Words by Scott McCullar | Image by Al Blanton
One of my favorite television shows is Shark Tank. For whatever reason, I am glued to the TV when entrepreneurs give their pitches to the millionaires and billionaires who could make or break their businesses.
If anyone has watched Shark Tank for a while, you have probably heard of ScrubDaddy. One of the most successful products ever invested in on the show, the ScrubDaddy is a little round sponge with a smiley face. Its two eyes are for your fingers, so you can hold it steady for deep cleaning in a cup or drinking glass. Its tiny smiley mouth is for cleaning your utensils. It is designed to get rid of the toughest stains and yet be reusable after a cycle in the dishwasher.
And ScrubDaddy cleans everything. In addition to the kitchen, you can use it in the bathroom, the living room, and even on outdoor furniture! The ScrubDaddy packs a wallop when it comes to getting rid of tough stains.
Using my ScrubDaddy the other day to wash dishes, the thought came to me that before I was saved, my soul had some tough stains on it. Nothing I could do would completely clean my soul. Church attendance and membership couldn’t clean it. Baptism and being a good person couldn’t clean it. Not even reading the Bible and praying could completely clean my horribly soiled soul.
The Bible says in Hebrews 9:22 that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission or forgiveness of sin. The Jewish people ceremonially sacrificed innocent animals on a regular basis to deal with their constant sin-stained lives. But all the animals in the world wouldn’t be enough to forgive all their sins and ours.
John the Baptist, though, understood how sin could be totally cleansed. When Jesus of Nazareth showed up to be baptized at the beginning of His public ministry, John yelled, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” The Apostle Paul later writes in Ephesians 1:7, “In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.”
The Bible teaches that Jesus came to this earth as the perfect God-Man, the Son of God wrapped in human flesh, incarnated to live here without sin so that he could sacrifice His life to cleanse us from the stains, blemishes, and blotches of our wicked sinfulness. Jesus died on a Roman cross to pay for our sins and then rose from the grave victorious over sin, death, and hell itself. Therefore, if I, in faith, ask Jesus to forgive me of my sins, he totally, completely, and forever cleanses me of them through His amazing grace.
In other words, Jesus is like my spiritual ScrubDaddy. His sacrifice for me got to all the hard-to-reach places in my soul. No stain was left unclean. No blot was left untreated. No area of my soul remained unsanitary. I am now fully forgiven, cleansed, and accepted by God because of the scrubbing Jesus gave my soul. Amen! WL
