Luke 5:12b – Lord if You are willing, You can make me clean. (NASB)
The hand-painted sign had been leaning against the tree for months: Clean Fill Wanted! Today, in the tree above it, children lined the branches, perched several to a limb, like so many giant-sized birds. As I looked at the sign below them, I couldn't help wondering about the "clean fill" those children needed — past, present, and future. What did they know about God? Were their parents too busy providing life's physical necessities to worry about the spiritual? Had someone missed the opportunity to tell a parent about Jesus many years ago, and now another child would not know?
I began to think about those who had helped "clean fill" me: my scrupulously honest mother, longsuffering Sunday School teachers, moral friends and family, the obedient person who first told me about Jesus Christ who died for my sin.
Some of the fill was not so clean. Thankfully, God, through the gift of his Son, Jesus, emptied those not-so-clean places and filled me with the fresh newness of His Holy Spirit.
He waits only for our openness. He wants to pour through our lives and clean fill us with Himself. Are we willing?
Prayer: -Lord, we are too unclean to be in Your presence. Cleanse and renew us. Fill us up with joy, fill us up with peace, so that our believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope (Romans 15:13 MSG). Open opportunities for us to give "clean fill" to the children with whom we have contact. Amen.
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