Are you a sinner?

 Are You a Sinner?

 

When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor — sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”

MARK 2.17

The person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws.

JAMES 2.10

Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.

ROMANS 3.23

 

Have you ever known someone who had the chicken pox? Maybe it started with one little, red, itchy spot. Pretty soon that person had several itchy spots and it became obvious that the person was sick. But there didn’t have to be a bunch of visible spots to know it was the chicken pox. When there was just one spot, it showed that the chicken pox virus was in that person’s system.

Sin is like that. Just thinking or doing one wrong thing shows you have the fatal disease of sin. Just one sin reveals that you’re a sinner.

“Now, wait a minute,” you might want to say. “I’m a good person. I may have made some mistakes, but I’m not a sinner.” None of us want to think of ourselves that way. But until we see ourselves as sinners, we’ll think we have no need for Jesus. Jesus came to save sinners, not good people. He actually resists people who think they’re good, and he is drawn to people who recognise their own deep sickness of sin.

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we’re sinners. It is inside us, running through our bloodstreams. Sin is not merely a matter of breaking the Ten Commandments or any other list of dos and don’ts. More than what we do, it is who we are. We are all natural-born sinners.

But that’s not the end of the story — there is hope for sinners like us. God knew we’d never be good enough, and he knew we’d need someone to save us from our deadly disease of sin. So he sent Jesus to be the cure for us. The good news of the gospel is that we can be transformed from guilty sinners into forgiven sinners through faith in Jesus.