What Really Makes Us Dirty?

I've had some dirty jobs in my life. Outside of our annual Muck War, the various Student Ministry messes and plumbing mishaps I sometimes have to address, I've worked at Sonic Drive In, Pizza Hut, and for my neighbor, John Wayne Coletrane.

I lived in the country growing up, and John Wayne Coletrane lived in the house next door. He was as country as anyone you've ever met, and found any way to make money or do country things as he could. We shared a garden between our houses about the size of a football field, and we would make an annual trip to get truckloads of horse manure to fertilize. We hauled hay, made marble sinks, tended bees, mowed graveyards, herded and milked cows, raised goats, and one summer we cleaned a car wash pit.

In our town, the car wash was not tied into city water or sewer. So all of the dirt was washed into a giant pit under the car wash that would fill up after several years of 4x4s, cow/horse trailers, various off-roading vehicles, boats, and general auto cleaning activities.

John Wayne Coletrane was hired to empty the car wash pits.

We didn't have the requisite equipment, so we used 5 gallon buckets to dip out the mud and muck and pour the nastiness into a nearby field.

I have never been dirtier, with the possible exception of when we skied behind a 3 wheeler through knee-deep cow manure at my uncle's cattle farm.

There are lots of ways we get dirty through our every day experience of life. We wash, rinse, and repeat, day after day. Matthew 15 tells of a confrontation between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees about what really makes us dirty.

The Pharisees had some pretty specific rules about hand-washing that Jesus' disciples weren't following. When they challenged Jesus, Jesus had some interesting things to say that I think are instructive for us. Essentially, Jesus said, "Why do you care so much about that when you are violating much more important rules about how you treat even your mother and father?"

Sometimes we focus in so much on the outward dirt that we forget to address the much more important condition of our inner lives.
Yes, Jesus wants us to obey Him.

But God desires obedience from a motivation of love. It is so easy to be so focused on the details of our human interpretation of our pet peeves that we miss the deeper and more significant laws. When we do this we miss the fact that the value of obedience comes from the condition of our hearts. If we are following the rules without the right motivation, we end up as dirty as if we were covered in Pit Muck.

The easiest way to tell the condition of someone's heart is to listen to what they say. Do you focus on following the rules but find it easy to lie? Do you attend a church service, then berate the server at a restaurant for getting your order wrong? How do you respond to someone of the opposite political party, or when the idiot in the other car cuts you off and nearly causes an accident?

Do you have some inner dirt to deal with? What are some daily practices that you can work on to increase your own self-discipline?