The angel told Joseph to "call His name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sin."
The angels told the shepherds, that "unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ the Lord!"
Yet these people hardly grasped the magnitude of the gift the world had received!
Truth is, Christ Jesus saves His people from their sins! Without that salvation, we are all doomed to judgment and Hell forever.
Even believers often fail to grasp the depravity, the pervasiveness, and the damning reality of our sin.
To begin to understand it, start with the greatest commandment of the law: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, body, and strength!
Then in the same chapter, God told the people, that if they kept all His law, that would be their life.
That promise slams the door of Hell after every single one of us, for who can love God perfectly as He commands us?
There is none that doeth good, no, not one! We have no proper fear of God. We are all utterly condemned by the law.
These passages have a startling practical consequence: everything that a lost man does is sin.
Even the plowing of the wicked is sin!
Anything done without faith is sin, for without faith it is impossible to please God.
All our so-called good deeds are condemned by God: we are all an unclean thing, and all our "righteousnesses" are as filthy rags. There is no one that calls upon God's name, or that stirreth up himself to take hold of God.
King David traces the root of his own sin back his very beginning: I was shaped in iniquity, and conceived in sin.
But false teachers think that we can choose to do good things with our "libertarian free will." |
