Inner Cleansing  ...burdens, problems, sins, forgiveness

Modern man is still a pilgrim with a great burden on his back, only he is not looking to a cross to lift it. He turns to amusement to forget it, or to bromides to deaden it, or he goes to the psychiatrist, if he can afford it, to get his twist straightened out. We have a whole new priesthood, and a new vocabulary for the reality of sin. A tranquilizer is what you take for heartbreak. No, we haven't got rid of sin by redefining it. We are still a burdened people, great multitudes of mixed-up men and women struggling up the road with a great burden on our backs. What a wonderful release would come to our hearts and homes if we could find the point again, find once more the core of it. When his burden fell off, Bunyan's pilgrim "gave three leaps for joy and went on singing." What a lift would come to the world's life, what a cleansing of its moral soul, if we could recover the inner force of it, even though we might have to change some of the forms in which it is expressed. I am convinced we have to do that.

In every age we have had to get back of the forms and the words to recover the reality of what we started out to say. You can see it in the Gospels. You can see it in the story of Zacchaeus, the little man who climbed into the sycamore tree. When Jesus saved Zacchaeus there was a lift through the whole community ... everybody felt it. This little man found forgiveness, and it changed him. He was crooked and he became straight. He was stingy and he became generous. "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods," he said, "I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold" (Luke 19:8). See it? Fifty percent of his income to missions and restitution at the rate of four hundred percent! There is something quite practical about forgiveness.

In Wisconsin I once helped to get an old man converted, and he was so glad, so grateful, that he wanted to give me his horse. It was all I could do to keep him from giving me that horse. What would I do with a horse? That was a long time ago: I might take it now. Religion makes people big. It makes them joyous and generous and open handed and openhearted. There is something very practical and very exciting about forgiveness.

There is a story about Zacchaeus after his conversion in the sycamore tree. He behaved so strangely that his wife was alarmed by what she thought were symptoms of insanity. Every morning instead of going down to his business, as a sane man ought to do, he set off in the opposite direction with a spade in his hand and a water jar under his arm. Finally, she became so curious she followed him. (The most curious thing in this world is a woman who isn't.) She saw him go down to the village well and fill the jar with water, then out through the village path to that old sycamore tree. Scraping away the rubbish and the dirt, he poured the water over its roots stood there stroking its trunk with his hand. Out of hiding place came his wife for an explanation. "I Him here," he said. "Here is where I found Him."

Is there a tree in your life somewhere, some spot sacred you found Him there? If you have not found this, have not come to grips with this, then you have not the core of it yet. You may have a form of religion, but you have not experienced the inner force of it, for this is what the religion of Christ is first of all about -the cure of sin, and the transformation of the inner life.