My wife loves to clean with bleach. She uses a bleach-based cleaner on the kitchen tiles and likes to put bleach in the laundry. The problem is, she likes it so much that somehow (we’re not sure how) it manages to get on things that are not white, and that means they get badly stained and permanently damaged. Everybody in the family has a treasured colored T-shirt or pants that have been spotted with bleach. As a result, we all try to keep her away from the laundry if at all possible. If I catch her any where near the washing machine with a Clorox bottle it’s a simple “Alright, Marti, put the bottle down, put your hands up and step away from the machine!”
Actually, it may be a conspiracy. It may be more of a coincidence that anything that gets bleach stains on it seems to end up in Marti’s pajama drawer. She likes to sleep in my formerly favorite T-shirts.
I might be stretching here, but there seems to be a spiritual component to this somewhere. Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:27). Their idea of righteousness was to bleach everything, which ends up working only on the surface of things.
I think that’s what legalism does. It tends to take all the color out of life. No wonder Christians have a reputation of being so boring. When our spirituality is legalistic, we lose all color. Legalism (which is up to us) tends to whitewash our humanity where true righteousness (which is up to Christ) is a mixture Christ and who we really are. Which doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the law, it’s just that what’s good for getting things clean can also take the color out of something that was meant to be colorful.
Being righteous doesn’t mean being something other than human. In fact, if our righteousness is nothing of our own making (which it is not) it should be beautifully colored with our humanity.
In Paul’s description of the new covenant, the whole point is the contrast that Christ’s life creates in us between His power and our humanity. The “treasure in earthen vessels” that His life creates in us is precisely so that there will be no doubt that the power comes from God and not ourselves (2 Corinthians 4:7). And he restates it in a different way a few verses later: “For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that His life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Corinthians 4:11), the emphasis, for our current discussion, being on our mortality.
So use bleach in your household, if you want to, but don’t try being something that you are not. That takes the color out of life and hides the impact of Christ in you.
John Fischer The Catch 
Thanks for this, John. I’ve been a little down lately by comparing my robust opinions and attitudes to those my ‘bleached’ sisters’. She consistently puts a positive spin on things that sometimes need to stand by themselves as a negative or an area of conflict or pain for me. Or, when there is no positive spin to be had, she simply says, “don’t go there”. Later I come away from that conversation feeling unclean for what I think and feel.
You just reminded me that Christ wants us to be who we are and become more alive and real because He lives in and through us. Maybe he wants us to be loud and brash and messy as we work through, with His power, the challenges and joys in our lives.
Thanks
Yeah!
Great analogy, John, although “whitewash” and “whited sepulchers” are about using WHITE PAINT to cover up, not bleach to turn white – the way Huckleberry Finn did to those fences. You probably know that.
I struggle with my self-righteousness and God lets me get in trouble for it so that I will be reminded of His grace. Self-righteousness is simply forgetting God’s grace. I don’t think God is bothered near as much about our sin as our self-righteousness. When you read the Old Testament, and see how much people’s sin bothered God, it really puts thing into perspective. God looks on the heart.
My concern with this bleaching analogy is that we will think that sin is colorful and righteousness is bland white – which, of course, is not true. A lot of sin is very colorful and even fun. But think of how much more colorful and fun God’s righteousness must be. Think of how much more exciting it must have been to hang out with Jesus than to hang out with the sinful Romans OR the self-righteous Pharisees. Both pale in comparison.
Have a colorful day!
In my analogy, color = human, not just sin. Sin might be part of it but the point is we aren’t being completely honest. And the other, whether it’s white paint or bleach, it’s the fact that it is only surface deep is the point and that it is hiding the truth about us.
As I read today’s devotional about your wife using bleach, I wonder if that is a Northeastern thing, being raised in Waverly, New York, because my Mom always used bleac and I like no other cleaner than bleach, which is my preference.