Ah, laundry. It piles up and piles up and never seems to get completely done. Everyone has there own preferences and tricks, favorite detergents, be they powders or liquids, and don't even get me started on folding technique (my wife and I are fast approaching our 8th anniversary and still cannot agree on how to properly fold a bath towel!). Careful practice would say that we separate the colors from the whites. Oh, there's those commercials that try to convince us that their detergent allows us to mix it all up and the whites will stay white and colors stay fast...but we all know never to trust an advertisement! So we stand there on the cement floor near the basement floor drain by the light of a single bulb separating piles on the floor or in baskets or hampers. What constitutes an actual white varies too, but in the end, we do an outstanding job of separating all the whites out and we load up the empty washing machine with nothing but whites, turn the knob to HOT regular wash add your detergent, maybe some bleach if so inclined, and press on. The rush of water pouring into the body of the machine indicates its working and we can get back to folding until some time later, after wash, spin, rinse, and spin again and open the lid to prepare to load those damp whites into the dryer or into a basket to take to the laundry line to hang dry and we see it almost instantly. Even by the dim light of the single bulb in our basement laundry area we can tell the whites are no longer white. Our socks are pink! Our t-shirts are pink! Our wife's favorite white Capri pants are pink! Wait a minute. We spent all that time separating the colors out and still we have pink whites! We unload the entire washer and still can't find anything but pink whites. We then reach our hand under that plastic guard toward the top by the lid and there, stuck on the side of the washer is a toddler's red sock. We recognize it instantly. It's twin has been sitting on top of our son's dresser for weeks waiting for its mate to make its way back from the laundry room to be paired up and finally to return to the top drawer. You didn't fail to separate it out. It had been stuck there since the last round of reds!
1 Corinthians 5: 6b-7 (NIV) "Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast--as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."
Just like the yeast working its way through the whole dough, a tiny little red sock you failed to remove from the machine can turn your whites pink! The Bible passage is exhorting us to remove the yeast (sin) from our dough (our lives) so that we can be ourselves...CHRISTIANS....those that are saved by grace through faith in Jesus the Messiah. When we as Christians fail to purge ourselves from sinful habits and behaviors, our whiteness, our holiness, our reflection of the Holy One who died for us is turned pink. It is sometimes easier for us to eliminate the big red sweater (sins like adultery, murder, stealing) in our laundry pile of life but then fail to see that tiny speck of a red toddler sock hidden away (sin of coveting, anger, etc). Want the whitest whites? Eliminate all your sinful habits, and then use the ultimate detergent, the blood of Christ, our Passover lamb and savior to make you clean by grace through faith.
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