May 17, 2018
The voice said again:
"Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." Acts 10:15
Don't treat people as
sinful after they've been forgiven, and don't be sinful after we have been
forgiven.
On my first mission trip to Honduras, I was struck by two
things that happened the first day we started working. We went to a Christian school, and were
working in the heat doing painting and rock work. One of the kids there offered me a “bagged
water”. Assuming it was not polite to resist,
I said ‘gracias’ and took the bag. It
was sealed, looked clean, and I thought it was safe, but before I opened it to
drink a leader warned me it would be bad for me, and contained things that
could make me sick. What looked clean
was actually impure.
Later that night, we were eating dinner at our camp, and
after dinner cleaning up, and I was just about ready to throw away some old
ziplock storage bags, when the same leader told me to save them and clean them
like dishes. Apparently they re-use
their ziplocks many times over, economically using the resources they had. So we washed them, but I still didn’t think
they looked very clean. Then it struck
me - what looked worn and useless was actually clean and pure (at least pure
enough).
Humans tend to judge things by how they look. But Jesus didn’t do that. He would see the whitewashed lives of the
leaders and realize how impure their hearts were. Then he would look at the leper or the tax
collector and see the purity of some of their hearts. Jesus warned us not to judge, because we are
such poor judges of people. Leave the
judging to him, and work on the purity of our own hearts.
Jesus died on the cross to bring us freedom FROM sin. He wanted to clean up our hearts and make
them pure again, even though the outside of our lives may look like a used
ziplock bag. He is not impressed with the
exterior paint job we do to look good, he wants a pure soul. Peter learned that from God in this story
about Gentiles that God was saving.
Maybe we also need to learn that when it comes to the people we are
judging. Maybe we also need to remember
that when we have been cleansed & made pure – we’re not sinners when God
has made us clean (so don’t go back there).
The next time you start making a judgment by the way a
person looks or behaves, remember that water bag & ziplock bag. Maybe what is inside has a different level of
purity than what you are seeing on the outside.
Let God decide – and work on making your heart pure.
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