This is the third week in our sermon series called, “Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing,” which is a series all about the core beliefs we hold to in the Christian faith. The first week we looked at the Bible, which is the decisive source of our Christian witness and the authoritative measure of the truth in our beliefs. Last week, we explored the Trinity, specifically the first person of the Trinity, God the Father. God is our good, good Father that lavishes His love and grace upon His children, upon you and me. This week we will be looking at humanity’s need for grace. 

  According to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, our journey in the faith is a journey of salvation. Salvation is not a static, one-time event, but the ongoing experience of God’s gracious presence transforming us into whom God intends for us to be. There indeed is nothing more powerful than the grace of God in our lives but, before we get to grace, we must first acknowledge our diagnosis because it's the "first step" on the journey that is our salvation. The first step is our diagnosis, and the diagnosis is not good news. The sad reality is that you and I are sinners. That's just the truth. The even harder pill to swallow is that sin does not make you a bad person. You are not a bad person that needs to do better. The truth is that sin makes you a dead person because sin separates us from God, who is the source of life. The apostle Paul says it like this in Ephesians 2:5: “we were dead in our trespasses.” Jesus did not come to make you a better person, He came so that you could have life and have it abundantly. He came so that you could live. 

  Sin is a persistent force in our lives. But the good news is that where sin abounds, grace abounds much more (Romans 5:20). When we confess our sin to God, God promises to not only forgive us, but He also promises to erase the penalty, power, and one day, when Christ returns, the very presence of sin in our lives. My prayer is that by both acknowledging and confessing our sins before God, we would receive the strength to be, in the words of our friend, the brilliant John Wesley, "more and more dead to sin, and more and more alive to God."