“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3)
Jesus did not come into the world to condemn sinners, neither did He come to accept them. He came to save them by executing them through His own death on the cross. God saw that no rehabilitation was possible. The heart of man is deceitful above all things and incurable. There is no remedy for the sinner apart from Christ. Only by His stripes are we healed.
A sinner can no more change his ways than a leopard can change his spots. Sinners are doomed, not because of what they DO, but because of who they ARE. All who are in the flesh cannot please God. Except a man is born again, becoming a new creature, where old things have passed away, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Salvation is not simply forgiveness for what we have done; it is deliverance from who we are.
Salvation is not simply forgiveness for what we have done; it is deliverance from who we are.
Man’s problem is genetic. We all had a lousy father. His name is Adam. Because of his disobedience sin entered the world and every person born of him became a sinner. Not only David, but every one of us, has been born in sin and shaped in iniquity. While a baby in the womb has not committed any sins needing forgiveness, the problem lies deeper than what one DOES, the problem is who we ARE. The life in the womb is only an acorn, but it is a sinful acorn that will grow into a sinful oak.
God did not send His Son into the world to condemn us for who we ARE. We were already condemned. God makes no distinction between good sinners and bad sinners. The only distinction is between those who are in Christ and those who are outside of Christ. If you are in Christ you WERE a certain brand of sinner. You might have been a fornicator, thief, drunkard, or adulterer; but even if you were none of these things, you were still a sinner.
Salvation brings a constitutional change into our being.
Salvation brings a constitutional change into our being. We become people whose hearts are now turned toward God, equipped by Him with all that we need to walk completely pleasing to Him. We are washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Sin no longer has dominion over us. We are free indeed because we have been set free from the root of our problem which was in our very nature. The Second Adam came to reverse the legacy of the first Adam. By one man’s disobedience we were made sinners; through the obedience of Christ we have been MADE righteous. He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be MADE the righteousness of God in Him.
It is high time that we start walking in the provisions of this “so great salvation.”
The idea that we who are in Christ are still sinners, still saddled with a sinful nature, still bound to sin more or less every day, is a gross heresy that has been accepted as orthodox truth for too long. It forms the basis of much of the doctrine of our day in which the church is chided not to judge because, “We are ALL sinners.” No, we are not. We who are in Christ are NOT sinners, we ARE saints. It is high time that we start walking in the provisions of this “so great salvation.” It is time that we stop saying that His grace covers our sins. Grace does not simply deliver us from the penalty of sin; it delivers us from the power, the rule, and the very nature of sin. It gives us the power to say no to temptation, EVERY TIME. It abounds where sin did once abound.
Unless the true gospel of grace is recovered in this day, many in the church will continue down the slippery slope toward apostasy. A “gospel” that tells us that we are all still sinners and we will all continue to sin more or less every day is not good news to the heart of a hungry saint.