Doing the Wrong Thing

“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10-12)

Why is it that no matter what happens, it always seems to be the wrong thing. Mankind just cannot get things right no matter how hard he tries. For example, hand a pair of shoes to any 3 year old on planet earth and tell him to put them on his feet. He will put them on the wrong feet 98% of the time. Statistics would tell you that it would be 50-50, but anyone who has ever had children will tell you otherwise. Here’s another one. Pick up any two-prong plug (without the ground) and without looking, try to plug it in. They make them now with one prong larger than the other so that the polarization is consistent. I don’t care how many times you try, you will have to turn to plug around virtually every single time because you will plug it in wrong. Then there is the one that frustrates the devil out of me. Go to the store, and when it is time to check out, pick a lane. No matter which one I pick, it will come to a screeching halt because I always pick the wrong one. It gets so bad sometimes that I will jump out of that line and get into the next one – and of course, that line will then shut down. Can I get a witness?

No matter what it is, man seems to be able to make a mess out of it. Have you ever noticed that you don’t need classes on doing the wrong things? No one ever sits down with their children and says, “OK, Johnny and Susie, daddy is going to teach you how to lie today…” They pick it up naturally because sin is ingrained in our DNA. Psalm 39:5 says, “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Vanity in the Bible means “nothing”. The best we can produce is a big fat zero. I remember as a freshman in college taking an exam where the professor gave us a trick question. He had a whole series of one digit numbers that we were supposed to multiply to find the final answer. The string of numbers was huge. It was like 5x3x6x4x2x7x2… and the series spanned about 4 or 5 lines of text on the page. Right in the middle of it was a zero. The students were feverishly multiplying numbers and keeping track of the total until they hit the zero, and you could hear the audible groans when they realized that the zero wiped out every other number. It was cruel, but it taught us to look at the entire problem first before we plunged into trying to solve the details. That is a great illustration of the issue that mankind has in facing his Creator and trying to justify himself before a holy and righteous God.

No matter how hard we try, there is a big fat zero in the very heart of our existence called sin. It negates anything else we try to do to satisfy the claims of God upon our lives. You can try to multiply all the other “good works” of your life that you want, but you always hit the zero. You will always do the wrong thing. You might hit it right at times, because even the blind squirrel finds an acorn, but every day, you will run into the buzz saw of sin eventually, and usually sooner than later. Man wants so desperately to save himself by his own righteousness, but it will never work. Instead of looking at the individual details of your life, look at the whole thing first. The zero of our sin nature wipes out any effort we make to “add up” for God. Something needs to be done about that. Jesus died on the cross to pay your sin debt, and when you place your trust in him as Saviour, he removes your sin. The Bible says he places our sins in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19), casts our sins behind his back (Isaiah 38:17), and separates us from them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Now we can do something. Only after we apply the sacrifice of Christ can our individual numbers be multiplied to produce a “bottom line” that God can count and reward us for at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

If you have not come to Christ to deal with your sins, don’t put it off another minute. If you know him, spread the word to a bunch of zeros who need him. The time is short.