Thursday, January 14, 2016
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If you've ever been in an athlete's locker room, because you were playing or because you were working with the team, you know there is something very distinctive about the aroma in a locker room. And I don't think there will ever be a best selling fragrance, for example, called Essence of Locker Room. No, see, athletes carry into that room all the accumulated odors of sweat and dirt from their exercising. Fortunately, they leave their odors there if they get a shower every day; which they had better. And you'll be able to tell if they haven't! That's even more important if you live in a locker room like you and I do.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Staying Clean In A Locker Room World."
Our word for today from the Word of God is about getting clean. It's in John 15:3. Jesus said, "Now you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you." That's a simple but profound statement. Jesus is talking to us here about the cleansing power of the Bible-of God's Word. It's referred to again in that great marriage passage in Ephesians chapter 5, where it talks about "Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her..." Now, what happens as a result of Christ's love for the church, because that's talking about His love for us, He says he did that "...to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through The Word."
There we go again. The Bible gives us a brain washing, and our brain needs to be washed because we live in a locker room. Each 24 hours you and I are bombarded with so much dirt. We hear a lot of inappropriate talk and language. In fact, it's so common we almost don't even notice it any more. And that's sad. We're bombarded with programs, and commercials, and websites, and billboards, and humor, and Facebook posts, and music, and it's promoting what's dirty, what's selfish, what's greedy, what's godless.
And unless you live in a monastery, you're going to get a truckload of dirt dumped on you every day. And that's how often you need a spiritual shower, like the guys in the locker room-except we need a daily Bible bath. A daily Bible bath is a basic necessity. Each 24 hour period of time, we get hit with the aromas, and the dirt, and the smells of life in a broken and lost world. So, you've got to have a shower. And you need it every day, because the other stuff's coming every day.
So it means you need to consciously, intentionally set aside time in God's holy, cleansing presence, where you and He are together exclusively-nobody else is there, you're not listening to any other voices, and you let God's viewpoint, from His Word, wash your soul and get you back to a pure starting point for that day; washing you off again.
The dirt's going to accumulate on you, but it shouldn't stay there for long. It's got to be removed every day. The alternative is that the dirt of the world in which we live accumulates on you, it wears you down, and you start to accept as normal and acceptable and maybe even attractive. But it's what God calls sick, repulsive and deadly.
I didn't let my son go a day without a shower. He was a high school athlete. And I know that God expects a spiritual shower from his kids every day too. After all, in a spiritual sense, you and I really are living in a locker room.
We can't avoid the odors, but we can wash them off with a daily shower from the Word of God.