Bad Record, Bad Heart, Bad Master
Romans 3:9–26, the three barriers, and the God who answers all three
By Michael A. Graham
What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
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. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished — he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
— Romans 3:9–26 (NIV 1984)
The gospel begins with a gift. A loving God sent his Son to bring us a new and abundant life. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). The life he brings is God’s own life, given to us, and to have him is to have the life itself.
So the booklet asks the honest question: why are so many people without this life? The reason is not in God’s giving. It is in us. We are self-centered, not God-centered. We have taken the place that belongs to God, and by nature we are spiritually dead in it (Ephesians 2:1). The dead do not raise themselves.
This week’s fact, in the booklet’s words, is that self-centered man is separated from a holy God by three big barriers: a bad record, a bad heart, and a bad master — the wall our self-centeredness has raised between us and God. The record is our standing, what God’s court says of us. The heart is what we are inside. The master is our bondage, who owns us. All three come from the one source, and the work of this week is to see them come out of it, so that the gospel answers them at the root and not on the surface.
A word on how we are taking them. This week is a flyover. We pass over all three barriers together, to see the whole wall at once, rather than landing on any one. Later in the series we come back and give the record, the heart, and the master each its own Sunday, at depth. Today is the overview — the shape of the whole, so the parts have somewhere to belong.
Romans 3:9–26 lays all three on the table and then gives God’s answer to all of them. Here is the shape of it, in four lines:
The Principle — God is glorious, and I was made to live for his glory (Rom 3:23).
The Problem — Self-centeredness gave me a bad record, a bad heart, a bad master (Rom 3:9–20).
The Gospel — But now God justifies me freely by his grace in Christ (Rom 3:21–24).
The Response — So I say amen to his verdict and rest in his free grace (Rom 3:23–24).
The Principle — God is glorious, and we were made to live for his glory (Romans 3:23)
We start with God, because a person cannot see his own self-centeredness from inside it; the turn shows up only against the God it turned from. Verse 23 gives the standard the whole passage measures us by: we “fall short of the glory of God.” So we need to know what glory means. In Hebrew it is kabod — weight, heaviness, substance. We use the word this way of persons: someone weighty is a person of real substance, someone shallow a lightweight. God’s glory is his weight in that sense — the majesty and substance of the living God, Father, Son, and Spirit. He is the weightiest One there is, and everything he has made is light beside him.
To fall short of that glory is to come up light. This is deeper than breaking rules. It is missing what we were made for. God made us in his image (Genesis 1:26–27). An image represents something; it is set in the world to show what the original is like, the way an ambassador stands in for his country. Psalm 8 says God crowned us with glory and honor. We were made to carry weight, to matter, to show the people around us something of what God is like. We were made to live with God at the center, living for him and showing him. He is the center of everything that is real, so to live with him there is simply to live in the truth of things. To step off that center is not to become a small center of your own; it is to step out of reality.
To say God is glorious is to say he is worthy of all worship; the deepest thing we were built for is to adore him. And the life we were made for is not something alongside God — it is God himself. To know him is the life.
Here is the strange thing about worship: no creature can bear it. Win the applause of others and it puffs you up; lose it and it crushes you; either way you were never made to be worshiped. God alone can receive worship and stay good, because he is not self-centered even at the center — Father, Son, and Spirit pour glory into one another, self-giving love with no ego in it. So worshiping him is not the flattering of an ego; it is coming into the truth of things, and into the life and love we are starving for. The old catechism joins the two we keep tearing apart: our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. They are one act.
This is why so many reject God, and often rightly reject the god they were shown. If God were a great ego who made a universe to praise him and raged when it would not, no honest person should want him — I would not either. But that is a caricature. The real God is full, other-centered love, with no emptiness in him for our worship to fill; he calls us to worship not to feed himself but to give us himself.
So self-centeredness is the refusal of all this. We were made to worship God at the center; it wants the worship for itself — to be seen, admired, applauded. That is what falling short of the glory of God finally means: keeping back from God the praise he alone is worthy of, and grasping it for a self that can neither give life nor survive being worshiped. Measured against his glory, no one comes out standing.
That is the standard and the calling: God is glorious, and we were made to live for his glory (Romans 3:23).
The Problem — Self-centeredness gave us a bad record, a bad heart, and a bad master (Romans 3:9–20)
Paul writes verses 9 to 20 as a court case. In verse 9 he files the charge: all of us, Jew and Gentile, are under sin. The verb is a legal word for an accusation already laid. Verse 19 closes the case the same way: the law speaks “so that every mouth should be stopped, and the whole world become accountable to God.” Every defense falls silent, and the whole world stands liable before him. The word “righteous” runs down the middle of the case — none is righteous (v.10), none declared righteous (v.20), and then the righteousness of God (v.21).
Paul does not build the charge from his own words. Verses 10 to 18 are stitched together from Israel’s own Scriptures — Psalms 14, 5, 140, 10, and 36, and Isaiah 59. He builds the whole charge sheet out of the songs the devout Jew prayed and sang. The man who prayed Psalm 14 is described by Psalm 14.
This is how you bring a person sure he is righteous to see that he is not: you show him his own Bible describing him. Paul does it across chapters 1 to 3 — he lets the religious reader condemn the pagans, then turns the same standard on the reader, and finally climbs into the dock himself, saying “we” and “all.” Whoever preaches this stands under the same verdict as those who hear it.
Paul turns his sharpest words on the religious insider first, and that order matters. Judgment begins with the household of God (1 Peter 4:17), and leaders are judged more strictly (James 3:1). Church leaders have abused people in terrible ways, and the worst of it grows from the same root we are tracing: a self using God and power to harm others. God’s heaviest judgment falls on them, and it falls first. The charge still reaches everyone — even a person rightly angry at a leader’s sin can set himself up as judge in the same self-centered way — but God alone is the judge, and he judges the shepherds who harmed his sheep first and hardest.
Whoever the charge names, one thing lies under all of it, and the order of the list shows it. Verse 10 gives the verdict — none righteous — and verses 11 and 12 explain it, starting with the mind and will turned from God: no one understands, no one seeks him. Understanding and seeking belong together: we go after the God we know, and we come to know him by going after him. Both have failed. Verse 12 says it twice for weight: all have turned away, all have become worthless — the same verdict Genesis 6 gave, when every thought of the human heart was only evil all the time.
The key word is turned. The problem is not first that we lack information; it is that we have turned, our faces pointed away from God. Verse 18 names the floor of it: no fear of God before their eyes. The self reaches for God’s place and never arrives, because no creature can be God and God is not moved off his throne. He is the true center of everything real, so the one who turns from him does not become a center of his own; he only goes off-center. Jack Miller’s word for it was eccentric — out of the center — a creature “playing God.” Following Geerhardus Vos, he called it a kind of insanity: a life lived against the way things are.
Our age has made that very insanity its ideal: be your own person, answer to no one, let nothing hold back your self-expression. We call the off-center life freedom, but underneath it is an older hunger — to be worshiped, to be seen and applauded, the center of our own small world. Scripture shows the damage running in three directions.
The bad record. The record is the barrier this passage presses hardest, and the one people are most blind to. A person dead in his sins does not walk around feeling guilty before God; he assumes the opposite, takes himself for a decent person on the whole, and his conscience toward God has gone quiet. So the connection to the root has to be made here, or the whole thing turns into scolding. The self in God’s place makes itself the judge and the standard, setting right and wrong by its own measure. A self like that cannot survive being wrong, because being truly wrong means there is a higher court it must bow to. So it justifies itself.
This is where the record shows up in a life, long before a person will admit he has one before God. He can feel nothing toward God and still spend every day proving himself right before other people. Paul has already named that inner court: the conscience bears witness, the thoughts accusing or excusing (Romans 2:15). It is God’s courtroom set up inside every person, and it never closes, so we live as defendants who never stop pleading. It comes out as defensiveness the moment we are crossed, as boasting, as excuses and blame — the way Adam pointed at Eve, and Eve at the serpent — as judging others and measuring ourselves against them, because putting someone else down is a quiet way of clearing ourselves. Follow any of it back and it leads to one place: a self that will not let God be God, and so cannot bear to be wrong.
This is why the thing that finally keeps us from Christ is not so much our sins as the worth we imagine in our own goodness. A person who knows he is a sinner can be driven to a Savior; the man quietly sure he is decent has no use for one. His goodness is the very wall between him and Christ. And the effort fails anyway, because no verdict from other people settles an account with God. A man can win every argument and keep a clean record with everyone around him, and the unease stays, because their court was never the one in session.
Verses 19 and 20 bring it to an end: the law speaks “so that every mouth should be stopped,” and no one is declared righteous by works of the law. The law does more than inform us; it shuts our mouths and drives us to Christ. Miller said it bluntly: faith “is to shut your big mouth about your own power, about your own righteousness, about your own self-efforts — it really is to recognize that before God you have nothing to boast of, that you stand there condemned” (Faith vs. Magic in the Modern World). A stopped mouth is a mercy. Only the defendant who has finally stopped talking can hear the verdict as a gift. That is the bad record: a standing we cannot clear, and a self that will not stop trying.
The bad heart. The self in God’s place is a wrong love. When the self takes the center, the heart’s deepest love turns toward itself, and every other love falls in behind it. Jesus said the mouth speaks out of what fills the heart, and that the evil comes from inside (Mark 7:20–23). The words and deeds are not the sickness; they are what the sickness pours out. A heart that loves the self most will lie to protect it, curse to lift it over a rival, turn bitter when it is crossed, and turn violent when it is threatened. That is the body catalog of verses 13 to 18: the throat an open grave, the tongue that deceives, the mouth full of cursing, the feet quick to shed blood.
And here is the deep wound. God made these parts of us to represent him — the mouth to praise him, the feet to carry good news, the eyes to look to him. Turned toward the self, they show the world a false picture of God. James says it plainly: with the same tongue we bless God and curse people made in his likeness (James 3:9–10). The third commandment forbids exactly this — carrying God’s name in vain, which is less about coarse language than about wearing his name and misrepresenting him (Exodus 20:7). Ezekiel names the damage and the cure together: God’s people made his name look bad among the nations, and the answer is that God takes out the heart of stone, puts in a heart of flesh, and puts his own Spirit inside (Ezekiel 36:20–26). The bad heart is not patched. It is replaced.
The feet catch it well. Here they are “swift to shed blood,” and “the way of peace they do not know” (Isaiah 59:7–8). Yet the same prophet says, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace” (Isaiah 52:7). Same feet, opposite errand; the difference is the center. Feet turned to the self run to keep the self safe; feet turned back to God carry his peace. And Christ, who is our peace, came to “guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79; Ephesians 2:14–17), so that being justified we have peace with God (Romans 5:1).
The list ends at the eyes: no fear of God before them (v.18). Jesus said the eye is the lamp of the body, and if the eye is bad the whole body is dark (Matthew 6:22–23). Here the eye has no fear of God, so the whole body, throat to feet, is dark. That is the bad heart: the whole person darkened by a love turned to the self instead of to God. It shows in the words and deeds, but runs deeper than them, and we cannot change it ourselves.
The bad master. Self-centeredness tells us we are our own masters, answerable to no one. The serpent promised we would be like God, in charge of ourselves (Genesis 3:5), and Satan is glad for us to believe it, because a person who thinks he is free does not look for the master who really has him. But when we refuse to be ruled by God, we are not left ruled by no one; we are ruled by something worse. Verse 9 says it plainly: all are under sin — a power over us, a claim on us. Scripture names who holds the claim: the world around us, the flesh within us, the devil over us. The self that thought it was free is serving all three.
This was the point of last week’s passage: the man who thinks he is living free is in fact walking in step behind the course of this age, following the ruler of the power of the air, driven by the cravings of his own flesh (Ephesians 2:1–3). What looks like independence is obedience to another. Jesus said everyone who sins is a slave to sin (John 8:34) — not a free man who slips now and then, but a man owned by it, carrying out its will as his own. It shows in the appetite he cannot give up, the fear that governs his choices, the habit that has become who he is — and in the fact that he never suspects he is owned. That is the heart of the bondage: it feels like freedom.
This speaks straight to the person who left the church looking for freedom. He is right that religion used to crush people is a real slavery, and Jesus attacked it harder than anyone, calling out leaders who tie heavy loads onto people’s backs. But the freedom of belonging to no one is the same lie the serpent told. There is no third master called “no one”: we serve the world, the flesh, and the devil, or we serve God. That is the bad master: a self ruled by powers it will not name, while it calls its slavery freedom.
Three barriers, one source. And this is why it matters to anyone, whether or not he has thought much about God. Self-centeredness does not only wall us off from God; it takes the very life we are all reaching for. The bad record is why we cannot rest — no verdict ever finally settles us. The bad heart is why we cannot love the way we long to. The bad master is why the freedom we chase keeps turning into bondage. We are trying to reach the abundant life by being our own center, and being our own center is the very thing that separates us from God and destroys the life. We cannot pull the barriers down ourselves, because the self that would do it is the self off the center, and a center cannot move itself back. That is the problem: our self-centeredness has separated us from a holy God by a bad record, a bad heart, and a bad master (Romans 3:9–20).
The Gospel — But now God justifies us freely by his grace in Christ (Romans 3:21–24)
Then come two words: “But now.” Verse 21: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been made known, the Law and the Prophets bearing witness to it.” “But now” marks the turn from one age to the next, the point that changes where we all stand. And it lands on the sight thread from the diagnosis: the eyes that had no fear of God, that would not look to him, are shown a righteousness he has put in the open.
Paul puts “apart from law” at the front to press the point of verse 20: the righteousness that saves does not come by keeping the law. Yet the same verse says the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it. The law as a set of works cannot justify; the law as Scripture points to the righteousness that does. So it is not contradicted but kept — kept by Christ, who was born under the law (Galatians 4:4) and obeyed it fully, so that righteousness comes to us apart from our own record.
This righteousness comes through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe, and Paul adds that there is no distinction (v.22). The reach of the gift matches the reach of the ruin. The same “no distinction” that put Jew and Gentile together under sin in verse 9 now puts them together under grace.
And God gives it. He gives it to the dead and makes them alive to receive it. Verses 23 and 24: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus.” The word for freely, dorean, means for nothing, with no cause in us. God declares the guilty righteous as a gift — the end of the self-justifying life and the answer to the bad record. In the same verse stands “the redemption,” a ransom word, the answer to the bad master: bought out of slavery at the price of Christ. The guilty declared righteous and the slave bought free, in one line. And the grammar protects the gift: the same “all” who sinned in verse 23 are justified in verse 24. The gift falls on the guilty.
The answer to the record has two sides, because the record was wrong in two ways. It carried real guilt, and it lacked the one thing heaven requires: a righteousness we never produced. So God does two things. He takes the guilt away — our sins were laid on Christ and are no longer counted against us. And he credits to us a righteousness that was never ours — the perfect obedience of Christ, reckoned to our account as if we had lived it. Paul puts both sides in one line: God “made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Our sin went to Christ; his righteousness comes to us.
Zechariah saw it in a picture: Joshua the high priest stands before God in filthy clothes, and the LORD says, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you” (Zechariah 3:4). The filthy clothes come off — that is forgiveness, the guilt removed. The clean robe goes on — the righteousness of Christ worn as our own. A blank record is still not a righteous one; God requires righteousness, and accepts only his Son’s, so he does not leave the page empty but clothes us in Christ. This is what Paul wanted above everything: to be found in him, “not having a righteousness of my own… but that which is through faith in Christ” (Philippians 3:9), credited the way it was to Abraham, who “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3).
And because that righteousness is real and truly ours, the verdict is true. We are joined to Christ, and the righteousness put to our account is his own, so when God calls us righteous he says what is so. This is the verdict of the last day spoken now — the judgment every person will finally hear from God, brought forward into the present and received through faith alone — so that the believer already stands acquitted: “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And it is ours before any of it is worked into us. First the righteousness of Christ is credited to us, whole and at once; then, across a lifetime, the Spirit works that righteousness into us. The standing rests on what was credited, not on how far the working has come.
How can a holy God declare a guilty person righteous and still be holy? Paul answers in verses 25 and 26, and the answer reaches back to Genesis. God put Christ forward as a propitiation, the word for the mercy seat — the lid of the ark where the blood was sprinkled on the Day of Atonement, the one place in Israel where a holy God met sinful people and did not destroy them. God set his own Son forward as that place. The penalty was paid, not waved away. He did this “to show his righteousness,” because in his patience he had passed over sins committed before the cross, covered ahead of time by the blood that was coming. He did it “so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Justice is satisfied, and so declaring the guilty righteous is itself a just act. This is the God of Genesis 15, who put Abram to sleep and passed between the pieces himself, taking the covenant oath and its curse on his own head. He supplies what he requires and pays what is owed.
And the gift reaches farther than a verdict. It answers the deepest wound of the bad heart: we were made to represent God and gave the world a false picture of him, and now God has shown his own righteousness in a Person. Christ is the image of the invisible God, the one who has made him known (Colossians 1:15; John 1:18). The god of this age had blinded the mind so it could not see (2 Corinthians 4:4); the same God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” shines in the darkened mind, so that we see the truth of things again — God at the center, and his glory “in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
The gospel meets all three barriers. The bad record is answered fully: the guilt taken away and the righteousness of Christ credited in its place, so that the guilty are declared righteous, and truly so, in him. The bad master is answered by redemption, the slave bought free. And the bad heart is answered by a new one — God takes out the heart of stone, puts in a heart of flesh, and puts his own Spirit within (Ezekiel 36:26). So the answer to all three is one Person, given to us: but now God justifies us freely by his grace in Christ (Romans 3:21–24).
The Response — So we say amen to his verdict and rest in his free grace (Romans 3:23–24)
The response begins with a single word: amen. First it is agreement. We stop keeping the private ledger, put down the worth we imagined in our own goodness, and say yes to the verdict — we are what Romans 3 says, all of us, the one who preaches it standing in the dock with everyone else. There is relief in that. When every mouth is stopped and nothing is left to say, the only hope left is grace, and the one who knows he has nothing to bring is the one who can take everything as a gift. Jesus said as much at Simon the Pharisee’s house: the one forgiven much loves much (Luke 7:47).
But amen is more than a grim yes. It means true, sure, so be it — the word you say to lay your whole weight on something as trustworthy. It was Jesus’ own word for staking everything on what came next: “Truly, truly, I tell you” is, underneath, “Amen, amen.” So to say amen to God’s verdict does two things in one breath. It agrees: yes, I am what you say I am. And it worships: yes, you are right, you are God. The same word that owns the verdict praises the Judge who gave it.
Then it rests. The verse that condemns and the verse that saves fall on the same person, in one breath, with the same “all” running through both: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus (Romans 3:23–24). The guilt is taken away and the righteousness of Christ is put to our account, for free. The standing is settled, and it does not rise or fall with the next thing we do, because it never rested on us. And it is the whole new life, not a righteous standing by itself: a new heart comes with it, and a good Master, and the abundant life we were made for. We receive it by repentance and faith, and God gives even that — the God who raises the dead gives the faith he asks for and keeps us in it (John 6:44; 10:28). The weight never falls back on us.
And this is why repentance, at its root, is coming home. Vos saw it in the prodigal, the story he calls Jesus’ description of the psychology of repentance. The boy “comes to himself” because before he “had been out of himself, had not known and felt himself in the simple truth of his fundamental relation to God” (Luke 15:17). To live away from God is to be beside yourself; to turn back is to come to yourself. Miller called it a return to sanity. And it is worship in its plainest form: the living God given his place again, at the center that was always his. The self that sat there could never say a true amen, because to mean it is to hand the center back to God. To say it and mean it is the creature come to itself, praising God as the center of all he has made and all he is remaking. In Vos’s words, “in the new life which follows repentance the absolute supremacy of God is the controlling principle.”
He can receive that praise and it does him no harm, for there is no emptiness in him for it to fill; Father, Son, and Spirit have poured glory into one another from before the world began. So the last note of the response is the gladdest thing a creature can do. To say amen to God is to receive back the God we were made for, and with him the life and love we went chasing everywhere else.
So we say amen to his verdict and rest in his free grace (Romans 3:23–24).
We began with the gift: a new and abundant life, God’s own life, sent to us in his Son. The reason so many are without it is not in God’s giving but in us — a self that turned from God to itself and left us with a bad record, a bad heart, and a bad master, and unable to mend any of them. Romans 3 brings us to the end of ourselves, every mouth stopped, and then hands us the whole answer in Christ: a righteous standing, a new heart, a good Master, and the life we had lost. What we could not get by grabbing, God gives to the dead and makes them alive to receive — and the creature that had wandered off-center is brought home and comes to itself, to worship and enjoy the God who was the center all along, and to find in him the life and love it had been chasing everywhere else.
This is the third of the Five Facts of the gospel in Jack Miller’s A New Life. The verse to carry and memorize this week (NIV 1984):
“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:23–24)
Pray it back: Father, I have sinned and fall short of your glory, in my record, my heart, and the master I have served. You have justified me freely by your grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Give me the whole of the new life you promised, and teach me to live it by faith, day by day. Free memory cards and the five-facts summary are at anewlife.thejackmillerproject.com.