I’m not sure your soap brand of choice, but I use Axe body wash in the shower (my apologies if this post has quickly launched into the TMI zone for you). The other day I noticed a slogan on the back of my body wash container. It said:
“The cleaner you are, the dirtier you get.”
If you’ve seen any of the commercials for Axe products you know that they tend to be a bit risqué, and this sentence got me thinking. Logically, it’s true. But as you can see from the picture they add to it they aren’t building on logic alone.
As I thought more about that sentence (I do some of my best thinking in the shower), I realized that the inverse is also true. Then I realized that this is actually an argument that Jesus once made (you might imagine how this is a somewhat alarming train of thought to get to from where I started).
We read about this in Luke 7:40-43:
Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.” “Tell me, teacher,” he said. “Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.” “You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Basically, Jesus is explaining that the more sinful you are the more grateful you are when you are forgiven. This is said in the context of dinner at a smug religious leader’s house.
There’s another example in Matthew 9:10-13:
While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Same concept said a different way.
Insight from Axe body wash: the cleaner you are the dirtier you can get.
Insight from Jesus: the dirtier you are the cleaner you can get and the more grateful you will be as a result.
We all are dirty when it comes to our sin but some people are more aware of that than others. The religious leaders had convinced themselves that they were spiritually clean and that they had no need for Jesus. The sinners around Jesus realized what He could provide for them and jumped at the chance.
This leads us all to a natural question: are you aware of the dirt in your life? Second, are you becoming dirtier or cleaner? Getting dirty is easy but getting clean requires the grace of Jesus Christ and a truthful acknowledgement of where we are without Him. That process should fill us with gratitude always.
Good food for thought, Jeremy. And not just for in the shower. I do not advocate that every one should go out and do the worst thing they can do and come back to be cleansed by Our Lord and Savior(What then, are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? May it never be so), but I have found that sometimes the most grateful believers I have met are those who were the “dirtiest” and Jesus made them cleaner through His blood.
Of course, before the Holy Spirit quickened our hearts to be touched by God, weren’t we all the dirtiest sinner in our rejection of Jesus?
Great analogy. Two keys:
For the unbeliever: Awareness of the dirt (sin) is key to understanding the need for cleaning (Jesus). The purpose of The Law, ultimately, is to show those without Christ that they can never be “good enough” for God, hence the need for the cleansing blood of Jesus!
For the believer: Awareness that we have been made perfectly clean once for all by rebirth in Christ is key to understanding the magnitude of His gift and how our exchanged life changes everything! Living in celebration of His finished work, knowing we are truly clean, allows us to exude the Spirit, naturally, instead of constantly trying to do something better by our own will/will power. This understanding that we are fully equipped to live by the Spirit free’s us to experience true joy! Living by the Spirit produces great fruit, and living by the Spirit and not by law means sin loses much of its grip on us too (since any/all law increases sin)!
Good news indeed!! Woo hoo!