Skip to main content

Wash

 

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. (Isaiah 1:16)

          Up north when I garden, I’m likely to have to wash my arms up to my elbows and my clothes. Maybe I’ll have to wash my face and neck. The soil has a lot of clay and compost, so it behaves itself, so to speak. It may require a scrub brush to get the skin it touches clean, but it doesn’t get all over.  The plants I deal with also seem to be fairly well-behaved. Sure, they may reseed themselves and populate the entire neighborhood, but they don’t usually stick to your clothing.

In Florida, the soil is sand. Chances are that if you pull weeds, you’ll end up with sand in your hair, on your face, in your mouth, in your clothes, etc. It doesn’t come out of clothing as readily as I’d like, but it comes off the skin more easily than clay dirt, does.

Unfortunately, when you garden – and when you live life - you get dirty. The dirt from the garden is the easy one to clean. Washing your soul is one of those basics we need to master. How often it needs to be done, and how challenging it is to clean the grime from under our fingernails, or inside of our hearts doesn’t matter. It has to be done.

This means we need to make sure we’re paying attention to the evil in our lives, and actively seek to wash it away. No excuses. No, “I was born this way.” No, “I can’t help it,” even if you can’t help it. It needs to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, confessed to our Lord, and if we need to make restitution or apologize, we need to do so.

It’s basic. It’s very difficult, but it’s necessary.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Way, The Truth, and The Life

              Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me . (John 14:6)           If “I am the gate of the sheep…I am the good shepherd” from chapter 10 is a double whammy, this verse is a triple whammy. And its first victim is the notion that any other so-called god was acceptable or the same as Jesus. He, and He alone is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to get to the Father. There is no other Savior, or Redeemer, according to Jesus. Now, to be fair, other religions will claim that their religion or god(s) are the only way. That is the nature of gods and of religions. If this and that are equally good and agree on what’s necessary, then this and that are the same thing, so there’s no need to from the other to one. If that’s the case, then why speak against the other or promote the one? There’s a song I’ve been listening to i...
Post a Comment
Read more