It's Sunday morning, you stroll into a church building. You're just checking things out, you tell yourself, you won't commit to anything long-term at the moment. You sit down, enjoy a sermon--you admire the minister's delivery, his animation, his wild hand gestures when talking about wild stuff like death-bed conversions and so on, though you prefer not to think about what he's actually saying--and then you leave as soon as the service ends. You want to talk to someone, but, for some inexplicable reason, you just can't muster up the strength to. You don't belong here, and you can feel it. Everyone else here just looks so cheerful, so righteous, so spiritually in-tuned, and you wouldn't know how to approach anyone else with the serious questions you want to ask.
Maybe this is the place you find yourself in. You're ailing spiritually, and you know it. You want recovery, but you don't want just any clinical, psychological treatment or over-the-counter medication, you want to be right with--gulp--the very Creator of the Universe Himself. But, you can't get there just yet, because, well, you have to be better at...(fill in the blank with your particular problem).
Many people who want to be Christians often feel spiritually cornered. They think, "Gee, I'd love to be a Christian, but if I became a Christian, first I'd have to clean myself up. And there's just no way I could give up my anxiety, my selfishness, my addiction to pornography, etc., etc. I just couldn't do it."
it's an intimidating idea, getting rid of your sin, merely killing it by resolve, and...that's why you don't have to do it. Yes, you read that right. You don't have to kill it by resolve. Somebody already took it for you so you don't have to. That somebody? Jesus.
"It is not the healthy who need a doctor," Jesus says in Mark 2:17b, "but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (NIV).
Jesus was a radical figure in his time. In fact, the most radical figure in any time. The religious teachers of Jesus' day preached that by strictly following the Old Testament laws you could have access to heaven and a relationship with God. They steered clear of "sinners" and tax collectors and the sleazy members of society. Jesus, on the other hand, was a "friend of tax collectors and 'sinners' (Matthew 11:19b, NIV). He taught that, in our brokenness, in our moments of direst need, God wants us not later, but now.
God isn't waiting for you spend 30 years chanting with monks in a monastery or attending dozens of theological seminaries every day before you come to Him. God wants you to turn to Him right where you are--in your distress, in your troubled times, in the midst of your sins and failures. So, in closing, I ask you this question: what is keeping you from God?
References
Mark 2:17 (NIV)
Matthew 11:19 (NIV)
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