Daily Devotions

Roms 3: 23

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

When Paul stated that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, this means that we are all included in the rebellious company of sinners. According to God’s standards for all men, none is without sin. Even all the apostles who lived with Jesus during the three years that they were with Him had made them to be better men but not sinless.

It was also the same with Paul and though he had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and his life was completely turned around he too confessed that he was the greatest of all sinners. Paul and all the other apostles had given their lives to Jesus and though they became holy and righteous before God, none claimed to be sinless.

However in the next two verses 24-25 Paul said; “all are justified freely by grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus…to be received by faith.” This is the gift of God when we invited Christ into our lives and accepted God’s offer of forgiveness, we have become a new creation in Him and we are only our way to sanctification and eternal lives.

We don’t and we cannot become perfect immediately but we are no longer under the bondage of sin as by His grace and through the Holy Spirit we are able to overcome the temptations and bondages of sin. The Holy Spirit gives us strength as we consciously do what the Holy Spirit leads and guide us as we put off our old self so that we may be made new in the likeness of God’s righteousness and holiness.

For without His grace, we will never be able to overcome our sin nature. We can fortify our lives by consciously building our spirit man in the fruit of the Spirit which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Again we cannot be having all these operating fully in our lives, we may have some or most of it and we may still have weaknesses to overcome in certain areas of our lives. For example our patience and self-control may still need to be controlled.

In the same way, every other aspect of the spiritual fruit in our lives may have different levels or degrees of imperfection, for these we need to continue to work it out so that we can put all our weaknesses and imperfection under control.

Only when we are totally in submission to the leading of the Holy Spirit and is in obedient to Him can we overcome our weaknesses. Let us therefore work diligently in strengthening our spiritual lives and ensure our salvation to be secured.