Talk about the power of words!
He walked in Sunday morning, smelling like Friday night.
I heard those lyrics this past Sunday morning on a southern gospel radio station. I don’t remember the title of the song, or even the rest of it, but the first line struck me.
Our Friday nights are often very different from our Sunday mornings. Sunday morning, of course, we walk into church. Many of us make a good appearance. We walk in dressed in our best clothes, with our best manners, and our friendliest personalities–hiding what we don’t want others to see–our hypocrisies–the awful smell of our sins.
On Sunday mornings, we ask for forgiveness with the idea that God will wash away all we’ve done wrong doing the past week. Of course, God, our Father, can do this if He wants, but wouldn’t the father of a wayward child expect the bad behavior to stop? Wouldn’t a loving father present a criteria for the child–criteria that included reprimand if it did not stop?
Each of us is in an ongoing collaboration with God. He has presented us with a covenant. “I am your God. You are my people.” Sometimes we forget that second sentence and expect God to do all the work while we simply come into church, smelling like Friday night, for our short, weekly bath. And then return to play in the mud.
This is typical of our human nature which is sometimes very weak. Still, we are called to change ourselves. We are the ones who have to run the shower, pick up the soap, and do the work.
We cannot say it is not our fault. We are the ones who have sinned, so we are the ones responsible for washing our own spiritually dirtied clothes and cleaning up our own smelly messes.
Translating a World on the Edge 