Psalm 61:2 - Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
Without a doubt there’s nothing like waking up on a Sunday morning (Super Bowl Sunday, no less) to find your sewer has backed up. No wonder there was that odd smell the night before that prompted a long spray of room! But thank heavens for that odd, “I have to look for something in the downstairs bedroom” thought the next morning. And even more thanks go to the even odder sense that I needed to poke my head into the mechanical room! “We have water in the basement again! And it smells like gas.”
Just what I wanted to do Sunday morning instead of going to church! As with everything else in life, there’s a lesson...or a blog.
I got to thinking about our lives without Christ. They are sort of like sewers...dirty, mucky, smelly. I kept thinking about the guy who would have to clean out our well. I thought about what a disgusting job it is lifting the lids to these wells and seeing all the “stuff of life” down there.
Then I got to thinking about Jesus. He sees the muck in our lives. He's looking down at us and seeing the stuff we have made of our lives. Funny, I was thinking earlier before I arose about Jesus and how He didn’t hang out with the elite but He hung out with the baseless sinners because they often knew they would not amount to much in the states they were in. They needed someone to take them out of a lifestyle they had gotten themselves into and couldn’t get out of.
I’m certainly not equating the well-pumper-outer to Jesus! I’m just saying that He would have been about the same type of business...cleaning up messed up lives. Jesus was there to offer a hand. He offered to bring righteousness into their lives. There is nothing in the Bible that says we’re like sewage, thank goodness. The worst I believe is a scripture describing base things in 1Corinthians 1:27-28 - But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are..
Look at the lives of those who have allowed themselves to get out of hand...through drugs, alcohol, prostitution, even at times homelessness. When one wakes up in their own vomit or worse, living in the most squalid conditions. Is this life? Is this how God intended us to live? Is this how anyone really wants to live? Is this the life they really chose? I doubt it, but somewhere they made a bad choice and this would be the result of it.
Jesus comes to clean us up. And He does this quite well. There is a verse in Psalm 40 that tells us “He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my steps.” Well, there you have it. Another Bible version says He will take us out of the slimy pit. Aren’t some people referred to as slimeballs? We might all be considered slime in our sinful states! We were, after all, formed once a long time ago out of the dust of the ground.
Jesus is into cleaning us up. Like cleaning out the “stuff of life” in our own personal well. If we are at the bottom of this personal pit of a life, we are the dregs! We are the sediment that sinks to the bottom. But Jesus He takes us out of the dregs of our life and puts us where we should be, on the Rock that is Jesus and then He guides what’s left of our life.
We’ve all been in such a place. Don’t think anyone is immune. Before Christ we are all dead in our sin. There is only one way out of a pit. If you look up, out of the pit you are in, in that mucky well, you will see the hand of Jesus reaching down to pull you up to the place where He would prefer you abide.
As I think about how the awareness of this sewer backup came about, I see that it all started last week Sunday with a comment a woman made to me after I said something to her. She was urging me, sort of, to consider something. All week I thought about what she said. It also prompted me to look for something in our basement bedroom yesterday morning. If I would not have approached her and she would not have responded, I would not have gone to the basement and sensed I needed to look in the mechanical room. This is yet another way that God sets things in motion. It may seem like coincidence to you, but after seeing things like this happen occasionally, and probably even more than I think, I know it was God.
Don’t think He isn’t interested in even the “basest” things about your life. Every detail of our lives is important to Him. Although this sewer backup is a very strange way of looking at what He can do for a person, He is interested in only bringing good to a person’s life. He watches out for His children.
If you’ve messed up your life and want to remove the dregs, clean up your sewer, call on Jesus. Let Him be your sewer-pumper-outer.
Psalm 50:15 - and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.
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