April 25 2021
A long time ago in a life time far, far away, I decided I wanted to go for a bike ride. I went down to the basement and took my bike outside and got ready to take off. The only problem was, my tire was flat. Not just low, it was flat. As in, I wasn’t going anywhere on that bicycle. What I needed was an air pump. You can’t just get into the car and go get an air pump when you are ten years old, so I did the next best thing. I took some money out of my handy-dandy piggy bank and walked down to my grandparent’s house and asked my grandfather to take me to Western Auto. For all y’all kids who weren’t privileged enough to know what Western Auto was, it was sort of a forerunner of Walmart and Auto Zone but just a lot more laid back. You could buy everything from auto parts to ammunition! Well, when I went inside, I looked around and found the air pumps. The picture on all the different boxes looked pretty much the same and they were all just about the same price… except for one. One of them was way cheaper. At ten-years old, way cheaper seemed like the way to go, so I checked out and went to the car while my grandfather finished up. I got home and was ready to pump the tire up. I opened the box and reached inside to take out my air pump…except it wasn’t an air pump. It was a replacement hose for the air pump, hence the reason for way cheaper! I have shared this story for one reason. Well, two really. One reason is to entertain you just a little bit but the main reason I related this story is to remind you that there are a lot of “Christians” out there that look like Christians on the outside, but when you look inside, you get something totally different. Many of these pseudo-Christians go to church, sing with lots of energy, put their money in the collection plate, and may even say an amen or two during the sermon. But, when you get them away from the church building and church people, they look like the world, sound like the world, and dress like the world. Jesus told some of these kinds of people that while they looked pretty, clean, white, shiny and new on the outside, when you looked inside, they were nothing but “dead men’s bones”. You can read the entire twenty-third chapter of Matthew for the full story. As I wrap up this little story about my shopping excursion in Western Auto many years ago, may I leave us with this. It is my prayer for all of us that Jesus would clean us up from the inside out so that our Sunday Morning self matches the self from the other six days!
Be blessed and be a blessing . . .
Brother Andy
