Saintsnotsinners.org is the blog-site for Daniel Silva who currently lives in the East Bay, California.

I grew up in church and have always had a conscious awareness of God ever since I can remember. I even remember preaching a 3 second sermon to my Kindergarten teacher and seeing the blank reaction on her face. Much like many of the stories from people with church backgrounds, at a certain point in my life I decided to go off “do my own thing”, but eventually realized that “my own thing” didn’t work very well so I decided to hand everything over to Jesus and have never looked back in the nine years since.

I’m 25 years old, but I have a long history in the church. I’ve amen’d a lot of different sermons, jumped into a lot of different movements, and accepted a lot of different traditions over the years. I was never confident, or bold with what I believed, or with myself, until I experienced the fruit of the finished works message in October of 2009. Since then I haven’t been able to keep quiet, and have spoken unapologetically about the truths which happen to be contrary to many of the traditions I grew up with.

Writing is my greatest passion. The thing I was always best at in school was writing, although I never realized it, I just knew it was something I loved to do. In 2003, a few months after I gave everything to Jesus, somebody told me that they thought I should get a journal and start writing because God had given me a gift in that area and wanted to use it. I nodded my head but really didn’t think anything of it. About a month later I was sitting in my room and out of nowhere I got this really deep desire to write, so I grabbed some paper and a pencil and wrote a couple of poems about Jesus, which turned into writing new poems every day. That may be one of the main reasons that Myspace and Xanga stood out to me so much in their days. It was a platform to do what I loved to do, write what was on my heart, and watch it impact people’s lives. And then facebook came along and spoiled me like no other!

One of the biggest desires of my heart is to see the church as a whole be free from those same traditions that had so negatively effected my life, and the lives of many people I know. To see the individual Christian come to the realization of who they really are according to scripture rather than their own experience, and see what they are actually capable of. To see the individual Christian not be ashamed to say loudly and confidently, “I am perfect, righteous, and holy! I’m not a sinner, I’m a saint!”

I’m also currently in the process of writing a yet to be titled book that I hope will deal with the “sinner mentality” of the church once for all.