And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living beings. And they fell before the throne with their faces to the ground and worshiped God. They sang, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and strength belong to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Then one of the twenty-four elders asked me, “Who are these who are clothed in white? Where did they come from?” And I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are the ones who died in the great tribulation. They have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and made them white. “That is why they stand in front of God’s throne and serve him day and night in his Temple. And he who sits on the throne will give them shelter. They will never again be hungry or thirsty; they will never be scorched by the heat of the sun. For the Lamb on the throne will be their Shepherd. He will lead them to springs of life-giving water. And God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” Revelation 7:11-17
There’s a phrase that shows up in evangelical thought and speech; it is washed in the blood of the Lamb. On World Communion Sunday (two weeks ago) that phrase took on a whole new meaning.
The stains on the arms of my shirt
immediately caused a smile. I had held
the cup in my hands and was clapping those hands together as a means of
participating in praising God for what we had just heard. The result was all over me…a sign of
sloppiness to some, a mark of surrender in my heart.
As I shared with the congregation what had just happened,
the members laughed with me, and we proceeded to share the time together, being
washed in the blood in the proper sense, saint-sinners, kneeling before our
Savior.
Reflecting on that moment, I’ve been once-again
reminded how much different life is than the life I try to construct. In my mind I construct perfect settings where
people gather as single-minded, joyful, trusting, and quite orderly. But life is seldom (if ever) that
uncomplicated. There are fears without
and within. There are bills to be paid,
Covid-19 germs to be avoided, and that new ache in the belly that won’t go
away.
There’s the shame of past wrongs, hidden, but
returning to mind every idle moment just to remind you how messy your life is,
while others seem to have it all together.
In the end, it’s like that, always. We come to the table to celebrate just how
wonderful it is to be part of His flock; we wind up shrinking back in condemnation
when it shows us our hand in crucifying the Lord of Glory.
We come to a table for grace, which (in our
minds) is but a simple affirmation of how good we’ve become since we belong to
a church, a body of believers, and instead we discover the dirty laundry that
bellows out our need to confess beneath the flow of blood. And if we’re going to be clean at all it must
be a washing of innocent blood that takes the stains away!
For You Today
It’s one thing to
hang the dirty laundry on a line for every passerby to see; it’s quite another matter
when you come to the table – THAT is the very place your
dirty laundry belongs…and becomes holy, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have
a blessed day!
Title image: Pixabay.com W Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For other posts on heresy see: Got Answers and
On That Day
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