No Part Dark

I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I offered to do any of the dirty work involved in fixing my 5 year old boiler. Our furnace guy is a friend who had offered to come over and help troubleshoot the faltering system, but since it was all volunteer, I wanted to spare him the grunt work. So following his instructions, I carefully removed the front panel and discovered heating tubes all clogged up with soot. "There's your problem," he said, and handed me a painter's mask, a long handled pipe brush and the shop vac. "I think this is going to get a little bit messy," I thought, as I started brushing and vacuuming. 30 minutes later I emerged from the furnace area with my eyes burning and every inch of exposed skin now colored in varying shades of black. I glanced at a mirror near the front door and was shocked to see a man who could easily be mistaken for a 19th century coal miner looking back at me.

With the dirty work over, the worst was still to come--the cleanup effort. A few shop rags and some hand cleaner made a good start and did a reasonable job on my hands, but they couldn't even begin to help with all the nooks and crannies of my face. So I did something I've never done before. I took a mirror with me into the shower. With some meticulous scrubbing and alot of water streaming over me for a long time, I finally got out and recognized myself again. I thought that was the end of it, but the next morning a closer examination revealed that a black sooty residue had still managed to cling to the inside of my ears...and the next day a wrinkle in my neck...

And so it is with all of God's children who embark on this lifelong "clean up effort" called the Christian Life. The mess that we are in when we come to God is a pretty evident reality. Take the raw materials of an inborn self-centeredness and put it into the environment of a fallen world and we find ourselves blackened from head to foot with the soot of sin. Our immediate impulse is to try to clean ourselves up in order to come to God. But then we discover that God has provided a Savior who does not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. When we finally admit the tremendous need of forgiveness that our souls have, and look to Jesus, then a tremendous miracle of cleansing occurs and we are never dirty in the same way again.

But what about the ongoing sin that dirties our faces and feet as we walk on as children of God? Many Christians find themselves falling into the subtle trap that captured the Galatian Christians, "having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect by the flesh?" (Gal. 3:3) With tremendous effort, they seek to make themselves clean by trying harder, looking better and serving more. However, this response to sin doesn't bring the internal cleanness that God alone can bring. Instead, it generally brings a spirit of pride and self importance before others while the private sins and sins of the heart remain undealt with. The implied answer to Paul's question to the Galatian Christians is that our own efforts cannot bring about the level of perfecting that is needed. Just as the initial cleansing work must be done by Jesus, so the ongoing cleansing work belongs to Christ as well.

Others who experience disappointment and failure in trying to perfect themselves simply abandon their efforts by lowering the bar. How many Christians live with pockets of bondage and sin that they simply hide, bury or try to ignore---all the while claiming that nobody's perfect and that their posture is really just one of "living in Grace"? It is very easy to excuse little areas of compromise in our own lives and hearts when it seems that Christians around us do the same sorts of things. Isn't God a gracious and loving God who is willing to bear with a little fleshliness here and there?

To this, the Scriptures resoundingly respond that Jesus' intention is to "present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish." (Ephesians 5:27) And to the individual, Jesus says "If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light." (Luke 11:36) It is not by allowing for a little dirt to remain that we live in Grace, but by surrendering ourselves completely to the only One who can truly sanctify us.

And even in this, becoming clean is not the end that God calls us to. God calls us to Himself--to walk moment-by-moment with the One who made us and loves us. But because He is absolutely righteous, walking with Him brings about more and more righteousness in us. The surrender to His workings in our soul as we walk with Him necessarily results in a deeper holiness, but it is an outcome our walk with Him, rather than an aim on our part.

This sort of quiet surrender to the internal work of Jesus in our hearts is as simple as confessing sin as soon as we become aware of it. It is responding with willingness to be changed when God shows us an area that needs improvement, and it is believing in the enabling of God when he asks us to do something that seems beyond us. Walking in Grace is never abandoning the idea of a spotless life before God, but it is also never presuming that anyone but Christ can bring it about. In time, this sort of dependence on Jesus not only brings a holiness to our lives, but a humility as well.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. (Jude 24-25)