Many churches extend the invitation to come and worship with this familiar refrain: “Come just as you are.” In other words, wherever you find yourself is fine with us. No one is perfect and surely the church has no perfect people. So come just as you are, whether that pertains to the internals or the externals.
But what the church must not overlook or ignore is part two of this refrain: Don’t stay the way you are. In other words, we simply cannot come to Jesus and stay the way we are. As sure as we will smell like smoke around a fire, we ought to “smell” like the aroma of the gospel when we’ve been with Jesus.
God does not redeem lost people to leave them at square one. Having worked in the gospel of salvation, now we can work out this gospel of salvation. We are never idle spectators but active participators. Growth isn’t an option but a necessity.
Since we schedule periodic checkups with our doctor, so too we should with the Great Physician. We should regularly take long looks in the mirror of His Word to examine, to measure our progress. Everyone of us has room to grow, so where is our necessary area of spiritual growth?
What we do not want to discover, at the end of our life, is that we did not make the cut, that we were disqualified. What a disastrous determination that would be!
#honorable #truth #spiritualgrowth #edification #disqualified #maturity