No matter how good it is, it has to be cleaned up. Isn’t that always the case? No matter how good anything is, it has to be cleaned up. You get a new suit of clothes, you wear it a few times -- maybe only one time, in this heat -- and before you know it, it has to go off to the dry cleaners. No matter how good and beautiful it was when you got it, eventually it will have to be cleaned.
You go to the showroom, and they dazzle you with those bright, shiny chariots, enhanced by several thousand watts overhead. There is nothing quite as spectacular as a brand new car, and when you make your deal and get it out on the road, you can just feel every head turning, you just know that every eye is following you. Spectacular! But then you park it out under these big trees when you come to church, and let nature take its course, and if it is not sap dripping from the leaves, it is pollen sifting down like a sickly green blanket; and if is neither sap nor pollen, it will be those dirty birds dive-bombing you. Before long the awful truth hits you. You have to do a cleanup job. A cleanup job is inevitable. No matter how good anything is, it has to be cleaned up. The cleanup job is inevitable.
I’d go a little further. I’d insist that anything which is worth having, anything which is worth nurturing, is also worth cleaning up. If you value it, you will clean it, gladly.
We have a variety of garden plots in our back yard. Some of them are very little trouble, because they were filled twenty years ago with wild flowers imported from Kentucky, and, as you know, anything or anyone imported from Kentucky takes care of itself and is no trouble whatsoever.
But we also have some plots we use to grow vegetables. And these are quite another matter. While we were away in England one of those plots, designed for tomatoes and lettuce, instead sprouted dandelions and wild onions. It had to be cleaned up. If we hadn’t invested last Monday morning in uprooting those weeds and cleaning out that bed, our veggies would have been completely choked out. The cleanup job was inevitable; but it was worth it, it was necessary to get a worthwhile harvest.
No matter how good anything is, from time to time it has to be cleaned up. But if that thing is of any value at all, the cleanup job, inevitable as it may be, is eminently worth the effort.
Now for the past two weeks I’ve been referring to the First Letter of John as Dr. God’s Baby Book. I’ve been comparing it to all of the things we have to do with and for babies to get them going and growing on the right track. Two weeks ago I spoke about the "Elbow Test”, whereby you try to provide just the right climate or environment for spiritual health. Last week we thought together about "First Stumbling Steps" and about what it means to learn to walk with Christ.
Today our theme is "The Inevitable Cleanup Job". I don’t think you have to be Solomon to figure out in what sense babies and cleanups go together. Let me not offend anyone’s sensibilities or their sense of smell by getting too specific. But amidst all the sentimentality about babies, despite all the oohing and ahhing over little ones, one unpleasant fact remains: infants have to be cleaned up. Inevitably, unavoidably, they have to be cleaned up. At the most inopportune times, such as ten minutes after you have put them to bed and stolen off yourself for forty winks, they have to be cleaned up.
What is my premise this morning? That cleanup jobs are inevitable in every aspect of life. And that anything worth growing, anything we value, anyone who is maturing, is worth the energy and the investment of cleaning up. Who would question that’? Who would doubt that it is more than worthwhile to clean up those little guys and keep them healthy and happy?
Dr. God’s Baby Book, as expressed in the First Letter of John, makes that point and makes it forcefully. Listen to this passage and listen for the word "cleanse", and you will see how Dr. God’s Baby Book instructs us about cleanups, spiritual cleanups.
I John 1 :5-10
I
Dr. God’s Baby Book makes it abundantly clear that the cleanup job is, indeed, inevitable. Nothing could be more forceful, nothing could be more clear than John’ s insistence that the filth called sin is a reality.
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us … if we say that we have not sinned, we make him (God) a liar, and his word is not in us."
Why would anybody deny the reality of sin? Why would anyone, reading the world’s grim history, suggest that sin is unreal? Why would anyone with half a mind and with eyes open to the streets of this or any other city, suggest that we have no sin?
And yet, from time to time, the intellectual fashion is to discount the reality of sin, to play down its harshness, give it another name. TV and movie scriptwriters poke fun at people who still have a conscience. It’s popular to discount the harsh reality called sin. That tells me we are trying to avoid it; we are denying something very powerful that is happening inside ourselves.
And yet sin’s devastating effects are all around us, if we’ll only admit them for what they are. Young men and women die in our streets, blown away for next-to-no reason at all. Do not tell me that this is nothing more than the product of supply and demand economics. This is the outgrowth of something called sin.
Young women, some of them little girls as young as ten years old, find themselves sexually abused and then thrown away like yesterday’s newspaper when they become inconvenient. Do not disguise this by calling it romantic obsession; do not glorify it by naming it youthful indiscretion. Call it what it is; call it by its unglamorous name of filth, dirt, sin.
You see, the real issue is that we are all tempted to deny reality. Even if we are convinced intellectually that sin is real, most of us do not focus very well on its personal dimension. Most of us deny that it’s serious. Oh, just a little problem. But it’ll go away. I’ll be all right. I’m a pretty good person.
But John will not let us get away with this. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" And deeper yet, "if we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar, and his word is not in us." In other words, the cleanup job is inevitable.
Dr. God’s Baby Book insists that we, like all babies, like all growing things, accumulate dirt. And we have to be cleaned up. There is no choice. Do you know the comic strip baby "Marvin", who acts as a magnet for mud? Do you remember the cartoon character Linus in the Peanuts strip who can be standing perfectly still in the middle of nowhere and see his clothes suddenly sprout smudges and his hair spontaneously spring into a tangle? Like every child who ever came into the world, you and I, infants in God’s universe, just plain soil ourselves. And cleaning us up is inevitable.
II
But, remember, I’ve pointed out that when you value something, you don’t mind cleaning it up. If you care for someone, you clean it up gladly. And so I have good news for you this morning. I have the best of news for you this morning.
Our God has decided that you are I are worth cleaning up. God in Jesus Christ has decided that we are worth it, and He is going to do it. He is going to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. All we have to do is to acknowledge that we need it.
In the middle of all our efforts to deny our sin, you see, God comes crashing in to let us know that He is not fooled, not for one moment, about what our problem is. But He comes to do something about it. We must be cleaned, and God says, I will do it. You are worth it. I love you. I value you. I will clean you. All you must do is to present yourself, and I will do the rest. John puts it this way:
"If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin … If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
May I put that into our kind of language? Once we let the truth come to light, once we find out we are none of us any different from anybody else, once we just admit that we need help, then there is one there who will help. There is one who will give his energies and his very life to see that we get the cleansing help that we need. And that one is Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ, who, though sinless, lived among the sinful; Jesus Christ, who, though guiltless, paid the price of the condemned; Jesus Christ, who, though all-sufficient, humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. And all we have to do is to acknowledge our need; we have to acknowledge it freely and openly -- that’s what confession means and that’s what John means when he speaks of having fellowship with one another and then submitting to the cleansing blood of Christ.
I want you to notice that the key is confessing our sin within the fellowship of faith. The key is acknowledging our problem freely and openly. "If we walk in the light … we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us … if we confess our sins, he … will forgive us and cleanse us.” God in His wisdom has seen that we work so very hard at denying our need, we work so very hard at avoiding the truth, and so He has ordained that when we are ready to confess our need, we should do so within the family of faith.
That’s what He gave us the church. The church is here to receive and accept people, with all their flaws and failings, because we all have the same basic need. The church is not here as a mutual admiration association; the church is not the Sunday society of the smugly self-satisfied, gathering to congratulate one another on our goodness. The church is a gathering of the filthiest people there are, keeping each other honest and open before God, so that His cleansing forgiveness can flow. "We have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us … if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us and cleanse us."
Despite what I may have looked like to a few of you who attended a funeral I led on Friday at a Catholic church, I am not a priest. At least not in the everyday sense of that word. But the truth is that sometimes I function like one, and so do some of you. We hear confessions. Or sometimes we see confessions. Sometimes when I am talking with someone about his or her problems, the voice says, "No, no, I have no problem" but the tears in the eye say, "Yes, yes, I’ve been found out, haven’t I?" I’d love to say this morning that, yes, a whole lot of us have been found out. Practically every one of us here knows some dirt about somebody else in this roan. But that’s not a negative. That’s not bad. That’s a positive. That’s a gift. If we ever act like the church of Jesus Christ, it is when we love each other, dirt and all. When we accept each other, knowing that the cleanup is inevitable. And so when we come together, we don’t need to hide from each other, we don’t need to protect our reputations. We just expose ourselves to one another, and into the midst of that exposure, into the midst of that light, comes the Lord Christ, pouring out His life’s blood to do for us what we have finally confessed we needed to have done.
Glory to His name! There to my heart was the blood applied, glory to His name!
Let me share with you a very earthy story. A friend of ours says that she realized one day that it was past time to respond to her little daughter’s needs. She stood in astonishment as that child went to the bedroom, got a clean diaper, spread it out on the floor, wriggled out of the dirty diaper, and then flopped down on top of the fresh one, waiting for Mom to finish up!
That’s what confession is like. We know we need to be cleaned up. It’s inevitable that the need will occur. We know also that someone is going to have to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. But what we surely can do is divest ourselves of the old filthy rags we’ve carried around too long, and be ready for something fresh!
Come to the Lord’s Table, gathering there with all who are honest enough to admit their need, sharing fellowship with men and women whose only qualification to be here is that we admit we are not capable of cleansing ourselves. Come to the Lord’s Table, we presenting ourselves just as we are, in all of our need, and trusting Him. We simply trust Him. And He whose blood was spilled for us whom He loves and values, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
