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IT’S HARD TO LIVE STRAIGHT IN A WORLD OF TILT

 

I have often criticised the lyrics of some of the stuff you hear sung in church gatherings, like the Brian Doerksensong, ‘Purify my heart, let me be as gold and precious silver.’ Sometimes I think I should mellow a little, but perhaps not, because that particular song can lead you to believe that you’ve got to pray that prayer every day; grovelling before God the Celestial Policeman, pleading  for forgiveness for misdemeanours he has long since forgotten. Frankly, that’s nothing short of heresy, because biblical teaching is that the sacrifice of Jesus was a once and for all affair.  Sometimes I get cross when people talk about, ‘keeping a short account with God,’ because under the terms of the Old Testament the blood of bulls covered the sins of the Israelis for a full year, but some Christians seem to think that the blood of Christ doesn’t deal with our sins for even a week!

 

Having said that, I readily accept that our minds can be contaminated by the world in which we live; the rubbish in the Soaps, the gutter grunge of Big Brother, the greed of materialism. Although I admit I could be wrong there because I’ve never watched more than a couple of minutes of a couple of episodes of that one, but surely the degrading spectacle of George Galloway MP pretending to be a cat eating something out of a lady’s hand is enough to make any balanced person cringe!

 

There’s a story my mum used to tell about a woman who went to see her minister, she was worried that however hard she tried to remember his sermons or memorise passages of Scripture, it all seemed to go in one ear and out the other; ‘What’s the point in me coming to church every Sunday,’ she wailed, ‘when I can’t retain a single word?’

 

The minister noticed she had a wicker basket in her hand.

 

‘Go down to the river and bring me back a basket of water,’ he told her. The woman looked at him in a peculiar way, but submissively trotted off to the nearby river bank, and as you would expect, by the time she got back, the basket was empty.

 

‘Do it again,’ said the minister, and off she went, back to the river bank, but once again she presented him an empty wet basket. After a while the woman got irritated; ‘How can I bring you a basket of water?’ she complained.  ‘I’ve been to the river and back six times and the water just trickles through the wicker. It’s futile!’

 

‘No it’s not futile,’ said the minister. ‘Look at your basket. See how clean it is?’

 

Do you want to have a clean heart? You can, but it’s not easy, for as an old friend said to me the other evening, ‘It hard to live straight in a world of tilt.’ However, the answer doesn’t necessarily lie in being preached at more, or chanting the mantra; ‘Purify my heart...’ No, it’s about creating a little space of quietness in your life, to sit, alone, listening to the quiet, inner voice.  And here’s what you might hear, ‘My sacrifice was a perfect sacrifice, by a perfect person to perfect some very imperfect people. Trust me; I have already wiped your slate clean – forever!’ (Hebrews 10).

 

Now, isn’t that a wonderful de-contaminant?