I was recently driving through the beautiful Rocky Mountains, enjoying the wonders of God’s creation. I turned on the cruise-control, and I prayed and meditated on God’s Word, His Greatness and our Christian pilgrimage. As I got a fresh glimpse of our Heavenly Father, I reveled in awe.

I went on thinking how necessary it is for us to feed spiritually, daily. We know that our physical bodies need nourishment (e.g. steak). In the same fashion, our spiritual body needs to be well fed, too. This is a concept with which many of us Christians are familiar. We feed on God’s Word, as well as on our communication with Him and a fellowship with other believers. Such things keep our spirit strong, and enable us to resist the schemes of the devil or of our own flesh. (Eph 6:10-18)

Yet another analogy came to my mind. God said that His Word “washes” us. “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17) We are saved through believing what His Word says, and we are sanctified (cleansed, made holy) through the process of learning and applying His word in our lives.

Imagine the situation if some of our friends and co-workers decided to save time each day by not taking a shower. The problem might not surface for a few days, but I am quite sure that we would soon notice the smell. As those dear folks continued in their new, time-saving scheme, they would begin to stink to the point that we could not be around them. We would file complaints with our employers’ Human Resources. We would start devising schemes to make them take a shower, but they would respond, “I know I should take a shower, but I am just struggling to find time to do that.”

I escaped from a Communist Czechoslovakia twenty years ago. After the communism fell, I got an opportunity to visit my family for the first time in 6 years. I flew back to Prague, and I quickly noticed one thing: Most Czechs smelled sweaty. Some smelled just a little bit, some really badly. But they did not know it, because they all smelled that way!

For economic reasons, most Czechs during my childhood would take a bath and change their shirts and pants about once a week. When I was growing

up in Czechoslovakia, we did not have a bathroom in the flat where we lived, just a toilet. So, as most “middle class” Czechs, we would take a bath once a week, on Saturday evening. We would drag a big metal tub into our “kitchen/dining-room/family-room,” fill it with hot water from huge pots which my mom had been warming up on the old-fashioned coal stove, and all take a turn and wash in that same tub.

Throughout the week, we would just wash our faces, necks, hands and feet in the sink. Like most other people, we wore the same shirt for several days, “until it got dirty.” By the time Wednesday arrived, we smelled like sweat and we would either not notice or it would just not bother us – we were used to it.

Toward the end of my visit to the old homeland 14 years ago, I started to get tempted not to change my shirt every day because quite a few people around me didn’t do it. For some, it was less of a hassle to wear the same shirt; others just didn’t have many shirts anyway.

Now, if I may be frank with you, even though here in America we find time to take a shower every day, how many of us take the time for a “spiritual bath” every day – washing our spirits as we study and apply His Word? Is there anyone else who at times stinks spiritually, or is it just me?

But how does our spirit get dirty? How do we get manure on our legs, dirt underneath our fingernails and on our knuckles; how do we get spiritually dusty, sweaty and smelly?

Day after day we encounter various temptations and do, say or THINK things that, as Christians, we should not. We are to be in the world, but not of the world. “Friendship with the world is an enmity with God” (Js 4:4). In order to be a witness of Christ to the world, we should not be irrelevant to them. However, in the process of being in the world, we tend to get “dirty.”

Well, let me go now and dig into His Word, which will wash away the spiritual dirt I got on me today. But, of course, the knowledge of the Word is only good as long as it does not replace my loving relationship with the Author of the Word.
(1 Cor 8:1-3)

© 2005 Milan Tachecí