Based on Luke 19:1-10

MEMORY TEXT:  “But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:13).

You've probably heard the saying, “The church is not a rest home for saints; it's a hospital for sinners”.  For years, I didn’t understand what that meant.  I understood the part about the church not being a rest home.  We saints should not consider the church a place to come and sit in our rocking chairs and let others take care of us.  We must never retire from Christian service.  But I misunderstood the part about the church being a hospital for sinners.  I thought it meant, If you want to sin, you should come to church.

But that is not what it means.  A person who is sick goes to the hospital, because hospitals are there to help make sick people well and then send them back out into life.  People don’t retire in hospitals.  A hospital isn't a residence.  We are all sinners, and the church is where we go to be made well by the grace of Jesus.

While the church isn't a rest home for saints, neither is it a hospice for sinners.  A hospice is a place where the terminally ill are cared for during their last days.  But the church isn't a place where sinners come to stay as they are until they die.  The gospel of Jesus doesn't save us in our sins, or in spite of our sins, but from our sins (Matthew 1:21).

When we become convicted of sin, we realize that we cannot continue as we are.  We also know that God cannot excuse our sins as if nothing were wrong.  God would be either weak or unjust if He were to let us continue in our sins.  How wonderful it is that, when God forgives our sins, He gives us a new life, a holy life.  The apostle Paul wrote, “What shall we say then?  Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?  God forbid.  How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein” (Romans 6:1-2)?

In the end, both the saved and the lost will have one thing in common: they were all sinners.  The fundamental difference will be that the saved wanted to get out of sin, and Jesus made them whole.  The lost enjoyed sin and refused to accept the cure Jesus so graciously offered.