It happened again this morning. In the pre-dawn hours I lay awake, unable to sleep. Anxieties were filling the room like ghosts in the night, trying to frighten and alarm me with varying degrees of success, and successfully robbing me of sleep. As always, I lay there sending up little prayers to the Father.
It happened again
this morning. In the pre-dawn hours I lay awake, unable to sleep. Anxieties
were filling the room like ghosts in the night, trying to frighten and alarm me
with varying degrees of success, and successfully robbing me of sleep. As
always, I lay there sending up little prayers to the Father.
“Forgive me of my
sin, Father. Help me. You are my Rock. You are my strength.”
Lying there, I thought of all the reasons the Lord has for
not hearing me. I’m such a poor Christian. My prayer life is so shallow. I read
the Bible in the mornings and rarely give it another thought in the day. He
takes care of my financial needs and still I worry. What kind of Christian am
I? Why should He forgive me? What if the people I work with knew what a poor
Christian I am?
And then this
morning, He sent an answer.
I heard the
garbage truck outside, running its usual early Saturday morning route. The
motor revved as workers compacted the trash.
Someone hollered.
A can hit the pavement. The engine purred as the truck softly moved forward to
the next house. The noises were oddly comforting, and then the Holy Spirit told
me why.
The workers were
taking away our garbage. The sanitation system has ways of dealing with it,
places to dump it, methods for disposing of it. It will be gone; we will never
see that trash again.
Their system
works–our streets are clean and our homes are free from the continual buildup
of accumulated garbage and the unhealthy conditions that it would produce. We
owe a great debt to workers whom we rarely ever see.
In the same way,
God removes the sin we have confessed. It is gone. We will walk outside later
this morning and retrieve the garbage cans we set out last night. They will be
empty. We will set them back in place inside the fence, ready to receive
today’s and tomorrow’s garbage. That’s the process; we believe in it and rarely
question it.
Shouldn’t we
believe God just as strongly and surely? Shouldn’t we take as fact that “if we
confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us
of all unrighteousness.” (I John 1:9)
When He takes it
away, God removes it totally and deals with it thoroughly. He buries it in the
deepest ocean (Micah 7:19). He forgets it (Hebrews 10:17). He nails it to the
cross (Colossians 2:14).
The point being,
we’ll never see that sin again. “As far as the east is from the west, so far
has He removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalms 103:12)
There’s a
condition here, though. A “divine however”.
The garbagemen –
the sanitation workers – only remove what I set out. They do not enter my house
and walk through the rooms and comb through the waste baskets gathering up all
the trash they can find. That’s my job. What I identify as trash and put in the
appropriate container and set in place, they will cart away.
My job before the
Lord is to identify and name the trash in my life, anything unworthy of Him,
everything that interferes with my worship and obedience to Him, all that does
not have His name on it, whatever weighs me down and holds me back and hinders
faith.
“Whatsoever is
not of faith is sin,” we’re told in Romans 14:23.
I make it a point
to name anything the Holy Spirit calls to my attention–because He is the One
who knows what I need to set on the curb–and then I pray, “Forgive me of all
my sin, O Lord.”
In confessing it
to the Father, I am not removing my sin. I am merely bagging it and setting it
on the curb for the Holy Spirit to pick up and deal with.
Because of the
great and mysterious process that occurred when our Lord Jesus Christ died on
the cross, and was resurrected three days later, the system works.
Jesus’ blood
atones for my sins. His death paid for my wrongs. He died in my place. He and
He alone is the Savior. I am the beneficiary, the heir of His estate, the one
blessed by the curse of the cross.
Only in Heaven
will we learn the full dimension of the blessings that are ours by Calvary.
Human language
falters trying to fathom and encapsulate and describe all that is ours as a
result of that event on the hill outside Jerusalem
some 2,000 years ago.
We know it’s not
just a matter of saying the right words, of touching all the bases, but in
asking the Father for cleansing and forgiveness and for Him to fill me with His
Spirit and to use me that day, I ask Him to do this “by the precious blood of
Jesus, in the matchless name of Jesus, for the wonderful sake of Christ”
Now I’m ready to
face a new day.