“Brainwashed”
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008I’ve been reading The Fisherman, by Larry Huntsperger, about the disciple Peter and I can “feel him.” He’s so over-the-top, like me at times. He’s one extreme or the other and seldom in the center. He’s a nothing-or-all-kinda-guy. Listen to him: “Peter said to Him, ‘Never shall You wash my feet!’ Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.’ Simon Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.‘ Jesus said to him, ‘He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean…” (John 13:8-10).Peter jumps from bold, fleshly, zealous defensiveness to bold, fleshly, zealous, self-surrender. First, his fleshly defense: ‘Never shall You wash my feet!’ Peter exudes a blind confidence in the current stream of thought flowing through his brain, impulsively acting on his own imperfect agenda from the gut, reacting to Jesus from his own perspective. But a subtle rebuke from the Master must have created an instant avalanche of “Stupid me, what was I thinking! Wait! I’ll make up for it. Watch this! I’ll see to it that I don’t make the same mistake twice and embarrass myself again. I am somebody. I’ll do something heroic!”This leads him to his second extreme, his heroic self-surrender: “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.” If one rebuke was an avalanche, the second correction from Jesus must have snowballed him into a frozen state. “Oops! That was the wrong thing to say. I would back-track and cover my trail, and pretend this scene never happened, but I’ve already been seen.” Feeling caught, he reacted by resorting to his super-spiritual underwear. He mentally ducked into the nearest phony-booth, stripped himself of the blush-red, defensive coverage and popped out with a deeper layer of pseudo-spiritual success wear labeled “I surrender all.”
Jesus isn’t fooled. He knows the truth. He is the Truth. He doesn’t go along with Peter’s roller-coaster reactions, his pendulum pandemonium, but stands centered in the truth, the truth that He made real in Peter’s life by His word: “He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean…”Clean. What a nice word. What a nice feeling. I’m on the plane from a week in Peru as I write this. We haven’t had a clean shower in eight days, so I’m longing for that feeling soon. I do need to be bathed from head to foot, but more than that I need a brainwash! As I was saying, “I feel Peter.” Just as I walked through the dirty streets and “poopy pastures” of Peru, I have often traveled the same up-and-down mental dirt roads Peter did, getting dusted by the same internal self-talk, and I need my brain washed!
I hear professor Terry Powell’s words echoing in my mind: “You’d worry much less about what people thought of you if you realized how seldom they did.” It’s when I go through those self-focused periods of self-consumption, wondering about my worth and the impression I am leaving, that I am either thinking more highly of myself than I ought or less of myself than is the truth in Christ.
“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17). Sanctified. Washed. Made new by the truth of Jesus Christ. Through His powerful word, God has cleansed the soul (mind, emotions, and will), making us, His Bride, acceptable and even glorious in His sight: “having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.” (Eph. 5:26). Good news: It’s done! The natural mind, like Peter’s at the time, does not get this, “But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16b). However, Peter gets it after the coming of the Holy Spirit: Read all of 1 Peter 1:3-25!
“You shall be holy for I am holy” (1:16). The OT command or prophecy becomes a NT promise and provision in Christ. I no longer try to be holy or “clean my own brain” for I can neither manufacture nor consistently manifest mental or moral might regardless of my sincerity; but through faith, in rest, I receive what I cannot achieve: the very mind of Christ. Brainwashed by Jesus! “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you (John 15:3). Receive the life you want.
