“For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy – full of greed and self-indulgence! You blind Pharisee! First wash the inside of the cup and the dish, and then the outside will become clean, too” (Matthew 23:25b-26, NLT).
When I was a kid my grandmother offered to pay me to refinish a metal glider on her front porch. It was her favorite swing, but had eventually become covered with that deep rust where the metal is actually bubbled up with oxidation.
It was a big job for a skinny twelve year old because there were a LOT of rust bubbles and pits. But I rose to the challenge and I scraped and I sanded… a LOT! At one point, I figured, “Does all this old stuff really need to come off? I’m just gonna paint over it anyway.”
So, I half-heartedly chipped away at the rest of the rust, but did not actually get rid of it. And, you guessed it; I just painted over the remaining rust. It looked pretty good. Matter of fact, it looked GREAT and my grandmother was so pleased and proud of me!
Until the fall. Then the rust bubbles reappeared and even the pitted areas rusted through. It was a MESS! I had to go back and do the job right. To add insult to injury, I had to not only scrap and sand the rust, but I also had to remove all the paint that I had put on!
Whew! I doubled my workload, I had disappointed my grandmother, and I had embarrassed my dad, all because I wanted to take the easy way out and fix the surface of the problem instead of getting rid of the core issue – the rust!
How many times do we do that in our own lives? We have low self-esteem so we get botox to make us look better. We’ve been hurt or wounded, so we dress up or take pills to reduce the pain. Even with our faith, we want our friends to see that we go to church, but we don’t pursue a real relationship with Christ.
Jesus warned us about window dressing. In the Bible verse above, Jesus chastises the Pharisees for trying to look good on the outside, while they have ignored the core issues of their problems on the inside. He tells us that we must first fix what’s on the inside, and then the outside will take care of itself.
Change starts at the core, not on the surface. Rust attacks from within the metal, not from the outside. Changing our looks doesn’t lighten our hearts. Only by allowing Jesus Christ to reshape our hearts can true transformation take place on the inside AND on the outside. Transformation that brings wholeness and life.
David McCall, Executive Pastor
Highland Park Church
