Don’t Confuse Religious Life With True Spiritual Life
In the Old Testament and in Jesus’ day, contact with a dead body rendered a person ceremonially unclean. (Numbers 19:16) For that reason, graves and tombs were often whitewashed to keep people from accidentally coming in contact with them. They were bright and white on the outside but unclean on the inside. Jesus used this well-known custom to illustrate that what’s on the outside of a person may be very different from what’s on the inside — religiously lifelike on the outside, but spiritually dead on the inside. The same can be said today: Being religious on the outside is no guarantee of being spiritually alive on the inside. Jesus said that it’s necessary to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God. (John 3:3) We must become a “new creation” through faith in Christ. (2 Cor. 5:17) Don’t confuse religious life with true spiritual life. If you’re not a new person in Christ, you can lay all of your sins at the feet of Jesus and become one.
