Maybe Pure. Spotless. Clean.

Maybe Chores. Impossible. Unreachable.

What crosses your mind first when you think of the color white? 

My grandmother is a fantastically gifted painter. As a little girl, I used to ask her for training tips all the time. How do I make the water look like waves like you do, Grammy? Teach me how to get the lines on hands to look more realistic.

One of my favorites was: Tell me again about how all the colors mixed together make white, and how you were required to do it at Art School?

That may or may not be new knowledge to you, but it’s true. White light is actually a perfect combination of all of the colors of the rainbow.

My Grammy can do it with paint. I’ve tried again and again, but I just can’t seem to make anything but brown. Maybe a light purple, on a good day.

It’s so fascinating to me—this truth about the color white being a blend of all of the other colors.  In Revelation 4:3, we read about the Lord’s throne being encircled by rainbows. And He sits on that throne, surrounded by gleaming colors, in His perfect, pure, white radiance.

My daughters sat on their little knees at the table, drawing pictures of rainbows. They pondered the way that colors blend together and their order in the rainbow. They worked hard to fill all of the empty white space on their paper.

Avianna asked Ava where the white belonged in the rainbow. Ava replied that it wasn’t part of the rainbow at all, but that it was the color that was meant to fill the clouds.

I reminded these sweet ones that the perfect blend of the rainbow’s color actually makes the very white that covers the smooth surface on which they are creating beautiful pictures. They love trying to mix their colors to make white, the way I did as a little girl.

But creating pure white just always seemed out of reach to me. I couldn’t achieve the color on my own. No matter how hard I stirred and mixed and blended.

How much is that like salvation?

1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

• Have you thought of that purity as something that is wholly out of reach for you—so completely unattainable?
• Have you wondered if even your most tearful confession could possibly reach the ears of a perfect God?
• Have you thought of “clean” as something that requires a perfect past?
• Have you felt that your mess and your mistakes covered you in stains far too glaring to really be able to be cleaned?
• Have you thought of “purity” as the thing that God might give to someone else, but that He couldn’t possibly offer to you, with the way that you keep falling short?

Please hear this, dear friend: 

Pure, clean, spotless White isn’t void and empty. White is not a color that is untainted.

White requires perfect unity of an array of colors. We cannot attain it on our own—that’s true. We cannot reach a pure and perfect God by any amount of our own doing. We are a mess of colors on our own—blackened, even—by our insistence upon going our own way.

God, in His powerful creativity and beautiful love, draws us to His pure and spotless self. He carefully mixes the blood of Jesus with our colorful pasts and presents with our confession of sin with our trust in Him with our willingness to follow Him. He takes our sin-stained lives and covers them with Jesus. He takes our hearts and unifies them with His own. He takes our trust and He sets us free.

He takes the ashes of our broken lives and makes something new and beautiful and everlasting.

Pure and spotless. From a blend of all of those vibrant colors. He is a skilled artist.

And He makes white.

He makes us white.

 Isaiah 1:18 tells us that though our sins are like scarlet, Jesus washes us white as snow.

What a beautiful picture to remind us that in order to become white, first, there first must be color.

God gave us the rainbow as a reminder of His mercy. And He mixes those very colors to show us our salvation.

Do thoughts of regret, worry, hopelessness, or insecurity run through your mind? 

What might freedom and peace really look like? 

From May 16-20, we're doing a free online Bible study about getting ahold of our thoughts. We would love for you to join us! We'll be using our new Captive Cards and working through our Captive model of Take, Replace, Surrender, Resolve. 

You are more than welcome to participate in this free {Worry Cleanse} without the Captive Cards, but they'll definitely help you get the most out of the study {and conversely, the study will help you to get the most out of the Captive Cards}.