Beyond the Surface: True Cleansing Through Christ

   The stains on my favorite living room chair used to drive me crazy. No matter how hard I scrubbed, they just wouldn’t come out. So, I did what any desperate person would do—I covered them up with a cozy blanket. The chair looked fine, but the stains were still there, hidden just beneath the surface.
   Isn’t that what we often do with our own lives? We try to scrub away the guilt, the shame, the memories of mistakes, but they never seem to disappear completely. Instead, we cover them with good deeds, hoping no one notices the stains underneath. We think that if we do enough good, we’ll finally feel clean.
   But in Titus 3:4-8, Paul reminds us of a hard truth: we can’t clean ourselves. “He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy.” No amount of good works can wash away the deep, internal stains caused by sin. Only Jesus can do that.
Imagine trying to clean something with muddy water. It just makes the mess worse, right? Our own efforts to scrub away our spiritual dirt are like that—filthy rags trying to fix a deeper problem we can’t reach.
   But here’s the good news: God doesn’t ask us to clean ourselves up. In His kindness and love, He offers us a different kind of washing—a cleansing that comes from the Holy Spirit. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, where sin left a crimson stain, He washes us white as snow.
Baptism is a beautiful symbol of this truth. It’s not the water that cleanses us; it’s Jesus. Baptism is our way of publicly declaring that we are clean in Christ. So, the question is—are you?