Pushing a Nice Paint Job.

I like cars.  I've had more than a few - don't get excited none of them were "good" cars.  I had a '71 VW Square-back once, I liked that one.  When I was younger I remember spending hours washing and waxing on a warm summer day.  I would clean the wheels and tires and carefully apply Armour All and make everything sparkle and look shiny and new.  Then I would push the car out of the grass and back into the driveway.

Do you treat areas of your life like I treated my car?  Have you spent time polishing and shining something that just didn't work?  I recall a not-too-old episode of Mythbusters where the co-hosts tried to polish dung.  And it worked! But guess what, it was still dung!  It had a nice shine to it but I wouldn't use it as a table decoration!

We can spend so much energy, both physically and mentally, trying to shine areas of our lives so we look like everything is okay.  My car looked really nice, but it was a fraud.  A fake.  And after awhile someone wanted to see under the hood.  And the outward show I had worked so hard to maintain was proven to be worthless.

And we don't just do this with our lives.  We do it in our churches as well.  There was a day when the goal of nearly every Christian (at least that I knew) was to make everyone "think" that their lives were perfect.  They pretended that God was providing for them and giving them the "desires of their hearts."  Somehow they thought no one would listen to their Gospel presentation unless they thought that slapping the name "Christian" on their lives would make all their dreams come true.  So they polished up their messed-up lives real good.  But they were still a mess.  And out of that culture we get statistics like 50% of all Christian marriages end in divorce.

Guess what.  Marriage isn't about what everyone sees; a clean home a well behaved child, a spouse who laughs at all your jokes, it IS about what happens when the door is shut.  Christianity isn't just about what people see "Christians" doing, it's about what happens when no one is looking.  It's about how treat our family.  Our children's teachers at school.  How we handle the person who cuts us off in traffic.  It's how we talk to our co-workers and what place Jesus Christ holds in our hearts.

Jesus tells the story of a gnat and a camel as it relates to the religion of his day (Matthew 23:23-25).  He says that there are religious people who work so hard to rid their lives of a sin or a problem that He represents as a gnat that they end up neglecting the sin/problem He represents as a camel.  And I think we do the same.  How we look on the outside (to others) is the gnat.  What is going on in our hearts and private lives is the camel.  Jesus tells us that our outside should match our inside.  He says it this way, you don't get good fruit from a bad tree. You can fake it for awhile, shiny and new looking, but eventually you're gonna have to turn the key.

A car with a fancy paint-job and tailored interior sitting in your driveway without an engine is not worth nearly as much as a piece of junk that gets you to work every day.  Don't spend your life polishing the paint when you need to rebuild the engine.

And Jesus wasn't just a carpenter, He's a mechanic as well, really a handyman, if it's broke, He can fix it.

Check out this post (Think Napoleon NOT Uncle Rico) if you want some help getting your life right with God or if you think you're beyond help!