According to Romans 3:23, all have sinned. This means we have broken God’s law. There is none that has kept the law of God. The charge is heavy, but the verdict is true. True, if we look at the Ten Commandments, we have broken the first, by trusting in and loving other things more than God. We have come short. What shall we do in order to be saved? This is the anxious inquiry of an awakened sinner. By an awakened sinner, I mean the man who knows what sin is, and who painfully feels that he is a sinner. Are you an awakened sinner? Unfortunately, all men are naturally asleep, insensible of their danger; and so they continue until they are roused up out of their carnal slumbers by the word and Spirit of God. They cry peace, peace to themselves, when there is no peace just as expressed in Isaiah: 48:22, when God said, “There is no peace to the wicked.” They live on, day after day, keeping death, judgment, and eternity, out of their thoughts; never reading the Bible with a sincere desire to know what their state is. And never praying to God from the bottom of their hearts accepting that they are sinners (like in Luke 18:13; “God be merciful to me a sinner”). If you can live without serious prayer to God for mercy, you show full proof that you are alienated from the life of God through ignorance. It is as if you are living in the nastiest immoralities. But when it pleases God to close conviction on the heart of a man, and to awaken his conscience, then he starts up as one out of sleep. Man sees what he never saw; that it is an evil and bitter thing to sin. He reads that the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God as told in Psalm 9:17. This makes him tremble as he reads. He acknowledges, “I have forgotten God and sinned against Him.” And as so, he asks himself, “How shall I escape the damnation of hell?” The world with all its pleasures, profits, and honours, becomes tasteless and insipid. It cannot give ease to his painful heart, nor heal his wounded conscience. He now begins to pray wholeheartedly. His prayer is now the real language of his heart not the formal and unmeaning service it was before. The sense of his danger drives him to the throne of grace. He now reads the word of God as the decision of eternal truth and reads it with an interest in every line. Sinner, has this inquiry ever been yours, “What must I do to be saved?” Accept Jesus Christ into your life and you will be justified. To be justified is to be pardoned and accepted by God. Pardon and acceptance are only obtained by faith in Jesus Christ. When you believe that Jesus Christ has taken away your sins, there is nothing more to disturb your conscience; then you have peace with God and you are saved. Ends
