Romans 3:22 “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Everything interests me. When I was a little kid, put me in a room with a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and I would be entertained for hours. I tried collecting everything from rocks to coins to beer cans. I like sports. I played on football, baseball, basketball and track teams. I took lessons for tennis and dabbled in golf. But I also wanted to play music–I took piano lessons and sang in choirs– and I liked having parts in school plays. My dad was handy–my grandpa always said he should have been a carpenter– and I liked to build stuff in his workshop, and watch him fix cars.

The only classes I didn’t care for so much in school were math classes, and that was mostly because of the endless repetitions of solving equations after you’ve got the concept. I mean, once you have memorized the quadratic equation, why do you have to work twenty-five examples? It’s just the same thing with different numbers.

Everything interests me. But talent? That’s another matter. There are very good reasons that I am not earning a living as a musician or pro athlete. I probably shouldn’t even be allowed on a golf course. Sometimes I still try to do my own car repairs or home improvement projects, and sometimes it turns out okay. It’s hard to mess up an oil change, and painting isn’t rocket science. But what do you do when you have torn half way through an engine, and then you get stuck, especially when your wife is gone with the other car? Or what do you do when you put it all back together, and you have parts left over? Some things are best left to a professional.

Salvation is one of those things. Everyone is gifted at something, but no one is gifted at dealing with sin and its consequences. Paul spends chapters of his letter to the Romans trying to talk us out of making this a do-it-yourself project. “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he writes. No one has the qualifications. “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his (God’s) sight by observing the law.” Try as hard as you might, trying to be good enough for God to be satisfied never, ever goes well.

Righteousness, you see, isn’t a relative term. It’s like computer code, either a one or a zero, either the switch is on or its off. Either you are, or you aren’t. Misspell what you are searching for on a web page or computer document, and you will never, ever find it, even if it’s just one letter. Commit just one sin, and the whole save-yourself project crashes and comes tumbling down. “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” After thousands of years of history with no exceptions, neither you nor I are going to be the exception.

So God turns us to the “professional.” There is someone who can fix the sin problem. He can repair the damage it has done, restore us to a right standing with God and spare us from death and hell. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

Righteousness, you see, is God’s not guilty verdict. Just because we can’t live life so well that we deserve it doesn’t mean that God can’t still give it away. Jesus Christ is the source, the “professional” if you will. Faith is the channel through which he gives us our not guilty verdict, our restored relationship with God. He doesn’t ask us to do something. He simply invites us to trust him.

Why trust Jesus? “He was delivered over to death for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification,” Paul writes at the end of Romans 4. He paid for our guilt so that God could declare us not guilty.             Trust the professional. Trust Jesus Christ. He alone can make people righteous who have been broken by their sin.