A Change of Clothes [justin]

For sanity’s sake, at least one good road trip a year is needed. Road trips help in two ways with life. The first is that of getting away from what you know. The second is returning to what you know. The first deals with adventure, the expansion of worldview, and leaving your comfort zone. The second deals with stability and common day appreciation.

This year the trip happened to be a four and a half day, seventeen hundred mile, camping, hiking, burger eating road trip with the guys. As I was packing things up the night before, I decide to go simplistic on the clothes since I wasn’t going to be around the wife. And maybe it was the granola in me rebelling against the 9-5 desk job, but I felt kind of proud that I wasn’t taking as much of my wardrobe as I should.

On the third day, after two nights of sleeping and a three hour hike, it was time for a shower and a change of clothes. Luckily, the place we were at had the Hilton of campsite shower facilities: four minutes per fifty cents, hot water that didn’t take three minutes to attain, quality nozzle pressure, and a locked room all to your self that was bigger than most apartment bathrooms. Factor all those in together and it equals glorious. The smell of coconut, uhm… I mean manly musk, was present; the slight campers itch was gone; my hair didn’t hurt anymore! And as I put on a new pair of underoos, shorts, and a fresh tee, I was re-livened. I felt like a new man both emotionally and physically and was now ready for the next half of the journey.

Woven throughout Scripture, the model of changing and repenting present the ground rules for a godly lifestyle. We can see the Gospel message in Acts to turn from worthless things and turn to the one, true, living God (Acts 14:15). Paul encourages Timothy to flee from evil desires and instead pursue righteousness and its offspring (2 Ti 2:22). Even in regards to our identity and character we are told to put off our old self and its ways of darkness and to put on our new self and be clothed with Jesus Himself (Eph 4:17-24; Ro 13:12-14).

The concept of changing seems simple enough: step 1 – take off old clothes; step 2 – put on new clothes. But when changing involves more than our fashion trends and actually deals with the fabric of our souls, it can get messy in many ways.

For practicality’s sake, both putting off and putting on need to work in harmony and not in ignorance of each other. In my walk over the past few years, I can see where I’ve done one of the steps, but not the other. When we empty ourselves but then don’t replace it with something redemptive, we end up back to where our familiarity left us. Our junk returns with guilt and shame and oppression to reinforce it.

There are also times when we prematurely put on virtue without being undressed of vice. We become wolves in sheep’s clothing and attain a form of godliness that has no power because underneath we are still wearing the old person. It’s like taking up humility without putting pride to death. Nobody who boasts about how humble they are has really been cloaked in God’s grace.

I believe this is the harder of the two. We can know of good things but still not use or live them. And it’s so much harder to put down something that is inheritably good, but used in the wrong way, and have it be redefined to us after we thought we knew it. But God wants us naked. God wants to strip us to our core and work in us at an intimacy that is closer than our flesh. He also wants to clothe us with His Son... to have us experience the victory of His sacrifice and how deep and visible that redemption is.