Come as you are,
But don't stay as you are
Jesus invites, welcomes, gathers, accepts and embraces people irrespective of where we’re from or what we’ve done. Don’t feel that you have to be someone else before you belong to Jesus.
A hospital receives people with all types of ailments, and it desires for people to be healed and made better. If people came along and were told, ‘welcome, we’re glad that you’re here, but we have no concern for your future development and well-being’, they would simply get up and leave. When we say, ‘come as you are, but don’t stay as you are’, we’re provoking people to step out in faith and be prepared for God to give his fullness of life.
To change, as God would have it, doesn’t mean that we become someone we’re not – it means we become the best of who we were always meant to be.
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
John 8:2-11 (ESV)