TOD 04.09.08

While I was enjoying some leisure time doing my taxes the other day, my son asked if he could color with the crayons. So I got them out and gave him a blank piece of paper to work on. After a few minutes, he asked for my help again because the white and yellow crayons weren’t working properly. They were dirty because he had used them on top of the darker colors.

I showed him that he could just wipe it off by coloring on a clean patch of paper, and I explained to him that this would happen again any time he colored over dark colors with lighter ones. Not sure whether my strange advice could be trusted, he nevertheless went back to work. And that’s when it struck me how this illustrates our own character. When we’re born again, we’re cleansed by Jesus and made like the white crayon. But if we color back over the sins of our past, we become tainted again and need recleaning with something that will take our new stain away.

I think this is why Jesus used the illustration of looking at the bronze serpent when he spoke about our dependence on Him in John 3:14-15, the verses before the verse that everybody knows.