Finding No Good Men

Open your Bibles with me, if you will, to Romans chapter 3. This morning, we are back in Romans 3, as we continue together in our journey on the Romans Road. And while you find your spot, let me tell you a story from another place in God’s Word. This story comes out of Genesis 18.

Now, you need to know that God had directed Abraham to set out from his home land and from his country to go to a place that he didn’t know. And Abraham had gone. He had taken his wife Sarah, and his nephew, Lot, and they had set out. And through their journeys, the Lord made Abraham and Lot to be very rich men. They had herds and livestock and lots of servants and slaves. And their households started bickering, and so, the two men thought it was good to part ways. And Abraham let Lot pick which direction he would go. And the grass was greener towards Sodom and Gomorrah than it was in the other direction, so Lot chose to go towards Sodom and Gomorrah; but Abraham went the opposite direction.

And as Abraham and Sarah were settled in their new place, the Lord appeared to them. He came as three men, and he promised to make them a mighty nation, and that Sarah was going to have a son in her old age. God had promised, again, to bless all of the nations on earth through Abraham’s descendants. And Sarah didn’t believe God, and He called her on it. But as the Lord was preparing to leave Abraham, the Lord decided to share something with Abraham. Because He had blessed Abraham, and because He would use His descendants to bless others as they obeyed His commands, God decided to tell Abraham where He was headed and what He was going to do.

And so, God told Abraham, “the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is grave. Their sin is great, and I am going to confirm just how bad it is. I am going to search over the cities just one more time, and then I’m going to destroy both cities. I am going to wipe them off the face of the earth because of their wicked sin before me.”

When Abraham heard this, he was concerned. So, he asked the Lord, “God, surely there are righteous people in that city as well! It isn’t like you to punish the righteous with the wicked. What if you find fifty righteous men in the city? Will you still destroy it?

And God said, “No! If I find fifty righteous men, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” So Abraham asked, “what if there are only 45 righteous men?”

And God said, “I’ll spare the whole city for the 45.” And Abraham asked, “what if you can only find 40?” And God said, “then for 40 righteous men, I will spare the city.” So Abraham continued, “What about if all you find are 30 righteous men?” And God said “The whole city will be spared for the 30.”

Now, Abraham knew he was pushing it, so he said “I don’t want to test your patience, but what if there were only 20? And God replied for those 20 righteous men, I will spare the whole city.”

And Abraham said “one last time, I must ask, if there are only 10 righteous men?” And God said, “Even if there are only 10 righteous men in the whole place, I will spare it from destruction because of them.”

And the Lord left Abraham. And when you get to Genesis 19:28, it says that Abraham looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and he saw dense smoke, like the smoke from a furnace, rising up from the land, and from the plains that surrounded them. God had destroyed the two cities, because in all of the mass of people in them, there weren’t even ten righteous men.

And I want you to keep this picture in your mind, as we turn back towards Romans this morning. We have been talking about righteousness and sin. We have seen that God does not play favorites. He isn’t fooled by you. He doesn’t honor a lip-service faith, where we attend a church service on Sundays, and we say prayers for our mealtime food, and that is the extent of our faith practice. We’ve talked about the religiously lost, about those whose faith is built on their basic understanding, and on their family heritage. And we have been wrestling with the fact that many Christians today have been sold a lie that because you walked down an aisle, and you said a prayer, and you even got in that baptistry and got dunked under water, and you come to church and Sunday School, that now you are saved.

And what we are seeing so far in Romans, what we are going to continue to see this morning is that their is a whole lot more to it than that. And as we turn to Romans 3 this morning, I want us to do so thinking about what those burning cities must have looked like, and I want us to remember that they could have been spared, both cities, if but for 10 righteous men.

Let’s look at Romans 3:9-20 together, and as we do so, would you stand with me in honor of the reading of God’s Word?

Romans 3:9–20 NASB95

What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave, 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.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.

Let’s go to the Lord in prayer: Father, we come before you today in praise and singing for who You are and the things that You have done. You are the Mighty and All-Powerful King of the universe, and there is nothing that we could pursue in this life that is better than You! And as we turn towards Your Word this morning, we know that it is true and that it is good. We know that it is useful to us, both to encourage and instruct us in the way that we should go. Lord, would You be with us this morning as we consider it together. Help us not to turn to the right or to the left, but to hear what You would teach us, that we may be changed by it to be better reflections of Your Son Jesus. It is in the Name of Jesus that we ask these things today, Amen.

Thank you, you may be seated. As you take your seat, and get comfortable again, you may want to go ahead and get your listening guide out, so that you can follow along with us this morning. It is available in your program, or digitally from Facebook and our web page, but you’ll want to have that handy as we go through this passage together.

If I were to ask you this morning, are you a good person?, what would you say? My bet would be that most of us in here this morning would say yes. In fact, I’ll take it a step further. If we went into Publix after church today, or if I went on Facebook or Instagram, and I did a survey in any or all of these places, I would expect that most people would tell me that they are a good person. I’m sure there would be exceptions, but most people would describe themselves as good people that try to do the right thing.

And let me say, that by man’s law, and by man’s way of thinking, they probably are. If I were your judge, If I were the one that you had to be accountable to, I might think that you are a good person. I might even tell you that you are a good person. I might commend you to others as a good person. You might even win awards from chamber of commerce, from civic groups, or philanthropic groups for being a good person. You might be Time magazine’s person of the year.

But the problem with this, friend, is that none of these things make you a good person. I don’t get to judge if you are a good person. The world around us doesn’t get to judge if you are a good person, because what it comes down to is that we are not your judge! God is.

We’ve been talking about the fact that there is God is not partial. God doesn’t play favorites. In other words, God judges everyone equally. A partial judge judges people differently based on who they are, but God doesn’t do that. He looks at everyone of us exactly the same. And while He has blessed Israel so that they can, in turn, be a light and a blessing to the rest of the world, He is not partial towards Israel. And what we see in our passage this morning is that we have one thing solidly in common. Let’s look together, starting in verse 9:

Romans 3:9–12 NASB95

What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; There is none who understands, There is none who seeks for God; All have turned aside, together they have become useless; There is none who does good, There is not even one.”

What did God say about Sodom and Gomorrah when He was talking to Abraham? For 40 I’ll spare them, for 30 I’ll spare them, for 20 I’ll spare them, for 10 righteous men, I will spare destruction from both cities. Just ten among hundreds of thousands. And yet, God destroyed both cities because not even 10 righteous men could be found between them. And this ties right into what our text is telling us this morning. If you’ve got your listening guide this morning, the first thing that I would have you to right down is this, that

There is no such thing as a good person

That is what this text just said. Forget about Sodom and Gomorrah. Forget about looking for 10 righteous men, THERE ISN’T. . . EVEN. . . ONE! No one is a good person. That kind of limits the scope of the search, doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter what your race is, or whether you’re a man or a woman; it doesn’t matter what nationality you were born into, what government you pledge allegiance to, how much money is in your bank account, who your mom and dad are, what you do for a living, how much power, authority, and sway you have; It doesn’t matter what church you grew up in, or that you have never even been to church, there is not one righteous man, NOT. . . EVEN. . .ONE!

Now, I know I just stepped on a bunch of toes in here this morning, and I’m sorry that sometimes it is painful to hear the truth. But it would also be unloving of me to not tell it to you. But, I want you to hear what I’m saying, because I’m the same as you. This comes straight out of scripture. In fact, Paul is quoting scripture when he says it. Verses 10-18 are quotations of Psalm 14:1-3 and Psalm 53:1-3, so what that means is that this passage appears 3 times over in Scripture. Signed, sealed, and delivered, there is no such thing as a good person. We are not righteous before God, which is the very definition of what it means to be good.

Jesus affirmed that no man is good. Now, He was speaking, I believe, rhetorically when He said it, because He was speaking to a leader, and He was trying to point the people to His identity as the Son of God, but in Luke 18:19,

Luke 18:19 NASB95

And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.

There is no good in us. In and of ourselves, there is no one that is good. The idea of a good person is a fantasy. It is what we know deep inside of ourselves that we are called to be. It is a memory, buried in the fabric of our humanity, from that time before the garden of Eden, before we chose sin and death above life in the presence of our Creator, when God Himself looked upon the man He had created and said that he was good.

We know that is what we are supposed to be. We are supposed to be good, but we are not. And it isn’t even close. In fact, our text this morning tells us just how not good we are. There are three indictments that stand against everyone of us in this passage. There are three things that God says are true about you and I in these verses that prove that we are not good. Look at verse 13:

Romans 3:13 NASB95

“Their throat is an open grave, With their tongues they keep deceiving,” “The poison of asps is under their lips”;

We are going to make these things personal this morning. I’m not going to talk about us, or we, but about each one as an individual, because I don’t think we really get this until we allow God to make it personal. And so, The first indictment that God says is true is this, I want you to write this down:

In my heart of hearts, I am a liar

That’s a hard word, isn’t it? You might be tempted to immediately deny it. I know that I am tempted to deny it, and you know what? That is proof that it is true. Our whole lives through, our inclination is to deceive. We act in self-preservation. I see myself in the best possible light. You see yourself in the best possible light. Now, I know the truth. In my heart, I know how wicked I really am, but that isn’t what I project. It isn’t what I try to show to other people. When I met Bethany, those were not the parts of me that I tried to show her.

But I want you to see me as good, even when I’m not. And the sad thing is, friends, is this isn’t even the worst of it, not by a long shot, because we lie to ourselves, but we lie to others. Some of you probably did it this morning in Sunday school. Somebody asked if you’ve been in God’s Word, and you said that you have when you haven’t. Or how about this one, guys, your spouse asks what you had for lunch, and you tell her that you at the salad she made you, but you forget to mention the slice of pizza you bought to go with it.

And these things don’t even seem to us like they are that bad, and that is the problem, because at the very heart of who I am, and at the heart of who you are, we are both prone to deception. We are deceitful and we poison the world against others with our words so that we can elevate ourselves. We regularly lie to ourselves, when we read God’s Word but fail to apply it to our lives because down deep inside of us, we still believe that we know better. We might not express it that way, but all of our actions declare that is what we truly believe. At my heart of hearts, I am a liar, but that’s not all. Look at verses 14-17

Romans 3:14–17 NASB95

“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.”

The second indictment that God says is true of you that you need to write down is this:

In my heart of hearts,I am a murderer

This is a hard one, as well, isn’t it. Nobody said it out loud, but I know that some of you just had the same thought that I have when I read those words. You thought, “I’m not a murderer. I’ve never killed anyone. I could never kill another human being.” But here’s the thing: God said this is true about you.

You’ll remember a few weeks ago, we talked about the fact that God doesn’t just look at who you present yourself to be. He looks at your actions, He looks at the things that you say and do, but He also judges the heart. God judges the heart of a man. He sees every thought, every doubt, every emotion, every conviction, and every rejection of Him. He knows the truth of your heart. He sees the anger inside of you. He knows how you feel about others around you, and how you react to adversity.

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus expounds upon the ten commandments. He explains them to us, and sheds light on the heart of God behind them, the things that drive the commandments to be what they are. Listen to what He says about murder:

Matthew 5:21–22 NASB95

“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.

Everyone of us have done these things, haven’t we? You and I are murderers. Our mouths are full of murderous thoughts, and we are a people quick to shed blood. From the day that Cain killed Able, we have been a people of bloodshed. We allow anger to sink down inside of us. It festers and grows, until it becomes bitterness.

Why do churches split? What is the most common cause of people leaving one church to go to another? It’s conflict. It is anger, and the dis contentedness that it brings. No, you didn’t lift up the knife, but you sure celebrated when bad things happened to them. You sure were miserable when God shed His grace on them and they were blessed.

You and I are liars. You and I are murderers, but perhaps the most scathing indictment against us this morning is the last one. Look at verse 18:

Romans 3:18 NASB95

“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

The last indictment that God says is true of you in this passage, that I would have you write down is this:

In my heart of hearts, I fear everything but God

Aren’t we afraid of so many things? We are afraid of suffering the loss of those that we love. We might not fear death, but we do fear dying and many of the ways that it can happen. We fear economic disaster, and physical illness.

We fear so many things in this life, that are really centered on this life; and yet we don’t truly have a fear of the Lord. The Lord says in Proverbs 1:7 that

Proverbs 1:7 NASB95

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Now, why would I say that in your heart, in my heart, that you and I fear everything but God. You might say, but pastor, I do fear the Lord. And I would say to you, do you? For, if I fear the Lord, why don’t I obey Him. If I fear His wrath, why do I constantly sin against Him. If I fear the Lord, why don’t I act like it.

Do you know what it means to despise wisdom? It means that you hear wisdom, and you know it, you just don’t live by it. In other words, you know that you should fear the Lord, and you have heard His statutes, but you live as though you hadn’t. In other words, if you are a liar and a murderer, you fall into this category. You are among the fools that despise wisdom and instruction.

You and I are liars and murderers that are fools because we don’t fear the Lord. We live as though doing these things doesn’t lead us to death, even though God has plainly told us that they do.

These are some pretty heavy indictments that God finds us to be guilty of, and what it amounts to in us is that you and I affirm that we are just like everybody else: we aren’t good people, because since sin entered into the world, there is no such thing.

Look at the last two verses with me, quickly:

Romans 3:19–20 NASB95

Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.

What this verse tells us is the summary of what we’ve looked at together all morning. Anyone that thinks they are good only has to look at God’s law, and they will know that they are not.

When I go to share Jesus with others, I often will start the conversation by asking them if they are a good person. Then I will ask them how you decide who is a good person and who isn’t. And then we talk about the ten commandments. Have you ever lied? me too. Have you ever stolen anything? me too. Have you ever coveted something that didn’t belong to you? me too. Have you ever committed murder in your heart? me too. And so, by your own admission, you are a liar, a thief, a murderer with a covetous heart, and we’ve only covered 4 of the ten commandments.

And what this points us to, friend, is your need for Jesus. Because if you are guilty, which you are, then you are deserving of the punishment for that guilt, which is death. And the only one that can free you from that punishment is Jesus Christ. He is the One that took that punishment for you so that you wouldn’t have to experience it. And He has promised that if You put your faith in Jesus Christ and will follow Him as your King, then You can be forgiven of your sins, and He will transform you. He will make you into a good tree.

And as the Lord transforms you into a good tree, your life will begin to produce good fruit. And this is the key piece. This is why we continually come back, again and again, to what kind of fruit is growing in your life? Can you see good fruit, the fruit of the Kingdom of God growing in your life, or is it the the fruit of your own kingdom. When others look at your life, will they see Jesus fruit, or the fruit of your desires?

See, we know that in your nature you are a liar and a murderer. We know that in your nature, in your heart of hearts you are not a good person, because nobody is! There is no such thing as a good person. And so, what that means is that the only way that good fruit can be growing in your life is if Jesus is in your life. And if the fruit that is there isn’t good fruit, it’s because you do not know Jesus, because knowing Him WILL bring about good fruit.

So, where does that leave us, friends? This morning, we know that none of us are good; but God has given us the capacity to know the only one who Is. This morning, you are not good, but the One who is can grow good fruit in your life, if you are ready to follow Him. Would you examine your heart this morning? Look at its fruit. If you are ready for it to be good fruit, and not what you’re looking at, the altar is open to you this morning. We are going to pray now, and then we’ll sing a song together. And if God is calling you this morning, harden not your heart. You are not righteous, but the only One who is, is waiting this morning to meet you where you are, and to start you on the journey of changing that. Come to Him this morning. Won’t you come as we sing?

Would you pray with me? Lord, my heart is heavy this morning, because I see the truth of Your Words. I am not good, I am not righteous. I am a liar and a murderer, full of deceit and bitterness. I run towards my own desires, angry at anyone or anything that gets in my way. I have not feared You as I should, and I have lived as though your commands do not matter. And this morning, I am before you to ask You for forgiveness. I know that I don’t deserve it, and there is nothing that I can do to make up for the wrongs that I have done. But, this morning, I throw myself fully into the mercy of Your Son Jesus Christ. I know that He died to pay the price for my sins, and I believe that by Your power He rose from the dead. Forgive me by His blood, that I may be among Your saints. Be the King in my life. I pledge myself to You, and will seek to follow You from this moment forward, wherever You may lead me, so that Your good fruit will grow in my life and so that You will be glorified in me. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.