New Stuffing
October 22, 2015
Psalm 51
Many of us have children who have had a favorite stuffed animal, one they slept with every night and carried with them everywhere they went. For my son Andrew, that was Polar Bear. As the name would suggest, he is a pure white stuffed bear. Several times my wife has had to sneak in at night and extract Polar Bear for a washing. He gets dragged around, food gets spilled on him, once or twice he’s been thrown up on, but after a round in the washing machine he’s back to his snow-white self again. However, recently we began to notice that Polar Bear was not just dirty, he was looking dead. He flopped over and couldn’t keep his head up. He looked more like a bear rug. Polar Bear was a stuffed animal who had lost his stuffing. So, Emily scheduled “surgery.” She bought some batting, cut a slit and stuffed it inside, and sewed him back up. All of the sudden Polar Bear seemed back to life again. He can sit up on his own and look Andrew in the eye. Psalm 51 is David’s famous Psalm of confession. We tend to be drawn to those lines, “Wash me, and I will be as white as snow.” However, I love even more then lines that say “create in me a clean heart…renew a right spirit in me…uphold me with a willing spirit.” It’s good news to know that when sin makes us dirty, we can be washed clean by God’s mercy. But it’s even better news that God can put a new heart inside of us and transform us from the inside out by the power of the Holy Spirit. Like Polar Bear, we can be not only washed, but also given new “stuffing” that makes us alive once again in Christ.
Many of us have children who have had a favorite stuffed animal, one they slept with every night and carried with them everywhere they went. For my son Andrew, that was Polar Bear. As the name would suggest, he is a pure white stuffed bear. Several times my wife has had to sneak in at night and extract Polar Bear for a washing. He gets dragged around, food gets spilled on him, once or twice he’s been thrown up on, but after a round in the washing machine he’s back to his snow-white self again. However, recently we began to notice that Polar Bear was not just dirty, he was looking dead. He flopped over and couldn’t keep his head up. He looked more like a bear rug. Polar Bear was a stuffed animal who had lost his stuffing. So, Emily scheduled “surgery.” She bought some batting, cut a slit and stuffed it inside, and sewed him back up. All of the sudden Polar Bear seemed back to life again. He can sit up on his own and look Andrew in the eye. Psalm 51 is David’s famous Psalm of confession. We tend to be drawn to those lines, “Wash me, and I will be as white as snow.” However, I love even more then lines that say “create in me a clean heart…renew a right spirit in me…uphold me with a willing spirit.” It’s good news to know that when sin makes us dirty, we can be washed clean by God’s mercy. But it’s even better news that God can put a new heart inside of us and transform us from the inside out by the power of the Holy Spirit. Like Polar Bear, we can be not only washed, but also given new “stuffing” that makes us alive once again in Christ.
– Ken Roach, Content Development