Is everybody a sinner in God’s sight?
If you were like me as a 20yr old black man going up in the inner city there was so much I wanted to do to experience life to its fullest now that I had finally moved out my parent’s house and was on my own, and I fully intended on doing some of those things when I could afford it. After getting a job that I wanted and i started working there, my supervisor and later on another guy working there told me I was a sinner in God’s sight. I thought, wait a minute, I know I am not a that bad of a person. I try to do what is right, I am not a thief, I haven’t robbed anybody. I am just out here trying to live my life and enjoy it, and so my feeling was, if you want to get that involved with all that church stuff and miss out on life, that’s you. I am alright with God I felt, and God was alright with me. Maybe latter on in my life I would do something like they were doing, but not now. Me and God was alright I thought, and I based that on strictly what I felt. At this point in my life, I wanted nothing to do with the Bible. I didn’t care what they told me said God said. God was going to see what I had done in my life, and I know He will see enough to let me in when my time came, I thought.
There came a day when I began wondering about all I heard them say about everybody (including me), being a sinner. That led me to open up the Bible one day and read it. I saw in the very last book in the Bible, which is “Revelation”, in chapter one, verse #3 it says,
“Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near…. (Revelation 1:3)
It was at this point that I first began to see that maybe I am not alright with God as I thought I was because I wasn’t a person that really reads the Bible the way. I wasn’t a person that was trying to hear what it said, and I wasn’t a person that was trying to keep those things that was written in it. I was living by what I felt it said, not what it actually said. Then I saw where it kept saying things like this,.. “He that has an ear to hear”… and then God made a promise to that person who wants to hear and you see it over and over again:
“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” ’(Revelation 2:7).
Then I looked at what God says in Revelation 2:26, and also verse 29;
“And he who overcomes, and keeps My works until the end, to him I will give power over the nations
“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” ’( Revelation 2:29)
One thing I became convinced of through reading all this was this..,“God was not making any promises to me because I wasn’t trying to hear Him at this point. God’s promises,. according to these passages,. is to those who overcome and keep His works until the end,. as it says right hear in verse #26, and to those who have ears to hear Him. What I felt made me right before God up to this point in my life, was wrong and i was starting to realize just how wrong i was in my thinking. I was wrong because I never actually looked at what God actually said in the Bible. When I finally did, I hear are just a few things I learned;
For there is not a just man on earth who does good, And does not sin…( Ecclesiastes 7:20)
As it is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one; 11 There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God…( Romans 3:10-11)
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Romans 3:23
In the book of First John, (1 John 1:8),… this is not the Gospel of John, that a different book, it says this,
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.,,( 1 John 1:8)
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness….(1 John 1:9)
If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us…(1 John 1:10)
If you live in this world long enough somebody is going to lie on you. Somebody is going to say you did something that’s just not true. Somebody is going to say, you said something that you did not say, and it may make you so angry that you might want to get back at them even though you may not do so. God said we all are sinners. We all have sin. Nobody is without sin in His sight, and if we say or think otherwise we make Him a liar,..and I am sure not going to say,. God is a liar. Therefore, because I came to realized that I am a sinner and one day I would stand before God to be judged by Him,.I knew I needed His forgiveness for my sins like everybody else. Forgiveness for sin against God can only be given while we are still alive. Once we die, it’s too late. I think about what Lord Jesus Christ said to a group of people that didn’t believe He was Christ, the promised one that the Scriptures said hundreds of years before would come into this world. In the Gospel of John, chapter 8, and verse 24, Jesus says this to those who did not believe who He was,
Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”…(John 8:24)
Every one of us came from Adam and Eve and because they took on a sin nature when they sinned against God, everybody that descended from them takes on that same sinful nature. It is that sin nature that causes us to want to be independent from God, doing our own thing, our own way, and be our own God. That is what we inherited from Adam and Eve.
All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way…(Isaiah 53:6)
So, is everybody a sinner in God’s sight? Yes,.. God actually said that. However when we realize that in our hearts and come to the Lord Jesus Christ and truly confess that confess that that before Him, then He will forgive us. We then become a redeemed sinner, which is what a saint is. I talk about how to confess our sins before God and know He has forgiven you in the Prayers page under the Encouragement menu on the home page. I also talk about it in another one of my blog post titled, “Can I know for sure I am going to Heaven when I die”?