Forty miles out into the Gulf of Mexico, Associated Press writer Rich Matthews goes diving into the oil that has poured into the Gulf.  It is a horrible ordeal as the oily scum quickly coats everything until he feels just like one of the pelicans seen coated with oil and dying on the seashore.  Under the water it is dark, oily, and lifeless.  Ten minutes into the dive he is ready to get back to the boat.

As he surfaces at the back of the boat he discovers that he cannot get back on the boat until he has been cleaned.  This is not an easy task for they must scrape the scum off down to his skin and then scrub with Dawn dishwashing soap.  Thirty minutes later he is clean and ready to get back on the boat.  The only problem is that he had not washed the bottom of his feet and as he goes to get on the boat he slips and falls back into the water.  Now the cleaning process will have to begin all over again.

As I read this I thought of how like life this is.  Sin leaves us feeling so dirty.  We want nothing more than to be clean, so we try so hard to clean ourselves up.  Just when we think we have managed by hard work to get ourselves clean we find ourselves slipping right back into the sin we thought we were free from.  We wonder why until we realize that we had not gotten completely clean.  There was part of us we had held back from the cleaning process.  Maybe it was because we did not think this little sin mattered.  Maybe it was because we just could not give this area of our lives up to God.

The scene above has been replayed so many times.  We get almost clean and then we fall again.  We get almost clean again only to fall again.  Is this the way it will always be?  Thanks be to God, this is not His plan.

In 2 Corinthians 5:17 we read, “Therefore is anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”  Wow, this is not just getting cleaned up this is being made new.  But how can this happen?

The answer is not hard work.  The answer is coming to the place where you are disgusted by your sin, but also aware that you can do nothing about it.  When you reach this point of desperation and cry out to God, then He will hear your cry.  Like the children of Israel He will hear your cry and lead you out of the bondage you are in.  But there is a catch.  Real freedom requires a total surrender to God.  If we let our feet stay dirty, then we are just asking for a fall.

Do you need this cleansing?  Are you ready to be made new?  Then why not give it all to Him, and let Him show you what life was really meant to be like.