Your Daily Bread – Salvation Is From Sin

➡ Paul, the voiceover for the ministry ‘Your Daily Bread’, discusses the concept of salvation from sin. He explains that salvation is a process that happens in the past, present, and future of a Christian’s life. He further breaks down salvation into six aspects: from sin, by love, into life, with purpose, through faith, and unto good works. He emphasizes that being spiritually dead means being unable to respond to God’s love and affection, and that sin is a result of this spiritual deadness.
➡ Sin is not about the bad things we do, but about what we fail to do, like living a holy and perfect life that meets God’s standards. Even if we do good things, we are still sinners because we fall short of God’s glory. The world pressures us to follow its standards, which are often against God’s. Only through Jesus Christ can we reach God’s standard of perfection and holiness.
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Hello. My name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God Is Government called Your Daily Bread. Taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting scripture but scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on salvation is from sin. Now let’s look at it, and as we examine this, verses 1-10, I want you to see six aspects of salvation.

Now the general outline of this text is that he presents salvation in three tenses. Past, verses 1-3, present, verses 4-6, and 8-9, and future, verses 7-10. He sees the past, the present, and the future of the Christian. What he was, what he is, what he will be as salvation takes place. And so we’re looking at that. But under that general thrust, I want you to see six aspects of salvation, and these are the six. Salvation is from sin by love, into life, with purpose, through faith unto good works. Now we’ll give those one at a time.

First, salvation is from sin, from sin. And this deals with the past, the past from sin. Look at verse 1, and you, and we’ll skip the part that’s italicized. If in your Bible it’s italicized, that’s meaning it’s added. It’s all right there, but we’ll skip it because it picks up later in the text. And you who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which in time past, past, now you see, were in the past tense of the Christian life. You walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all had our manner of life, its past tense again.

In times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. We’ll stop right there. Now there is probably no clearer statement on the sinfulness of man in the New Testament than that. That really delineates it, and it makes Paul’s first point. You are a sinner, and you are dead. Now if he’s going to tell us about God’s power, God’s power is best demonstrated in resurrection. And the resurrection of Christ was demonstration number one, and your resurrection from sin is demonstration number two.

If you’re a Christian, you’ve already been raised from the deadness of sin, and maybe that’s a great miracle than physical resurrection. Look with me at verse one again, and you who were dead. Now this describes the condition of every individual, you were dead. Now listen to me. If you’re a Christian, this is your past. If you’re not a Christian, this is your present. This is where you are right now. You’re dead. You see, man’s trouble is not that he’s out of harmony with his environment. Man’s trouble is not that he can’t make meaningful relationships.

Man’s trouble is he is dead. In 418 of Ephesians it says he is alienated from the life of God, so that his deadness is not deadness in the physical, it is deadness in the spiritual. He is dead to God. His body is alive, but his inner man, spiritually speaking, is dead. You say what does it mean to be alienated from the life of God, dead to God? The best way to see it is in reference to physical death. Physical death is an inability to respond. No matter what the stimulus is, physical death means you can’t react.

You’ve been to enough funerals and so have I to know what physical death is. It doesn’t matter what the stimulus is. No physically dead individual ever reacts to any stimulus. Now I remember one time I was sitting in my office over here some years back and a little boy came banging on the door. He was crying and he said, are you the Reverend? Are you the Reverend? And I said yes. He said come please, come please, quickly quickly. And so he took off running and I ran after him. We ran down Roscoe Boulevard halfway down this block and crossed the street into a house.

And I got in the house and the lady was standing there, a young lady, and she was weeping and the tears were running down her face. And I said, well, what is it? What’s wrong? And she said, my baby is dead. My baby is dead. My baby’s dead. And she pointed to the bedroom and I walked in and lying on the bed was a little lifeless baby of about three months. It was turning a funny kind of a blue colour and there was absolutely no breath at all. And I asked her if she had tried to revive the baby and she said yes, yes.

And she picked up the baby and she caressed the baby to her breast and loved it and kissed it and cried tears all over its little head. But there was absolutely no response. And soon the ambulance arrived and they were unable to do anything. The baby was dead. And I thought to myself, you know, I’m sure that in terms of human relationships, the very strongest stimulus there is is the love of a mother for a little infant. If that mother can’t get a response out of that little infant, that’s death, physical death, the inability to respond.

Spiritual death is the same thing. All the caresses and all of the affection and all the tears and the love of God draw out absolutely nothing, because a spiritually dead person is alienated from the life of God. There is no capacity for a response. And it isn’t just the question of being dead and inanimate. It’s like John Eddy, the great Scotch commentator said, it’s a case of death walking. They are literal spiritual zombies. Because they don’t know they’re dead, they’re still going through some motions. Death walking. Jesus put the two concepts together, physical death and spiritual death together, in the certain man to be his disciple and follow him.

And the man said, well, I’ll follow you, but first let me go home and bury my father. And Jesus said in Matthew 8 22, let the dead bury their dead. And he put them both together. Let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead. I’ve got better things for you to do. And so it is that man is in a state of death walking. First, Timothy five, six, Paul said, she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. It’s a case of going through a zombie like activity. And what is the activity of the death walker? Look at it, verse one, dead in trespasses and sins, functioning in the area of sin, functioning in the area of trespass.

Now I want you to notice something. We are not dead because of sin. We are dead because we were born sinful. We are not dead because we commit sin. We don’t do a sin and then die. We’re born dead. That’s why we sin. I always think of it this way. I am not a liar because I lie. I lie in the first place because in my heart, what? I’m a liar. A man does not kill. And thus he is a murderer. He kills because he is a murderer. The Bible says that it is what comes out of a man that defiles the man and we are dead and that deadness functions in sinfulness.

The in here in the Greek is what is called a locative of sphere. It is talking about the sphere in which we live. It is not a because of, it is an in, it is a location, a position. And by the way, the opposite of being in Christ is being in trespasses and sin. The word sins is interesting. Hamartia, very familiar word. It’s a hunter’s word. It means to miss the target, to miss the mark. A man shoots his arrow and misses the target. The second word paraptoma, the word trespass means to slip or fall or stumble or go the wrong direction.

Both are true of man. And I don’t know, commentators through the years have tried to make distinctions between what these two words mean. They’re basically two ways of looking at the same thing. And it’s just that God uses two words and both of them in the plural to show the totality of sinfulness that is the result of deadness. Being alienated from the life of God means total deadness. Total sinfulness. Now you say, but Hamartia in the sense of missing the mark, what do you mean by that? Now watch. This is the real, trubical definition of sin.

Sin is a failure to hit God’s target. Alright? Well you say, what’s God’s target? Here it is, listen. For all have sinned, even chi there, come short of the, what? Glory of God. Sin is a failure to glorify God. Romans 1 says that. When they knew God they what? Glorified him not as God. That is sin. Sin is coming short of glorifying God. It does not mean when we saw a person is a sinner, it does not mean that they’re all the same level of vile, rotten, degraded, corrupt, decaying sinners. You could have 20 dead corpses and they could all have varying degrees of decay.

They’d all be dead but different degrees of decay. And so it is in human history and humankind, all are dead, but there are variances in the decadence, in the decaying of what is left. But sin is not a question of decay ultimately, it is a question of falling short of something. In other words, now listen to this, we all understand that a robber is a sinner and a murderer is a sinner and a rapist is a sinner and a liar is a sinner and so forth and so forth and so forth.

We’re all clued in on that. But listen to me, sin has much more to do with what you don’t do than what you do do. You got that? Sin is really not an issue of what you do but of what you fail to do. It is that you fail to come to the glory of God. It is that you fail, Matthew 548, where Jesus said, be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and that’s where we fail, right? Or, or as it is written, 1 Peter 1 16, be ye holy for I am holy.

Glory, holiness, perfection, that’s the target and that’s where we fail. Now there may be different levels of morality, different degrees of decadence, but we all fall short. It would be as if the whole congregation from grace all lined up on the Pacific Ocean and said, we’re going to have a run as you want and we’ll run down to the beach and everybody jump and we’ll see who gets there. Listen, we’d all end up at different levels in the water, but nobody would get to Catalina. Now, the same thing is true in terms of the spiritual.

There are different levels of attainment in human life, there are different levels of morality and so forth, but nobody gets to the glory of God and nobody gets to perfection and nobody gets to holiness. That’s why we only know that in Jesus Christ, when his righteousness is given to us by God. You see, it is not so much that sin is what I do, it is what I fail to do. I’m trying to jump to perfection, I don’t make it and I land in the sea of sin. So my behavioural sins are simply what is left when I can’t make it to God’s standard.

And I say that because a lot of times we meet good people and we say I’m a good guy. I mean, I do civic good, humanitarian good, I’m a wonderful father, love my wife, love my kids, take care of things, I’m very generous, very kind. Listen, nobody would ever deny that and that’s very wonderful. I mean, that’s a good way to be. Jesus recognised that. In Luke chapter 6 verse 33, Jesus said, if you do good to them who do good to you, what thanks do you have? Sinners do the same. Jesus said sinners do good to each other.

That’s right, people do good to each other. But Jesus said, people who do good to each other are still called what? Sinners. Because sinning is not an issue of what you’re doing to each other. It’s not relational. You can’t say, well, I’m all right because I do good to people. That isn’t the point. The point is, it’s what you don’t do and you don’t live a holy life and you don’t live a perfect life and you don’t reach the standard, which is the glory of God. That’s the issue. And in Luke 11 13, Jesus said this, if you then being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to that ask? In other words, he says, you know, there are people who give good gifts to their children.

What kind of people are those, Lord? Evil. What do you mean evil? Well, their evil is not manifest in the fact that they do good for their children. It’s manifest in what they don’t do and can’t do, and that is to reach the standard of the glory of God. After the shipwreck on the island of Malta or Maleta, it says, and the barbarous people showed us no small kindness. You know, those barbarous, pagan, ungodly, Christ-rejecting people showed great kindness to Paul? You see, that isn’t the issue. Good works isn’t the issue.

Relational goodness isn’t the issue. Being a good neighbour and a good father and a good mother and a good parent, that’s not the issue. The issue is the glory of God. Let me show it to you another way. John 16.8. John 16.8. We’re going to hurry a little bit, so if you don’t have it, just listen to it and I’ll read it. And when he has come, the Holy Spirit, he will reprove the world of sin. Now watch, the Holy Spirit is going to convict people of sin. He’s going to move into the hearts of men and convict them of sin.

What sin? Verse 9, of sin, because they believe not on me. Now notice, the sin of which the Spirit will convict is the sin of not doing something. You see that? It’s not the sin of doing something, it’s the sin of not doing it. You are not living to the glory of God. You are not perfect. You are not holy, because you are not believing on Jesus Christ. And no matter what else you’ll do, you’re just ankle deep in the sea, a long way from the goal. That’s the problem. So man is dead.

He is dead in his inability to reach God’s standard, and he falls and slips and stumbles and goes the wrong direction because of his deadness. He is a death-walking zombie manifesting at total inability to accomplish God’s standard. Even though, from time to time, he manifests some moral goodness. So he’s a death-walker. Let’s look at verse 2. You say, well, what environment is he functioning in? This death-walker who is wandering through existence, what is the sphere in which he functions? Alright, verse 2. In which in time passed you walked according to the course of this cosmos, this world, this age.

Stop right there. First thing he says, you are not only dead before you’re a Christian, but you are functioning as a death-walker, doing sins and trespasses according to the course of the world. In other words, you are a victim of the spirit of the age. People say, well, we do what we want. My football coach used to say to me, I’d become a Christian, but I want to do what I want. And I used to say to him, but you’re not doing what you want. You’re doing what the world dictates. You are walking according to the course of the cosmos.

Now, the word cosmos here doesn’t speak of a physical world. It speaks more of the ideological world of sin, the conceptual world of evil, the system of Satan, the system which he generates. In other words, the zombie, the death-walker does indulge in the sins of the times. He’s right up on them. He’s current. He lives according to the world’s standards, the world’s values in his own time. He is conducting himself in complete harmony with the spirit of the age. The Germans called it the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. He just does what the world does.

It is an age alienated from God, and he has a mind alienated from God. They’re in harmony with each other. He just walks in the sphere of sin in the spirit of the age, the cosmos which Satan dominates. According to John 1231, the prince of this world, Jesus said, he dominates it and it pressures man, and man succumbs and does what the world’s system tells him to do. That’s total depravity. Total depravity is death, walking in sin and trespass, according to the spirit of the age. That’s total depravity. It doesn’t mean you never do a good thing.

It just means you’re locked into a circle that you can’t escape, a death walk in the spirit of the age. What is the spirit of the age? You can see it around you. Three things would classify it to me. Three things characterise our age. Humanism, materialism and sex. Humanism, that’s do your own thing. Do it your way. You’re the boss. You’re the king. You’re the ruler. You know Burger King says it. Have it your way. Grab all the gusto you can get, the beer says. It’s all the same stuff. You are the one.

You are the only one. McDonald’s tells you that. Everybody tells you that. It is to tell you that you’re it, man. That’s humanism. That’s humanism. Just remember that next time you stuff in a quarter pounder, that’s humanism. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of salvation is from sin. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].