Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Paint vs. siding

You will cover over my sin (Job 14:17).

When I was little, Mom and Dad repainted our house. I was drafted into the project—it seemed like I spent hours and hours scraping away old paint. It was slow, frustrating work, because no matter how hard I tried, I could never get all the old paint off. But Dad said that if we didn’t do a good job scraping, the new coat of paint would not stick the way it should.

As I got older, I found out one additional frustration that comes with painting—you have to do it over and over again. By the time I was an adult, I’d had enough of scraping and painting. When our first house started peeling, my wife and I hired someone else to do the work.

Of course, I knew about siding. Siding was a permanent solution. Siding did not require scraping or repainting—as a matter of fact, the sales rep told me that it is better to put siding over wood that was peeling than over a surface that was recently painted. But as attractive as siding was, we simply could not afford it. So repainting was the way to go, even though we knew it would someday have to be done again.

All of us are like houses that need to be scraped and repainted. Our souls are ugly—ugly with selfishness, prejudice, and laziness. We try to cover up our imperfections with a coat of paint; we dress well, we socialize with the right people, and we give to charity. But no matter how hard we try to make ourselves look good, the paint flakes off, revealing the ugliness underneath. We lose our temper for no good reason. We make fun of people that are different from us. We impulsively make bad decisions.

We need Jesus. The Carpenter from Nazareth will cover up our ugliness with His siding, a siding from God called righteousness. There is no backbreaking effort involved; we don’t need to be scraped down. And there’s no cost—the Son of God installs His siding for free. Covered by Jesus, our ugliness is permanently hidden—the work of Christ covers all of our flaws. Of course, the storms of life and the vandalism of Satan chip away at Jesus’ work, so it’s important that we have a close relationship with the Master Carpenter. If He lives with us, He’s always on hand to fix any damage caused by sin.

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