Consider the Source

Behind my childhood home was the "appliance" that had no bearing on our electric bill nor did it ever break down: the clothes line. I was actually very familiar with how it worked, too! Perhaps you can remember the joy of crawling into bed and the feel of clean, line-dried sheets ... nothing like it. As I recall those days, I also remember right next to the clothes line was a pig wallow (more accurately pronounced "waller). Oh, how those pigs loved to roll-around (waller) in that mud hole; and, the stench was horrible. There was no escaping the odor as long as the clothes line and the wallow shared space. There's a spiritual lesson for us, something well worth our consideration ... that is, if we desire holiness. After David's most famously recorded sin, God confronted him and David acknowledged his sin; his prayer is profound, "Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin ... Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:2,7, NASB). Noah Webster defines "wallow" as living in filth "as a man wallowing in his native impurity" (Webster's Dictionary, 1828). Our natural impurity is a terrible place in which our hearts should wallow! The stench of it is never contained: it overflows into our attitudes, our speech, our behavior. We must pray like David, "create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me" (V.10). Honestly, I don't recall those line-dried sheets having an unpleasant odor; that is not the way of the heart, however. Pay attention and carefully tend the heart because from it flows all that is life lives (Proverbs 4:23). The heart is the source of who we are ... consider the source.