| “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this … to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” |
| —James 1:27 NKJV |
The principal of the newly renovated school where I taught liked to use my spacious music classroom for faculty meetings after school because I didn’t have student desks, and had plenty of room for adult size folding chairs. In the spirit of Christian hospitality, I enjoyed allowing my fellow teachers to use my room for such a purpose.
However, I cringed to see fellow faculty members balancing coffee cups and stacks of papers as they entered the room. Worse yet were those who would set their cups willy-nilly on the floor near their chairs.
I knew that if coffee spilled and stained my carpet, I would have to wait until the next summer before custodians would thoroughly clean the carpet. By then, the stain might have become so deeply set that it would not completely come out.
For 20 years I had taught in an old building with a room of mixed and matched items. I had an orange-painted desk, a collection of old chairs painted various colors, and a bright green bulletin board. Now, with the recent renovation, I really enjoyed having a newly remodeled room with freshly painted walls and a spiffy new look. I treasured my unspotted carpet.
According to the Scripture, God wants us “unspotted” by the world around us. How easily stains appear when we try to balance too many things and lose our focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. How often we let down our guard and allow the culture around us to get too close and become ever-deeply ingrained in the core of our beings.
We need a spiritual vigilance to remain unspotted. We need the Holy Spirit to examine us and to warn us when our thoughts or actions cause us to stray from the pathway God has laid out for us. We also need Jesus, our Advocate with the Father, to cleanse us from all “spots” as soon as they appear and well before they work their way into the fabric of our lives, making them difficult to remove.
Stains seem to become more permanent the longer they stay in the fabric of our lives. Not only do we see these stains, but others do, as well. The stains blemish our example and blemish our testimony for Christ.
I urge you to make the most of every opportunity to do some scrubbing in the Lord’s presence. Confess your sins. Repent of your sins. Fall back into the life-transforming grace that God offers us through His Son. Jesus stands ready to cleanse us, as the Apostle Paul describes in Ephesians 5:25b-27:
…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
Just think how God will approve when He sees our lives “unspotted” through the cleansing power of Jesus.
