, but thankfully doesn’t leave us there but brings us back to the pure hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And let’s pray.

I think most people would admit something is seriously wrong with the world. Throughout history and at any given time, the world is full of war and murder and rape and abuse and oppression and corruption and divorce and infidelity and stealing and loneliness and heartbreak and so much more. We read it every day in the news, with tragedies like two year old Caylee Anthony’s story, and the sad realization that we may ever know how that precious little girl died, and we may never see the person responsible for her death brought to justice. We see it in the aftermath of a Michigan man’s rampage that left 7 dead, including two children. For us that’s a news headline for a day or two, but there are so some who now have to live with the devastating effects for the rest of their lives. Parents who will never hold their son or daughter again in this life. Wives who never see their husbands, children who will never see their parents. We see that something is wrong in the political scandal du jour as over and over again powerful men do stupid things and have to resign in disgrace. Sadly, we see it in the church as Christian relationships are torn apart by bitterness and rancor and pride and congregations are ripped apart by immoral or unethical behavior by their pastors. On a global scale, we see it in things like the genocide of Darfur where it is estimated as many as 500,000 people were killed over a few years, and we see it in the widespread persecution of Christians and other religious faiths going on all over the world today. And then, we need to acknowledge that we see very little. There’s more evil and heartache and tragedy and suffering and broken relationships and murder one any given day than we could bear – and then consider that’s been going on for all of human history. It’s hard to deny that something’s seriously wrong.

But it’s not just out there. If we are honest we see the same symptoms in every one of us. To some degree we have all known broken relationships, hidden secrets, deep regrets, people we have hurt, people who have hurt us. Stealing, lying, hating, lusting, killing, slandering, flattering, coveting aren’t just things we read about in the news, these are things that to some degree we see in us.

So what’s the problem? What’s the diagnosis for this sick world?

• Some people blame society – we are the product of our environment

• Freud famously taught us to blame our parents: everything I’ve ever done wrong I can pin on my mom. That works until you become a parent!

• In recent decades it has become popular to blame pain. The reason we do what we do is that deep inside we’re hurting. Pain is to blame.

• One creative man blamed the fact that he killed two men on having eaten too many twinkies.

• And then there are others who believe that there is no problem except that people think there’s a problem. Saying there is a problem makes people feel guilty when they shouldn’t. Stop labeling things right or wrong and people will stop feeling guilty.

The Bible has a different answer to the question and it isn’t society, or our moms, or pain, or twinkies, or undeserved guilt. The problem, according to the Bible, is our hearts. They are bad. They are sick. They are deceived and they are deceptive. They are full of something the Bible calls sin.

Jer. 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?

In Romans 3:10-20 Paul piles on 7 OT passages to describe the sinfulness of the human condition and how hopeless it is that we could ever being good enough to stand before God on Judgment Day. Let’s go through this a couple verses at a time:

I. We are all sinners (vv. 10-12)

Paul quotes Psalm 14 to underline that we are all sinners, no exceptions. Listen to the repetition: No one is righteous, not one, no one, no one, no one, not even one. A few verses later he will declare all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. With the exception of Jesus Christ, the Son of God come to earth as a man, everyone of us – 100% of humanity – is born unrighteous sinners. What’s our problem? We are sinners, everyone of us. Maybe you don’t believe that – maybe you even feel a little offended at being labeled a sinner. But if you make the claim that you are perfect, do you really believe that? Would anyone who knows you agree with that? And if not, why not? What’s wrong with you that you can’t act perfectly? Why can’t you be perfectly good and kind and loving and selfless and courageous and humble? “Well, to err is human. Nobodies perfect.” Yeah, but why? We are all sinners.

Now the fact that we are all sinners does not mean that that’s all we are. The Bible is straight up with us that we are all sinners, but it never says that’s all we are. Man was created in God’s image and there is much that is noble and beautiful and precious in the human race, and every human being carries the image of God in him or her. Because of sin the image of God is distorted to varying degrees in all of us, but it’s still there. Like a mirror that is broken still reflects but not accurately, we still reflect God, but not accurately because we are all broken and sinful. That’s why the world is this mixture of evil and good, noble and base. Each of us has both in us, capacity for good and inclination toward evil. But sin pervades everything we are and do – even our best motives and best actions are poisoned by sin. And verses 13-18 help us know that our sin is worse than we think.

II. Sin is worse than we think (vv. 13-18)

Let’s face it, this verse makes us sound worse than we think we are. We know there’s a problem but we don’t really think its that bad. The human heart is, according to the Bible, a very deep cesspool, and we only skim the surface of knowing what lurks deep within. In your heart and mine are deep chasms and channels of sinful cravings and motives and attitudes that we simply aren’t aware of. And we don’t know what potential for sin given the right circumstances we would be capable of. Sin is worse than we think.

a. Sin is deeper than we think

One of the first people I knew to have cancer was a guy in my church named Pete Penney. I was about 16 when we learned that this kind, gentle man had cancer and doctors scheduled him for surgery to remove it. But when they opened him up they discovered the cancer had spread throughout his entire body, and there was nothing they could do to extract the cancer – it had become an inseparable part of him. They just closed him up and sent him home to die. He wasn’t all cancer, he was still Pete Penney, but the cancer pervaded every bit of his body until there was no unweaving it.

That’s how sin has infected us. It’s not contained in any one aspect of our humanity – it’s woven through every fiber of who we are. In verses 13-18 we see it has spread to our throat, our tongues, our lips, our mouth (an observation: sin seems to do a lot of it’s dirty work through our mouths), our feet, our eyes.

This language isn’t supposed to make us think it’s actually in our mouth, feet or eyes. It’s woven into what and who we are: its command center is our hearts and from there it has metastasized throughout our thoughts, our will, our desires, our motives, our perspective, our understanding. Nothing isn’t affected and infected by sin – in ways that we cannot possibly know or comprehend. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Sin is deeper than we think.

b. Sin is more deceptive than we think

One thing that is sometimes said by Christians that isn’t biblically true is that all sin is the same. I think where people get that is the biblically true thought that all sin is serious in God’s eyes and all sin is worthy of His eternal judgment. But all sin isn’t the same, all sin isn’t equally evil or worthy of equal punishment.

In the gospel of John 19:11 Jesus told Pilate that he would have no power of Jesus if God hadn’t put him in the place of authority that he held. Then Jesus goes on to say, Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin. There are levels of guilt. God will judge all sin absolutely justly on Judgment Day. No one will receive even one blow more than their sin deserves.

Having said that, sin is very deceptive and it is good at making us think we’re less sinful than we really are. Not only does sin make us real good at covering our tracks so people don’t see the full brunt of our sin, but it deceives our own hearts so that we really don’t see how sinful we are.

Not long ago Matt was helping Janice and I through a conflict, and I had a “eureka moment” when Matt helped me see a blind spot that I had. Although its getting better, over the years, Janice has struggled with anxiety (I have her permission to share this, btw), and it often hits her at 2 or 3am and then she often wakes me up and kind of dumps those worries on me, sometimes in a way that makes me feel like she’s blaming me for whatever is wrong, and we end up in a conflict. So I was humbly pointing out to Matt how over the years I never did that! She wakes me up and I feel like she’s being critical of me – and I never do that to her!

The facts were on my side to measure how righteous I was and how guilty she was, until Matt pointed out that the reason I don’t do that isn’t because I’m more righteous but just that that’s not where I’m tempted. I’m not tempted to lie awake thinking of how we need to strengthen the family or deal with this situation or that situation. Know what I’m tempted to do? I’m tempted to sleep! The truth is that my temptations lie in a very different direction – laziness, carelessness, seeking pleasure, neglect of spiritual responsibilities. Suddenly I don’t feel so righteous.

So many ways this can play out. One person looks down his nose at anyone who doesn’t have the same level of self-control or discipline. How could they be so lazy? How could they live like that? But he doesn’t see that his heart is ridden with pride – one of the most serious sins in the Bible. He shifts the focus to the battlefield where he (or she) doesn’t struggle and then thinks he is really superior. And he is deceived by sin.

There are Christians that would get their noses bent out of shape if they saw someone smoke a cigarette, but think nothing of sitting around gossiping about everyone. Gossip is a serious biblical sin, smoking isn’t. I’m not recommending it cause it’s bad for our health, but so is eating twinkies. The point is we move the battlefield to where we don’t struggle and then play the judge – and we are deceived. Your heart (and mine) is more deceptive than we think.

c. Sin is more deadly than we think

Sin is likened an open grave and a venomous snake and feet that run to shed blood. Sin is poisonous and bloody and leads to death. This is not a flattering picture but it’s accurate.

Even with the grace of God working in us, we all have venom in us and apart from the grace of God in our lives, we’d have far, far more. Hit me just right and the fangs come out. And so do yours. Words can be so destructive – leave venom in those we bite. A person’s reputation can be torn down with venomous words. A child can be torn down by constant criticism, or puffed up in destructive pride by indulgent praise. A wife can be battered by her husbands words, or starved by his silence. A husband can be worn down by his wife’s nagging, or left to continue in a destructive path by her fearful silence. A friendship can be destroyed by gossip, trust can be damaged by a single foolish act.

There are so many ways that sin hurts and poisons and eventually can kill ourselves and others. Sin is more deadly than we think. And now we come to the most serious thing about sin:

III. Sin is primarily against God and will one day will be judged by God (vs 11, 18-20)

(11) No one seeks for God…(18) there is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Paul begins and ends this description of sin by its relationship to God. Sin is first and foremost against God – it is not seeking our Creator, it is not fearing God and therefore feeling free to do whatever our hearts want to do. We become our own gods and we make up our own rules and live in defiance of the Ruler of the universe. Even when our sin really, really hurts someone, it’s even more so against God.

Sin isn’t just killing someone or stealing something. Wayne Grudem defines sin as any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature. It’s anything against the will of God. God is perfect in love and wisdom and righteousness and justice and goodness, and therefore His will is the only good and right and just and wise and loving will, and when we rebel against that will (which is what sin is) that rebellion becomes a cancer in creation that if allowed to go unchecked would corrupt creation.

But there is a judgment day and Paul reminds us that all peoples – Jew and Gentile – will on that day stand before God and in the presence of God every mouth will be stopped. There will be no trial lawyers on judgment day. There will be no clever defenses or arguments or objections. Every mouth will be stopped – no one will disagree with God’s perfect justice. There will be people who hate God, but there will be none who will accuse God of injustice. How could we? Our hearts aren’t perfectly just, our judgments aren’t perfectly right. His are. And we will know it, and so judgment day will be silent as every mouth is stopped and we are held accountable to God.

And verse 20 tells us that no one will be right in God’s sight because they obeyed His commands. Not one person will be accepted by God because he or she kept God’s commandments. Paul is writing to Jews, but it includes all those who think that religion is trying to be good enough to earn heaven. Not gonna happen. Ever.

That is bad news we don’t want to run away from – not because we want to magnify sin – but because it brings us to the good news that God has given us in Jesus Christ. In the next two weeks we will consider how God justifies the ungodly and sanctifies the Christian by faith in Jesus Christ, but let’s close by taking a brief trip together to the hill called Calvary. Read Romans 3:23-25

There on the cross, God put Jesus forward as our propitiation, which means he stood in our place and bore the wrath that we deserved. Jesus was the One human being who never sinned –the One Man who lived in perfect obedience to God’s will, pleasing His Father in every action, thought, deed, motive, down to the minutest motive, and as he hung on the cross and bore our sins as if His throat was an open grave, as if His lips carried the venom of asps, as if His mouth was full of curses against God, as if His feet ran to shed innocent blood. And there God poured out His just and furious anger over those sins on His beloved Son.

This is the love of God. How He loves you and me. We who have together become worthless were so precious to Him that He would sacrifice His Son to save us. Jesus valued us so much that He would live and suffer and die to rescue us.

His grace pulls us out of the cesspool and washes us off and embraces us as His children – and no children have ever been loved more than we are loved in Christ. That’s the gospel. Charles Spurgeon (the 19th century preacher) once said:

The gospel does not consist in making a man’s sin appear little. The way Christians get their peace is not by seeing their sins shriveled and shrinking until they seem small to them. But on the contrary, they, first of all, see their sins expanding, and then, after that, they obtain their peace by seeing those sins entirely swept away – far as the east is from the west. ~ CH Spurgeon

That’s what Jesus did, swept away our sin as far as the east is from the west. And if you aren’t a follower of Jesus, He’s ready to do that right now and right here if you would humble yourself and ask Him to save you from your sin. Christianity isn’t about what we do, it’s about what Jesus did: will you put your faith in Jesus this morning? Let’s pray.