Unspotted

 

“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.

 

 

Rattling Bones

 

The Lord set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones… And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone.

—Ezekiel 37:1,7

Talk about bizarre! Perhaps, by the time Ezekiel had the vision of the valley of dry bones, he had experienced the Lord’s visions enough times to not completely freak out. Here he sat, among the exiles from Israel in Babylon, with a message from God and the hand of the Lord upon him. The Jews had been captive there for more than thirty years and, according to God’s timeline given to other prophets, they had forty more years left in their captivity.

The people around Ezekiel appeared as those dry bones—lifeless and ignorant of the God who was ordering their nation’s woes. Yet here, in the most forsaken place, God was giving Ezekiel a message of hope using this strange vision.

Ezekiel, the obedient prophet, did as God commanded. In response to the vision, Ezekiel preached to these dry, lifeless bones. Surprisingly, he heard the sound of the rattling skeletons and saw them come together and reconnect with flesh surrounding them.

Next, God commanded Ezekiel to preach to the wind and ask for breath to come again and revive those dead bones. In obedience, Ezekiel did as God asked. As he watched, Ezekiel saw a huge army of people and he heard them confessing that they were dry and without hope. God responded by bringing a message of hope to all of them, by promising that, with His Spirit upon them, they would live and go back to their own land!

What hope this must have brought the prophet and, as he recounted his vision, to the people! God had not forgotten them. In fact, He acted in their behalf to restore them to life.

Sometimes, when we look at our country in the midst of this pandemic and with the political and cultural unrest all around us, it must feel like we lie in a valley full of dry bones. Can God cause us to live again? What must we do to see that happen? Like Israel, we need to confess that we lie dead without hope and without obedience to the living God.

But, not only does our culture look dry, dead, and useless. Oftentimes, we also look at our churches and see that they carry on without the “life” of the Holy Spirit moving them and giving them health and strength to serve God. We ask, “Can these bones live again?” Once again, can we stand like a mighty army and with renewed energy serve Him? In Robert Coleman’s book on revival from the 1960’s, he writes:¹

Yet there is hope. Dry bones can live again. In other days of crises when catastrophe has threatened, men have turned unto the Lord and found in him deliverance and strength. In fact, our greatest spiritual awakenings have come during the darkest periods of church history. Perhaps again the peril of the age may bring us to our senses.

The church uses the term “revival” as “the return of something to its true nature and purpose.” Certainly, dry bones need to form skeletons, and skeletons need not only flesh and blood, but life breathed in, as God did when He created Adam. From Coleman again:²

In the Old Testament, the word revival comes from a root meaning “to live,” which originally conveyed the idea of “breathing,” inasmuch as breath is the expression of life in all animate beings.

Hence, the word to the prophet in Ezekiel 37:5 refers to this kind of reviving power:

“This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.”

Let us listen for the rattling of the bones. As it did at Pentecost, let us pray to see the wind of the Holy Spirit come into our own dry existence, into the life of our churches, and into our lifeless culture. Then, may the Holy Spirit’s power within us and our churches accomplish all that God wants to accomplish, to the glory of His Holy Name!

______________________

1 Coleman, Robert E. Dry Bones Can Live Again. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1969. Pp. 7-8.

2 Ibid. Pp. 11-12.

 

 

The Reflection in a Mirror

 

	“We, who with unveiled faces reflect the Lord’s glory… are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the spirit.”
	—2 Corinthians 3:18

I’ve been thinking about mirrors lately. Mirrors reflect what we put in front of them.

If we consider what Christ sees when He looks into the “mirror” of our life, does He see His reflection there? Think of Moses. When he came down from Mount Sinai, after being in the presence of God for 40 days, the Scripture tells us that his face shown with the glory of God.

Because Moses revealed God in his countenance, those who saw him became uncomfortable around him. Too much light compared to the darkness of their hearts. Responding to their discomfort, Moses put a veil over his face, so the people didn’t have to be confronted with the glory of God.

Learn from Moses. Don’t be surprised if, when you reflect Christ well, others around you become uncomfortable.

I’ve been thinking about mirrors lately. They need cleaning regularly in order to reflect the clearest image. Our lives need the cleansing that comes when we bring our sinful behaviors and thoughts before the purity of Christ. He waits to cleanse us—to wipe the mirror of our lives thoroughly clean.

In 1 John 1:9 the Apostle says:

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

A Choice Instrument

 

“So whoever cleanses himself [from what is ignoble and unclean, who separates himself from contact with contaminating and corrupting influences] will [then himself] be a vessel set apart and useful for honorable and noble purposes, consecrated and profitable to the Master, fit and ready for any good work.”

—2 Timothy 2:21 Amplified Bible

Since I began playing piano at age six, I have had opportunity to play on hundreds of different pianos. I have played on pianos with sticking keys, with wildly out-of-tune strings, and even some pianos that leaned to one side like a sinking ship. Often, someone at the venue housing the piano will remark, “Well, it’s better than nothing!” Though I understand that person’s somewhat apologetic sentiment, frankly I’m not too certain that’s true.

Other pianos I’ve played do the job quite well in a utilitarian kind of way. They may sound in-tune, be fairly regulated (a piano technician’s term for how evenly the hammers produce sound), and play loudly and clearly enough for accompanying.

But, less frequently I have had the opportunity to play on an unusually fine instrument: built well, maintained well, placed well in a good acoustical environment, even beautiful to look at. What a difference for a trained musician who listens for nuance of dynamics, beauty and warmth of tone, crisp response time, and reliability for every style of playing.

I can remember when I turned from a fairly good technical player into a musician. My college professor had given me a key to her studio and allowed me to practice frequently on her Steinway grand piano. All the technical exercises, the hard listening and careful pedaling paid off. That piano allowed me to fully express all that I possessed of work and talent to play the music on the page.

God has chosen us as His superb instruments for honorable and noble purposes. Just as one who knew young King David said of him in 1 Samuel 16:18:

“He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the Lord is with him.”

So, God wants us to exhibit the qualities of a masterful servant. Similarly, the Lord spoke of the Apostle Paul in Acts 9:15:

“This man is my chosen instrument.”

Even though we may not have the influence of a King David or an Apostle Paul, God has still purposefully chosen us to represent Him. God desires for us to carry out noble tasks and to give full expression—like a fine Steinway—to the purpose that He has for us.

The qualifying words in our theme verse at the beginning of this blog post tell us that, in order to offer ourselves to God, we must cleanse ourselves from the unclean things, and separate ourselves from evil influences. “Holiness” is the theological term for this. It sounds stuffy and unattainable, but God expects all of us who carry His name—we whom He has specifically chosen—to live holy lives in order to carry out noble purposes.

What a high calling He has given us! May the “music” we make with our obedient lives glorify Him to the fullest.