Dear Friends,
If you are like me, when you listen to the news for a while you exclaim,”Good grief! Isn’t there anything out there but chaos and conflict? Why is this all I am hearing?” Today’s devotional answers your questions. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Romans 3:10-20 (ESV)

  10 as it is written:

  “None is righteous, no, not one;
  11     no one understands;
  no one seeks for God.
  12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
  no one does good,
  not even one.”
  13 “Their throat is an open grave;
  they use their tongues to deceive.”
  “The venom of asps is under their lips.”
  14     “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
  15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
  16     in their paths are ruin and misery,
  17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
  18     “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
  19 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 whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

“It is because they do not realize the biblical teaching concerning sin that men fail to realize so many other things that are contained in the Christian gospel. There are so many people today who say that they do not see the need of the incarnation; that they do not understand all this talk about the Son of God having come down to earth; that they do not understand this talk about the miracles and the supernatural; that they cannot follow this idea of the atonement and terms such as justification and sanctification and the rebirth. They say that…all this seems to be unnecessary. They would argue like this: ‘Isn’t it the church that has evolved all these theoretical, purely abstract ideas? Aren’t they things that have been conjured up in the minds of theologians? What have they to do with us, and where is their practical relevance? …People who talk like this do so because they have not realized the truth about sin…. They have not realized that they themselves are sinful. But the Bible, in sharp contrast, constantly insists upon this from the beginning to the end…. It tells us that the life of man, whether individually or collectively, simply cannot be understood apart from the doctrine of sin. Here we are in this modern and perplexing world; we are conscious that something is wrong, and the question is: ‘What is wrong?’ Politicians do not seem to be able to solve our problems. Philosophers are asking questions but they do not seem to be able to answer them. All our efforts do not seem to put the world right. The Bible says, ‘You are ignoring the one things which is the key to the situation! It is sin. Here is the cause of the trouble in individuals, in intimate human relationships, in international relationships everywhere.” [David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Out of the Depths, (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 1995), p. 20-21]