Category Archives: Sin

Fresh Start (More on Mary tomorrow)

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Back in the 1940’s, housewives began using brand new products called laundry detergents in their wringer wash machines. These chemical compounds promised to clean clothes better than traditional soap ever had, even in hard water, and women were thrilled with the results on laundry day. All the detergents came in powdered or beaded form and were easy to use.

Fresh Start, late 1970'sIn the 1970’s, Colgate-Palmolive came out with the first laundry detergent sold in a bottle rather than a box, though it was still in powder form. They named it Fresh Start and promoted it as the first “highly concentrated” detergent on the market. Each full load needed only one-fourth of a cup rather than a whole one.

This morning in church, our Pastor Jay delivered a fascinating children’s sermon with a bottle of Fresh Start in his hand. The vintage bottle no longer contained detergent but had something far more interesting inside: water from the Jordan River in Israel. A pastor friend of Jay’s had given it to him after a visit there, and this water and the bottle it was in were the focal point of today’s message to the children.

Earlier in the service, Jay had baptized two babies. (Our church baptizes or dedicates, according to the wishes of the parents.) The detergent bottle and river water was meant as a visual to help youngsters understand the symbolism of baptism, the washing of our lives by the Living Water that is Jesus. Jesus himself was baptized in the Jordan River, and ever since, he wants us to see baptism as symbolic of being cleansed from sin.

Fresh StartAmazingly, the Fresh Start bottle with its bit of the Jordan in it was aptly named. It said, “Heavy Duty Fresh Start.” Who wouldn’t want one of those?

Our God is the champion of heavy duty fresh starts, and the bottle put it well: “Cleans your family’s deepest dirt and many tough stains.” That’s exactly what Jesus does for us when we repent of our sins. The Fresh Start label says, “Extra stain-fighting power! Concentrated for strength!” Jesus says the same about himself, though he deals with stains more difficult to clean than those on our clothes. He cleans the invisible ones on our insides.

All of us have been stained by sin, and we spend lots of time working to remove that dirt from our lives. Coming clean doesn’t happen, though, unless we ask God to wash us. After that he’ll give us a heavy duty fresh start!

Pastor JayJay’s detergent bottle even tells us what our lives can be like after we’ve been cleansed by Jesus. Wherever we go, it says, we’ll leave a “clean fresh scent.”

The Lord’s cleansing will smell good to us and to others. And even to Him.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)

Praising and Praying with Mary

  1. Praise for a weekend in Michigan making wedding plans with daughter Stina, and for time with 3 grandchildren
  2. Praise for feeling good, though very tired
  3. Pray for enough stamina to meet the many demands of this week. (More about this tomorrow)

Can I stop?

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???????????????????????????????One of the delightful pleasures of having babies around is watching them sleep, and one of the sweetest things they do in their sleep is practice their sucking. They’ll suck on bottles, pacifiers, their own tongues, or on mommy, all while unconscious. Sucking is their greatest skill, and we now know they do it even in the womb.

Experts debate about how much sucking is necessary for babies, but all agree it is beneficial. Somewhere along the way, though, all this sucking becomes a negative. Parents of pre-schoolers who have become too attached to their pacifiers or bottles know the difficulty of taking these things away.

Thumb sucking.I sucked my thumb as a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, and even as a school girl. By the time I was 8, my parents had tried every-which-way to make me stop: pinning the ends of my PJs closed, painting my thumb with distasteful medicine, punishing me, and threatening me with braces. Even dangling rewards in front of me to make me stop didn’t work. I loved sucking my thumb and didn’t ever want to quit.

Eventually I “went underground,” hiding my thumb-sucking behind a book or a long sleeve while in school, sneaking it at  home when no one was looking, freely sucking my thumb during the night. What finally made me stop was being caught (and teased) by my peers. The pain of that outweighed the sting of not being able to suck my thumb, and one day I just quit, though the longing didn’t disappear for several years.

God understands how hard it is to break a well-entrenched habit and can see what’s going on in our heads when we’re tussling with our self-will. He thoroughly understands the complicated nature of our brains and appreciates the whole serotonin thing, but he still asks us to work on taming bad habits. “You don’t have to do it alone, though,” he says. “I’ll help you.”

Many bad habits get their start in something good that we’ve taken to an undesirable extreme. Then, when we try to reel it back to reasonable levels, we’re dogged by failure and conclude we’ll never be able to break free. Success can be ours, but probably not until we admit we need the help and cheerleading of someone else. We need “a higher power,” and that, of course, is the Lord.

Once we take advantage of his willingness to partner with us, we’ve taken the first step to becoming the person we wanted to be all along. And best-case-scenario, that habit we struggled to conquer will become only one small piece of a very distant past….

Thumb sucking in the womb….just like the sucking of a baby.

“There is a time for everything.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

The Flip Side

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45sBack in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s we bought popular music on small black records with big center holes that could only be played on properly equipped hi-fi machines. Because of their rpm speed, they were nicknamed “45’s”, with a Top 40 hit on the A side and a not-so-popular one on the B. We wore out the “good” sides and virtually never played the “bad” ones.

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My 3 year old grandson Micah reminds me of those old 45’s. His A side is tender and sweet, causing him to suddenly stop playing and rush over to me (or someone else) to deliver a kiss and a hug. “I love you,” he’ll say in a lilting voice, and I absolutely melt. With his strawberry blond curls and round face, he resembles a cherub straight from heaven.

But Micah has a B side, too. It can pop up without warning and amaze us with its intensity. For example, when asked to get ready for his bath, he might ask for a longer play time. But very quickly the “please can I…” escalates to “I can’t because…” followed by further resistance at increasing volume, till finally he’s having what I call a hissy-fit.

It’s his flip-side, and he has flipped out.

We adults may inwardly feel much like Micah when we’re told what to do, but we don’t let ourselves show it. It can be especially evident in our relationship with God.

Scripture refers to this problem as our old and new natures warring against each other. Paul explained it well in Romans 7 when he described his repeated failure to live a righteous life. “I want to do what’s right, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what’s wrong, but I do.”

We (and Micah) can all relate to this same miserable struggle, because it’s endemic to mankind. Paul says, “I love God’s law with all my heart. But there’s another power within me that’s at war with my mind.” He defines it as sin. He recognizes, as all of us should, that the trouble is not with God but with us. We’re willfully disobedient and need empowerment from someone other than ourselves if we’re to rise above hissy-fits.

Thankfully, Paul defines that help as the Holy Spirit. He says it’s not necessary to bounce back and forth between our A and B sides. “The power of the life-giving Spirit has freed us from the power of sin.” (8:2) Now that’s good news!

Tender-hearted Micah.And as precious Micah gets to know Jesus better, one day he can live regularly on his A side with only an occasional flip to his B. In the mean time, his grandma Midgee is eating up the hugs and kisses, letting his mommy and daddy deal with his flip side.

“As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.” (1 Peter 1:14-15)