Romans 3:9-20
March 22, 2026
preached by Pastor Doug Cooper
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Time of Reflection Quotations

“If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God’s, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.”

~ John R. W. Stott (1921-2011) in The Cross of Christ

“The first link between my soul and Christ is not my goodness but my badness; not my merit but my misery; not my riches but my need.”

“Learn this lesson… not to come to Him because you are fit to come, but to come to Him because you are unfit to come. Your fitness is your unfitness. Your qualification is your lack of qualification.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), English pastor and author

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), novelist and famed Soviet dissident

“There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.”

“No sin is so great but the satisfaction of Christ and His mercies are greater; it is beyond comparison.”

~ Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) Anglican author and theologian

Sermon Passage

Romans 3:9-20 (NIV)

⁹ What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. ¹⁰ As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
¹¹ there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.
¹² All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
¹³ “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
¹⁴ “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
¹⁵ “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
¹⁶ ruin and misery mark their ways,
¹⁷ and the way of peace they do not know.”
¹⁸ “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

¹⁹ Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. ²⁰ Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.