Messy Mugs

Last week I devoted an unbelievable amount of time to cleaning out my coffee cup. Imagine Alaska's coast after the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf coast after the huge BP oil spill. Imagine your teenager's room converted to porcelain. Get the idea?

It isn't that I am a slob. I simply forgot to empty the last swallow of coffee before the weekend hit and the water evaporated, leaving a resinous goop about a half-an-inch thick in the bottom of the cup. Adding to my disgust and revulsion was the fact that some helpless insect with a caffeine addiction had fluttered down and gotten mired in that muck. Eeew!!

The frightening thing to me is that I almost drank from that cup! You see, I discovered the residue while in the act of pouring in a fresh cupful of coffee on Monday. How could I have missed such a mess? Simple - the outside was clean. Had I not glanced within before drinking, I could have seriously fouled my stomach!

I have always suspected that drinking coffee must be a spiritual thing, if for no other reason than the sheer number of Baptists who do it. Now I have proof. Jesus, in Matthew 23:25,26, spoke about the surface religionists who keep a clean cup on the outside, while allowing scum and tar and dead bugs to lie a foot thick on the interior. Christianity in our day abounds with cup-scouring scribes who use the Bible as their personal Brillo pad against others. Envy, anger, lust, and deception may adhere to their hearts, but, armed with a "clean" surface and a few chosen Scriptures, they set up as "legitimate" dispensers of the pure water of life.

While scrubbing my messy mug, I pondered another passage, Mark 7:14-23, where Jesus says that what defiles us is not what goes into our mouths, but what comes out. In other words, drinking coffee from that dirty cup would have done a lot less harm than dispensing the gospel from a dirty heart. I then asked the Lord God Almighty to clean me up - insects and all -  from the inside out with the washing of the water of His Word (Psalm 119:9,11; John 15:3; Eph.5:26). How about you, my friend?!

Bottoms Up,
Pastor David Blevins