“One-A-Week Challenge” – Week 22

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

— Romans 3:23 NIV

Sin is becoming an archaic word. In our modern society we have replaced the word with more palatable ones like, mistake, error, or shortcoming. None of these do justice to the original Greek word, hamartánō. This word literally means, “to miss a mark on the way, not to hit the mark, or one who keeps missing the mark in his relationship to God.”

This week we begin to look at the three steps to heaven.

We are all sinners! Remember what the Bible says: “There is none righteous, not even one” — Rom 3:10 NASB “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” — Rom 3:23 NASB “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” — Rom 6:23 NASB

Perhaps it is important that we are reminded of what Sin is. It is lying, stealing, cheating, having bad thoughts, saying and doing bad things. We all do these things but why: “Where did sin come from?”

When God created the world, He created one man and one woman and placed them in a place called Eden. The bible tells us that Eden was a perfect place. There was no sickness, death, old age, trouble or problems. God gave the man and the woman everything they needed in the garden and they only had one rule to obey. God told them that they must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Of all the other trees in the garden they could eat freely, but they must not eat of this tree. The place was paradise but they willingly chose to disobey God and because of their sin, they were banished from the garden and the curse of death was on them and their children.

Since the fall of humanity in the garden every human being has been born with a sinful nature and thus separated from God. This means when we were born we were all born with a dirty heart. It’s not our fault, but it’s our problem! It is our problem because the Bible says that no one with a dirty heart can come into God’s clean heaven.

Nothing impure will ever enter it [heaven], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
— Rev 21:26-27 NIV

So there’s the problem. We want to go to heaven and God wants us to come to heaven, but we are born with a problem that will keep us from going to heaven.

Facing the truth of the human condition is the first step of entering into a right relationship with God. Our sin does not cause God to hate us, rather, the truth of God is expressed in this verse,

But God demonstrates His own love toward us,
in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
— Romans 5:8 NASB