How Do You Clean House?–Large Print Tract

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The giant print and message shown below make this an excellent tract for your next visit to a nursing home. It looks great in color or black and white.

Some of the ancient cliff-dwellers of Arizona had an interesting way of cleaning house. The smoke of their fires filled their old stone dwellings and covered their walls with a black layer of soot. When this became intolerable they did not wash or scrape it off, but calmly went to work and plastered over it a fresh white coat of a kind of mortar, one above the other—eleven layers of mortar—eleven housecleaning days, no one knows how many years apart.
We smile, but those who live in precisely such houses should not throw stones.
I don’t mean to say that we clean house in just this way, (though it is possible to find houses where there may be four or five layers of wallpaper, one over the other). What I do mean is the way many of us clean house in our own souls.
How we shrink from facing the dirt—the sin—within us! It seems so much easier to whitewash ourselves just as we are. So the whitewash is made up, a smooth blend of morality and respectability and self-righteousness, and it leaves the soul outwardly a fine bright white. But scratch it anywhere and—ugh! the black underneath!
Someday, in the white light of the holiness of God, all this whitewash will peel off and such soul-rooms will be seen to be pitch black—nothing but black—and black forever.
When God says, “Wash ye, make you clean” (Isaiah 1:16), He does not mean a little cosmetic polishing up of outward appearances nor a little more socially acceptable behavior. God desires “truth in the inward parts,” but, “who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” (Proverbs 20:9).
David, the writer of the Psalms, knew the only way to be cleansed from his sins. He prayed: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy loving-kindness: according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin…. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow…. Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:1-2,7,10).
Cleansed from sin—whiter than snow—a clean heart—no whitewash there! Cleansed from sin—how?
There is only one way: “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
It is only through faith in His blood that was shed on Calvary’s cross that we can be washed and clean and fit for the presence of God. No effort of our own can make us so, but believing and receiving His cleansing makes us “clean every whit.”
“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18).