Psalm 62:1-2
My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.
I spent a number of years in my life as a painter. Not as an artist, mind you, but as that guy who shows up dressed in white that you hope doesn’t make a bigger mess while he recolors your den. There were a lot of things about painting that I didn’t like, but there was only one part that I hated, and that was stripping old paint. I can still remember standing on top of scaffolding 2 levels up holding a torch in one hand and a scraper in the other on cold winter days. I’d heat the old paint until it bubbled, scrape it off, and then repeat the process a couple hundred million times or so until all that was left was the bare wood. In fact, nothing new could be added to the surface until only the wood remained, or else the new finish wouldn’t look as good.
I thought about this a lot during my recent trip to India. As I watched the believers there, I realized that the environment in which they live has actually done for them what that torch did to the paint, and now they have been stripped down to the place where all that is left for them is hope in Christ. They would have a very different reaction to these two verses than I do. I read it and wonder if all my hope is in God because I am surrounded by so many things that are good at offering some hope, some of the time. But they would read it with a strong conviction that the word of God speaks truth because they are living it every single day. They literally have nothing else to cling to but God.
There is something unnerving and yet thrilling about the stripping process. There is the pain of the heat on our lives, and yet the freedom of seeing another unnecessary layer removed. Though we feel that we are losing, we are in fact gaining; less truly is more. The tendency in western Christianity is to add, but the process of stripping is all about subtraction. He must increase, and that only happens as we are stripped away.
I don’t know how we got this so wrong in our faith here in the west. Admittedly, our faith looks quite a bit like the rooms that have 5 coats of paint on them. We know they need to be stripped and redone the right way, but the amount of work required makes it easier to simply add coat number 6. It looks good for a while, but all the imperfections on the surface eventually show up again, and we find ourselves searching for the next coat so we feel new again. Perhaps it is time to give the torch to the Lord and allow Him to start the process of stripping away what should never have been there in the first place.
You and I won’t look better overnight. In fact, we may look worse for sometime. Stripping paint is messy, and sometimes seemingly endless, but keep the faith. When the old is gone, a new strength will come – one that cannot be shaken because it will be in the only One Who has been stable all the way through.
Let God strip you back to the bare wood of the cross. It is there that you will find the power of the victory that Christ won for us there.
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