scrub

                    Can bubbles get you clean, or does it take something more?

                              Copyright 2007 / Leslie A Turvey

                                  Don’t scrub-a-dub-dub

                                  in the shower or tub.

                                Let our EZ Spray bubbles

                                  take those stains away.

Terrible poetry, I know, but it serves to introduce an important truth. Those EZ Spray bubbles   might bub-bub-bubble the stains from your shower stall, but they really don’t get the tiles clean.   Chances are those bubbles are bleach, and bleach doesn’t get out the deep down dirt. All it can   do is take the colour out. The cause of the grungy look is still there.

For several months my wife had used one of those no-work, spray-on wipe-off shower cleaners and,   each time for a few days, everything sparkled. But the real test came when I ran my thumb nail over the tiles. Yech! They looked clean, but there was a build up of soap scum the power bubbles had not touched.

Only one solution did the job. I scrub-a-dub-dubbed the tiles the old fashioned way with a cloth   and some tough-stuff cleansing powder. No more soap scum under the thumb nail.

Our lives are like that, aren’t they? We want the EZ way out. We go to church each week, listen   half-heartedly to a sermon, sing a few hymns and, to the world who sees us, we look sparkling   clean. But the build-up of scum is still there.

It’s tempting to list some of the popular scum – sins – we all need cleansing from, but you might   discover mine along with yours. Guess I won’t take the risk.

Oh, yes, the scum is there, and we expect our weekly hour in church will make us sparkling clean.   But it takes more than that to really clean up our lives. The psalmist, David of Israel prayed, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin (Psalm 51:2).” He didn’t expect a few EZ Spray bubbles to do the job. The Hebrew word for wash means to trample, to wash by stamping with the feet. In the days before laundry detergent and automatic washers, laundering was hard work. The scrub board was a relatively new invention a century ago. But before that clothes were made clean by scrubbing them on rocks at the river’s edge. And, it seems in David’s day the cleaning process meant stamping the dirt into the river with the feet.

  

In vs 7 he cried out, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter   than snow.” David didn’t want a once-over rinsing. He wanted to be thoroughly clean. Hyssop was   one of the things used in the purification of lepers (Leviticus 14:2-7). John Wesley argued that   David’s prayer was to be cleansed like a leprous and polluted creature.

Are we, who call ourselves Christians, ready for God to wash us thoroughly from our sins, or would   we rather have him simply shower us with some EZ Spray bubbles to make us look clean to the world?

Our eternal life depends on the answer.

-leslie a turvey