Son Bleached

By Cheri Cowell –

I was amazed the other day to discover young girls still use lemon juice in their hair during the summer. My teen girlfriends and I put lemon juice in our hair before heading to the beach. While out all day in the sun, the lemon juice would bleach our hair in streaks—a cheap highlighting job. If we returned to the beach day after day, those streaks would turn almost white. I remember one time, however, we tried this when spending a day at a friend’s pool. Some of you may be laughing right now because you know what happened. That’s right, our hair turned green. The lemon juice produces a chemical reaction with the chlorine in a pool that turns hair green. And there is no way to fix this problem, except to bleach your hair. I still chuckle with that memory. God knows all about highlighting, bleaching, and the solution for color mistakes.

In God’s color wheel, sin is given the color red—blood red. Purity is white—snow white. Though our sins are blood red, God’s forgiveness, or His purity, bleaches that sin, making it as white as snow. How does this process work? We begin by highlighting them, and then submitting them to the rays of His Son. Often, you and I try to make this process “easy” by skipping the step of bringing our sins into the Sonlight. Instead, we try to hide them in the pool of self-help, self-analysis, or self-pity. But these don’t really work and instead of white as snow, we get green with envy. Our only hope is to turn to God’s bleach bottle and blot out our transgressions. His solution is the only one that works.

PRAYER: I praise You God for Your gift of forgiveness that comes through the blood of Your only Son. Forgive me when I choose self-help, self-analysis, or self-pity instead of the wonderful free gift of forgiveness—Son bleached sin.

“‘Come now, let us settle the matter,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool’” (Isaiah 1:18 NIV).