Living Our Faith

"And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice -- the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him." Romans 12:1

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How To Get Clean

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Our Scripture reading for this Sunday is Mark 1:4-11.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” That’s how the old saying goes, most often encouraging people to have a clean house and good personal hygiene.

That saying is wrong (and unbiblical). Outward cleanliness, or the cleanliness that we can achieve on our own, has no connection with godliness. It never did. Jesus himself said, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and then the outside will also be clean.” (Matthew 23:25-26) Cleanliness is a matter of the heart, not of what we can see.

But the saying does highlight the importance of being clean. 

The problem is this: how do we as a sinful people live in the presence of a holy God? 

The answer to that question is what is described in the making of the tabernacle in Exodus, throughout Leviticus, and it echoes throughout the rest of the Old Testament. God called His people to holiness (to be set apart). God called them to be clean. And through a myriad of laws and regulations he instructed them how to be clean, how to live in His presence, how to be His people.

The problem is that those laws and regulations didn’t quite work. God’s people turned them into a list of rules that the people could check off (see Matthew 23:25-26 above). Cleanliness became about checking off all the right boxes; it became about keeping the letter of the law and not about the intention of it. They failed to look at their own hearts. 

The law and all the regulations were supposed to reveal their desperate need for God. The ritual acts for cleansing were supposed to draw them closer to God because through the sacrifices and through the offerings and through the rituals they were supposed to see that God makes them clean; it was God who removed their sin and guilt, not their actions.

This problem of cleanliness persists throughout Scripture. How does a sinful people live in the presence of a holy God? How do they get clean? 

The people of Israel at the beginning of Mark’s gospel were gathering in the wilderness, listening to John the Baptist preach, and getting baptized. They wanted to be clean.

Then Jesus comes, and He too is baptized even though He doesn’t need to be. He is clean. He is God’s own beloved Son (and one person of the Trinity). He doesn’t need to be washed clean, but by being baptized He identifies with us, with our need to be clean.

Even today, the problem remains. How do we live in the presence of a holy God? How do we get clean?

We try to do the right thing, say the right thing, attend church as much as we can. 

We say, “Sorry”, we feel guilty, we try to be nice people.

We confess our sins to God.

These are all good things. We should do these things. But doing them doesn’t make us clean.

God does that. God makes us clean. Our baptism shows and assures us of that. Before we can do anything, before we can speak or even control our body movements God makes promises and water is sprinkled on our foreheads to remind and assure us that, through Jesus, our sins are washed away. 

Every time we gather to worship we remember and celebrate that God makes us clean. Our sins are washed away by Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, through His sacrifice on the cross. Through Him, God graciously cleanses us from all sin and unrighteousness. Through Him, God graciously calls us His daughter or His son.

Every time we gather to worship we remember and celebrate that there is no other way for us to be clean.

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