Painting is not enough.

Yesterday I was driving down highway 34 on my way to Yorkville and noticed that the highway had fresh yellow paint. The yellow paint made the lanes much more obvious and it was clear that someone had put forth a lot of effort to make sure the lines were straight. It was much easier to determine where we could pass and where we could not pass. However, as I drove a little further I could not believe what my eyes saw. There in the road a squirrel had met its demise and was lying dead in the road. It apparently could not decide rather to cross the road or go back because it was lying in the middle of the yellow stripe. But then I noticed something that I had to look twice to be sure I was seeing it correctly. That dead squirrel had a perfectly drawn yellow stripe across its body. Two things immediately crossed my mind. First, how lazy a person must have been to paint over the squirrel (must work for the government?) The second thought that came to mind was how revealing it is of the human condition. We have this condition in our lives that we want to just paint over and it will look great to the casual observer. Instead of removing this problem that we have we try to cover over it and hope that no one will notice. The Bible calls this condition, sin. It is a deliberate rebellion against God and His standard. We try to cover over the sin problem by doing a lot of good deeds. Our thinking is that if we can just keep doing good things then no one will notice the condition inside us. We might try to cover up the condition within us by going to church and singing loud and talking very spiritual. By blending in with others they will not be as likely to notice that we have a terrible condition. There are other things that we try to do to disguise our condition, but the problem is that everything we do is just paint. It might look good, but it does nothing to rid us of the problem. Jesus talked about people that painted over their inward condition. Jesus stated "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness." Pretty strong words from Jesus, but something that we need to hear. Until we get rid of the condition within us, no amount of paint is going to cover up the truth. We need someone to perform some serious surgery on our inward condition. Jesus can do that if we will trust in his finished work on the cross. He will come into our lives, clean up the filth and remove the sin that dominates our life. Don't try to cover up your inward condition with a bunch of outward deeds. Get rid of that squirrel! Ask Jesus to come into your life and cleanse you from all unrighteousness and then live your life to bring glory to Him. He will wash away your sin and paint it white as snow. Then the good news is that He will be able to use you to point people in the right direction on the road of life. Why not do it today!