“Clean”

“Clean,” a song currently being played on Christian radio, along with a most painful story playing out at a rather short distance from my own life, have prompted me to reflect once more on how God, through his Christ, sees us (as opposed to how we typically choose to see one another).  It seems that we humans have an uncanny knack of elevating others’ choices, when we deem them to be poor choices, up some supposed ladder of sin all the while allowing our own choices (which are often questionable as well) to remain on a lower rung of that very same sin ladder.  Thus, we view ourselves as squeaky clean if we appear “normal,” whatever that might actually mean, to those around us who see us from the outside only; but not a one of us, on our own, is clean enough for the presence of our most holy God.

Yes, the thing that we’re perhaps forgetting is that we all have battles playing out within us, fights in the very flesh that does indeed envelope us, and thus even the very best that we have to offer up is lacking; and that is precisely why God sacrificed his very best for us all–so that there would be a way for us to always measure up to his standard, no matter the mess we might be.  Jesus the Christ is that way…is the Way.  And nothing about us and the people we love is ever too much for him.   Being too far gone for his coverage is a lie of man, is a lie of the enemy.  We can turn any and every battle within us over to him and trust him with the outcome, even and especially when this broken world chooses to tell us we can’t.

“There’s nothing too dirty that You can’t make worthy.  You wash me in mercy.  I am clean.”  These are part of the “Clean” lyrics Natalie Grant sings.  I think we all need to know this, even those of us who think we don’t; we all need to know, on some deep and perhaps hidden level, that the very worst thought and/or action in us does not make us unfit for life, for goodness, for light, for others, for God.  I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that, until we begin to grasp how very wretched even the finest man or woman among us is, we will never be able to even begin to fathom the height and depth of God’s love for us.  As God himself tells us, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isaiah 1:18).  That’s the kind of God we have–the kind of God who is willing to do whatever it takes to clean us up ever so perfectly so that we, the sinners that we all are, are worthy to pull up a chair at his table and sup with him, the King of the world.