None is righteous, no, not one.
—Romans 3:10
God is holy, and His standard is holy. He is righteous, and His standards are righteous. And the Bible tells us plainly that every one of us was born with an infectious disease called sin.
What exactly is sin? At its root, sin is independence from God. It’s the determination to live our lives our way, to do our will instead of His. And while most people will admit they’ve sinned at some point, they don’t reckon with the consequences of it. Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” That’s the paycheck sin hands out.
We tend to grade ourselves on a curve. We compare ourselves to the people we consider worse, and we feel pretty good about the result. But “none is righteous, no, not one” wipes the curve away. The standard isn’t the person next to you. The standard is the righteousness of God Himself, who is of purer eyes than to look upon evil.
Jesus put the bar exactly where it belongs: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And if I break the law of God at even one point, Scripture says I am guilty of breaking all of it. One broken link causes the whole chain to fail. We’ve all broken the chain. We’ve sinned with our minds, sinned with our mouths, sinned with our morals.
We were born and bred in sin. We do what comes naturally to us, and the natural result is separation from God. And here is the sobering truth: a person can be living and breathing, going through all the motions, and still not have life. As 1 John 5:12 says, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
I know this isn’t a popular message. The world keeps insisting that people are basically good, that with enough education and decency it will all work out. But God says otherwise. Spiritually, apart from Christ, we are not merely struggling: we are dead in our trespasses and sins.
Yet “none is righteous” is not where the story ends. It’s where the gospel begins. The doctor who tells you the hard diagnosis is the one who can point you to the cure. Through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ, anyone, anyone, can move from death to life.
So let me ask you the most important question you’ll consider today. Do you have life? Not breath, not a pulse, not religious activity, life. If not, you can have it right now. Ask Jesus to forgive your sin and to come live in you, and begin to truly live… starting today.
YOU MAY BE LIVING AND BREATHING, BUT WITHOUT JESUS CHRIST, YOU DON’T HAVE LIFE.
