For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. (Romans 3:23-24)Everybody does something wrong no matter who they are and no matter how good everybody else thinks they are. It is a fact of life. Nobody is as good as they look.
That doesn’t mean everybody is necessarily sorry and good for nothing. But what it does mean is that there is no one who can really stand in judgment on someone else. Everybody messes up.
The thing is, though, that you might mess up little and in private, or in such a way that no one has caught you. Maybe you cheated on your taxes, or stole something from your workplace, or lied, or – the list goes on. You sinned. You just didn’t get caught.
Or you might have sinned big time. You robbed someone, or assaulted someone or even killed somebody. Everyone saw you and is waiting for your punishment.
But everybody has done something wrong. And in God’s sight, sin is sin. Anybody who sins has lost his right to be with God. God is good and holy and sinless and we are not. So we cannot be with him.
That is, if it is up to us. It isn’t. When we accept Jesus as our Savior, when we acknowledge God as our King, when we give ourselves to God, he declares us righteous.
We stand before the court, God in the Judgment Seat, Jesus standing next to us and Jesus says, “he is mine and I have taken care of everything.”
No plea bargain, no parole, no probation – just declared innocent.
Are we innocent? No, at least in our eyes or the eyes of the world. But we are in God’s eyes because he now looks at us through the eyes of Jesus.
Because of the sacrifice Jesus made – the dying on the cross even though he alone had done nothing wrong, had never sinned, and the raising from the dead – we are declared sinless.
We still sin, we still mess up and we still have to pay for what we have done to society, but in God’s eyes, we are fine.
No matter who you are, and no matter what you have done, God loves you and will forgive you.
All you do is accept him. Simple to do, but sometimes hard to live and hard to remember. But he loves you.
And that is the whole point of being a Christ-follower.
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