Cleansing Grace
- Message: In John 13 when Jesus removed his robe and put a servant’s towel around his waist to wash his feet Peter was horrified. Jesus told him that he wouldn’t understand it then, but he would understand it later. We talked about some of this in yesterday’s devotion but what I want to focus on here is that Jesus was putting down his priestly privilege to be a servant, and more importantly, that he intended to wash him clean by washing his feet. This was literally the role of a servant in this culture so when Peter tried to refuse it Jesus told him that unless he allowed him to wash him he couldn’t be part of him.
- Command: Allow God to cleanse us of the filth in our lives.
- Promise: Jesus loves us enough that he won’t leave us in our filth.
- Warning: Resisting God’s cleansing is the same as resisting God.
- Application: In this story the role Jesus took in washing their feet was a huge point to show the servanthood. But the emphasis was when Jesus told him that if he didn’t allow him to wash him, he could have no part in him. In my mind I don’t really corelate those two things together but when I step back from the story a bit I see where we resist letting God cleanse us. Not because we struggle with seeing Jesus lay aside his honor to cleanse us. He certainly did that on the cross, but we may not want Jesus to deal with the dirty parts of us. There are so many reasons for this so I won’t even digress to that point, but this is still true of us today. We can’t be “in him” if we don’t allow Jesus to see the dirty parts of us and clean them. We have a tendency to throw the word “grace” around. We know we don’t deserve grace, but somehow we think it means that Jesus will overlook our sin. That he will look at our filthy dirty feet and not clean them up.
