PAT ROBERTSON:

The law we have today can be summed up in a few words: We are to love God with all our hearts and minds and strength, and we're to love one another, even as Christ loved us. The apostle Paul said, "He who loves another has fulfilled the law."

There are two objects, then, of our love. First, we love God with every bit of our being. Second, we must love our fellow man as much as we love ourselves. That encompasses all the law. In Jesus' words, "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 22:40).

In the law given at Sinai, on the other hand, there were specific rules and regulations, beginning with the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments have to do with devotion to God. The fifth commandment has to do with obedience to someone who stands in the role of God, namely our parents. The remaining five have to do with the way we treat our fellow man. Don't steal his wife. Don't steal his possessions. Don't lie about him. Don't murder him. Don't hurt him. If you do to him as you do to yourself, if you love him the way you love yourself, you have followed those commandments.

So in the final analysis, God's law is that we should put God first in our lives. He wants us to function under Him as loving, obedient sons and daughters. We must listen to Him, obey Him, and be prepared to do His bidding, whatever it is.

Law, when you see it in today's world, is essentially a restraint on people who do not live in love toward others. There are traffic lights, pollution controls, laws against murder, kidnapping, theft, fraud, and a host of other things. All these laws seek to prevent conduct that will hurt someone else. But for those who walk in love, law doesn't really need to exist--no law to burden or bind them, because they naturally and voluntarily fulfill through the spirit all the righteous demands of the written law.

Since the law is based on loving God and our fellow man, we break God's law whenever we fail to love Him or whenever we harm our fellow man. Since harm to another--be it theft, adultery, murder, or false witness--usually begins in our inner being, God added to the law a prohibition against coveting--a mental sin. Jesus expanded the concept by saying that lustful thoughts are the equivalent of the act of adultery, and that anger, along with demeaning insults, is the equivalent of murder (see Matthew 5:21-28).

PAT ROBERTSON:
The word sin in Greek is hamartia, and it means "to go apart from a mark." If you were to shoot an arrow at a target, and you missed the bull's-eye, you would be missing the mark.

The mark of God is perfection--total perfection. Anything that falls short of His perfection and holiness is sin.

There are two other words which refer to specific kinds of sins. The first is iniquity. Iniquity means twistedness or crookedness. It is a perverseness, a twisted desire to do something contrary to an established norm. If Jesus Christ is our standard, then repeated conduct deviating from His example, would be iniquity. The second word is transgression. Transgression means the deliberate breaking of a known law or standard. You know what God wants you to do at a particular point, but you deliberately go against His will. Iniquity bends and distorts God's will for our lives. Transgression deliberately cuts across it and breaks it.

There is one final definition of sin. The apostle Paul said that "whatever is not from faith is sin" (Romans 14:23). In other words, when in doubt, don't. There are many areas where we have to ask ourselves if what we are doing is right or wrong. To one person something may be all right, while to someone else, it might not be.

To the one man, living in an expensive home might be sin; to the other it might be a sin not to. It depends on the circumstance, because God has a special plan for each of us. Therefore, the standard for the undefined areas of our life is faith itself. "Whatever is not from faith is sin" (Romans 14:23).

We should copy Jesus and not necessarily one another. The Bible says, "There is none who does good, no, not one" (Psalm 14:3). "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

When we trust in Christ, we take His sinlessness upon ourselves. That is the only way we can enter into heaven--without any sin. The Bible says, "If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin" (I John 1:7). As we are walking with Jesus, whatever sins we commit by our contact with the world are being continuously forgiven by the blood of Jesus as we confess them.

PAT ROBERTSON:
and the wages of sin is death (see Romans 6:23). Jesus Christ never sinned, so as a sinless "second Adam," He was able to die as a substitute for all human sinners. Therefore God was able to preserve His righteous law and government by punishing the breaking of the law while offering a pardon to those who had broken it.

The apostle Paul said that Jesus redeemed us from the curse of the law (see Galatians 3:13). The word redeemed means to buy back a slave in the marketplace. Mankind was in bondage to the curse of the law, which is death. Under this analogy, the death of Jesus was the "ransom" needed to set us free from the bondage of the law, sin, and death.

So in one sense, Jesus is our substitute; in another, our ransom. In yet another, His is our hilasterion (translated "propitiation") or mercy seat, a reference to the lid or covering over the ark of the covenant. When the mercy seat was covered with the blood of a sacrifice, the law's condemnation against the people was shut out before God. Jesus Christ is our complete and only covering.

Our salvation has three parts. First, at the moment we receive Christ in faith, His death cancels completely all of our sins. This is called "justification by faith" (see Romans 3:24-30, Galatians 2:15-21). In Christ our position before God is sinless. We are totally absolved from all past sins, just as if we had never sinned. This is salvation of our spirit.

Then as we walk with Jesus day after day, we have present salvation, and we grow in holiness. We enter into the state of sanctification, where we become freer from sin and more like Jesus. Paul said that we change from one degree of glory into another, even as by the Spirit of the Lord (see II Corinthians 3:18). The goal of the Christian is to grow up into Christ. This is our ongoing salvation.

The third part of salvation is future, where we will lose these bodies which are always being pulled by sin, and we will get brand new bodies (see I Corinthians 15:42-44). This salvation is also called glorification. So salvation is total. It is a matter of the past, present, and future.»

PAT ROBERTSON:

Here is the step-by-step-process. First, you must consider your life and then turn away from everything in it that is contrary to what God wants. This turning away from selfishness and toward God is called repentance (see Matthew 3:7-10, Acts 3:19).

Second, you must acknowledge that Jesus Christ died on the cross to forgive you of sin. You take Him as your Savior to cleanse you from sin--as the substitute who paid the price due you for your sin (see Romans 5:9-10, Titus 2:14).

And third, you must ask Him to be Lord of your life, acknowledging openly and verbally that Jesus is not only your Savior but your Lord.

The Bible says that as many as received Him were given the power to become the sons of God (see John 1:12). So when you open your heart and receive Him, He comes into your heart, your inner person, through His Holy Spirit, and begins to live His life in you. From that point it is a question of confessing what God has done.