Skid Marks On The Driveway!

“J

onathan Blake Carpenter!  If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times….” My dad’s tone of voice and his selection of words indicated this was not going to be a pleasant conversation.  He had begun this verbal exchange by using all three of my names which for a kid was the curse of death!  

But there was nothing I could do.  I had been caught red-handed with the evidence of my crime all around me.  Saying I was innocent or that I had done nothing wrong would have given my dad more ammunition than he obviously needed to make his point!   

My crime?  Leaving skid marks on the driveway, something I had been warned against repeatedly.  I would ride my bike down Main Street, turn onto our driveway, race toward the bottom of our hill, and slam on the brakes!  This left a wonderful skid mark as the rubber from the tire was transferred to the concrete.  It was a six-year-old’s equivalent of a sixteen-year-old burning rubber in a car and it was a blast!  My dad, however, wasn’t so amused!  And now, I understand why.  Instead of clean concrete, it looked as if the Indy 500 had taken place on our driveway and I was Mario Andretti! 

My solution was simple; I would just take a cloth and wipe up the tire marks!  Wrong!  It seemed the rubber was intent on clinging to the concrete in a bond that was much stronger than my small rag and little arms could remove.  The drive way was stained; that was a fact.  Nothing short of time or a miracle could make it come clean. 

Actually, both of these elements worked to remove the evidence of my wild and crazy days as a neighborhood-driveway-bicycle-tire-rubber-laying-guru! A few weeks after this episode, with the evidence on the driveway still stacked against me, something wonderful happened.  We had an old-fashioned thunderstorm, North Carolina style!  It rained all night with heavy doses of thunder and lightning.  In the morning, the sun shone bright and clear, and the driveway was clean.  In fact, it was spotless!  There were no traces of rubber anywhere and it looked as if I had never touched that concrete with my bike! 

If you think about it, that driveway is a good representation of our lives.  We do a wonderful job of laying rubber and leaving dirty skid marks everywhere.  There seems to be no greater thrill to us than leaving as many of these marks as we can one after the other.  We even try to outdo ourselves by making sure the next skid mark is longer, darker, and more elaborate than any that have gone before.   

All this is great fun until we are called to account for our actions and to realize what we have done.  As we look over the driveways of our lives, we see mark after mark, each one representing a poor choice we made, an action we shouldn’t have performed, or a word we should never have spoken.  Bending down and wiping up these marks is not an option; what we need is a miracle, something or someone to completely remove all the ugly marks we left all over the clean concrete of life. 

Paul addressed this very issue in Ephesians 5:25-27 “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”   

This passage is taken from Paul’s admonition to couples about loving each other.  The first part of the passage—where wives are instructed to be submissive—is usually quoted without continuing on through the entire passage.  It is in the portion chosen for today that we get the full understanding of how husbands are to love their wives and how Christ loved us. 

Notice that Paul tells us that Christ loved the church, the body of believes, so much that he gave himself up for her. Not only that, his wish was to make her holy and to wash any and all stain from the church so that her body (that is every believer in Christ) would be clean, without spot or wrinkle!  Wow!  You want to talk about having your driveway cleaned!! This is how Christ loved us and consequently it is how husbands are to love their wives and how the body of Christ is to love each other! 

When we make a mess of our lives, when we constantly leave mark after mark, knowing what we are doing and continuing anyway, we end up making one colossal mess.  Jesus, however, stands ready to clean up all the marks we leave behind us.  He wants us to be holy, that means set apart, and he wants us to be without spot or wrinkle, acceptable to God.  We can only do this when we accept him as savior and lord, receiving his sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins. 

What does the driveway of your life look like today?  Are their skid marks everywhere?  Does it seem there is more rubber than concrete and that the driveway is just one big black stain?  Please don’t give up!  There is a way that all those marks can be removed and the driveway restored to the clean condition it was meant to have.  Because of Jesus Christ, your driveway need never again be stained by the skid marks of life!  Won’t you accept his gift of salvation and forgiveness today?