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 I sometimes sit in church and think I don’t need a Savior quite as much as some other people I know (Luke 18:11-12).
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 patch the Gospel onto a heart that persists in denying your utter sinfulness. 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.”
“But that is not the way you learned Christ! Put off your old self…and…put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:20, 22, 24). So 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 came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13).
PS: Diane and I are taking a vacation. Lord willing, the Minute will be back in two weeks.
Comments