I had just parked my car on a Chicago side street and had not yet gotten out. It was late afternoon on a cold winter day. Across the street a man wearing one-piece, dark-yellow, thermal overalls, the kind worn by construction workers in cold weather, got out of his car. As he grabbed stuff out of the car and walked up to his house, I noticed a prominent dark stain in the seat and inside thighs of his yellow overalls. I concluded he must have been working at a construction site with no portable toilets on a task he could not interrupt without risking his job. He thought he could hold it but failed.
Embarrassing, uncomfortable. What do you guess was the first thing he did when he got in the house?
Something foul
No stain is pleasant, and some are worse than others. This was about as bad as it gets. Actually, no, there is a stain much worse. The Bible says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27 ESV).
The fallen world in which we live can stain the soul. Have you ever watched a movie that stained your soul? The credits roll, you turn the movie off or walk out of the theater, and you feel you have experienced something foul, something filthy. You wished you could erase the stain, but no, the stain remained. If only it could be shed as easily as soiled construction overalls.
A stained world
You can read a book or have a conversation with someone and feel stained by the profane, degraded view of life expressed in profane words.
This fallen world makes it possible for you to sin in countless ways and afterward feel stained. Scripture provides a shopping list of worldly ways that stain the soul:
“They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29-32 ESV).
A precious word fallen on hard times
That is just a short list of behaviors flourishing in our fallen world. Those who practice them are stained by evil, and Christians who are not careful can have the stain rub off on them if they follow these same worldly ways.
There is an important word used in the Bible for those who carefully avoid being stained by the world. The Bible uses this word to describe Jesus, who lived in this fallen world but never succumbed to its evil temptations and influences. It is a word that non-Christians have little use for and scarcely talk about, and even Christians are uncomfortable when the subject is raised. It is a word rarely used in book titles because it is likely to kill sales. Even many pastors are reluctant to use this word in a sermon, lest they give the wrong impression to visitors or repel immature and worldly believers.
God, on the other hand, is not shy about using this word to describe himself. In fact it is central to his identity. God says, “You shall be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16).