If you go to church this weekend, and I hope you will, be careful. Churches have ways of teaching us how to hide our impurities and sins. Not that they mean to; it just happens. “God, I thank You that I am not like other men… I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get” and whatever other ways you might sit in church and think you don’t need a Savior quite as much as some other people you know (Luke 18:17).
Jesus once said, “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.” (Mark 2:21) Look as good to others as you may, you can’t put a patch of being religious on an impure and sinful heart. The devil uses the ways of churches to deceive us into thinking that our shows of being religious are compatible with our self-serving heart. It won’t work, “the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.”
“Put off the old self…and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:23-24) Be careful in church lest the devil game the system and deceive you. Pray in church, pray always, that the Spirit make you new within, a person of one cloth, clothed in true righteousness and holiness.
How loudly does the church bell ring in your ears? Jesus says, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13)
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