Valerie Rae Hanneman
Romans 3:9-11 “ What does all this mean? Does this mean that we Jews are better off than the Gentiles? No, it doesn’t! Jews as well as Gentiles are ruled by sin, just as I have said. The scriptures tell us. “No one is acceptable to God! Not one of them understands or even searches for God.”
This past June we took a bunch of the Care Fresno Kids Klub kids to San Francisco. Going over the Bay Bridge was an adventure as most of the kids had never even seen a bridge that big, let alone ridden over it. We took the Red & White boat tour around the bay and then went to the Exploratorium. The Exploratorium was fascinating! The displays were incredible (Although not nearly as incredible as the prices of a soda!) My favorite display was a water fountain toilet. The water came up from inside the toilet, and you had to put your face almost into the bowl to get a drink. There was a sign by the toilet explaining that the toilet had never been used for anything other that a drinking fountain, and that the water coming out of the fountain was purified and yet most people still could bring themselves to drink from the toilet. Would you be able to drink from the toilet? I can understand why most people could not. Do we want to put our face into anything that might be as tainted as a toilet?
If you ask most people who are not in relationship with Jesus about how they are hoping to get to heaven they will answer with some variation of, “Well, I am a good person, I have never killed anybody or done anything really wrong. I help people, I give to charity, I am honest.” They are hoping that the good part of them outweighs the bad part of them and so they will be allowed into heaven because of what they have done.
I get this mental picture of standing in front of God as He puts all the good we have done on one tray of a giant scale and then all the bad that we have done into the other tray. Can you imagine the tension as the bad tray slowly sinks and the good tray slowly rises? We would know for sure that if the bad scale outweighs the good tray we are toast (literally). But what if the trays are even? Or the good just slightly outweighs the bad? Does the good need to just slightly outweigh the bad? Or is it like twice as much as the bad? Or what? Just exactly where is God’s cutoff?
To discover the answer to that we must first look at God. God is perfect – He is absolutely perfect. He is perfect and holy, sin has never touched Him, sin has never marred His perfection and holiness. Sin cannot be near Him.
We, on the other hand are not perfect. Who among us can deny the truthfulness of God’s Word when it says, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) We may not be murderers, or robbers, or drug abusers, but we are sinners. When we gossip, when we lie, when we are jealous, or spiteful, or damaging to another, we have sinned. Suppose, by some miracle, we only sinned one time a day, in a life of eighty years that is almost three thousand sins! And the day that I am only guilty of one sin is the day that I am probably comatose. How about you? Do you sin only once a day?
How much sin does it take to contaminate us in God’s perfect, holy eyes? Suppose you had a bottle of filtered, purified water and you have just broken the seal of it in preparation of taking a long drink of it. But just before you do, I stop you. I take an eyedropper and fill it with the water from the bottom of your toilet bowl then squirt it into your bottle of water. It is just a little contaminated. Are you going to accept it? Are you going to drink it? Not me – no way!
If we will not accept something even slightly contaminated, how can we expect God to accept us when we are more than slightly contaminated by sin. We cannot.
God cannot accept us when we are contaminated by sin, so He gave us a way to be cleansed from our sin – to be decontaminated. That way is Jesus Christ.
The Word says, “The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) That is the price tag of our sin-contamination – death. Thankfully, the Word also says that God is not willing that any should perish. (2 Peter 3:9) The rest of Romans 6:23 is “But the gift of God is eternal life..” That has to be the biggest “but” in all of history. Wages but gift, sin but God, death but life. The gift that God has given us that gives us eternal life is His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus willingly paid the price for our sins through His death.
How do we get this gift of life from God? Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is LORD,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you will be saved.” All that we have to do to accept the gift of eternal life is to believe in Jesus as our Savior, to ask Him to forgive us of our sins and to ask him into our hearts and into our lives. Once we do that, Jesus takes our sin from us – He decontaminates us and makes us clean.
If you have not asked Jesus to forgive your sins and you would like to know more – please call Fresno First Baptist at (559)Bap-tist and ask to speak to a pastor, or go to our website at www.fresnofirst.org and select the tab “Knowing Christ”
I drank out of the toilet bowl water faucet. I did it because the largest percentage of people could not, so I had to. But I did not do it easily because of just the thought of what it was, the thought of contamination.
God cannot accept us while we are contaminated by sin. Accept Jesus as Savior and be decontaminated.
Contact Valerie or sign up for the e-Ministry of FFBC at valerie@fresnofirst.org