For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23 (NIV)
What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Romans 3:9-12 (NIV)
We all have a desperate need for a perfect God, Amen? Flawed flesh gets stuck on the external – the outward pretentiousness of our works. Yet even our “good” works are as “filthy rags” in His sight as their heart motivation, apart from Christ, has selfish ambitions and vain conceits at its core. Every heart is wanting apart from Jesus.
Flesh is uber concerned about the external – what shows to the world – what is “living large” in the eyes of man. But God looks at the inside – it is He, and He alone, Who judges the thoughts and the attitudes of our hearts. The flesh gives birth to flesh but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. It’s a heart thing – it is always a heart thing - heart not works. Albeit a transformed heart will produce works in keeping with our repentance.
It takes the mighty Hand of God “to part the Red Sea” to save the saint, Amen? To take us from the land of slavery of sin and self and bondage to the place of abundance and freedom – a place we all yearn to live freely, accepted, valued and dearly loved. God has loved us with an everlasting love and to allow us to remain without remedy in bondage to sin and self would have been so unloving. So He sent His Son to “part our Red Sea” and save our scrawny necks from our own selves. We know longer rely on flesh but on Him – Who raises the dead – and figuratively speaking that is what He does in every believer’s life. Before Christ enters a vessel we are all the walking dead. It is He Who has delivered us from such a deadly peril and He will continue to deliver us. On Him we have set our hope.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 (NIV)