News from the House
News from the Coach House
Church is Perfect! Wouldn’t it be nice if this was true?
Someone once said, if you find a perfect church….leave it because you will ruin it!
We hear a lot about identity theft nowadays, with internet scams designed to steal personal information so that thieves can pose as you and I in order to obtain money. It is not nice when this happens to you….
….. I once lost my passport and only realised when I arrived at the airport to return home. There was no way that I was being allowed to fly or leave the country unless I could prove who I was .... our identity is important to us (and authorities) and without it we feel helpless and lost.
Probably the most important understanding we need to have is this - What it means to have our identity in Christ.
We are given the nature of Jesus when we believe in Him, we gain a new spiritual identity … it’s as if our passport photo is superimposed with a likeness of Jesus!
Ephesians 1 v 13 …And now you … have heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, He identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago.What amazing news that we are given a new identity … so why isn’t ‘the church’ perfect?
Well for a start, it’s full of people just the same as me!
This calls for a bit of honesty.
I’m not perfect, so how can the church, which is made up of people just like me be perfect? This is one of the tensions in the Bible. We have new identities because Jesus has paid the price for our sins with His death, but I am still me … I still do things wrong!
The tension is the new identity, battling with the old identity (nature).
In a way, God sees us as we will one day be. When we accept the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins, then God accepts this as full and unreserved payment, and saves us from judgement. This is why we call it being ‘saved’
Don’t wait to be perfect to join a church …. It will never happen.
Only one man has been perfect, and He was killed but rose again to conquer death. That man was Jesus…...and this was God’s plan from the very beginning….to accept a perfect sacrifice for an imperfect church.
Welcome to the Coach House Church…. A work in progress.