Romans

“ For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through redemption that came by Jesus Christ.”

The first part of this passage says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. As Christians we believe that nobody is blameless and good before God. We all fall short of his expectations by sinning and doing things that do not please him. We are naturally bad people, in the same way a baby is naturally naughty. I have a young cousin and he is so naughty, I don’t have to teach him to be naughty or do naughty things. He just behaves that way naturally. In fact, you have to teach them to be good because what comes naturally to them so often tends to be wrong. You have to teach a new born to be good, as their actions tend to be bad. We as Christians fail God every single day. We fail him in the things we do, the things we say, and the things we think and he sees all of these things.

The passage goes onto say that we are “justified freely”. This means that we are made right with God, pardoned and accepted by him. This is not because of any good deeds we do or through anything that we as people have control over. We don’t do anything to deserve this acceptance and pardoning by God and it doesn’t cost us anything. God’s love, his everlasting, never fading love is for us all and he pardons everyone that wants to be pardoned. It is through this love that we can be forgiven, pardoned by him not through our works or deeds.

God had to punish us for the things we do wrong, every single day of our lives and we deserve this punishment as we have failed him. But God does not give us the punishment we deserve because he loves us so much. Instead he sends his son Jesus Christ to take the punishment for us. Jesus carries all our sin and all the bad things we do so that we do not have to be punished. This can be seen in this sketch. (Sam comes on wearing plain white t-shirt)