Dealing with dirt

How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word. With my whole heart I have sought You; Oh, let me not wander from Your commandments! Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You.  – Psalm 119v9-11

We live in a dirty old world. Living in a dirty old world chances are we are going to get dirty. It’s just like the kids playing outside in nice weather – they are going to usually find a way to get dirty. Kids not only brush up against dirt to get dirty, too often they seek out the dirt! All four of the grandkids who live nearby are dirt magnets. No, it is worse than that, magnets just draw- our kids go after the dirt.

Once they get dirty it is a chore to get them cleaned up. Kids seem to have a knack of getting dirty at the worst possible time and clean-up is usually a real pain. But, it has to be done.

Christians can be like that. We spend time with the Lord, we go to church, we fellowship with other believers, and we feel pretty good and, well, clean.

Then we go out into that dirty old world we talked about earlier. Sometimes we brush up against some dirt or step in a mud puddle by mistake. Those things happen, so we clean up and go on. We can’t always avoid the filth of sin, so we have to do our best to deal with it when it comes.

Other times we are like our children or grandchildren. We can find ourselves going out of our way to get dirty. We even be guilty of searching out the dirt, like the kids, just to get dirty.

We can excuse kids and they dirt because they are kids – but there is no excuse for us to purposefully get dirty with sin.

Psalm 119v9-11 tells us how to deal with this.

How can a young (or old) man (or woman) clean up his way? We pay attention to God’s word.

How do we avoid sin? We hide God’s word in our hearts.

We seek God and His way. We don’t wander off from His commandments. We keep them close to our hearts.

Doesn’t getting dirty get old after a while?