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The River ChurchSermons

The NEED

All Are Guilty Before God and NEED to be Saved

Gary Wright · Sunday, 25 May 2025 · Romans 3:9-20 · 32:41 · 4,205 words

Romans S5 · 3:9-20 Burton

There is no public page for this message yet — the transcript below is the whole of it.

The pastor begins with his teen smoking, showing how addiction can dominate a person, then moves to the biblical teaching that all are born under the power of sin. He explains that sin corrupts our self, speech, and actions, making us unable to meet God's standard. The message stresses that we cannot free ourselves from this power; only faith in Jesus, who died and rose again, can set us free. The pastor invites listeners to acknowledge their guilt, turn to Jesus, and ask him to be their Savior and Lord.

What this sermon is about

Ranked by keyness against every other sermon in the corpus. Each one is a word this sermon actually said — nothing here was written by a model.

seek 21 power 19 addicted 6 inner 7 affect 9 mouth 11 sin 40 speech 5 smoke 5 computer 4 guilty 8 inside 9

Topics

Sin 11 The Law 3 Justification 1 Faith 1 The Holy Spirit 1 Freedom 1 Righteousness 1 The Gospel 1

Scripture referenced 20

Verified against the transcript. A reference the recording does not support is never listed here.

Romans 3:9 2:28 Romans 3:10-18 5:30 Romans 3:10 7:43 Romans 3:12 7:43 John 6:44 10:58 Luke 19:10 12:42 Matthew 12:24 14:56 Matthew 12:34 14:56 Romans 3:13-14 15:54 Psalms 5:9 16:18 Ephesians 2:1 17:27 James 3:8 18:45 James 4:1-2 21:06 Isaiah 59:7-8 21:45 Romans 3:18 24:41 Romans 3:19 27:48 Romans 3:20 28:47 Titus 3:3-6 30:10 John 8:36 31:46 John 8:36 31:57

Transcript

Every word, as spoken, with the second it was said. Each word links to its own entry in the index.

So I'm going to preface this story with this.

This is not a story I'm proud to tell.

And I'm not saying, I'm not encouraging anybody in any way.

And in our society today, this probably isn't as big of a problem as it was when I was growing up.

I'll tell you the story.

When I was a teenager, I got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

And how many have done that in their life?

Yeah.

So I got mixed up with the wrong crowd.

And a lot of kids I hung out with, they smoked cigarettes.

So I thought, man, I'm going to do that too.

I want to fit in.

I want to fit in.

And even though I didn't like smoking, I mean, honestly, I didn't even inhale at first

because it just made me cough my brains out when I inhaled the smoke.

I didn't do it, but I continued smoking, or really, I was like pretending to smoke just to fit in.

But eventually what happened is this.

I learned to inhale, and my body started craving cigarettes.

And I found myself addicted to them.

And I struggled with it from a teenager, honestly, until Kim got pregnant with our first child.

And I thought, I don't want this to be the example for my son.

I honestly quit on my own.

I really wasn't even following the Lord at that time.

I just thought, I don't want to be that guy.

I don't want to lead my son that way.

And I was able to quit on my own.

This addiction was very difficult to overcome.

I felt like it had power over me.

Have you ever been addicted to something?

I mean, maybe it's not cigarettes or something harmful, but maybe even, like, I've been addicted to caffeine.

I've been addicted to sweets.

It's easy to get addicted to stuff.

And when you're addicted, it has this power over you, or it seems to.

And that's what Paul is speaking about in our passage today.

He is speaking, telling us that we are under the power.

The power of sin when we don't know Jesus.

And that's exactly what he's saying in Romans 3.9.

I'm going to read that passage again.

He says,

And Paul's not just telling us that we're sinners, that we commit sin.

He's saying we're under sin with no S.

That means,

That means that sin is who we naturally are when we're born.

And I'm going to prove it to you.

I'm going to tell you my story, but you'll be able to relate.

When my kids were born, I did not have to teach them to be selfish.

When my grandkids, I have five grandkids, I do not have to teach them to be selfish.

I have to teach them to share.

I don't have to teach them to be bad, because it's natural.

Right?

Because why?

We're born under the power of sin.

And it's who we are on the inside when we don't know Jesus as Savior.

That's who we are.

And maybe you're here this morning and you don't know what sin is.

Sin is when we rebel against God.

It's when we do something that God don't approve of.

It actually means this.

To miss the mark.

I just bought a new bow.

And I honestly, on my lunch break,

I probably shouldn't even tell you this.

I shoot it out back here on my lunch break.

I take 20 shots every day when I'm here working out back.

I wish I hit the bullseye every time.

But you know what?

I miss the mark a lot.

I can shoot groups, but they're not always in the bullseye.

And when it comes to sin or following Jesus, we miss the mark.

And that is sin.

Anything that's outside of that bullseye of following Jesus or following God,

following God perfectly is missing the mark.

That's what sin is.

And Paul says, none of us, and you may be asking,

Gary, we've been talking about this for three weeks.

This is the fourth.

Because Paul's making a point here.

We're going to talk about that as we go.

But why are we talking about this?

Because it's so important to understand who we are

before we're going to be willing to give our lives to Christ.

That's truly what sin is.

Why Paul is making this case.

It's like a court case.

But he's saying, he's already proven to us

that the whole world is guilty of sin.

And now he is backing it up here.

Verses 10 through 18 are actually Old Testament quotes

or Old Testament scripture.

He's backing this up with scripture.

But he's already talked to the pagan world,

people who don't know anything about,

the Bible, people that don't know anything about God.

You might say the bad people in the world.

But truthfully, that would be all of us if we said that.

But he also condemned the moral world,

the world, the people who think they're good,

that, oh, if we compare ourselves to that person, I'm better.

But truthfully, we do the same things they do

as what Paul's argument was, and we're no better.

And thirdly, he condemned the religious people,

those who are striving to,

to do things, to earn favor with God.

He's like, you can do all that you want,

but if you don't put your faith in my son,

you're just as guilty.

We're all guilty.

That's what, we're either Jews or we're Gentiles.

Most of us in here are probably Gentiles.

We are guilty of sin, and Paul's gonna continue this thought.

And because we're under this power of sin,

facts, every aspect of what we do,

especially three things Paul covers here.

The first is this, our inner being.

Sin, when we have, when we're under the power of sin,

it's who we are on the inside.

So, first of all, sin affects our inner self.

Secondly, it affects what we say.

When we're, we have sin on the inside, guess what happens?

It comes out of our mouth, eventually.

And it affects how we act, our conduct.

But we're gonna talk about these three things.

As we read through the passage.

The first is our inner self.

In verse 10 through verse 12, Paul says,

as it is written, again, he's quoting Old Testament scripture.

He says, none is righteous.

And just in case you don't understand that,

he says, no, not one, not one.

And he says, no one understands.

No one seeks for God.

All have turned aside.

All, all together, they have become one.

Nobody does good.

Not even one.

Seven times in this passage, Paul uses the words,

none, no one, or all.

And he's saying, none of us are righteous.

Righteous is a central theme of the book of Romans.

The righteousness means that we are in right standing before God.

And what he's saying here is none of us,

without Jesus, are in right standing of God.

And we're under sin.

And being under sin affects our inner body,

or our inner self in three ways.

It affects our mind.

That's why Paul says, no one understands.

It affects our heart.

He says, no one seeks for God.

And it affects our will.

No one does good.

Not even one.

And because we're under the power of sin,

we don't even understand what God's righteousness is.

I would love to tell you that I was an expert on computer work,

but I am really technologically illiterate, really.

I wasn't born with a computer.

I didn't have a computer until I was in my mid-30s, probably.

So I'm really behind on that.

And guess what?

Our church, where I work, everything they do is on the computer.

Like, I was like, this was the biggest hurdle I had to overcome

when I started working.

When I started working here, I'm like, I was overwhelmed by that.

The things I need to do, I know how to do,

but I just don't understand.

And that's what, when it comes to God, when we have sin in us,

when it's our nature, we don't understand God,

and we don't understand his righteousness either.

Paul goes on and he says, it's our heart.

No one seeks for God.

And some people might argue with me on this,

no one seeks for God on their own.

We've heard, I've heard people say, person is seeking God.

Well, I'm going to tell you this, that no one seeks for God on their own.

The Holy Spirit has to be involved for somebody to seek for God.

That's why Jesus says this in John 6, 44.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

And I will raise him up on the last day.

The Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin, and then we seek God.

That's what Paul's talking about.

We may see people come to the church, and I've seen this.

People come to church and they're in need.

And this is a great place to come when you're in need,

because we can help with a lot of things.

But mainly we're here to help spiritually.

But people come here seeking fulfillment.

They come here seeking help.

They come here seeking escape from pain.

And we're able to pray with them.

We're able to come alongside of them.

But some of the people, as soon as their need is met,

the seeking is gone because they came for the wrong reason.

They didn't come to seek for the Lord.

They came to seek for that material thing or whatever they were struggling with.

But when the Lord seeks us, or when he comes after us,

and he convicts us with this Holy Spirit, we will go after him.

Look, we don't seek.

We don't seek for the Lord on our own.

Here's the beautiful thing.

The Lord seeks us.

He does.

And if you guys, maybe you guys have heard about Zacchaeus in the Scripture.

I'm not going to tell the whole story, but this is from that.

This is Luke 19.10.

It says,

For the Son of Man, that would be Jesus,

came to seek and save the lost.

That's beautiful.

Jesus also says this,

If you have a hundred sheep and one goes astray,

will you not leave the ninety-nine and go after the one?

Aren't you thankful he came after you?

He did.

He will seek us even though we won't seek him.

Paul says every one of us have turned aside.

We've turned away from God.

And he says because we've turned away, we're worthless, he says.

And I don't want to tell you that you're worthless.

That's not what I'm saying.

But when we don't know Jesus and we're under the power of sin,

we are worthless when it comes to our purpose that God created us for.

He created us to glorify him.

We exist to glorify God.

And when we have this power of sin over us, we can't do that.

I read somewhere this week that we're like, when we're in that position,

we're like fish who can't swim and birds who can't fly.

I love that.

Paul finishes this section on our,

we're sharing that none of us are good, not even one.

We all miss that target.

We all miss the mark.

And we're under this power.

All of us need Christ.

Because we're under the power of sin, it's corrupted us on the inside,

but it's also going to show up on the outside.

Because whatever's on the inside is eventually going to come out.

In Matthew 12, 24, or I'm sorry, Matthew 12, 34,

Jesus says,

You brood of vipers, how can you speak good when you are evil?

This is the passage right here I really want you to hear.

For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Whatever's in your inner being is going to come out of your mouth eventually.

We may be able to say nice things about people.

We may be able to lift people up.

But if we're under the power of sin, eventually what's in our heart,

is going to come out of our mouth.

What we're thinking is going to come out.

Paul says it this way in the next two verses.

This is 13 and 14, verses 13 and 14.

He says,

Their mouth is an open grave.

They use their tongues to deceive.

The venom of ash is under their lips.

Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.

This is again quoting from Old Testament Scripture.

This is actually Psalm 5, 9, if you want to look that up on your own.

But notice he uses four words here.

Talking about,

He uses throat, tongue, lips, mouth.

He's definitely talking about our speech.

One pastor says this about this passage.

He says,

His tongue is tipped with rod.

His lips are tainted with venom.

His mouth is full of gall and bitterness.

His tongue is a sword to run men through.

And his throat is a grave to bury them.

Speech can do two things.

It can build people up, or it can rip them to shreds.

It can do that.

And that's what Paul's saying.

When we truly have this nature of sin, that's what's going to happen.

A sinful, spiritual, dead heart will produce dead words.

Ephesians 2, 1, the same writer of Romans wrote this.

He says,

You were dead in your trespasses and sin.

We're dead on the inside.

Our words, when he says that our words are like an open grave or an open tomb,

our words have the stench, deadness.

It reflects the deadness on the inside.

Paul says we're liars.

We lie.

And the word, he says, he uses the word deceit,

but it has the idea of practicing lying.

That we keep on lying.

How many of you have ever lied in here?

We all struggle with lying.

It's our nature.

We want to make ourselves look good.

Jesus, when we have him in our heart, he gives us the ability to overcome that too.

But Paul says we use our speech to hurt people, to slander people, like venom from a snake.

I love how James, in the book of James, 3, verse 8, James says this.

And I love how he uses it.

He says,

But no human being can tame the tongue.

It is restless evil.

Full of deadly poison.

When Paul talks about cursing, he's not speaking of profanity.

He's speaking of us calling for bad things to happen to other people.

I've heard people saying, man, I wish this would happen to this person.

Or I wish that would happen to this person.

That's what he's talking about.

He says we speak from bitterness.

We speak bitterness to other people.

We're hateful.

We use our mouths to express resentment and hatred.

Towards one another when we are under the power of sin.

Wishing harm to come to them.

Have you ever said something that you wish you could take back?

Many times.

And I'm going to be honest.

I've said things many times as a Christian that I wish I could take back.

I've said things about people.

And I look up and they're standing right there.

And God's saying, you need to change that in your life.

Listen, we naturally want to hurt people.

But Jesus wants to set us free from that.

That's exactly what Paul and Jesus both are talking about.

When they say our words come from who we truly are on the inside.

And even as believers, we can fall away and we can get to that place.

But our words come from who we are and what we're thinking.

But not only speech.

Not only does our inner sin being on our inside.

Affects our speech.

But it also affects the way we act.

James 4, 1 and 2 says this.

Causes quarrels and what causes fights among you.

Is it not this?

That your passions are at war within you.

You desire and do not have.

So you murder.

You covet and cannot obtain.

So you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask.

Paul's quoting again from the Old Testament.

When he says the same thing here.

He's quoting from Isaiah 59 verses 7 and 8.

But he says this.

Their feet are swift to shed blood.

In their paths are ruin and misery.

In the way of peace they have not known.

By nature, we're quick to hurt other people.

Especially when it comes to helping ourselves.

When we need something.

We're willing to cross the barrier.

Of hurting someone else.

To get what we want.

We're willing to cross it.

It reminds me.

Honestly, it reminds me of the Sermon on the Mount.

That we talked about a few months ago.

Paul says that our paths are ruin and misery.

I think about the wide road and the narrow road that we talked about.

Back, if you weren't here.

Jesus says that when we're born, we are on this wide road.

And it leads to.

The only way to exit off of that.

Way to destruction.

Is through faith in Jesus Christ.

That's how we get on the narrow path.

Because before that.

We are hurtful to people.

Paul says there's.

They have known no peace.

And there's two kinds of peace.

We get when we come to Christ.

First of all, we get peace with God.

The Bible says that we're enemies of God.

Because we have this sin nature.

Living in us, we're enemies and the only way to become a friend is through faith in Jesus.

And when we do that, we, instead of being his enemies, we have peace and we're his friend.

Now, the second piece is this, when we know Jesus and we're walking with Jesus, it don't,

we can have these hardships in our lives.

And you maybe have seen a Christians that have went through incredible trials in life,

and they've able been able to withstand and stand under the weight of that.

And why is that?

It's because they have peace of God.

They know that Jesus is in control and they know no matter what he is going to be there.

And he is going to, to maybe not make the circumstance happen like you want.

But you know, they know that he's in control.

And at the end of the day, they're going to spend eternity with him.

And that is where they get their peace from goes on.

And he says the cause for.

All of this in Romans 3:18 is this, well, it's because we're under the power of sin,

but it's because, because of the power of sin, they, there is no fear of God before their

That's Roman 3:18.

There is no fear of God before their eyes.

It reminds me of a story I heard was a lady, a single lady, and she had one son and she

worked her whole life.

She had the desire for this young man to go through college.

And get an education.

And she worked two and three jobs her whole life to save up the money, to send this man,

this young man to college, and she did it and he went and he did well, actually he got

like a three, you know, like a 4.0 or a high grade marks.

And when he finished, she got a good job and he was very successful and wealthy, but this

is what happened.

He forgot about his mom.

He wouldn't answer her calls.

He wouldn't answer her texts.

He wouldn't visit her.

Obviously all that success means nothing to me, maybe not to you either, because he

forgot his mom, the one who provided everything.

And honestly, when we don't fear God, that's who we are.

God is the creator of the universe.

He sent his son to die for our rejection of him.

All we have to do is turn to him and get in faith, but we reject God.

We don't fear him.

We don't.

We turn aside as he said earlier, these are hard things to hear, aren't they?

I'm going to tell you some good news here at the end.

You may be asking me, and I'm going to, I know I said this at the beginning.

Why are we talking about this for four weeks in a row?

It's because we don't understand who we truly are without Christ.

We're never going to turn to him.

It's like this.

If we are, if we don't realize our roof at home is leaking when it rains, we're not going

to put a roof on it.

If we don't realize our car is broke down, we're not going to fix it.

And if we don't realize that Jesus is our only hope, we're never going to turn to him.

In verse 19, Paul says, now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under

the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the world may be held accountable to God.

Paul's gave us this extraordinary court case.

He's proven we're all guilty.

And when we realize we're guilty and that we're accountable to God, Paul says, we may

be saying, wait a minute, Paul, wait a minute, Pastor Gary, wait a minute, God, but when

we really realize who we are and that we're accountable to God, our mouth will be stopped

because we will know the truth of who we are.

And that's the point when we can come to the Lord, that is the point where we realize our

only hope is him.

And we need to turn to him.

Verse 20 says, by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since

through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Earlier, I told Charles the smoker, and I already told you that I quit under my own

But here's the thing, when it comes to being under the power of sin, we cannot overcome

that on our own.

We cannot overcome it on our own.

And that is really what Paul's saying here.

He's saying, by words of the law.

By words of the law, nobody will be justified.

Nobody will be righteous or right with God because the law wasn't given for us to be

able to keep it.

God knew we wouldn't be able to.

He gave it to us to know that we can't keep his perfect standard.

None of us.

And that's where we're all guilty.

That's why Jesus came and died on the cross.

That's why he suffered and was beaten and his beard was blocked.

For you and I.

Because we have this sin.

But the glorious thing is this.

He didn't stay dead.

He rose again and he's alive right now.

He is alive.

And I love what Titus says in Titus 3, verses 3 through 6.

He says,

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and

pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others.

And hating one another.

But when the goodness of the loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not

because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his mercy, by washing of

regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out so richly through Jesus

Christ our Savior.

Look, Jesus came because we were what he said we were at the beginning.

And he died for that.

And he did that because he loved us.

It has nothing to do with how good or bad we are.

We're all bad.

And he richly poured this mercy out on us.

What do we have to do to receive it?

Realize that we're sinners.

I need you.

You're my only hope.

I believe you died.

I believe you rose again.

Will you be my Savior?

I want to follow you.

I want to make you the Lord of my life.

Have you done that?

Have you done that?

John 8.36 says this.

First of all, remember that we are under the power of sin.

But John 8.36 says this.

So if the Son, Jesus, sets you free, you are free indeed.

You are free.

You want to be set free from your sin?

He is the only one who can do it.

Do you know Christ?

It is imperative.

It's the only way to heaven.

It's the only way.

It's the only way to be set free from our guilt, our sin.

He's the only way.

That's the good news.

That is the gospel.

That's why Paul has went through all of this to show us that we're all guilty.