When is a person considered a sinner? Is it when a person does wrong against society? Is it when they disobey the laws of the land? The scriptures tell us that all men are born in sin and shapen in iniquity.
In Psalms 51:5, David cried, “Behold I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” He said this after Nathan, the Prophet, called out his sin of adultery with Bathsheba. In the Garden of Eden, Adam deliberately and knowingly broke God’s commandment.
In Genesis 2:17, we read, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The word “die” means a physical and or spiritual separation. When Adam sinned, the entire human race was sold into sin. “Wherefore, as by one man, sin entered into the world and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned,” Romans 5:12. Regardless of birth, environment or opportunity, man’s heart is wicked because he is born a sinner, separated from God.
In Jeremiah 17:9, the Prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jesus said this about man. And he said, “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man,” Mark 7:20-23. Man in his natural state cannot reconcile with God because of his sinful nature. “There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one,” Romans 3:11,12. Man may attempt to correct the evil of his heart but cannot. There is only one way man’s sick heart can be changed, and that is through the miracle of God’s grace, but God’s grace can be imputed to man only because of the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh,” Ezekiel 36:26. II Corinthians 5:19 declares, “To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”
Man must be reconciled with God before he can have a relationship with him. If man does not have this reconciliation through the finished work of Our Lord on the Cross, his religious works are in vain.
Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:7, “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.”