In many a home washday comes around every week with unfailing regularity. Even little girls delight to be like their mothers and love to wash their dolly’s clothes.
How happy it is when from earliest childhood a love of cleanliness is instilled into the heart. A dirty home can never be a happy home, and a lack of personal cleanliness can make one an object of dislike to others.
Now just as dirt is not tolerated in respectable homes, so sin could not be tolerated in heaven. God is holy, and He cannot allow anything unholy to enter there. It is His dwelling place, and no taint of sin can be allowed to defile it.
What about you and me? We are sinners—sinful in thought and word and deed. Must heaven’s door be shut against us forever because of this?
No, thank God, for there is a way of being washed from the black stains of guilt and cleansed from all that which would shut us out from God’s dwelling place in glory.
I wonder if you have been cleansed from your sin?
Away up in the far, far north is the grave of a poor sailor who died during an Arctic exploration-a grave which perhaps is nearer than any other to the North pole. It bears upon the simple wooden post that marks its position amid those bleak, dreary, frozen wastes a simple prayer—
“WASH ME, AND I SHALL BE WHITER THAN SNOW.”
“A fine epitaph,” says an American writer, “but we must not leave it for our gravestone!” Nor must we leave it for our dying hour. Here and now we should seek cleansing, if we have not done so yet, through Christ’s precious atoning blood.
Happy is the boy or girl who is—
1.) Cleansed once for all from sins by the blood of Christ.
2.) Cleansed day by day by the purifying power of the Word of God.
“Though thy sins are red like crimson,
Deep, in scarlet glow,
Jesus’ precious blood can make them
White as snow.
“Consecrate yourselves
Today to the Lord...;
That He may bestow
Upon you
A blessing this day.”
ML-06/04/1978