Exposes Darkness
Tom Shrader opens a series called 'Who Is This?' by tracing the biblical doctrine of sin from Genesis 3 through Romans and Ephesians, arguing that all humanity inherits a sin nature from Adam and is spiritually dead apart from Christ. Drawing on John 3:19-21, he explains that Jesus came as the light of the world to expose the darkness of human sinfulness, which people naturally resist because their deeds are evil. The teaching closes with a call to respond to the Gospel, pointing listeners toward the hope found in Christ's atoning work, which will be developed further in the weeks ahead.
“Total depravity doesn't mean we're as bad as we can possibly be, but it means we're as bad off as we could possibly be — when sin came into our lives, it touched every area of our life.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Who is this?
Recorded: 2012 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 45 min
Themes: sin, darkness, light, gospel, human nature, hope, repentance, Jesus, new believer, skeptic, struggling with sin, seeking truth, feeling hopeless, young adult, unchurched, questioning faith
Scripture: Matthew 12, Matthew 21:10, Mark 4:39, Luke 5:21, John 12:34, John 3:16, John 3:19-21, Ephesians 1:18, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Genesis 1:1, Genesis 1:31, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, Romans 5:12, Romans 3:10, Romans 3:23, Romans 2:5, Ephesians 2:1-3, James 2:10, 1 John 1:5-10
Theological Themes: hamartiology, original sin, sin nature, spiritual death, atonement, total depravity, incarnation, redemption
Full Transcript
Who Is This? Introducing the Series
The series we are working through is titled *Who Is This?* — and it centers on the encounters people had with Jesus. Across all four Gospels, and more than once in each, there is a moment in the life of Christ where somebody, or a group of people, asks the question: who is this guy? Who is this Jesus? It is typically asked after He has done something remarkable — reversing or bending the laws of nature, forgiving sin, or making some public declaration. It is not always asked in the most positive light. It is asked by His disciples, by strangers, but the question is posed: who is this?
What Jesus does, as we see in Scripture, is refuse to leave neutrality as an option. Jesus says that you are either for Him or against Him. At one point in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus speaks about people who see and yet do not see. What He means there is not physical eyesight — not the eyes of your head — but the eyes of your heart. The Bible says we walk by faith, not by sight. He is not here to be seen physically; He is in heaven until He comes again to be seen by everyone. But the Bible does speak of seeing Jesus in another sense.
Scripture refers to "the eyes of your heart" in Ephesians 1:18, and to "seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" in 2 Corinthians 4:4. Jesus Himself spoke of two kinds of seeing — one physical, and one spiritual. When we see with our spiritual eyes, we see the truth and the beauty and the value of Jesus for what they really are. Therefore, a blind person today may see Jesus more clearly than many who have physical eyesight. That is our hope in these encounters: we look at Jesus in a variety of settings and watch this question being posed.
The Question Across All Four Gospels
Let me draw out that question from each of the four Gospels. The first instance is in Matthew chapter 21, verse 10. It is the triumphal entry. Jesus has come into the city, and the crowd has preceded Him crying, "Hosanna, Hosanna, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord." Matthew 21:10 says, "When He entered Jerusalem, all the city stirred and was saying, 'Who is this?'" Who is this man that generates this kind of response?
Mark's Gospel gives us another moment — one that is among the most striking of all. Mark chapter 4, verse 39. Jesus is on a boat in the sea when a storm arises. He is asleep, and the disciples wake Him saying, "Don't you care that we are going to perish?" He rebukes the wind and says to the sea, "Hush, be still." The wind died down and it became perfectly calm. He then said, "Why are you afraid? You still have no faith." And they became very much afraid.
Notice that they were already afraid when the ship was being thrown about, but now they are very much afraid — even though the sea is calm. Now they are in the presence of something more powerful than the storm itself. They are in the boat with the One who controls the storm. And so they said to one another, "Who then is this?"
In Luke chapter 5, verse 21, Jesus is faced with a paralytic. Those around him are asking whether he can be healed. Jesus tells the man to get up and walk, and then adds, "Your sins are forgiven." The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason among themselves and said, "Who is this man that blasphemes?" — meaning, who does He think He is to claim that He can forgive sin?
The final instance comes from John chapter 12, verse 34. Jesus has been teaching, and He speaks of being lifted up from the earth and drawing all people to Himself — indicating the kind of death He must die. The crowd answered Him: "We have heard out of the law that the Christ is to remain forever. How can this be? The Son of Man must be lifted up — who is this Son of Man?" That is a legitimate question for all time, and it is one that hopefully all of us will be able to answer by the end of this series — perhaps even by the end of today.
Where We Pick Up the Story
Most of you in this room would say that Jesus is God, come in the flesh to die on the cross to save His people from their sin. But it would be naive to think that is everyone. Technically, this series began last week. When we introduced it, we compared it to those movies, plays, or books that open with a scene that is chronologically the last scene, and then the story builds back up to it. In that same way, on Easter morning we asked the question: who is this that rose from the dead?
Proclaiming the Resurrection
Jesus is the answer. I approach it in a very matter-of-fact way. That was my twenty-first or twenty-second Easter, and these are just hard messages, but I have morphed from a position of trying to defend the resurrection to simply proclaiming the resurrection — to say here is what the Bible says, and to be honest, it is what history says. Now, especially with the internet and Google and so many tools, it is easy for me to say: you go home and do the work. You go home and search resurrection facts, look at just the facts, and I think, to the mind that is open and fair, you will see this overwhelming evidence that if you sit fairly, logically, and honestly with it, you are going to conclude at the very least that on that first Easter morning, the tomb was empty. It seems very hard to deny that.
Now, an empty tomb does not in and of itself prove the resurrection — that only proves an empty tomb. What the Bible also tells us, and what the evidence tells us, is that Jesus appeared, that Jesus is alive, and that all of the theories that try to explain away the resurrection simply do not hold up. Many of you are familiar with them. The stolen-body theory makes no sense: the Jews do not want the body gone, the Romans certainly do not want the body gone, and the disciples — if they stole the body — were not about to die for a lie. Peter is the same man who was intimidated by a little servant girl; I do not think he was going to go and die for something he knew was false.
Then there is the swoon theory, which may be one of my favorites, because that one really takes faith. That is the theory that says Jesus went into a coma — after being beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, and all the rest — was wrapped and placed in a tomb, somehow revived from that coma, regained all of his strength, and then in that very difficult condition rolled away a stone weighing roughly two thousand pounds. If He actually did that, you ought to fall down and worship Him for that alone. It seems to me that theory takes more faith than what really happened. Jesus was raised from the dead.
Who He Is and Who We Are
Here is the point I love to make: if that is true — and it is — then you ought to step back and say, "This is something special, this is a big deal." Because evidently He is who He said He was, the Son of Man. But more importantly for us to grasp right now: we are who He says we are. What is so lacking in the world we live in today is this idea of coming to God on our own terms, conforming Him to our image, rather than understanding that we are made in His image and that He is not an object we define but a subject of truth we must reckon with.
I started reading a book on a recent trip. My daughters and I flew to Columbus, Ohio on Monday, drove up to Worcester, Massachusetts to visit a friend and his father, then drove nine and a half hours to see my mom. My daughters joined me on Wednesday, and the three of us were there visiting my mom and my brothers. In that process I was reading a book commenting on the mindset of the next generation of Christians and the world we live in — the observation that while there is open hostility toward God in some quarters, more and more people are increasingly willing to talk about God on their own terms, as they define Him, rather than engaging with God as He really is. So when you get to things like the resurrection, or to things like sin that we are going to talk about today, people have their own wild theories they have assembled rather than simply going to what the Bible says.
Here is what I have discovered — and when I say discovered, I did not invent it at all, I simply saw it over and over again. It is the pattern you see in Isaiah 6: when I begin to see God for who He really is, when I grasp that Jesus rose from the dead, all of a sudden I see myself for who I really am. And then I understand that God is the One who defines the nature of the relationship we have, the depth of that relationship, the fact that we are at war with Him, and that the only way of reconciling is on His terms.
Surrender on His Terms
When I stayed at my brother's house — I called it the Lincoln bedroom, because he has one room full of Lincoln memorabilia and American history — there is a picture of Grant receiving the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. On that day, Lee did not dictate the terms of surrender. Grant did. When you come to God, the terms of reconciliation are not defined by you. They are defined by Him.
The Questions Ahead
So we have answered who it is that rose from the dead: it is Jesus. Today marks the beginning of a series of questions we are going to look at over the next four weeks. Who exposes darkness? Who is it that knew no sin? Who is it that takes away the sin of the world? Who is it that is God and Savior and King? Jesus is the answer to every one of those questions — hopefully you already knew that, but we always need to reinforce it.
The Condition of Man
What we are going to talk about today is the condition of man — not necessarily in an economic sense, an intellectual sense, or even a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense. We want to look at the condition of man, talk at length about sin: what it is, where it came from, what its effects are, and how it affects us. We tend to think about sin primarily in terms of life after death, and that is certainly important, but what about this life?
The World God Made and the Fall That Followed
Turn to page one of your Bible, Genesis chapter one. We are reminded that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Through the balance of chapter one, God creates heaven, earth, and all that goes with it. In verse 31, "the Lord saw that all that He had made, and behold, it was very good." As God created and designed and moved through creation, He sat at the end of it, looked back, assessed it, and said it is very, very good.
Chapter two gives us a little more detail of the creation of man and woman. Chapter two ends with Adam and Eve naked in the garden and unashamed. That picture of nakedness is innocence, transparency — there is nothing to hide, nothing they are ashamed of.
Then jump over to chapter four, and you see Cain and Abel. Here there is strife, jealousy, anger, lying, murder, bitterness, and all sorts of evil. You have to step back and ask: what in the world happened?
What happened in that story of creation is what affects mankind for all time. Ray Stedman, writing on Genesis chapter three, puts it this way: "It explains over a hundred centuries of human heartache, and misery, and torture, and bloodshed. If you remove this chapter, Genesis three, from the Bible, the entire book becomes incomprehensible. But the most striking thing about it is that we find ourselves here. The temptation and the fall are reproduced in our lives many times a day. We have all heard the voice of the tempter, felt the attraction of sin, and we all know the pangs of guilt."
Genesis three becomes essential for understanding the world around us. God tells us in this story that Adam and Eve are in the garden and given a restriction. They are in paradise — a whole orchard of trees and everything they could want — and God said simply, do not eat from that one tree. Then the tempter comes, Eve is deceived, and Adam sins.
Defining Sin
Let me give you a couple of broad definitions of sin. First, J.I. Packer writes: "Sin may be comprehensively defined as a lack of conformity to the law of God" — lack of conformity in act, habit, attitude, outlook, disposition, motivation, and mode of existence. Wayne Grudem shrinks that down: "Sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature." And Tim Keller states it simply: sin is slavery to anything other than God.
What happens is that sin comes into the world, and all at once this innocence and this light moves into darkness.
Jesus Exposes the Darkness
Who exposes that darkness? Jesus does. Turn to John chapter three — page 577 in the Bible we gave you. When we say John chapter three, your mind immediately spins to the most familiar passage in all of Scripture: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life."
Coming a little further along, Jesus speaks in verse 19. This is the judgment — by that He means, here is the verdict: "This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light. Their deeds are evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed, but he who practices the truth comes to the light so his deeds may be manifest as having been wrought in God."
Those who are in sin are those who are in darkness, and the darkness hates the light. The light comes and the light begins to expose it. That is exactly what Jesus says — they run from the light because their deeds are evil and they do not want those deeds exposed.
The Bar with the Clean Windows
When I was recently back home, I drove through the old neighborhood the way you do — here is the house where I was born, here is the first house we lived in, here is where we used to shop. I remember my mom sending me to the store to get bread and losing the change on the way home. I passed a place I used to hang out, an old bar called the Circle Tap.
The term "bar" has been lost in our culture, because now everything is a restaurant or a lounge. But a bar is a bar, and one of the defining characteristics of a bar is that it is dark. The Circle Tap was a Pabst Blue Ribbon bar — classy fellows. There were windows, but you could only see out enough to know that it was daylight outside.
I remember going in there one day when they were converting from old Pabst Blue Ribbon to new Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I had never seen those windows fully open and clean.
The Light That Exposes
The doors were open and I was stunned at what a dump this place was. I was stunned that we used to eat there. That is what the light did. So that dumpy little sinful place is your heart. Along comes Jesus — He is the light, and He exposes it. He is the one who reveals who we really are.
Sin comes along and it does not show us reality. One of the things I do almost every time I am home is go by the bookstore at St. Ambrose University — I graduated from there — to see if there is a new shirt or a gift for somebody. I was reflecting on how St. Ambrose has just taken over the neighborhoods; the school has just grown. But I was reflecting back to my college years. I was there a while — three terms: Nixon, Johnson, and others.
I remember that our mascot was the Bees, and the center of the college was Memorial Hall, which was obviously called the Beehive. I remember on occasions being in or around the Beehive in a contemplative mood with other students, contemplating what is reality.
Sin Distorts Reality
Once you get to Genesis 3, you cannot find reality, because what sin does is distort — it distorts the truth. Eve doubts God's Word. It distorts morality itself. She trusts her own judgment, her own identity, and puts herself above God. That is what sin does. So in comes this sin, this distortion.
When I am talking about sin, what I am talking about is: here is God, and here is me. How did it begin? We have some indication already from Genesis 3, but turn to Romans chapter 5. Paul is writing and he simply says this — Romans 5:12: "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned."
What the Bible teaches us is that we were in Adam. He was our representative, and when he sinned, that sin is now passed on to all people who have ever lived or will ever live. I took the girls over to the John Deere store downtown — there is a kind of museum there — and there is a display with two bins kicking out kernels of corn, showing world population and population in rural areas. There are little windows where you can go and see the world population in 2020, in 2050. What is interesting is to go back and see what it was.
When I was born, the world population was about two billion. It is now seven billion — in all shapes and sizes and nationalities. But the one thing all of us have in common is that if you could go back far enough and trace our ancestry, we would all end up with two people: Adam and Eve. And from them we inherited sin. That is what Paul says. Death comes into the world, and that is how we know that all of us have sinned — because all of us die.
Why the Virgin Birth Matters
That is why, by the way, the virgin birth is important. Let me take you back to the Beehive again. I remember being in there one night when there was a Dutch Catholic theologian present. I was never a smoker — I never smoked cigarettes; I like cigars, I love the smell of a cigar or a pipe. This theologian, though, he would just suck on these cigarettes, coughing and saying he would be all right, and then going right back to the cigarette.
He said to us — minds of mush, essentially — "What is important: the virgin birth, the process, or Jesus, the product of the birth?" I remember at the time thinking this was profound. It is profoundly stupid is what it is, because the virgin birth is critical. If Jesus is not born of a virgin, then He is a sinner like you and me, and at that point we might as well die for each other. That is what makes Him the perfect sacrifice.
All Have Sinned
How did this all begin? It began through Adam's sin. Sin comes into the world, and the point we want to camp on here for a while is that it affects all of us. In Romans chapter 5, verse 12, that truth is declared. But the verse we identify most often with it is Romans 3:23: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." That is the condition of all of us, without exception.
I used to work for a guy who was a wonderful man, but theologically just a little odd. He had all sorts of theological views based on nothing but his own impression, and one of the things that was really key to him was reincarnation. Before you mock him, you need to know that approximately forty percent of the people in this country believe in reincarnation. Let me define reincarnation for you: if at first you do not succeed, die and die again.
I remember talking to him one time about reincarnation. He gave me this whole explanation, and in the process I said to him, "Explain to me why you come back as a lower life-form." You can just see that lower life-form down there, and then eventually you work your way up and become perfect. And in this process of becoming perfect, he said —
The Problem with "Good People"
I said to him, "Have you ever seen one of these perfect people?" And he said, "No, I haven't." And I said, "Why do you think that is?" He said, "Well, you know, all these people in the world." I said, "No, it's because they don't exist." We know it. We instinctively say it all the time: no one's perfect.
Look back just a little earlier in Romans chapter 3, verse 10. Paul says, "There is none righteous, no, not one. There's none who understands, there's none who seeks for God. All have turned aside and together they have become useless." Here is the definitive statement about every person who has ever lived: "There's none who does good, not even one."
Now we want to push back at that and say, "No, no, no — I know certain people who do good." They'll cut your lawn when you're gone, or when snow comes they'll shovel your walk. You're going home and there's just a little lady and she bakes you cookies. Whatever it is. And what God is saying is, "No — you're looking at the action. I'm looking at the heart of the actor." And the problem is a heart problem.
Total Depravity
The term we use to describe this is depravity — total depravity. Now hang in here for a minute, because this is really important. Tyler has a great way of saying this. He says, "If sin were blue, we'd all be solid blue." What he is saying is that total depravity doesn't mean we are as bad as we can possibly be — Hitler didn't kill his mother. But it means we are as bad off as we could possibly be, that when sin came into our lives, it touched every area of our life.
J.I. Packer puts it this way: total depravity declares there is no part of us that is untouched by sin. Therefore, no action of ours is as good as it should be, and consequently nothing in us or about us ever appears meritorious in God's sight. We cannot earn God's favor no matter what we do.
It is important to see that all of us are impacted by sin, and that the wage of sin is death and separation from God. Sin has an impact on us not just in terms of eternity, but in terms of life here. You may be 98.6 degrees, you may have blood pressure of 120 over 70, you may be in picture-perfect physical health — but you are dead spiritually.
Light as a Measurement
The barometer for this is God's definition, not yours. I mentioned that I flew into Columbus and drove up to Wooster, Ohio. Wooster, Ohio is a branch of the Ohio State University — it has something to do with their agriculture — but one of the things the students were doing while we were there, obviously preparing fields and all of this, is they were literally measuring using infrared. One of the things light does when it comes into the world is provide measurement. And Jesus said the measurement is perfection. How are you doing with that?
So all of a sudden we realize this is the condition not just of some people, but of all of us — that we are as bad off as we can possibly be, that our heart is desperately wicked. Your two-year-old that you placed in the nursery today — as you begin to raise him or her, you don't have to teach him the law, you have to teach him to tell the truth. They instinctively hide. Why? They are in the dark.
Now, this is not just a fancy phrase — you have to grab it. It's not that they are sinners because they sin. It is because they are sinners that they sin. All they are doing is showing you who they really are.
Dead, Disobedient, and Under Wrath
If you want to understand the consequences of sin in our life, your Bible is almost embarrassed to be turned here again — it is Ephesians chapter 2, page 634. Your Bible has almost started to fall open to this section. Paul is writing to the church at Ephesus, speaking about their life apart from Christ, and he says, "You were dead in your sins and trespasses, in which you formerly walked according to the course of the world, according to the prince of power and the spirit that is working in the sons of disobedience."
You can circle three sections in this passage: dead in verse 1, sons of disobedience in verse 2, children of wrath in verse 3. He says, that is how you were — you formerly walked that way. We saw this when we studied Galatians 5: we produced the fruit of the flesh. In our lives are all the things we saw back in Genesis 4 — strife and jealousy and pride. We are consumed with ourselves: what about me?
So when Jesus comes along and says, "Love your neighbor as yourself," that is not going to work, because I love me. I love me too much to love my neighbor. The only possible reason I would love my neighbor is if I thought it would somehow benefit me. That is what sin does.
The Roots of Rebellion
When I was in college, there was a bumper sticker everywhere that said, "Question authority." Rebellion — nobody is going to tell me what to do. That goes all the way back to the garden, all the way back to Genesis 3, where Eve said, "I'm not going to have anybody put rules on me, any restrictions on me."
I have been getting a lot of emails lately — some saying, "Be careful, you're getting too political," and others saying, "You need more politics." Frankly, you need to understand something: I don't care. But I can tell you this: this country is not manageable. You can give it to whoever you want, but you have 330 million people all saying, "What about me?" with conflicting wants. I'm not sure anybody could lead that. And it is true whether you are talking about a homeowners association, a country club, or anything else.
The Weight of Sin and Its Consequences
Sin is about self — "I want me." The consequences of that are broken relationships and a distorted world. But Paul tells us in Romans 2:5 that we are also storing up wrath for what comes after this life. For the believer, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. For the non-believer, to be absent from the body is to be separated from God forever.
I recently helped move my mom from her condo — only about a mile away — into a very nice apartment complex for older people. My brother and I discovered that Friday night is happy hour there. So my mom, my brother, and I went down to play cards. If you put the word "free" in front of anything, older people show up. There were free nachos, free wine. There was a lady walking around with a walker and a glass of wine in both hands — it was awesome. But the honest reality is that none of these people are doing a lot of long-term planning. What the Bible says is that once you die, you are either in heaven or you are not — and that is not based on what you did, but on whether you accepted the gift God extended to you of life in Christ.
There is an illustration of a group of monks — and I understand it is a true story — that every morning they would gather around a grave that had been dug. They would have prayer and meditation together. When the next monk died, he was buried in that grave, a new grave was dug, and the practice repeated. They could do something like that at this apartment complex. These people are old. But the point stands for all of us: when I die, if sin has not been dealt with, the Bible says I will spend eternity separated from God in a place called hell.
A Child's Honest Conclusion
I had a friend who came to a Priority Living study. He had a son who was five or six years old, and the boy's grandmother had died. He was trying to figure out how to explain it, and of course the boy kept asking where Grandma was. Yale had a great line the other day along the same lines — he said to Haley, "Mom, can't Nana just come back for my birthday, just for my birthday?" And Haley said, "No, honey, she's with Jesus right now. One day we can go see her." Perfect.
So this father is explaining things to his son, and the boy asks, "Is Grandma in heaven?" The father is having a real problem with this because he is pretty confident she is not. How do you tell a six-year-old boy that his grandmother is in hell? The boy began working through it himself, drawing on everything he had been taught. "Grandma didn't love Jesus, did she?" No. "Grandma didn't go to church, did she?" No. "Grandma didn't read the Bible, did she?" No. "Grandma didn't care about any of these things, did she?" No. And here was the boy's conclusion: "Grandma is in hell, isn't she?"
I love that, because it strips away all the sentimentality about poor old grandma and grandpa. Poor old Nana is in hell because she was not just poor old Nana. She was a sinner who hated God all her life, though she covered it up very well.
How Many Sins Does It Take?
How many sins does it take to separate us from God? James 2:10 says, "If I keep the whole law and stumble at one point, I am guilty of it all." In other words, it only takes one. We are separate. That is all of us. And the wages of sin is death.
Max Lucado writes about Jeffrey Dahmer, and here is what he says bugs him. Not that Dahmer raped innocent boys and young men. Not that he killed them. Not that he cut them up or ate them. What drives him crazy is that apparently, three months before Dahmer died, he came to Christ in repentance and faith, was baptized, and was saved by grace. That does not seem right. But the problem is this: Jeffrey Dahmer — and you. I remember once posing the question of what the difference is between me and Adolf Hitler, and the person I was talking to said, "One little mustache." We are all in that boat. It only takes one sin to separate us from God, and yet we are wonderful at pushing that reality away.
John points this out in 1 John 1:5-10. If you say you do not sin, you are a hypocrite. If you say you do not sin, you are deceiving yourself. If you say you do not sin, you are calling God a liar, because He says all of us do. But if you confess your sin — that is, if you agree with God about what it is — He is faithful and just, He will forgive you and bring you into His kingdom.
Seeing Ourselves as We Really Are
That is really where this whole series is driving us — to see ourselves for who we really are. I wrote this down this morning: I can imagine someone saying, "I came here today hurting, needing a word of encouragement. The world is so negative, and you made it worse."
The Hope Beyond Our Helplessness
Though things are, on my own, helpless and hopeless, they are not helpless and hopeless if I come to Christ in repentance and faith. That is the darkness — that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and that eternal life is found in Christ and no one else.
You may be sitting there today going, give me more. That is where we head in the rest of this series. But you may not need to wait for more. It may be that when this service is over, you need to come to the front to talk to the men and women who will be there, either over in the conference center or here in the chapel. They will be here to talk with you.
Who Jesus Is
The answer is Jesus. Next week we will look at He who knew no sin. Brian said everyone who has ever been born was born with a sin nature. The exception — and you have that in the middle of the message — is Jesus. Why? What did He do? Why did He come? What was the whole purpose in His being here? We are going to talk about that next week.
This Is All of Us
I hope that what you heard today, though it may be brand new for some of you, does not sound harsh or judgmental. It is not harsh or judgmental. I am saying we are all in this. This is every one of us. That is our spiritual condition. That is who you are.
You know it, don't you? You really know it. You mask over it, you play a game, but deep down inside you know something is wrong. That is okay, because it can be made right through Jesus.
The Point of Bill's Story
One of the dangers in the story you saw with Bill is that you look at it and think, I am not a heroin guy, I did not rob anybody, I guess I am not that bad. The point is not Bill himself. Circumstantially it is different, but substantially it is all the same. When we were lost, we needed a Redeemer. It is Jesus.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for that amazing truth — familiar in a way to many of us, brand new to others. To those for whom this is new today, God, I pray that You would let us hear that message and respond. God, do not let us ever grow weary of Your grace and Your mercy. Father, thank You for Jesus Christ. We pray in His name, amen.