One of my biggest pet peeves is when I sit down to eat a pancake, biscuit, waffle, or other item requiring butter, and I open the butter to find crumbs. Granted, it's difficult to spread butter on toast without transferring crumbs back into the butter, but my heavens, that irks me. One day, I was lost in thought as I stared into the crumbly tub of butter, and an idea came to mind.
Our butter is full of crumbs. I mean, imagine your life as being your butter. Now look into your life, and you are going to see more than a crumb or two. Mine is full of crumbs, and sometimes there is just not a thing in the world I can humanly do about it. Now, let's go back to the literal butter.... I can take a knife to it and scrape out crumbs, but as I do I end up wasting way too much butter along with it. Wow... Do you see where I'm going?
Our lives are so full of what I sometimes call "schtuff". None of us have pure, clean butter to work with. Sins pop up every day, whether it's a quick thought or a drastic action. The Bible says that either of those is the same in God's eyes, and that sin is sin is sin. (James 2:10) Those can kind of be looked at as our crumbs. Try as we might, no matter what we do, we will never get rid of every crumb. We will never be able to have that pure, clean butter we would prefer to have. If we grab a knife to try to remove those crumbs, we are going to take some butter with us. All around us, people are trying to deal with the guilt, pain, and weight of sin in ways that is stealing minutes of their precious lives each day. Whether it's alcohol, drugs, pornography, or even just trying to stay so busy you don't have to face it, those knives are going to cut out too much butter along with the crumbs. In fact, it doesn't remove the crumbs, but it merely transfers them from one place to another. Wow again.
So how do we take care of those crumbs in the butter? If we are not able to use those knives to remove them, then what? The Good News is that butter can be purified. Here is how it happens... You heat the butter to a melting point so that it changes into a liquid state. You then can skim the crumbs, which float to the surface, right from the butter. When the butter cools, it returns to its original form, but there are no crumbs to be found.As Christians, God purifies us by heating things up in our lives. We are melted down basically to liquid, to the point that we are dependent on Him to return us to our original form. He skims the crumbs from the surface of our lives, and then He gently cools us so that we can become what He created us to be, in our most pure form. Then He has Jesus become the filter for us, the cheesecloth for our butter, the lid for our margarine tub, and Jesus keeps us pure from all of our crumbs.
Now I do realize that we will always have sin in our lives. However, if Jesus Christ is your Savior, you should never need that butter knife again. Seeing crumbs in my butter still bothers me, but it also reminds me of Romans 3:23. "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." If you have crumbs in your butter, don't you dare use that knife to get them out. You will cut out way too much of your precious life. Allow Jesus to purify that butter, and you will become what God created you to be, in your very purest form.
That's AWESOME!!
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