4/10/24
What is your morning routine? I will admit mine. The first thing I do most mornings is take a shower. I do this for multiple reasons. The main reason is it wakes me up but I also do it so I will be clean and look good. Then I spend time with the Lord in prayer and reading my Bible. The last thing I do is work on my devotional. Many people will spend so long getting ready that they don't have time to spend with the Lord. Unfortunately, this shows where their focus is. It is on appearance rather than dependence. Both Jesus and Paul used a term to describe this. Paul's uses this term in our text today. Acts 23:3 Then Paul said to him, “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall! Do you sit to try me according to the Law, and in violation of the Law order me to be struck?”
Paul was describing the priest who was ordering him to be slapped during his council hearing. Since Paul had yet to be found guilty of anything it was illegal to strike him. So Paul speaks out against the one who gave the order. He calls him a whitewashed wall. This is the term I will talk about today. This term comes from a description of trying to make something dirty look clean. However, it goes even further. The Jews would paint the entrance walls of a tomb with whitewash as a way of cleaning the outside of something that was defiled on the inside. This would be a warning to Jews if you proceed past this point you will find a dead body and be pronounced unclean. Paul and Jesus in using this term were saying, you have attempted to clean the outside but inside you are dead. I wonder how many people who proclaim the name of Christ are whitewashed. They go around speaking in actions and words look I am a Christian but all they have done is shower in the baptistry of a church and their inside is a dead corpse. We cannot clean our inside however, the word of God and prayer are the soap on the sponge of faith that the Holy Spirit's hand of grace uses to cleanse us with from the inside out. Stop attempting to cleanse your outside so you look good and give the Holy Spirit plenty of soap, through your time with God daily to scrub away the stench of death that has filled your insides.
Don't stand before God and have Him pronounce you have been whitewashed. Instead, stand before him and listen to Him say, I have washed you clean as I resided in you. Love Bro. Scott