Uncleanness

Firefighters from three departments responded to a report of a house on fire in the Cherry Grove area of Vancouver, Washington. When an engine from Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue (CCFR) arrived, fire personnel announced there would be “access issues” to the single-story residence because of clutter.

Fire and smoke were visible from the windows in the kitchen and living room area of the home, but the yard around the house was cluttered with appliances, vehicles, and storage bins. That made it difficult for firefighters to quickly stretch hose lines to the structure.

A news release stated: “Once firefighters were able to clear out some of the clutter and make access to the house, the fire had grown too large to safely make an offensive interior attack. In addition, the interior spaces of the house were also very cluttered with high piles of clothing, storage bins, appliances, furniture, and other items.”

Fire Chief John Nohr said, “Normally in these types of fires, we bring in a track hoe to tear apart the piles. Due to the clutter in the yard, we weren’t able to get heavy equipment in there to help with extinguishment.”

Extreme clutter is dangerous for firefighters, especially when mixed with a smoky environment, because responders can get lost in the clutter. The piles of items can also tip over, crush, or entrap firefighters.

Nohr said, “In 37 years in the fire service, this is one of the most extremely cluttered homes I’ve ever seen. I feel for the family that has lost all of their possessions, but I also feel for the firefighters who put themselves at significant risk trying to fight a fire in a house this full.”

Possible Preaching Angle:
Like houses, a clean life is more than just convenient. It could also be the difference between a close call and destruction. Honest confession of sin provides the opportunity to clean out your stuff now. You don't want to try to desperately clean up in an emergency. New Years is an excellent time to reevaluate your life.

Your stainless-steel refrigerator is hard enough to keep smudge free but consider what it costs in time and materials to clean a stainless-steel truck.

Matt McClure began to worry about how to keep his new $100,000 Tesla Cybertruck clean before he even owned it. He spent hours researching the internet for tips on keeping the exterior clean.

One Reddit user exclaimed, “WD-40 is the way to go.” No, retorted another – glass cleaner is the safest option. Adhesive-remover Goo Gone has its proponents too, while others swear by Bar Keepers Friend.

Chris Leiter also weighed in. In daily use, he often worries about “the stainless-steel panel above the front bumper becoming a massive graveyard for bugs.” At one point guessed there were upward of 3,000 squashed bugs on the truck front. (Seeking a more accurate count, he later submitted a photo of the bug massacre to ChatGPT, which estimated about 4,600 deceased bugs.)

McClure then shelled out $500 for cleaning products and settled on a multistep process to wash and coat the truck. His step-by step process is as follows: Wash with car shampoo. Apply a stainless-steel rust remover. Clean with Bar Keepers Friend and Windex. Dry thoroughly. Wipe the vehicle down with isopropyl alcohol. Finish with ProtectaClear, a coating for metal that helps hide fingerprints.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Customers might keep a Cybertruck for a few years, but your soul is forever. There is a song that asks, “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Jesus paid an expensive price to make our souls as white as snow, but He did it out of love, for all time, and He offers it for free to all who will follow Him.

Since 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit, over 4,000 people have successfully climbed Mount Everest. Unfortunately, the climbers have also littered the mountainside with garbage, such as used oxygen bottles, ropes, and tents. Today, Everest is so overcrowded and full of trash that it has been called the “world’s highest garbage dump.”

No one knows exactly how much waste is on the mountain, but it is in the tons. Litter is spilling out of glaciers, and camps are overflowing with piles of human waste. Climate change is causing snow and ice to melt, exposing even more garbage that has been covered for decades. All that waste is trashing the natural environment, and it poses a serious health risk to everyone who lives in the Everest watershed.

Both governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have attempted—and are attempting—to clean up the mess on Mount Everest. In 2019, the Nepali government launched a campaign to clear 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of trash from the mountain. They also started a deposit initiative. Anyone visiting Mount Everest has to pay a $4,000 deposit, and the money is refunded if the person returns with eight kilograms (18 pounds) of garbage—the average amount that a single person produces during the climb.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Legacy - We should all pause for a moment and think, “In my climb up the ladder of success, what am I leaving behind? Will others have to pick through my "garbage"?2) Sinfulness; Cleansing – We all have a filthy old nature which is desperately in need of the deep cleaning and spiritual renewal that only God’s Spirit can perform. “He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

The Ganges River is one of the world’s largest fresh water outlets, after the Amazon and the Congo. The headwaters emerge from a glacier high in the western Himalayas, and then drops down steep mountain canyons to India’s fertile northern plain. Just after it merges with the Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. It supports more than a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal, and part of Bangladesh.

But sadly, the Ganges has also long been one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The river is befouled by poisonous bi-products from hundreds of factories and towns. Arsenic, chromium, and mercury combine with the hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that flow into the river on a daily basis.

But despite countless studies and evidence proving the river's polluted state, environmentalists have gained little traction in cleaning up the river. Why?

The Ganges River is a sacred waterway worshipped by a billion Hindus as Mother Ganga, a living goddess with power to purify the soul, and to cleanse itself. A recent article in National Geographic explains: “There is this belief that the river can clean itself. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? Many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

False gods are capable of cleaning neither themselves or their worshippers. Only Jesus can purify the pollution of the human heart.

Beginning in 2019, the entire globe became immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic that has so massively disrupted our daily routines. And there is an understandable obsession with physical cleanliness, which is keeping pace with the spread of the virus itself. Everywhere we look are signs demanding that we regularly wash our hands and refrain from touching our faces. Personal hygiene has become paramount.

In the early stages of the pandemic, we heard of certain individuals who were hoarding a wide variety of hand cleansers and then selling them at exorbitant prices. At offices, stores, and public places are numerous containers of disinfectant wipes that we are expected to apply generously to all surfaces and objects. The disinfectant claims to kill cold and flu viruses and virtually all bacteria within fifteen seconds.

Needless to say, the concern in the wake of COVID-19 is physi­cal health. External cleanliness to guard us against infection is the goal. It is common sense to take steps to protect ourselves from such outbreaks of disease. But to put this crisis in an eternal perspective, the worst that COVID-19 can do is take your physical life. Any form of physical infection from a lethal virus can do only so much.

But there is a worse virus circulating in our world which is 100 percent fatal. It is the virus of sin, contracted from spiritual rebellion and its eternal consequences for people is far more severe. It is staggering to think that so many people obsess over their physical welfare but give little or no thought to the health of their soul.

“O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah” (Ps. 39:4-5).

In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek discusses the importance of motivation in a very interesting section titled “It’s What You Can’t See That Matters.”

Detergent advertisers once promoted their product with statements like “Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter.” That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. But was it really? Sinek explains:

The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different. The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights…. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean.

Later a group of anthropologists discovered that this approach wasn’t really driving buying decisions. They observed that when people took their laundry out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white and bright it was. The first thing people did was to smell it. Sinek concludes, “This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.”

Possible Preaching Angle: This same attitude extends out of the laundry room deep into the recesses of our hearts. We are much more interested in the illusion of clean than the reality of clean.

In his book The Porn Problem, author Vaughan Roberts recalled the following:

Bobby Moore was the England soccer captain who received the World Cup from Queen Elizabeth when England won the trophy in 1966. An interviewer later asked him to describe how he felt. He talked about how terrified he was as he approached Her Majesty, because he noticed she was wearing white gloves, while his hand, which would soon shake the Queen’s, was covered in mud from the pitch … As the triumphant captain walks along the balcony, he keeps wiping his hand on his shorts, and then on the velvet cloth in front of the Royal box in a desperate to get himself clean.

Roberts continued, “If Bobby Moore was worried about approaching the Queen with his muddy hands, how much more horrified should we be at the prospect of approaching God? Because of our sin, we are not just dirty on the outside; our hearts are unclean. And God doesn’t just wear white gloves; he is absolutely pure, through and through.”

Many have never heard of Spruce Pine, North Carolina but this remote area is tremendously important to the rest of the world. It's the mineral found here—snowy white grains, soft as powdered sugar. It's quartz, but not just any quartz. Spruce Pine is the source of the purest natural quartz—a species of pristine sand—ever found on Earth. This ultra-pure material plays a key role in manufacturing the silicon used to make computer chips. In fact, there's an excellent chance the chip in your laptop or cell phone was made using sand from this obscure Appalachian backwater.

Making today's computer chips is a fiendishly complicated process requiring essentially pure silicon. The slightest impurity can throw their tiny systems out of whack. Finding silicon is easy. It's one of the most abundant elements on Earth. The problem is that it never occurs naturally in pure form. Separating out the silicon takes considerable doing.

The sand is blasted in a powerful electric furnace resulting in 99 percent pure silicon. But that's not nearly good enough for high-tech uses. Additional extreme processing is required because computer chips need silicon to be 99.99999999999 percent pure—eleven 9s. "We are talking about one lonely atom that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions," says geologist Michael Welland.

Possible Preaching Angles: Holiness; Purification; Sanctification- Modern tech devices require material that is of the greatest purity possible and producing it requires intense refining efforts. God also requires His unique people to be of the highest purity, to be uncontaminated by the world, and He spares no effort in our refining process.

In his book #Gospel, Daniel Rice shares the story of Pastor Matt Chandler who came home one night and found his son in the living room playing a game on his Xbox, instead of cleaning his room. After asking his son to clean his room Chandler said:

After a pause he went to clean his room and start on his other main household chore—vacuuming the house. As I left to start unloading the dishwasher, I heard him turn on the vacuum—for about forty-five seconds. Reid found me and happily reported, "I'm done."

I said, "You vacuumed the whole house?"

"Uh-huh."

"Son, Superman could not vacuum this whole house in forty-five seconds."

"I did, Dad."

So I did what a loving father would do. I grabbed his hand and said, "Let's just walk around and see." We walked around the house, and over in this corner, we found an entire bag of Goldfish crackers that looked like someone had intentionally dumped them on the floor and danced on them.

I said, "Reid, did you vacuum this?"

"I didn't see it."

"Okay, but it's on the floor. You're supposed to vacuum the floor. I don't know how you missed this."

We vacuumed. We walked around and I showed him other obvious things he failed to see. It reminded me of the line in the Gospel of John when Jesus says, "We will make our house with you" because that is what the Holy Spirit does for us. He takes us around the house of our heart and says, ''Hey, look at these crushed up Goldfish. It's going to be awesome for them to be gone. Bugs are going to get in here, and bad stuff is going to happen. There's going to be a smell in here. Let's get this cleaned up. I'm going to help you get that cleaned up. He wants to clean up places that we didn't even know were dirty. "

In his book (Re)union, Bruxy Cavey asks the question:

How much sin do you think it would be wise for God to let into heaven? What would be the acceptable level of sin for God to allow into the realm of eternal life? Should God allow 5 percent? Maybe 0.5 percent? Would 0.05 percent be okay?

The answer to that question has to be zero. When Olympic athletes are tested for performance-enhancing drugs, they fail the blood test if they have even a trace of these drugs. Their blood is either clean or not clean. The standard for passing is 0 percent of banned substances. They can't protest, "But I only have traces of the banned substances, so obviously I don't use them too much." The standard is perfection.

When someone wants to donate blood, the blood bank must ensure that the donor's blood is completely free from various things, like HIV. The person cannot protest, "But my blood is mostly HIV-free, and certainly I'm not doing as bad as some people who have full-blown AIDS, so what's the problem?" The standard has to be absolute purity, and for good reason.

The same is true for our relationship with God. God's standard for heaven must be sinless perfection, just as Adam and Eve were when they were first created. Just being a comparatively good person is not good enough. If God were to let us all into the eternal dimension with sin still a part of our spiritual makeup, we would pollute the realm of heaven, starting the whole mess of planet Earth all over again. So God bans sin from heaven. He quarantines the infection and the infected to a different realm. Hell is God's quarantine solution for people who prefer to hold on to their sin rather than accepting Christ's cleansing.

Most people have heard of the "five second rule"—that if food spends just a few seconds on the floor, dirt and germs won't have enough time to contaminate it. Parents sometimes apply the rule to pacifiers (after their first child of course). The history of the five-second rule is difficult to trace. One legend attributes the rule to Genghis Khan, who declared that food could be on the ground for five hours and still be safe to eat.

But a 2016 experiment should permanently debunk the five second rule. Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University, reported that a two-year study concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. You can check it out for yourself in his journal article "Is the Five-Second Rule Real?" found in the always exciting journal for Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Professor Schaffner tested four surfaces—stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and carpet—and four different foods: cut watermelon, bread, buttered bread, and strawberry gummy candy. They were dropped from a height of five inches onto surfaces treated with a bacteria. The researchers tested four contact times—less than one second and five, 30 and 300 seconds. A total of 128 possible combinations of surface, food, and seconds were replicated 20 times each, yielding 2,560 measurements. So after those 2,560 drops they found that no fallen food escaped contamination, leading Professor Schaffner to conclude, "Bacteria can contaminate instantaneously." In other words, they debunked the legendary five second rule.

Possible Preaching Angles: False Teachings; False Doctrine; Doctrine—We suggest a tongue-in-cheek retelling of this study (after all, the five-second rule is kind of a joke anyway) and then asking, What other biblical, theological, cultural, or lifestyle legends we've adopted without critical study.

Researchers at the University of Toronto published data that suggests people experience "a powerful urge to wash themselves" when suffering from a guilty conscience. This urge is known as the "Macbeth effect," referring to Shakespeare's famous play in which one of the main characters cries, "Out, damned spot!" while trying to scrub away bloodstains that exist only in her mind.

In order to study this effect, the researchers asked volunteers to think about immoral acts they had committed in the past—shoplifting, betraying a friend, and so on. The volunteers were then offered an opportunity to clean their hands. According to the results of the study, those who had retraced their sins "jumped at the offer at twice the rate of study subjects who had not imagined past transgressions."

Interestingly, the act of washing did relieve the guilt of many volunteers—at least temporarily. After deciding whether or not to wash, the subjects who had felt guilty were given a chance to volunteer for a charity event. Those who actually washed their hands "were far less likely to sign up than those who didn't wash."

The act of confession is now an artistic expression. During the first half of 2006, two performing artists named Laura Barnett and Sandra Spannan created an exhibit in a storefront in Manhattan that allowed passers-by to alleviate their guilt.

The two women dressed as 19th century washerwomen and sat in the storefront, one of them underlining the words on the glass—"Air your dirty laundry. 100 percent confidential. Anonymous. Free."—the other painting. Onlookers were encouraged to write their deepest secrets on pieces of paper. When they had disappeared from sight, the women collected their confession and displayed it in the window for all to see.

The sins and secrets ranged from slightly humorous to sordid:

"The hermit crab was still alive when I threw it down the trash shoot."

"I want to see SUVs explode. Those people are so selfish."

"My girlfriend and I both think Osama Bin Laden has a sweet-looking face."

"I make fun of this one friend behind her back all the time. She just enrages me! But I get freaked out when I think of what she might say about me—I worry this means we're not really friends? Human relationships are infinitely confusing!"

"I haven't slept with my husband in a year and I am about to start an affair with ______."

"I haven't yet visited my dead parents' grave."

"I am dating a married man and getting financial compensation in exchange for the guilt. I'm 25 and he's a millionaire. It pays to be young."

"New York makes me feel lonely."

Barnett told the New York Times that the women are often overwhelmed by the weight of others' sins: "We go there, and the window is empty, and we're wearing all white. And at the end, the window is full, and we're covered with paint. It's exhausting. Some of those things are really, really sad. And afterwards, I need to take a bath."

In his book Music Through the Eyes of Faith, Harold Best tells the true story of a young man who became heavily involved in a satanic cult that developed an elaborate liturgy focusing on the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The young man later became a Christian and started attending worship services. Everything went well until the church organist belted out a piece composed by Bach. The young believer was overcome by fear and fled the sanctuary.

Best writes that Bach's work "represents some of the noblest music for Christian worship. To this young man, however, it…epitomized all that was evil, horrible, and anti-Christian."

Sex is that way for some Christians. Past associations and guilty feelings have created severe spiritual roadblocks. Christians try hard not to believe that sex is inherently evil, but because of previous experiences, for many it certainly feels evil.