Those really “old” and trite sayings that used to fall from your grandma’s lips (you remember those, don’t you?), a stitch in time saves nine, waste not, want not, and so-on…these survived because they’re true; even the funny ones. I may have split my side laughing the first time I someone who was trying to help me understand, dressing-up a failed project to look like a winner won’t amount to more than a caricature of what was reality.
The image
he used to illustrate was about lifting a pig from the muck of the pen, and dressing it to the nines. In the end it was still a pig, bound to
return to the muck. That old expression,
you can put lipstick on a pig, but you still ain’t
gonna kiss him, makes hilarious sense!
Now, as funny as that may be, even about the cutest of
pigs, when the speaker’s voice is coming from the throne in Heaven, the imagery
fades, and we are the ones who must put on the lipstick and quietly, solemnly look
in the mirror.
The prophet, Amos, was a farm boy from Israel’s sticks. Visiting the temple in Jerusalem must have
been an eye-opening, jaw-dropping experience.
The ritual of sacrifice was impressive, bloody, and totally without
concern for the kind of life God wanted for His people. Talk about old sayings and truth, Amos must have
been thinking: Man, you can dot all the i’s, and cross all the t’s, and still misspell
the word…don’t these people get it?
It is told about Martin Luther, the great reformer of the 16th-century, when he was still a Roman Catholic priest, he would go to confession…often…sometimes multiple times in a day, re-confessing the same old sins. His confessor, an older priest, would patiently hear the young priest, give him pennance to do, and ritually assure the guilt-driven Martin Luther his sin was absolved. The forgiveness after breakfast might last till lunch, and then it was back to the confessional. When the elder priest decided this routine had gone-on long enough, he stopped Luther mid-way through his litany of the forgiven, unforgiven, and reforgiven sins, once-again being confessed, and said: Martin, you either need to accept forgiveness for these same old sins, or get some new ones. It seems the futility of the same old ritual had been swamped by Martin’s trust in the nursery of his priest’s protective absolution, instead of Luther’s call to the wild field of God’s vineyard. It’s safer to slip into easy forgiveness, and forget the purpose of what we do…spreading the word, and ministering healing to the lost and marginalized of our brethren.
For You Today ,
The church services, with its rituals and routines serve God’s purpose, of
keeping our eyes on His holiness, and developing a doctrinal understanding of
our responsibility to serve others. But
if the ritual and routine, and our comfort zone of being forgiven is all we
seek, we have done worse than putting lipstick on the old pig…we’ve begun to
enjoy kissing him.
There
are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions libraryI. To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some
of these:
The Elephant in the Room Has
Sharp Teeth and When It's God's Move
[1] Images: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
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