TIMELESS AND TIMELY TRUTHS FROM THE BOOK
"Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls." - James 1:21
At an altar this week, a young mother with a beautiful bay in her lap came and sat down by me on the front row of a church at the end of a service. She asked for prayer for her bay who was about two, and then she spoke quietly saying, "I have battled drugs for many years." She was no older than twenty-five, and when she said many, I knew what she meant. You could hear the despair in her voice. Then she said, "I have been clean for sixty days," and for her, sixty days was like a decade.
As I meditated on this passage of scripture in James, I thought of her and prayed for God to help her. I wondered what had keyed the confidence in her to share with me what she had kept secret. She was like the man with the withered hand whom Jesus spoke to and said, "Stretch forth your hand." She was stretching her need in faith toward God, and you, also, can do that today. I love this passage in James. These words arrested my attention: LAY APART. "Wherefore lay apart all filthiness of naughtiness..."
To get free and stay free, here is what James had to say. It helps to know that salvation comes with an instruction book. James' word on the subject is timeless and timely, i.e., "lay apart" all filthiness from our lives. It is a Greek picture-play on words illustrated as if you are putting something away out of reach or removing your filthy work clothes at the end of a work day like a Kentucky coal miner has to do. They are glad to get them off. They don't just fall off. They have to remove them. James suggests that you put them out of arm's reach, so far away you can never reach them again.
That is what the young mother needed, and you may need it as well. "Lay apart, out of reach all filthiness of the flesh...and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls."
We believe in you!
Cleddie & GayNell