Welcome saints!

Sometimes we are allowed to do a “sermon” in a church, and then I start with this:

Welcome, all you saints in God’s house! It’s good to see you all today!

And when you look around in that church, you see all the people looking cheerful, laughing and some greet back. Yeah, the atmosphere is great! Until… I say the following:

And that was the first lie in this sermon… the Bible does not say you are saints…. On the contrary…. “There is no one righteous, not even one;”

Romans 3:10

A church is not a collection of saints in one place. It is a collection of sinners who, like me, are desperately in need of God’s grace… every single day…

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Romans 3:23-24

And then you see them thinking…. Oops… And to top it off, I often say the following:

Let this be the first lesson for today…. Don’t believe a single word I’m going to tell you today…. Check everything(!) what I say, what everyone says, with the word of God in your hand. Everything. I, too, am human, make mistakes, do sin, but God makes no mistakes in his Bible. Check everything. As it says in the Bible: “but test them all; hold on to what is good,”

1 Thessalonicenzen 5:21

And that sets the mood… yes, a tough start, but let’s be honest… are you really as holy as you thought you are… really…? And if you understand that, that we are anything but holy, and you look around your church where sometimes things can go terribly wrong, then you understand… I shouldn’t look at people… because we are all sinners. But I have to look at a merciful God… because we REALLY need His grace… so that we can ultimately come to a merciful God in an eternity where there will be no more sin… and only in that heaven will we be without sin, but until that time… it remains, together with God, a battle against sin…. In a world full of sin…

And then the real “sermon” begins. 🙂