Recently I was walking through the parking lot of the church when I had one of those memorable experiences. It was a scorching day in the triple digits. I was wearing my new white tennis shoes... And as I rounded the corner of the church building I stepped on a discarded piece of bubble gum.
Well, you can probably imagine what happened next… With every step I took, the gooey gum stretched out behind me like some kind of Wrigley Spearmint Spider Web, leaving a sticky stringy mess in my footsteps. So, being the neat freak that I am, I stopped in my trek, lifted up my shoe and took a look at the situation.
I swear, it must have been a quarter pounder piece of bubble gum that someone had spat out. And, NOW, it was all over the bottom of my shoe from the tip of my toe to the bottom of my heel and it had to be at least a half an inch thick. As I lifted my foot higher, I noticed about a dozen strings of the gooey stuff stretching out like the tentacles of an octopus… until the tension snapped the tennis shoe right off my foot right into the gooey glob.
So, there I was, hopping around on one foot, trying to bend over and pick up the tennis shoe out of the sticky mess. It must have been quite a sight for anyone who might have seen me.
But, finally, only after great effort, I freed my tennis shoe from the gum and hopped over to the trash cans where I found a discarded popsicle stick on the ground which I attempted to use to clean the gum from my shoe. Well, that turned out to be a big mistake. A dozen popsicle sticks later my shoe looked like some kind of modern art piece with popsicle sticks sticking out everywhere.
Well, by this time a good hour had gone by and I was a sweaty, gooey, sticky mess. There was gum everywhere… on my hands, on my face and even in my hair. So… I hopped on over to the parsonage, straight into the laundry room. I tore off my sweaty sticky clothes and threw them into the washing machine. Then I went to take a shower and wash my hair.
When I was done cleaning up, I threw the load of clothes from the washer into the dryer and sat down and had some lunch. Then, when lunch was over, I went to the drying machine to pull my clothes out only to discover, much to my horror, that not only did the gum not wash out of the clothes I had been wearing, but that in my frustration I had neglected to take a pen out of my shirt pocket and now black ink blots were all over all my white clothes.
Have you ever had a day like that?
But, you see this make-belief story is about more than just gum and ink spots… it is about sin.
Sometimes in life we step into things… we step into a mess, and even though it may not have been our problem to begin with, it becomes our problem.
Sin can be a sticky messy problem for us once it has gotten a hold of us. And in all of our efforts to rid ourselves of the problem… our problem gets worse. And sometimes in our best efforts to wash ourselves clean we are left stained and nothing we do can ever take that stain away.
We Are All Guilty
In his letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul said, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).
The prophet Isaiah tells us essentially the same thing, Isaiah 64:6
6 But we are all like an unclean thing,
And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags;
We all fade as a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind,
Have taken us away.
Even Jeremiah understood the problem of removing the stain of sin when he said, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil" (Jeremiah 13:23).
We… by our very nature, are all sinners. And although some of us may have sinned more than others in this life, we are all equally guilty in the eyes of the Lord. We have fallen short of perfection.
We are tainted and stained with the sticky mess of sin that has affected our lives. And the problem with that is… there is nothing we can do by ourselves that will take that mess away. We are powerless to remove the stain of sin. Whether it be one sin or a thousand… it is a blemish on our lives that will be judged on that great day when we all stand before the Lord.
And because God is perfect and pure, because God is light and in him there is no darkness at all… because our stain of sin is an imperfection, an impurity, then we will stand before him in our sins, darker than the darkest night. And God will not allow any darkness in his presence… and this is eternal death.
And once we understand this… Once we understand that the consequences of sin brings death… Once we accept that we are tainted and dirty and stained before His eyes… and that we need His help to wash away the sin of our lives away forever… only then, can we grasp the need for our Savior, Jesus Christ.
But, there is hope… that is why the Word of God tells us, "Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD, " Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool" (Isaiah 1:18).
In 1 Cor 6:9-10 the Apostle Paul describes the things that stain us and what the Lord has done to clean us up when he says, " 9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."
The Apostle Paul further elaborated upon this them in Titus 3:3-6 when he said, "3At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. 4But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, 5he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, 6whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior"
So, if you have found that your life is tainted and stained, come to the Savior to have the gooey mess of sin washed away forever. He is in the stain removal business!
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