1. The Reality of Sin
According to God’s Holy Bible, there is a place called HEAVEN and a place called HELL.
The Bible tells us that every person will spend eternity in one of these places. God wants
everyone to know the way to HEAVEN. The following verses from the BIBLE point the way...
The Reality of Sin
The Bible tells us that “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). This
means that ALL have fallen short of God’s standard, and missed the goal. My friend this means,
“There is none righteous, no not one...They are all gone out of the way...there is none that doeth
good; no not one” (Rom. 3:10,12). The good deeds and self righteousness of man is in vain, for
God says, “All our righteous-nesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).
It is absolutely useless for a sinner to depend upon his good works to make him acceptable in the
sight of God. “The scripture hath concluded ALL UNDER SIN” (Gal. 3:22). “There is NO MAN
that SINNETH NOT” (I Kings 8:46). “All WE like sheep have gone astray; we have turned
everyone to his own way” (Isa. 53:6).
The Reason for Sin
You may be wondering why that every person is a sinner. The Bible tells us, “By one man sin
entered into the world” (Rom. 5:12). That one man was the first man upon the earth and his name
was Adam. “In Adam all die” (I Cor. 15:22). We are all descendants of Adam, and just a
physical likeness is passed down from generation to generation, even so a moral likeness is
passed down.
Therefore we are sinners by nature and we are sinners by choice for “ALL HAVE SINNED’’
(Rom. 5;12). “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they be born”
(Psa. 58:3). “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). “By
nature (we were) the children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3).
The Result of Sin
Every sinner (unless he accepts the ONE true remedy) will spend eternity separated from God, in
a literal burning hell. Please do not doubt the following verses from God’s Word.
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:4). “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death”
(James 1:15). “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). “IF YE BELIEVE NOT...ye shall die in
you sins” (John 8:24). “The wicked shall be turned into hell” (Psa. 9:17). “And whosoever was
not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:15).
The Remedy for Sin
The remedy is NOTIN another HUMAN BEING: “Who can bring a clean thing out of an
unclean? not one...” “None...can by any means redeem his brother” (Job 14:4; Psa. 49:7).
The remedy is NOTBY MONEY: “Ye (are) not redeemed with...silver and gold” (I Pet. 1:18).

2. The remedy is NOTBY WORKS: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8, 9). “Not by
works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us” (Titus 3:5).
But the Remedy is Only Through the Lord Jesus Christ
Do you feel guilty over your sins? Do you feel sorrow for your sins? The Bible tells us that
“godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation” (II Cor. 7:10). “God...commandeth all men
everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). A person who never repents will be lost forever!
“Repent...and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). Repentance is more
than sorrow over sin, it is a change of mind. It involves turning from sin and turning to the Lord
Jesus Christ by faith.
Are you ready to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, the only true remedy for sin? He is the only one
that can cleanse you of sin and make you a child of God. “Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “As many as received him, to them gave he power
to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12). Christ literally
became our sin bearer, as he took our place and died for our sins. “For he hath made him (Christ)
to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (II
Cor. 5:21).
“Christ died for our sins” (I Cor. 15:3). “Who His own self bare our sins in His body on the tree”
(I Pet. 2:24). Will you right now take your place as a poor lost sinner and confess Jesus as your
Saviour and Lord? “The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).
“Jesus saith...I am the way, the truth, and the life: NO MAN COMETH UNTO THE FATHER,
BUT BY ME” (John 14:6). “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt
believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead thou shalt be saved. For with the
heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto
salvation...For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Rom. 10:9, 10,
13). If you do not understand how to be saved, then read this over and over again until you do
understand. The eternal destiny of your soul is at stake. If you are willing to receive Christ as
your Saviour, get on your knees right now and ask Him to save you. Then thank Him for His
wonderful Salvation. Tell others what Christ has done for you.
Editor and Pastor: John Reaves Sr.
God’s preferential
In the Gospel of Matthew we find Jesus warning us about how our lives will be judged. His
words are pointed. We are to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit
the prisoner. For what we do to the poor and the destitute”“the least of these my brethren,” says
Jesus”we do to the Lord himself.

3. It’s a sobering warning, and I fear that I’m typical. For the most part I think about myself: my
needs, my interests, my desires. And when I break out of my cocoon of self-interest, it’s usually
because I’m thinking about my family or my friends, which is still a kind of self-interest. The
poor? Sure, I feel a sense of responsibility, but they’re remote and more hypothetical than real:
objects of a thin, distant moral concern that tends to be overwhelmed by the immediate demands
of my life. As I said, I’m afraid I’m typical.
That’s why the modern Catholic tradition of social ethics has consistently insisted that the needs
of the poor must take priority. In Octogesima Adveniens (1971), an encyclical marking the
eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s seminal treatment of modern social issues, Rerum Novarum ,
Paul VI evoked the fundamental importance of a transformative spirit of self-sacrificial love. “In
teaching us charity,” he wrote, “the Gospel instructs us in the preferential respect due to the poor
and the special situation they have in society: the most fortunate should renounce some of their
rights so as to place their goods generously at the service of others.”
“Preferential respect” became the handier slogan “preferential option,” a formulation that first
emerged from liberation theologies in South America but has percolated into a great deal of
Catholic pronouncement on social ethics in recent decades. It captures a fundamental Christian
imperative. When we think about politics and culture, our first question should be: “What are the
needs of the poor?”
Today, there is certainly material want in America. People who have lost their jobs can’t pay
rent. Unmarried young women who have courageously refused to abort their children struggle to
make ends meet. Illegal immigrants are exploited; the homeless need shelter; the hungry, food.
Some say the best way to meet these needs involves adopting tax policies designed to stimulate
economic growth, along with redoubled efforts of private charity. Others emphasize public
programs and increased government intervention. It’s an argument worth having, of course, and
to a great degree our contemporary political debates turn on these issues. But we shouldn’t lose
sight of the fact that there is a unifying consensus: The moral character of a nation is measured to
a large degree by its concern for the poor.
On this point I agree with many friends on the left who argue that America doesn’t have a proper
concern for the poor. Our failure, however, is not merely economic. In fact, it’s not even mostly
economic. A visit to the poorest neighborhoods of New York City or the most impoverished
towns of rural Iowa immediately reveals poverty more profound and more pervasive than simple
material want. Drugs, crime, sexual exploitation, the collapse of marriage”the sheer brutality and
ugliness of the lives of many of the poor in America is shocking. As the Catechism of the
Catholic Church reminds us, poverty is not only material; it is also moral, cultural, and religious
(CCC 2444), and just these sorts of poverty are painfully evident today. Increasing the minimum
wage or the earned-income tax credit won’t help alleviate this impoverishment.

4. We can’t restore a culture of marriage, for example, by spending more money on it. A recent
report on marriage in America from the National Marriage Project under the leadership of W.
Bradford Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America , paints a grim picture.
The lower you are on the social scale, the more likely you are to be divorced, to cohabit while
unmarried, to have more sexual partners, and to commit adultery. One of the most arresting
statistics concerns children born out of wedlock. In the late 2000s, among women fifteen to
forty-four years old who have dropped out of high school, more than half of those who give birth
do so while unmarried. And this is true not only of those at the bottom. Among high-school
graduates and women with technical training”in other words, the struggling middle class”nearly
half of the women who give birth are unmarried.
A friend of mine who works as a nurse’s aide recently observed that his coworkers careen from
personal crisis to personal crisis. As he told me, “Only yesterday I had to hear the complaints of
one woman who was fighting with both her husband and her boyfriend.” It’s this atmosphere of
personal disintegration and not the drudgery of the job”which is by no means negligible for a
nurse’s aide”that he finds demoralizing.
Teachers can tell similar tales. The wife of another friend told me that her middle-school students
in a small town in Iowa were perplexed by Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter : “What’s the
big deal about Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale gettin’ it on?” It was a sentiment that she
wearily told me was of a piece with the meth labs, malt liquor, teen pregnancies, and a general
atmosphere of social collapse.
Preferential option for the poor. A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to
reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are
moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people
living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other
goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess.
And why? It’s a complicated question that I can’t convincingly answer here. But I want to end
with a suggestion, if not an argument.
On the question of social justice, Pope John Paul II once wrote, “The needs of the poor take
priority over the desires of the rich.” For most of my life (I was born in 1959), the rich and well-
educated in America have desired nothing more than the personal freedoms of bohemian
liberation. The rich, we must be clear, include the secure and successful academic and
professional upper middle classes. I am not talking only about people who live in penthouses, but
about people like us and those we know.
This bohemian liberation has involved the sexual revolution, of course, with the consequent
weakening of the constraining and disciplining norms of a healthy culture of marriage. But the
ways in which the rich have embraced their freedoms hasn’t involved only sex and marriage. It
also includes the verbal antinomianism typified by George Carlin’s campaigns to normalize

5. obscenity, suburban librarians insisting on the right to view pornography, tech billionaires who
dress like dockworkers, a feminism that mocks the social mores that make women ladies and
men gentleman, and many other attacks on older notions of bourgeois respectability.
Here’s a typical story. A few months ago, a Northwestern University psychology professor
invited a sex entrepreneur to speak to his class, and the visit concluded with a sexual
performance that, as one newspaper discreetly reported, involved “a woman, a man, and an
electric-powered device.”
The powers that be squirm a bit when lifestyle revolutionaries frighten the horses and bring bad
publicity. Northwestern’s president, Morton Schapiro, put out an anodyne statement: “Many
members of the Northwestern community are disturbed by what took place on our campus. So
am I.” But elite sentiment remains indulgent, if not positively solicitous. The rhetoric of
liberation (“Sexual minorities need to be accepted!”) throws up a smoke screen, and there’s lots
of earnest talk about academic freedom. Meanwhile, the rich get their freedoms, which have very
little to do with justice and everything to do with marrying wealth and status to the delicious
benefits of a diminished conscience. And all this takes place in an environment furnished with
the safety nets of therapists, detox clinics, watchful friends, and economic security.
The social reality of contemporary America is painfully clear. By and large, the rich and
powerful don’t desire more wealth nearly as much as they desire moral relaxation and the self-
complimenting image of themselves as nonconformists living a life of enlightenment and
freedom in advance of dull Middle America. Meanwhile, on the South Side of Chicago”and in
hardscrabble small towns and decaying tract housing of old suburbs”the rest of America suffers
the loss of social capital.
I must admit that I often feel frustrated by my liberal friends who worry so much about income
inequality and not at all about moral inequality. Their answer is to give reparations. Are we to
palliate with cash” can we palliate with cash”the disorder wrought by Gucci bohemians?
No. Progressives talk about “social responsibility.” It is an apt term, but it surely means
husbanding social capital just as much as”indeed, more than”providing financial resources. In
our society a preferential option for the poor must rebuild the social capital squandered by rich
baby boomers, and that means social conservatism. The bohemian fantasy works against this
clear imperative, because it promises us that we can attend to the poor without paying any
attention to our own manner of living. Appeals to aid the less fortunate, however urgent, make
few demands on our day-to-day lives. We are called to awareness, perhaps, or activism, but not
to anything that would cut against the liberations of recent decades and limit our own desires.
Want to help the poor? By all means pay your taxes and give to agencies that provide social
services. By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses for those who can’t
afford them. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to
your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste and honorable . Put on

6. a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop
using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue.
In this and other ways, we can help restore the constraining forms of moral and social discipline
that don’t bend to fit the desires of the powerful”forms that offer the poor the best, the most
effective and most lasting, way out of poverty. That’s the truest preferential option”and truest
form of respect”for the poor.