Anyone more than a couple of years old knows you can’t clean your hands with a dirty towel. You’re grilling out, and a hot dog on the grill bursts open and sprays hot grease across your hand. UCK! You remember there’s a towel in the garage just a few steps away. Someone, probably the “neighbor kid” (wink) used it to wipe up an oil spill. Triple uck! You’d never use that to wipe off your hand. The same principle applies to sin. In previous messages I’ve pointed out that everyone – every, single, one – has sinned. That means everyone is a dirty towel. Even the pastors and priests people idolize (see what I did there? Idolize?) are flawed. They cannot save you. If you use a clean towel to wipe the grease off your hand, you wouldn’t use it on anything else until it’s been washed. A bit of relish spills in the kitchen, and you still wouldn’t use the greasy towel. Christ is so pure and clean – infinitely so – that He can be used to clean the dirtiest of dirt and have plenty of purity left to wipe away the sins of the person beside you. In fact, there is nothing His cleanliness cannot clean. We, on the other hand, aren’t clean enough to help the dirtiest person without His help. And then it’s not us doing it, but rather Jesus. A few months ago a coworker’s wife was told she probably had ovarian cancer. Nasty stuff, ovarian cancer. If it’s caught early enough, it’s not really too horrid, but it can quickly progress to the point where there’s not much that can be done. That coworker left early from work one day for appointments to have more testing done. I write on my lunch breaks. I can quickly lose myself in my writing, and have at times returned to work later than I’m comfortable with. That particular day I glanced at the clock at the exact time this man’s wife was to start those appointments. I stopped work on my latest project and prayed. I’m not a guy who prays much. God has called some for one mission, others for another. Praying isn’t what I’m called to do much of, though I talk to God multiple times every day. So when I say I prayed, it’s not a simple chat with God. Later that night I got a PM on Facebook – she didn’t have ovarian cancer. The previous diagnosis, which was all but certain, was wrong. The exact malady she had isn’t important. The point of that vignette is that my prayer did not heal her. God did. I was a paper towel that wiped up a bit of hot dog grease. God is the one who made me clean enough to have my prayer mean enough that He could alter the diagnosis. Dirt cannot clean dirt. As dirty as I am, He gave me the privilege of interceding on behalf of a coworkers wife. I’m honored, not proud, that I was for that moment clean enough to have my prayer effective.
UPDATE: From the time of my writing this to getting it posted, she went through chemo. A few weeks ago an MRI showed her cancer free.
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