Come As You Are...

 “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Luke 5:31-32

We need Jesus because we are sinners. That isn’t confined to the small “easy to fix” sins. That applies to ALL sins. We put so much pressure on ourselves, but the truth is that we need Christ. We need him because we absolutely cannot live the way we are called to live on our own.

We shouldn’t look down on lost people for sinning. That’s the most hypocritical thing we could do. We can never forget that we, too, were once lost. We, too, were once drowning in our own sin. And I don’t know about you, but I still struggle to keep my head above water every day. We are broken; we are sinful. Jesus comes in and changes that. If we had the capability to change it ourselves, then we wouldn’t need him. He wouldn’t have had to die on the cross. None of that is necessary if we can “fix” ourselves on our own.

The thing that is so wonderful about Jesus is that he changes something fundamentally inside of us. It’s a change that cannot be described in words, it can only be experienced. You don’t have to change for Jesus. He is the one who changes you.

Even those of us who have accepted Christ aren’t perfect. We need to cut each other - and ourselves - some slack. We need to recognize that, yes, we have to live to a certain standard to be Christians, but that Jesus is about forgiveness first. He forgives us before he changes us, and then he continues to forgive us over and over again.

We have to remember that we are only human. We have to remember why we need Jesus; why his sacrifice was necessary. We have to remember that true change of heart requires supernatural intervention, not human intervention. We have to remember not to get things in the wrong order.

Jesus first. Accepting Christ is the first and most important step. He will initiate the change after someone accepts him into their heart.

We are going to mess up. We are going to fall. We need to pray for the grace and encouragement to get up after we fall down. And we shouldn’t walk by and we look on scathingly to others that may have fallen. We should get down and help each other up.

Remember it's like Crowder tells us in this great song that we sang last Sunday in church, "Earth has no sorrow that heaven can't heal"...