To Encourage You

Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”

Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I’m sure you’ve heard of the stories that begin, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”  Usually that’s the start of a joke in which the bad news wipes out everything that was good about the good news.  Do you realize that the gospel is a story that puts this all in reverse?  It always begins with the bad news, but that bad news is just as essential to those who hear it as the good news.  The bad news is summed up for us in the verse above from Romans 3:23 and the first part of Romans 6:23. It tells us that everyone is a sinner and as a result of this, we will all die.  That’s why we die, if you’ve ever wondered about it. When people was created, the Lord told him that the moment that they disobeyed Him, they would die.  Death is the penalty for sin. So, what did man do?  He sinned.  And what was the result?  It was that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

You see, sin is a contagious disease. As with Covid, we don’t have any natural immunity.  We can’t avoid catching it because it’s a hereditary condition that we get from our own parents.  It’s a sad but true reality.  Even more sobering is the fact that when the Bible speaks of death in this way, it’s talking not just about physical death, but about eternal spiritual death as well.  It’s a separation from God for all eternity.  Yes, that is very, very bad news.  But it’s true, and it must come first in the telling of the gospel story, for if we don’t acknowledge that we have the terminal “sickness” of sin, we will never turn to the only one Who has the antidote. Jesus put it this way: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”  Then, in His next words, He explains what the sickness was that He was talking about: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).  He was pointing to the fact that many people see themselves as righteous.  They’ve never understood the first part of the gospel, the bad news part, so the good news has no significance to them.  Yet God knew it was essential to put the bad news first. That’s why He gave us the Old Testament before the New Testament. The Old Testament points to God’s Law.  The purpose of that Law was to expose our sin.  The Bible calls the Law “a guardian” or a “schoolmaster” in Galatians 3:24. It teaches us we are sinners by exposing our sin.  Paul put it this way in Romans 7:7: “I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”  Here Paul is telling us that the Ten Commandments were given to us to expose our sin.  It tells us that things like adultery, stealing, coveting, and lying are sins, and since we do all of these things, we know that we are sinners.  Jesus went on to teach us further about the Law by telling us that if a man looks on a woman to lust after her, He has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28).  In other words, we can sin with our minds, and though we may never physically commit the act, it’s still a sin.  It’s the bad news of the gospel – we are all, every one of us, guilty of sin and it is because of that sin that we will die. 

But there is also good news!  It’s given to us in the second part of Romans 6:23 above.  That’s the truth that though the wages of sin is death, “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  It’s glorious news. It’s the remedy for sin!  The good news is that Jesus paid the penalty for our sin by His death on the cross.  It’s the good news that if we admit that we are sinners, and come to the Great Physician Who alone can heal our terminal condition, we can be saved from the effects of that sin by the only One Who can give us life.  It’s the awesome message that Jesus spoke with these words recorded in John 11:25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”

But then the crucial question, “Do you believe this?”  Do you believe the bad news as well as the good news, for it’s the bad news that makes the good news so wonderfully good. But if you won’t believe the bad news, then the good news, which is the greatest story ever told, sadly, is not good news for you.