There is a myth flourishing in the church today that has caused incalculable harm: once converted, fully converted. In other words, once I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, an irreversible, sinless future beckons. Discipleship will be an untarnished success story; life will be an unbroken upward spiral toward holiness.

The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.' 'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either.

Everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease.

How far is it between light and dark? They aren't even in the same room. If there's any light there at all, then it isn't dark. Likewise, to live in the state of sin means that you're completely removed from the God of light—and desperately in need of a Savior. Eternity

Don't say that a loving God is going to send you to hell- He's not. The thing that's going to send you to hell is that you're a sinner and you don't want to admit it.

Natural man's sin is precisely this: He wants the benefits of God without God Himself.

Her guilty conscience was as vague as original sin.

I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of a sinful man.

It wouldn't be worth going on." The words caught in her throat, and tears sprang to her eyes. "I know it all sounds far-fetched. I've thought that too. That my mistakes … and there are an awful lot of them … couldn't possibly be erased clean. That Jesus couldn't possibly forgive them. But I think that's the whole point of why he came.

People have to realize that just because you're a Christian, it doesn't mean that you're perfect, because every once in a while everyone stumbles.

Holy Communion is offered to all, as surely as the living Jesus Christ is for all, as surely as all of us are not divided in him, but belong together as brothers and sisters, all of us poor sinners, all of us rich through his mercy. Amen.

The jubilation of God's salvation corresponds to man's very real condition of lostness ... In Scripture, there is never any mention of a relativizing of sin since any such relativizing of sin would also automatically relativize the unspeakably wonderful nature of salvation.