Ecclesiastes 7:29 (NLT) But I did find this: God created people to be virtuous, but they have each turned to follow their own downward path.”

According to scripture, King Solomon was the wisest and richest king to ever rule on the earth. That great wisdom, however, did not save him from himself. Solomon set out to accomplish many great things, acquire great wealth and to test how far he could go with his wisdom, fame and fortune. At the end of it all, his opinion was that everything was meaningless because everyone dies and is forgotten rather quickly. In the midst of all of his searching, he uttered some profound words, obviously inspired by the Holy Spirit. One of the things that God showed him, as evidenced by the scripture above, is that the way that people were created was to be virtuous. Or to say it another way, people were created to be morally excellent. As is the obvious case, something went terribly wrong because there is no one on the face of the earth that can claim to be virtuous or morally excellent. That is not to say that people can’t do virtuous things, but doing virtuous things does not make you virtuous. For example, if a person murders someone, but then helps a little old lady cross the street, is that person virtuous? Of course not.

The fact remains, however, that God did create us to be like Him, and He is absolutely and wholly virtuous. But sin came into the world through Adam and Eve’s sin and we were all infected by it. Because of that infection, we naturally turn away from God and just as the verse above suggests, we follow our own path and that path leads “downward,” or in other words, to much trouble. Even Solomon, with all the advantages of having everything that a person could desire, followed his own path downward and even he turned away from the God that had given him everything.

So knowing that we all have that strong inclination to head downward, what do we do? We turn to Jesus! Jesus came to restore us back to the way that God originally created us to be. Jesus restores virtue in us and brings us back to a restored relationship with our Heavenly father. He doesn’t do this by teaching us to be virtuous, but by living in us, thereby making His virtue, our virtue. He takes our wayward lives and cleanses us through the blood that He shed on Calvary and then gives us HIS righteousness. No one can claim to be virtuous, but now those of us that have received Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior can live virtuously by allowing Jesus to live His life through us. What a glorious thing it is that we can experience living virtuous lives because of the life of Jesus in us. It is so true what scripture says, that it is Christ in us, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27)!

Pastor Joey Vazquez