Life’s a mess. This is incontrovertibly true, no matter who you are. Some of us are better at hiding it (hedge fund managers, Dalai Lamas, me) than others (Kardashians, hacky-sack players, you), but we’re all a mess. We all want to be able to put our mess behind us; to start over. We all want a clean slate; to be washed. That’s why we’re coming to New York (a place that is truly a mess…I’m looking at you, trash night…er, rat night)…David Zahl (a mess) has promised us a conference that will tell us about this mythical creature: the cleaned slate. We’ve heard about it, but we’re not sure we’ve ever seen one. We’re coming. But we’re wary.
Why are we wary? You see, we already know that the answer is Jesus. But what sounds like good news at first (Yay! Jesus!) turns into bad news (Ugh…the one person who doesn’t need a clean slate!) when we feel the grating of our mess coming up against his clean.
We’ve heard that Jesus (not a mess) is all about cleaning up life’s messes. All our guilty stains are washed “white in the blood of the lamb” (Revelation 7:14). I’ve heard people say pithy things like “we can never out-sin the coverage of God’s grace” (presenter Tullian Tchividjian, a mess) So, in theory, there is no stain that Christ’s blood cannot wash out. But can this really be true? And, more importantly, can this really be true for me?
What about the mess I’ve made of things? What about when I keep making the same mess over and over again?
Using my signature style of stringing words together to make sentences and sentences together to make paragraphs, I’ll lead a breakout session at the upcoming New York City Mockingbird Conference that will follow Jesus through some of his Gospel-told adventures. What happens when Jesus comes up against the unclean? We’ll find, epic showdown by epic showdown, that Jesus has bad news for the unclean person. Frighteningly, that’s you and me. Jesus’ brand of cleanser is worse than caustic. It’s destructive. But that destruction is never the end of the story. Cleanliness can be yours.
Yes, even you Tricia. And you too, Gary.
So let’s get our messes together at 10:30am this Friday, April 17, and talk about the possibility of a clean slate…even for people like us.
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This sounds great!