The Condition of Mankind

I wanna tell you a story, a true story. A story about a young boy turned into a young man, desperately lost and searching for anything that might bring him a shred of pleasure and peace. You see this boy hadn’t been born to Christian parents, but still grew up going to church. He had the same Sunday school lessons taught to him as many of you did, yet when this world came and broke his little world, he couldn’t cope, couldn’t reconcile what he had been taught about God with what he was facing now. He came face to face with death, the cruel sting of it, robbing him of that last shred of childhood. So, what do you suppose went first? His small and ungrown childish faith. He blamed God for everything that had happened in his life, the bullying, the suicide of his cousin who was more like a brother, the at times tumultuous and rocky home life. He blamed God for the evil that he saw within the world, for the evil that was within his fellow man. And where do you think he sought peace?

He sought it in friends, in women, in trouble and unrighteousness. Lying and manipulation were practically a language for him as was anger and rage. After all, these things gave no peace, only a momentary release and distraction from the pain. Each and every death and disaster in his life drove him further and further into that life, a life where the rule of me was the only rule that mattered. A life whose goal was self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction, which viewed others as dispensable and nothing but pawns and means to ends which he set for himself. Fiercely independent, yet ultimately reliant on others for strength and validation. Nothing within him desired after God, or what God deemed and said was righteousness, in fact the only feelings he had towards Him were contempt and hatred. He persecuted those who believed in Him, actively attacking and lambasting the faith of others, seeking to convince them and himself of the truth that he thought he had. He was stuck, bound, slave to his nature, a nature which desired what was against the God he once knew, and yet he didn’t care.

That young boy, that young man, was me. I desired after nothing but what pleased me and what pleased me, what pleased my sinful nature, what pleased my corrupted flesh was unrighteousness. And yet that is precisely what we are talking about today. Sin, more specifically our sin, our sinful nature, the things which from our birth we have been slave to. Before we begin, examining a portion of the Book of Romans, I wanted to open with this truth about my life. What we are talking about today is without a doubt, a very difficult topic to talk about and a very difficult to accept truth. I want you all to know my heart before I begin, a heart that does not judge nor condemn you for a life that you lived or very well may still live in, for I have lived a life of unrighteousness and there are very, very few things that I have not done for me to judge you upon. My brothers and sisters, dear friends and dear strangers, please join me as we turn to Romans 5:12. The Word of the Lord,

“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

Through just one man, sin came into the world. Who is this one man? Verse 14 tells us outrightly, it’s our forefather Adam. For from him, we inherited a malignant cancer. But what was the mode that we caught this plague, this corruption? Was it from committing sin? Practicing unrighteousness and disobeying God as our forefather Adam did? I assume we all know of David, the man who defeated Goliath, who desired to see God’s kingdom be exalted above all, who followed after God to his end, the declared “man after God’s own heart”. In Psalm 51:5, our man David had this to say,

          “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.”

Our paragon of a man, perhaps one of the most virtuous men in all of Scripture, gives us the origin of how we came to inherit sin, not to Genesis as St. Paul did in Romans, but more simply to our births. We were given it, as a cursed inheritance from Adam. We, through no sinful action of our own at the moment of our creation, became accursed and guilty of God’s judgment upon mankind. But this inheritance was not only the guilty verdict of death, but an invasive and malignant cancer that would bind our will and desires to it, to total unrighteousness. In the Gospel of John our Lord Christ said this, Chapter 8 Verse 34,

          “Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin.”

And yet as we know from our beginning verse of Romans 5:12, all are guilty of sin. So according to Christ, we are all slave to sin, bound to its will and its way. Yet, it is likely that our understanding of slavery carries an understanding akin to being forced to do what we do not desire to do. Yet this could not be further from the truth! Our sinful and corrupted flesh desires and longs for that sinful and unrighteous release. We serve and served sin gladly and with no knowledge or understanding of a better way! For how could we know, except it was preached unto us, and how could we understand if not for the illumination of the Holy Spirit within us? Perhaps you remain unconvinced. St. Paul, early in the Book of Romans quotes a few Old Testament passages to drive home the unchanging nature of this point. Romans 3:9-12:

“What then? Are we better than they? Not at all. For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not, one”

Not even God’s own people, the Israelites, can escape this. I want to stress that the sinful nature is not our natural state! We were fashioned by God to be in relationship with Him! Our current nature is not new but the corruption of our original nature! We all find a commonality in our final destructions and destinations, both God’s people and the Gentiles, that’s us, for if we all cannot understand, how can we come to appease and find forgiveness in the eyes of God? It is not by our lives or our works as some might suggest, for we know from the teachings of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew that a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit and a corrupt tree cannot bring forth the good fruit. For as it says in the Book of Isaiah Chapter 64 Verse 6:

          “But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags;”

Our works are nothing for the judgment that awaits and awaited us. We cannot seek to appease or satisfy the righteous requirements of God placed upon us. Our hands are metaphorically and quite literally tied, bound for our final destination, that is eternal death.

We all, whether we can admit it to ourselves and others or not, have sinned, have fallen short of the glory of God. But not just fallen short, we have all brought upon ourselves the wrath of God. For why shouldn’t He who is holy and perfect in all things, seek righteous judgment upon the sinful ways of the thing which He has dominion and lordship over. I cannot overstress to you enough that we do not deserve mercy, we do not deserve grace, we deserve death. That’s what we deserve, our final destination in our sins. Ephesians 2:1-3 says this:

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in what you once walked, according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”

We who were and are children of wrath deserve exactly the same, yet righteous wrath. For how could we measure up? How could we appease and satisfy requirements that we could not desire?

Application

As we move into the closing, I want to leave you with just a single point of application, something simple, but something that must be accepted if one is to understand anything about what comes next. We, all of us, you, me, everyone outside these walls and doors, are broken. All of us, bound before a holy God at an impossible breaking point, totally and utterly destroyed, enslaved to our sin, a nature that we wish to serve. That’s the application, that truth, that understanding of who we are. For many of us we understand what might be coming next, Who is coming next. But I wanted to spend this morning talking directly about who WE  are. For how can we understand salvation and the One who brings it, if we can’t grapple with, understand, and accept what we were being saved from, that being ourselves and the enemy.

As we leave today, I’m asking you all to do something, something much more hands-on than what we are used to on a Sunday morning. Beneath your seats or in the storage compartments on the back of the pew in front of you is a piece of paper. While this last song plays, I want you to think about your sins, who you were and who you might still be, sins that you have confessed to God, and sins that you may not have. When you’re done, write them down on that piece of paper and fold it however many times you’d like and either leave it in your pews in the same spot you found them, or take them to the offering basket on your way out of the sanctuary. This will remain totally anonymous and no one but God and yourselves will know what you wrote. If you’d rather do this in the privacy of your own home, take a piece home and bring it back next Sunday and when we collect the offering, place it in the basket. I don’t often like to reveal my hand, but these seemingly insignificant pieces of paper are vital for the next sermon. As the worship team begins to play I’d like to read to you our final verse, a verse for us to meditate on as we think on who we are and who we were. From the Book of Isaiah,

“All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way; And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

Benediction Prayer

A Psalm of David,

“Have mercy upon me, O God, According to Your Lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, And done this evil in Your sight – That You may be found just when You speak, And blameless when you judge. Behold I was brought forth in iniquity, and  in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness, That the bones You have broken may rejoice. Hide Your face from my sins, And blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence…”

Amen