When I was a small boy, my mother would get me all ready for church on Sunday morning and then tell me to "keep myself clean and stay away from that pond!" We had a pond right next to our house, with fish, ducks, frogs, you know. Being a boy, how could I resist? Somehow, even though I wouldn't have a spec of mud on me, she'd know I had been down there and I'd get in trouble!

It was quite a while later before I realized it was the smell of the water that got on me, one way or another, from skipping stones or catching that one last fish before we headed off to town. I didn't notice the smell, because, well, probably because I smelled like it all the time. I don't think I ever fell in; goodness knows we never swam in there - but as country kid I would spend a lot of time playing around it, or watching the ducks, or whatever.

I had a friend once who used to smoke every moment he was awake. He and his wife chained smoked all the time. One day he saw an add for a hypnotist who came to town and claimed he could cure him for $20. He went without his wife and came home to never smoke again. He suddenly realized his house, clothes, car, furniture, and WIFE stunk, so he made his wife go down the next night. Sure enough, she quit smoking too. Just like that. And funny, whenever they got around one of their friends that smoked they would complain, oh so much, about the smell of the smoke.

I was thinking about this because today I had some boys over to stack firewood. They were wet and dirty, I suppose cold too, and were quite anxious to take showers as soon as they could to get the smell off of them. I was thinking how some people I've met don't notice the odor they have, but most people are so happy to be clean. Everyone likes new things because they have no dents or dings, and they are fresh and clean. People spend money detailing their cars, fixing up their houses to make them look tidy and new, and yes, primping even themselves so they look younger and clean. Nothing wrong with that. Clean is good.

When we are kids, we don't realize how dirty we are. We might eat food off the ground, or even eat dirt or sand just to see what it tastes like. Eventually we start to get fussy, usually because we don't like something, such as ``I can't eat that broccoli because it didn't get washed enough" or some such nonsense. Drop a piece of chocolate and even fussy people put aside their inhibitions, though.

When we are sinners, we may not realize we stink. Especially when we hang around other stinky people. But once we stop and get cleaned up, we are reborn! We go to great pains to never get stinky again, and we complain about other people who wallow in the filth of sin and reek with it. Before we didn't see it for what it was, but now it turns our stomach. And the feeling of knowing we can be cleansed of sin! What an awesome feeling! We might spend long hours studying and striving to remove every last iota of yuk from our lives. Nothing wrong with that! Clean really IS good!

The bulletin message today is very simple. Sin has a foulness attached to it. We might hold our noses and pretend otherwise, but just living any old stinky way and hoping God isn't going to notice seems, or smells, a little "fishy" to me.

Randy