Listen

Purify me with hyssop and I will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and celebration again; let the bones you crushed rejoice once more. Hide your face from my sins; wipe away all my guilty deeds!

Psalm 51:7-9

Think

I am notorious for spilling things on my clothes and staining them. Because I regularly eat Mexican food, those stains are pretty often from some kind of red chile, and they don’t come out easily. I feel terrible when I am wearing a new shirt and end up staining it in a way that will never come fully clean.

Our guilt can sometimes feel like a stain that won’t go away… a stain that will never be able to be washed out. But the psalm writer invites us to consider God the “best-stain-remover-ever,” able to wash out even the toughest of stains — the guilt stains we create — and to leave us as white as the snow, as good as new.

Rob Mueller

Pray

Today, Lord, help me trust that you are able to wash me perfectly clean. Help me live free of the self-conscious anxiety that my sins are visible to everyone like an un-washable stain. Amen.

Go

So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!

2 Corinthians 5:17

God has already begun the work of renewal in you.

Decide today to live from the new and not from the old!