Church is not for Saints it’s for Sinners
If you hang around preachers long enough you hear a lot of pithy sayings. This is one of my favorites. The church is not a museum for Saints. It’s a hospital for sinners. Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” If you think that getting “saved” will cure all your problems, you are going to be disappointed. Salvation saves us from the consequences of our sins. However, five minutes in any church will tell you it doesn’t make perfect people. Jesus told us to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. Clearly this was said as an ideal and not as a present possibility.
Those who seek perfection, those we call perfectionist, have just as many problems as the rest of us. In fact, they have some extra pitfalls. If you think you have reached perfection you start missing opportunities for growth, change, and improvement. The Shakers give us an example of the problem. This once thriving Christian sect died out in part because of their emphasis upon striving for perfection. If for some reason they were not able to maintain the highest level of perfection once achieved, rather than produce an inferior product they stopped altogether. For example, they were known for their wool sweaters. However, when WWI interrupted their supply of wool from Australia they stopped knitting them. They went out of the sweater business because they wouldn’t settle for a lesser grade of wool. They had similar challenges with other enterprises until their once thriving industry ceased and it lessened one of the main attractions their community had to offer: gainful employment in difficult times.
Recovery programs have a saying that could be adopted by all Christians, “We seek spiritual progress and not perfection.” The Christian life is often compared to a journey. Jesus loves us as we are and leads us towards the ideal of being like Him. As the bumper sticker with the caterpillar says, “Please be patient God isn’t finished with me yet.” It was Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, who compared Christians to beggars. We have nothing for which to boast accept the cross of Christ.
Some may think this means we need not try to improve ourselves, that we have a ready excuse for bad behavior. In his letter to the Romans, Paul answers with a declarative, “Of course not!” He continues, “God is not mocked.” In other words, we should be serious about our efforts to “put on Christ as a garment,” as he says in Colossians. Paradoxically, a mark of our maturity is an increasing attitude of humility. In fact many whom we know of as Saints with a capital “S” observed that they were increasingly aware of their sinful nature and not the opposite. The closer we get to God the more aware we are of our brokenness. It is, as with Peter, following the miraculous catch of fish. He sees the holiness of Jesus. Falls on his face and proclaims, “Get away from me for I am a sinful man.”
Hopefully it is in the faithful community of the church that we sinners all can find the love of God; the acceptance of our brothers and sisters in Christ; the encouragement we need to continue the journey; and the opportunity to show other beggars how to find bread.
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