Most of us keep a private list of reasons we assume God would want to keep His distance. A stretch of years we’re not proud of. A reputation that follows us around. A quiet sense that religious people are one kind of person, and we’re another kind entirely.

If any of that sounds familiar, there’s someone in the Bible worth meeting. Her name is Rahab.

 

 

Rahab lived in a city called Jericho, in a story from the Old Testament (the first part of the Bible). By every measure of her day, she was the wrong person. The Bible plainly says she made her living as a prostitute. She was on the losing side of a war. She had no religious pedigree and no respectable standing.

And yet, centuries later, the New Testament book of Hebrews puts her name on a short list of people held up as examples of faith—right alongside heroes like Moses. As Pastor Jim said on Sunday, she’s “one woman with the worst resume in the Bible who ends up standing inside the family of God,” while people who lived their whole lives in that city did not.

If your instinct is that people with a past don’t belong in that kind of story, Rahab is standing there to tell you otherwise.

 

 

Here’s the part that surprises people: Rahab didn’t clean up her life first and then earn her way in.

Word had reached her city about the things Israel’s God had done—including parting a sea so His people could escape an army. Most people in Jericho heard the same reports and did nothing. Rahab heard them, decided they were true, and acted on it. She protected two of God’s people, and she was told to tie a bright red cord in her window as a sign. When the city fell, she and her whole family were spared.

That is the pattern the Bible calls faith: you hear what God has said, you believe it is actually true, and you do something about it. It isn’t a feeling, and it isn’t a reward for being respectable. It’s trust that moves.

 

 

This isn’t a one-time exception. The same thread runs through the whole Bible—God bringing in the outsider, the foreigner, the person nobody expected, on the basis of faith rather than background.

Pastor Jim put it plainly on Sunday. He believes that even back at that first Passover in Egypt, if an Egyptian had heard God’s warning and trusted Him enough to act on it, that family would have been spared too. It was never about which side you were born on. It was about whether you trusted Him.

So if the thought of belonging at a church makes your stomach tighten because of what you’ve done or where you’ve been, hear this clearly: the door is wider than you think. It always has been.

 

 

You don’t have to become presentable before you come. That was never the requirement—not for Rahab, and not for you.

Faith starts the same way it started for her. You hear what God has said about you: that He loves you, that Jesus stepped into your place, and that anyone who turns to Him is welcomed, not screened. You decide it’s true. And you take a step toward Him.

A past doesn’t disqualify you. The only thing that keeps anyone out is deciding the door isn’t for them. Rahab decided it was—and it opened.

 

→ Planning your first visit? [Here’s what to expect.](https://www.fbcconcord.org/planning-your-visit/)

→ Looking for community? [Here’s how to meet people.](https://www.fbcconcord.org/how-do-i-meet-people/)

→ Ready to get involved? [Here’s where you can serve.](https://www.fbcconcord.org/where-can-i-serve/)