Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Jesus is a lot like soap

This Sunday, our pastor started a sermon series looking at the Gospels and how grace shines throughout them. He began by going through Luke 7:36-50. The story details Jesus' dinner with a Pharisee, where a sinful woman interrupted the meal to anoint the Messiah with perfume and wash his feet with her tears. It's such a great story, I dare not sully it with my description of it.

However, I'll share a thought I had during the sermon. As I visualized the woman washing Jesus' feet with her hair and tears, I couldn't help but think "Jesus is a lot like soap." Okay, before you gather your torches and pitchforks, hear me out a second.

Imagine the world before soap. People were dirty and grimy, and not too pleasant to smell. But they didn't really notice, because everybody was sullied. People got used to their own stench.

Now, if you read about God, you know that He's perfectly clean. So clean, He can't come in contact with anything dirty, or else He'd be dirty, too.

With a clean God and a dirty people, you have different ways you can relate to God.
  • You can avoid all the mud puddles and keep as clean as possible, like the Pharisees. 
  • You can hope for a Muddy God like the idolators. 
  • You can accept that you'll never be clean enough, and just live in filth like the tax collectors and prostitutes.
  • You can search after stuff to make your dirt smell better, like the desparate.
  • Or you could scrape off enough dirt to look only mostly disheveled, like normal folk.
  • Or... I'm sure you could come up with some more ideas.
Now, imagine that our Clean God has offered us soap. I'm not talking 99.44% pure, but 100% pure soap. And it's cheap, too. All you have to do is let it come in contact with all of you, and let it do it's job of lathering up and washing you clean.

So, would you use it? Judging by our society today, I'd say you would. Now, how would people look at the new, clean you?
  • Pharisees would be jealous of your cleanliness, since they used to be the standard for clean before.
  • Some people would wonder why you're going on and on about being so clean.
  • A few would say that since soap didn't taste good, they wouldn't use it (even though it wasn't meant to go in your mouth).
  • Some shysters would try to sell you something that's "better than soap", but costs a lot more and does a lot less.
  • But many would want to be clean just like you, and would want to know where you got the soap.
Now, in this analogy, Jesus is the soap, and God's grace and mercy are the soap suds that wash away your sins. Like the soap bar that wears down with use, Jesus sacrificed himself to make you clean and presentable before God. And without soap, you can't get clean enough on your own. Sure, you can roll in a field of daisies, but you're still dirty without the cheap gift of soap.

So, look at how you treat your soap.
  • Do you leave it in the cabinet, thinking that will be enough to keep you clean? 
  • Do you only take a bath on Christmas and Easter? 
  • Have you bought into the lie that you only get one bath, and then you have to avoid dirt for the rest of your life? 
  • Do you just wash your hands, and leave the rest of your body dirty?
  • Do you avoid washing certain parts of your body, thinking your soap is too good to go anywhere near there? 
  • Or maybe you cover up with perfume that smells like soap, just to make people think you're clean?
  • Do you like the concept of soap, but think you're going to find your own way to clean up?
  • Do you think you need to clean yourself before you can wash with soap?
  • Were you so scarred as a kid when someone made you eat soap, and you swore you would never touch the stuff again?
I could go on and on.  Why do we treat our relationship with Jesus any differently?

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Bleary-eyed post

Lately, I've felt a lot of pressure. Pressure to put something out, to perform, to create something. I've been looking for an outlet, but I can't decide on content.

Here's a few ideas that have popped in my head:
  • A work related blog about the field I work in
  • A blog about my faith
  • A blog detailing one of my hobbies
  • A blog where I write humorous stuff
  • A blog where I delve into the variety of food here
  • A blog where I whine about my life
  • A fake blog where I write from the point of view of a character who doesn't exist.
  • A blog where I write about my life
Here's what I came up with:
  • Work blog - work blogs require you to be very serious and technical about your work. While I am serious about what I do, I'm never serious about how I present it. Trust me, if you read the trade publications I have to read to keep up, your eyes wouldn't stop bleeding. Frankly, I'm not serious enough in my writing to write like that.
  • Faith blog - Maybe, but I can't focus on this all the time. We'll see
  • Hobby blog - Unless your hobby is writing, you probably make stuff you can take a picture of. And that requires downloading pictures from my camera. I usually let my wife handle all that, since she has the awesome camera that makes dreary days look beautiful. Basically, because I'm too lazy to upload the pictures I take, I just don't take them.
  • Humor blogging is a dangerous thing. I know, because I used to do it. At some point, you feel pressure to put more good stuff out, but you're completely tapped out in terms of ideas. Then you have to go on hiatus for a while, and your friends stop visiting your site. Then you whine about how you have nobody visiting your blog, and frankly, nobody likes a whiner
  • Food blog - Love food, but it requires that I go to different restaurants and eat. Why can't I write about how I went to Taco Bell for the fourth time this month and ordered the same grilled stuffed burrito again? 
  • Whiney blog - Like I said before, nobody likes a whiner
  • Fake blog - Interesting concept, but I'm only inspired to do this for about a day or two. Then I move on to something else.
  • Life blog - Don't know how interesting that would be. Most posts would start out, then be interupted with "Uh-oh, baby's awake. Gotta change his diaper and feed him."
We'll see where this one goes.