All have sinned (Romans 3:9-20)

Last summer I ripped up my old front deck and replaced the top. I was filling in the middle of a U shape with these planks, with a wall on either side. I didn’t do the maths beforehand, but I was hoping that with the boards they would all neatly come into place and I wouldn’t have to cut a board to fill in the last space. But as it happened, there was a gap too narrow for a whole board. So what I did was measure the gap in the middle and then cut up a new board to slot it into place.

But that was the wrong thing to do. After I had cut the board, I tried to put it in place, but it didn’t fit. The problem was that it was too wide at one end and too narrow at the other.

You see, I assumed that since I was dealing with straight bits of manufactured decking boards, everything would be square, so I only measured the middle of the hole. I didn’t measure either end. And when I did measure the different ends, the gap was out by about an inch.

Probably the main problem with my deck was that the walls on either side of my deck are not parallel. So aligning the boards with one side means they will be out when you get to the other side. (We ended up putting pot plants on that last little bit of wood).

And this is like our passage today. Today we are looking at divine alignment. And we find, just like my decking boards, no one is aligned correctly. Not even one. No one is perfectly measured up against God. Like in Microsoft Word where you want to justify all your text to the right, we find that we are not justified with God. All are crooked.


It has been two weeks since we last looked at Romans, so let me recap where we are in Paul’s argument, as we are reaching the very end of one long point he has been making.

Paul first writes that he wants to come and visit them. He wants to encourage them. He wants to preach the Gospel to them and to those far away.

He then says that the good news is a powerful message. It can save. The gospel message is that we can be made right, and be aligned with God by faith.

Paul then gives a long argument as to why we need the gospel, because everyone, Jews and Gentiles, are not aligned with God.

He first says we have suppressed the truth about God. His invisible qualities are made known to us, but we ignore Him and worship our own things that we like.

We also pretend we are God by judging others and yet do not live up to our own standards of the “shoulds” and the “oughts” we tell others to do.

Paul then addresses the Jews in particular. They may have thought that just because they are descendants of Abraham, just because God rescued their people from slavlery and they were a people group that God gave the law to, that they were all ok and would avoid God’s judgement. But external actions are only good if they match the heart.

And today we are coming to the summary point that Paul has been making: all have sinned. This is bad news, about everyone. Some may think that for some reason they are the exception, but this is not the case.

We are all misaligned; no matter where you put the ball on top (see slide), it will always fall off. And this is the case for all people

And hearing all this bad news may not make us feel good. But focusing in on all this means we can appreciate even more the good news. We can understand just how good it really is. How in our helpless state, we are saved.

If you are an outline person, today we will see that

• All are under the power of sin
• No one is aligned with God
• There is nothing we can say in our defence
• But there is another way

So let's see the end of Paul’s argument:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. (Romans 3:9 NIV)

Paul is summing up the point that the Jews were privileged. They were given the very words of God. But that privilege didn’t give them some sort of fast track to heaven.

The Jews were God’s chosen people group. God gave them more than the natural law. He gave them His law and a whole bunch of promises. But even though they were privileged in that regard, this whole argument is that when it comes to being aligned with God, that didn’t mean they are better off than the Gentiles.

The Jews were privileged, but they did not have some sort of salvation advantage.

All are under the power of sin.

The problem for both groups was sin. Not just about sins, the things we do. But the power of Sin. Sin is like a governing force that is over us. Like how in Australia we can’t just declare to be a sovereign citizen if we don’t like the Australian government. Like it or not, the government has power over us. It’s the same with sin; it has some governing power over us that we are all under, like it or not.

The sins we do are because of the power that sin has over us. That is why we suppress the truth, or judge others while doing evil ourselves. We all have the imprint of Adam on us. He was the first to disobey God. Our very nature is misaligned. We are all out of whack because of this power.

And Paul backs this up, with his last bit of evidence against all of humanity. He pulls out God’s word to say that everyone is out of step with God. There is something wrong with everyone, no exception. By our nature, we are under the power of sin. Paul shows this with a series of quotes from the Old Testament.

No one is aligned with God.

He shows that our minds, words and actions show that we do not go after God. We don’t fear Him, so we don’t listen to what He has to say. This leads to strife.

Paul says, without exception, that no one seeks God, no one does good.

On the horizontal relationships we have with others, it might seem like there are those who do good to others, but from the vertical vantage point of God, we do not do good. We don’t acknowledge him.

We are like the brilliant school kid that everyone thinks is good, and yet he hates his parents. At home he doesn’t speak to them, or say thank you, or tells them about his day. He ignores his parents, and they are heartbroken by it. He might be a good student, but he is a bad son. His relationships are broken. And that is a bit like how Paul is describing us here. We all have turned away from God. We all ignore our heavenly Father. We don’t thank Him for the good things he has given us. We don’t listen to Him and His instructions in how to live. That is a broken relationship; that is not good.

And it always fascinates me when someone says people are basically good. When I meet someone who says this (depending on the context), I ask them if they have locked their car or their front door today. If they did, they are literally saying they do not trust the man on the street. And they might say they do that for the few unknown bad people, but mostly people are good.

Well where do the bad people come from? Are their natures fundamentally different to ours? Would it be possible if we just separate the few bad people from the majority of good people, so we don’t have to lock our things? Why haven’t we done this already? It’s because it is an impossible task. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived in the USSR under Stalin, said:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

He echoes what Paul is saying here. We don’t seek God, and we don’t do good. It is in our hearts.

Left on our own, we go in the opposite direction of God. The existence of the universe and the complexity of life might logically lead us to God, but by our nature we don’t go that direction; we go the other way.

And so this means those who have sought after God, us included, have only done this with external help. It isn’t by our own wise thinking that we know God. We all need help from God to see Him for who He is. That is why we pray for God to work in people’s hearts, because they need God’s help to seek after God.


Moving on, from verse 13 in the next three lines quoted, they are all about speech and the death it can bring.

Throats are gaves. There is snake poison on lips. Mouths bring bitterness. You don’t have to last long in a high school to know that people can be mean with their words. Words bring hurt and pain, and it probably isn’t hard for us to remember the hurtful words someone has told us. We may also remember the pain we have caused by saying things we do not mean. But our words all came from us, from within. Our mouths show our heart. When you shake a bottle of Coke, out of the top spills over Coke, because that is what is on the inside. When we are shaken up, our mouth shows what is on the inside.

And not only do our words bring death, but so do our feet. From verse 15, people are swift to shed blood, and bring the opposite of peace, which is war, conflict, fighting, spite, tension. Every experienced this? Ever cause it?

There is this punk song titled “Freedom like a shopping cart”, and I am not sure what it actually means. But when it comes up in my playlist, I think of all the shopping trolleys that I have pushed that cut to one side. You know the ones where their front wheel is broken and doesn’t go straight. You can try by your own strength to push it straight, but eventually you will bump into something. We are all like that. The way we live, the freedom that we have, is like a shopping cart that needs a wheel alignment. We can try with effort to go straight, but our own nature is bent in on itself, so we go off to one side. We need an external alignment to be fixed.

Without this external fix, everyone is doing right in their own eyes. All have turned away from God and do not know or seek Him. The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, but we turn away from Him and get strife.

With all of these Old Testament passages strung together, we see that a self-seeking heart (vv. 10–12) leads to a bitter tongue (vv. 13, 14), and a bitter tongue creates strife (vv. 15–17). (Teaching Romans, Volume 1: Unlocking Romans 1–8 for the Bible Teacher Third Section: Bitter Tongues Destroy Human Community (vv. 15–18))

And that is all of us.

There is nothing we can say in our defence.

And so after hearing this argument, after the prosecution has spoken, there is nothing for the defendant to say. Nothing can be said in their defence.

We are the accused. Our predicament is direr. We are guilty. We are not right with God. Our hearts, tongues and actions show this. We can not make ourselves right with God by our actions. We can not do anything about it.

Verse 20:

Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin. (Romans 3:20 NIV)

It is only through the law that we know about our own sin. The law is the perfect straight line. The absolute spirit level, and when placed next to us, we see that we are not level. We see that we are not straight. The law reveals this, but like a spirit level it doesn't fix the unalignment; it just shows us it is not straight. The law can not make us right; it doesn’t have that kind of power.

Come judgement day, we will all give an account for things that we have done. Come judgement day, we will not be declared right because of the way we have lived our life.

Our Bible knowledge, our church attendance, our baptism, our doing good will not count towards our final verdict before God. God’s law, His standard, is perfect and we are not, and our good things that we do don’t help straighten out the past.

And this isn’t just for us in the room; it is for everyone.

Another way

We need something else; we need another way to be saved. This is the problem Paul has been explaining for 2 and a half chapters, but there is more to this letter. This is only half the story. The good news is, that it is possible to be aligned or justified with God. If you have read your Bible, you will know that some people are actually said to be right.

Soon we will look at Abraham, whom we have been following in our serial reading. We know he did some really bad things; jeopardised God’s promises a few times and mistreated the women in his household, and yet, soon we will see that he was deemed right. How is that possible? We can at least say it’s not because of his actions.

And if you were to look up the Psalms that were referenced in our passages, you will see for all of them that there are righteous people also mentioned. Here are the first three.

V10-12 is a quote from Psalm 14. Near the end of that Psalm it says

for God is present in the company of the righteous. (Psalm 14:5 NIV)

In verse 13 the first line is from Psalm 5, which also says

Surely, Lord, you bless the righteous; you surround them with your favor as with a shield. (Psalm 5:12 NIV)

The second quote in verse 13 is from Psalm 140 and that ends also ends with

Surely the righteous will praise your name, and the upright will live in your presence. (Psalm 140:13 NIV)

So this means there are people who are righteous. God’s favour is on them, they sing God’s name.

So there is a way to be right with God. And Paul has already said this in Romans.

Flick your minds and Bible pages back to chapter one:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. (Romans 1:16 NIV)

Chapter 3, verse 9 says we are under the power of Sin, but there is another power. The gospel is the power of God that brings salvation. It is the message of Jesus that saves and breaks the power of sin.

We can think back to words that we have said, to actions we have done, and rightly feel guilty. They have happened, and you can’t change the past. But the good news is, you can’t change the past. God’s actions in Jesus have also happened. We will see the high point in this whole argument next week, and it all rests on Jesus. We are all under sin, but Jesus saves us from that power, and we have to receive what He has done for us by faith. By trusting in Him, then we can be aligned.

To those here who think they are a good person, because they might read the list of things here and think, well, I haven’t killed anyone, I don’t cause strife, I come to church, here is something you can do after lunch today. Write down, with a pen and paper, all the good things you did last week. Maybe you were patient with that tricky person, maybe you bought someone a coffee, or donated to the pantry. You didn’t kill anyone and read your bible. Put it in a list and then say, "I am in a privileged position, but that doesn’t mean I have any salvation advantage for what I have done". And then cross each item off the list and say “these do not make me more right with God”. Your good works are not what save you. Instead, going forward this week, you could read ahead, and consider Jesus and what He has done, more than your own works, and come back next week to hear how great this is.

And to those who are in this room who already feel guilty of their past actions. You hear the list of sins and look back on your life and broken relationships and say “yep that is me”. You don't want anyone here to know the things you have done. Well this afternoon, when it is quiet, and those past memories come back, or you hear your accusing voice in your head, reminding you of all the bad things you have done, what you can do is say back to that voice is, “Yes, those things did happen. But they don’t affect my standing before God. Jesus is greater. His breaks the power of sin, and He has rescused me so I can be adoptd into His family.” And this week, you can read ahead and come back next week to hear how great this is.

Our words and actions are not the way for us to be rightly aligned with God. It isn’t because of our wisdom, it isn’t because we live in obedience to the rules, it isn’t because of the religious things we do, that we can be saved. Works are off the table. Those deeds that make us feel good, those that make us feel bad, they are the wrong ball game to gain salvation. It is only through Jesus.

Our only hope, and the hope of the world for salvation, is in the power of God. It is God’s works in Jesus that save us. So let's look to ourselves, and to our neighbours, and see that we and them, all people, need Jesus.

Holy God,

Your word levels the playing field for every single one of us.

We admit that when we look at our lives, we fail and we are crooked.

Our words have caused damage, our feet have wandered, and we have all turned away.

Please shut down any pride in us that thinks we can save ourselves by keeping the rules,

and silence the accusing voices that tell us we are too broken to be forgiven.

Help us to leave our resumes behind and simply rest in the finished work of Jesus.

Grant that we, and our neighbours around us, may see our deep and equal need for a Savior.

Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord

Amen.