I was recently reading an interesting book about life in America 200 years ago. One intriguing detail that the author shared was that back then most people only bathed once a year. It made me think of how unpleasant it would have been to gather on a sultry August Sunday morning in a sanctuary with no air conditioning with a bunch of people who hadn’t bathed in months. Ugh.
Of course, it’s very possible that it didn’t bother them the way it would bother us. I imagine that if you smelled like that and everyone around you smelled like that, pretty quickly you would just get used to the smell. Smell? What smell?
I pressure-washed the back porch a few weeks ago. It always amazes me when I do that how you really don’t notice how dirty most things are outside until you see what they look like clean. The porch floor doesn’t look that bad until you take the pressure-washer to it and see the difference.
This is all true of our spiritual lives as well. We get used to the smell. We get used to the dirt. We settle into our sin and decide that it’s fine. It’s not. We were made for more. Jesus didn’t just come so we could be forgiven; He came so we could be clean.