Clothes - Pt 10

When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 1:12-20 ESV). I rarely wear white dress shirts anymore; however, when I do I am especially careful with that last cup of coffee while driving to my destination. There have been those times when I ignored that personal rule and hit a bump in the road spilling coffee at the most inopportune moment, getting it on the white shirt. There really isn’t a good way to remove coffee stains from white shirts while driving to a speaking engagement! I suppose I could just ignore the stain and hope that no one notices, though that wouldn’t work for someone as particular as I am with things like that. After all, on an important occasion like a speaking engagement, clothes need to be clean. There is a spiritual application here as well. We often forget that our souls get stained too. Our pride, selfishness, and envy stain our lives from the inside out. Occasionally we catch glimpses of the ugliness. But no matter how hard we try, we can’t scrub out our sin. That’s why God’s promise in Isaiah is such good news. He says that our sins can be washed clean. Jesus cleans us from the inside out. He washes our soul’s dirty laundry. In Revelation, the apostle John sees people from “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes” (cf. Revelation 7:9). The only one who could offer dazzling white robes is the one who has washed away all sin. As we come to the close of this little series on clothes in the Scripture, my encouragement to all of us is to focus on the incredible grace God has performed on our behalf through Christ. It is much more than forgiveness of our sin. It is the reuniting of our spirit with our heavenly Father and returning us to our created state of perfect fellowship with Him. That “clothing” is more than just clean… it is perfect forever!