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Sin is any disobedience to God's laws.
When sin entered the world, death came with it.
"Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all have sinned." (Romans 5:12)
"Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness." (1 John 3:4)
"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)
Therefore, have no doubt that, we have all sinned and are condemned in God's eyes. However, keep in mind that because of God’s amazing grace, he chose to pay for our sin himself. He chose to credit that payment for sin to our account so we could live forever with him in heaven.
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The Devil will tell you that sin is no big deal, but remember:
THE DEVIL IS ALWAYS A LIAR!
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Man-Made Remedies
For Our Problem:
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You might think to yourself, "I guess I'll just have to try harder. I'll have to keep trying my best to work my way up the ladder by seeking to do everything God wants me to do. Maybe I'm only so high now. But if I keep working at it, maybe I can get higher."
The problem is, no one can get up to the very top of the ladder. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." And if you don't get to the top of the ladder, you're short of what God demands. So trying harder doesn't solve the problem.
So maybe you'll have to try something else. Another way by which people try to get out of this dilemma can be illustrated by an old-fashioned balance scale. You might say to yourself, "All right, I know that I have committed many sins. And these sins are a rather big weight. I won't argue with that. But I'll tell you this: Every time I know that I've done something wrong, I always make up for it and in that way balance things out. I come home from work and am really crabby because I had a rough day. So I'm impatient with my wife and speak harshly with her. But then on Friday night I take her out for dinner and in that way make up for my outburst of temper." Balancing the scale, you might call it.
But do you see the flaw here? If I do something wrong, recognize it, and then try to make up for it, that's good. But it still doesn't remove the sin that's at one end of the scale. Such a balancing act doesn't solve the problem.
Or, I might try a different approach. I might say, "I know I'm not perfect, but I'm a lot better than a lot of other people I know, including some regular church goers." It's not hard to find someone who appears to be a little worse than you are. Even a murderer on death row can think to himself, "At least I haven't committed ten murders like the fellow in the cell next to me." It's as though God is a school teacher and grades on the curve, taking the upper 50% to Himself and leaving the rest behind.
The truth is that God wants us to do some comparing; but He wants us to compare ourselves to Him. Then what happens? We realize that we are smaller by comparison to the perfect God than even the worst possible person would be in comparison to us. When we compare yourselves with the right one, the holy God, we are back where we started with a very big problem.
What we have been talking about here are man-made remedies to a problem that man can't solve. None of these remedies work. It might seen logical to think that God would expect no more from us than we're able to do. But that's not the way it is. The Bible says, "There is a way that seems right to a man (such as, "Try your hardest and God will accept you"), but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 16:25). The Bible tells us, "Whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles at just one point, is guilty of breaking all of it" (James 2:10). Either you meet God's demands or you don't. So there is no way that we can through human effort get to where God expects us to be.
But there is a way. God Himself has a remedy for the situation. We might call that remedy . . . GOD'S GREAT EXCHANGE . . .
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"There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." (Proverbs 16:25)
"Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." (James 2:10)
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CONTINUE TO PART 3
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