… Or, how big a sinner were you born?

Maybe you think God didn’t create you a sinner … listen then to what He said, Is. 48:8 Yea, thou heardest not; yea, thou knewest not; yea, from that time that thine ear was not opened: for I knew that thou wouldest deal very treacherously, and wast called a transgressor from the womb.

God, that’s an awful thing to say! … a transgressor from the womb! What an awful, terrible God to say such a thing!

… and it doesn’t get any better … Ps. 51:5 I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. … all have sinned, … what Lord? Even the children? … all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.

But that’s terrible. That’s the worst thing I have ever heard. Surely God makes exceptions! That doesn’t mean what it says, - it must mean something else!

No, be careful, - God doesn’t say one thing and then contradict Himself somewhere else …. Here is a description of the vastness of our sin, I Sam. 15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

But God …! I know that man and woman down the street and they are always so good and so helpful, - surely they don’t deserve to be utterly destroyed; and Lord, definitely not the infant and the suckling (!), - sure they are not old enough to have sinned to any great degree … if at all! And Lord, the ox and sheep, camel and ass, - what have they ever done … innocent animals, and yet you call on them to be slaughtered too! Lord, if this is what I’m called to believe I can’t do it, - it is absolutely terrible!

But let’s get off ‘our high horse’ for a moment. It is God Who sets the standards. It is against God that the standards are broken … who are you and I to contradict and challenge His ways that are directed by His holiness and His Sovereignty?!

I can’t say that I understand God, - because if I could I would be as God, - but I understand something of the vastness of my own sin and were God to cast me into hell I could not say He was being unfair.

Sin cannot be hidden.

	King David, you thought no-one would know when you took Bathsheba into your bed.
	King Saul, you thought you would ‘get off with it’ when you disobeyed the Word of God to destroy the Amalekites.
	Achan, you’ve hidden the Babylonish garments and the stolen riches in your tent.
	Gehazi, you tried to get for yourself the reward that Naaman was going to give to Elisha.

You all forgot … Num. 32:23 be sure your sin will find you out …

Many today who names the Name of Christ thinks they can get off with disobeying His Word but even when others cannot see their unconfessed sin it is laid open to the gaze of your Father in Heaven. I Jn. 3:20 [God] knoweth all things. Is. 48: 6 Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it? I have showed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them. I Cor. 4:5 Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts … The vastness of your sin, the visibleness of your sin …

The young man who came to Jesus was given all the opportunity to repent of his sin and follow the Master … but no, his riches were holding on to his heart.

The rich fool whose barns were bursting with the fruit of his success … his riches had captured his heart

Demas, who had all the opportunities forsook the work of the Lord, having loved this present world (II Tim. 4:10), … he valued his own longings far higher than any riches in Christ.

Sin devalues God and values that which is perishable, Mk. 8:36 for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? 37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

The sinner, unredeemed by the blood of Christ, lays no value or price or importance or merit to the things of God because II Cor. 4:4 the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

Does a child have to be taught how to sin? At what age do you teach them to sin? Do you remember the story of II Kings 2:23,24 when Elisha was in Bethel and the Bible says there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. Do you know what he did? he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

I couldn’t do that! If the worst rascal on earth came in here tonight I promise you I would preach to him the Gospel that He would be saved. No matter how bad and how evil he would be I still would tell him and beg him to be saved … but you see, sin is an awful thing that controls our will and our desires.

Don’t believe the nonsense that you have a free will … because your will is so bound up in sin and it is your will that has turned you against God and caused you to reject Him!

Lk. 19:14 We will not have this man to reign over us, they shouted! They didn’t know Jesus, many of them. Maybe some of them He had healed, but that didn’t matter; in Rom. 8:7 the Bible says, the carnal mind is enmity against God. Job 21:14 they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. 15 What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? and what profit should we have, if we pray unto him?

The volition, - the mind, - of the sinner is altogether against God … not just in part, but completely and absolutely.

Do you hear them shouting at Jesus, Crucify Him, crucify Him; they just didn’t want to have Him beaten and then to be set free (bad and all as that would have been); they wanted the Son of God to be put to death once and for all. They wanted to silence Him and to hear Him no more.

And yes, the men and women would have been standing there chanting Crucify Him, crucify Him; and I would daresay, the little children who would have gone up to the Feast of the Passover with their parents would also have been joining in with their mothers and fathers, Crucify Him, crucify Him.

Sin takes a terrible hold and it speeds up into such an uncontrollable velocity that we have no control over it. Sin controls the sinner, the sinner does not control the sin!

You see, sin is vicious, it is cruel, ferocious, inhuman and altogether in opposition to the holy God.

Are you seeing how awful sin is … that it takes over completely and that there is nothing it does not control? Sin controls every aspect of the sinner and is not content with just a little part.

We see it today: sin is called by other names so as to make it more acceptable.

We can turn it round and manage to make it pleasing and even welcome. We excuse it, or explain away its true character.

We mightn’t welcome it into the church but when it enters the church we don’t speak out against it. We tolerate it, for the sake of expediency … and Christ stands over many a fellowship and says, thou hast left thy first love … I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: … But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, … I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. … I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. … thou art neither cold nor hot: … then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

You see, it’s so easy to dress sin up, and to excuse it, and to ignore it … but God sees sin for what it is … even in the life of the believer. … The vanity that disguises our sin.

Sin is the source of all evil. There is absolutely nothing good about sin. There is no such thing as a big sin or a small sin. There is no such thing as white sin or a black sin. Sin is sin is sin. All sin is judged by God as deserving of the fires of hell … and the sinner, - regardless of age, sex, nationality, language, whatever else, - is judged condemned because of sin.

What! You say that’s not fair! Well, it doesn’t matter how you see it, it’s how God sees it … and God condemns sin in the life of every man, woman, girl and boy, four-legged creature, two-legged creature, no-legged creature that slithers along the earth or that swims in the sea. All have been affected by sin and all stand condemned without exception before the holiness and ‘perfectness’ of Almighty God.

And the violence of our sin condemns us to the wrath and punishment of God forever and God is totally justified in the eternal measure of His wrath that He deems appropriate to His fallen creation.

Have I drawn attention sufficiently to the awfulness of sin and the depth of its repugnance to our holy God? No, I don’t think I have for if I had every one of us, - myself included, - would be on our knees in tears.

There might even be someone here who thinks I’ve ‘gone over the top’ and I’ve overdone this whole sin issue … well, if that is what you think I fear that you have not yet confronted the terribleness of your own sin to even a quarter of the measure God sees it … because, God saw it so terribly He provided …

If it had not be so bad, or if we could have sorted it out ourselves, God would have allowed it; but the problem of our sin was so beyond our ability to confront it He provided the One Who would become the Victim of our sin.

If a prophet or a good person or a good set of ideals could have mended what sin destroyed God would not have sent His only-begotten Son to take upon Himself the terrible weight of the burden of our sin.

God, - in His Sovereign and immeasurable wisdom, - provided the Lamb before the foundation of the world to be offered on the altar … for His blood to be poured out as a sacrifice – not for sin – but for sinners.

Jesus became the only remedy for the sin of fallen Man … and Jesus had to die to save His people! Because of the will and plan and purposes of God He became the Victim of our sin!

It took God to do what we were incapable of doing for ourselves.

What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!

There is no other form of righteousness that can make us righteous before God except the righteousness of God.

The beautiful story of the cross all hinges on the mercy and grace and love of God.

There is not one thing I had to do to contribute to the plan of salvation by which I am saved.

There was nothing I could do to defeat my sin because my sin had defeated me.

It bore down heavily upon me and I could not get out from under its weight.

It had me so bound that its chains would not allow me to move.

It had me so dead there was absolutely no spiritual life in me … until Jesus came and took the heavy burden upon His own shoulders … until He came and broke the chains and set me free … until He came and gave me new life and I was ‘born again’.

You see, He is the Victor over my sin and that is why I am forever in His debt.

Have you seen again the wickedness and the evilness of sin … and how we must never underestimate its power and influence?

Do you see that you never took yourself out from under its power? Your salvation, - from start to finish, and every bit in between, - is all of God.

The moment you say you played a part you take away from Him some of the glory … and even if you were to dare to take away from Him the smallest portion of that glory you are telling Him, “Jesus, I couldn’t trust You to do it all; I couldn’t leave it all up to you, I had to do some of it for myself” …

But the moment you see that your salvation is all of Him that’s the moment you realise the depth of your sin and the glory of His full and free salvation and that only He can save you.

That is when you begin to see the sovereignty of God in salvation.