Put Away The Polish

Go wash your hands!
How many times a day does a parent say those words to their children?
Before meals, after playing, after sneezing into their hands, and after using the bathroom.
Washing hands is an important practice for good hygiene and for keeping the germs away.

We are a culture that loves to take showers.
We shower in the morning, after we exercise, or after a run.
Some people are bath people; they prefer to soak in a hot tub rather than take a shower.
We are a culture who insists on staying clean.

For the most part we like things streamlined and free of clutter.
We wash our cars at the car wash.
We power wash our houses and decks.
We go through our closets and donate the things we don’t wear or use any longer.

Neat.
Clean.
Sanitized.

We want our lives to be that way as well.
Except our lives are a bit more difficult to de-clutter.
Our lives require that we deal with people.
People are messy.

Spend any length of time with another person and you will now that’s true.
Our lives are not free of clutter; they are not streamlined.
Our lives cannot be wrapped neatly in a box and tied with a little bow.
Our lives intersect and entwine with other lives.

We want to keep messy lives at a distance.
We keep them over there so they won’t remind us that our own lives are messy, too.
We clean ourselves up.
We disinfect and sanitize.

We do all that until we become unrecognizable.
We put the best of ourselves out there for everyone to see.
The messy part of ourselves is hidden beneath layers and layers of clean.
We are so polished and scrubbed that we have trouble recognizing ourselves.

We are fine.
We are doing great.
We couldn’t be better.
Platitudes.

A platitude is a trite, meaningless, or prosaic statement.
Platitudes are used to help us with our unease.
It is a safe way to communicate.
It doesn’t reveal too much.

We put the best of ourselves out there on social media.
We clean ourselves up.
We smooth the rough edges.
We polish what is tarnished.

We are polite, friendly, funny, carefree, and terribly lost.
No one knows what is really underneath the surface.
We give sound bites; a synopsis of the way we wish it could be.
We give glimpses of the best of us in order to hide the worst.

How does this perfect facade help the church?
How can anyone approach a perfect person and hope to be understood?
How can our sanitized lives ever point the way to a Savior?
We are so put together; we cannot minister to the broken with any sort of honesty.

When will God’s people take off their mask?
When will God’s people show their scars to others?
When we God’s people understand that when we are vulnerable, we are real?
When will God’s people admit that they are terribly broken?

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me a sinner.’  I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)

The Pharisee was polished, cleaned-up, and clutter-free.
Or so it seemed.
He did all the right things, kept all the rules, was highly favored in God’s eyes.
Or so he thought.

He put forth the best of himself.
He thought that God would appreciate all that he had done to earn God’s favor.
But God knew better.
The Pharisee tried to clean himself up rather than allow God to clean him up.

The tax collector, on the other hand, knew that he was dirty.
The tax collector knew that he was a sinner.
The tax collector had run out of polish; there was not enough soap to get himself clean.

All the tax collector could do was rely on the mercy of God.
That was all he needed to do.

The only perfect Person that ever lived was Jesus.
All of us fall short; we fall terribly short.
We can never begin to clean ourselves up to meet God’s perfect standards.
Why do we even try?

In our attempts to put our best face forward, we alienate those who need to see Him in us.
Those that need to see we don’t have it all figured out.
Those that need to see that we desperately need a Savior!

We need to admit that we are broken.
We need to bring all of our broken pieces to God.
We need to hold nothing back.
Mercy and Love, not polish and soap, will make you clean.

No platitudes.
Simple truth for the entire world to see.

Put away the polish.
Admit that you are broken.
Bring the broken pieces to God, the One who makes all things new.

Messy people need a Savior.
And that would be ALL of us!