Wicked Hearts, Wicked Minds, Wicked Culture

"...as it is written, 'There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God.'" Romans 3:10+11

This is something that weighed heavily on my heart last night. I think it would be quite accurate to say that the average Christian has a very poor and very limited understanding of the wickedness of every person's heart. This results in a poor understanding and a lack of appreciation of God's awesome grace. We do not realize the power and beauty of His grace because we justify ourselves in our own minds. We think that because we are not Hitlers or Stalins, we are not so bad!

Let me share with you what God says about our goodness, lest myself or you forget.

Along with the above passage, the Bible says these things about us:

1. "All have turned aside; together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one." Romans 3:12

2. "Their throat is an open grace, with their tongues they keep deceiving,' 'The poison of asps is under their lips,' 'Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness,' 'Their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known." Romans 3"13-17

3. "There is no fear of God before their eyes." Romans 3:18

4. "For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God..." Romans 1:21

5. "...they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of corruptible man..." Romans 1:23

6. "...they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature..." Romans 1:25

7. "...being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful." Romans 1:29-31

8. "For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy [menstrual] garment." Isaiah 64:6

9. "The heart is more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick, who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9

10. "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultiers, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders." Matthew 15:18

The weight of these verses should fall heavily on you, as it should on me. It is a serious situation in which we find ourselves. I want everyone who may be reading this to understand the complete and utter hopelessness we have apart from Christ. We may say that we are not so bad, but even to SAY that is the sin of pride! You or I may never commit the genocides of Hitler or Stalin, but we are just as evil in our own hearts!

Oh, how we need to fall on our faces daily and cry out for God to show us the seriousness of sin and the depths of our own depravity!

I leave you with first a request that you would do this very thing, and with a very humbling thought. While you or I may never commit the level of atrocities witnessed by despots and tyrants in history, let us never forget that the gas chambers of Auschwitz did not originate within political halls legislative meetings, or even in the lecture halls of Nihilistic, secular professors. They began within the corrupted hearts of men and women like you and me.