What Makes Us Clean?

Today officially begins nine days of the Vegetarian Festival (ถือศีลกินผัก).

People start looking for the yellow เจ (Jeh) flags that signify vegetarian food. Some carefully clean their cooking utensils and separate anything associated with meat. And it’s not just food, they’re also trying to purify their bodies, words, and thoughts.

While the festival is associated with gruesome, physical acts of people seeking purification for themselves and their community, for most this isn’t a show. It’s simply what their families have done for generations. And underneath it all, a simple human desire:

I want to be clean.

Read — Mark 7:14–23

Jesus also talked about being clean and unclean, but He took the conversation somewhere unexpected. Our deepest problem isn’t what enters us from the outside.

It comes from within.

Today, as people around us carefully think about what they eat, what they wear and what they do, pray that the desire for outward purity would lead to a deeper question:

How can my heart be made clean?

Pray that people would encounter Jesus as the One who doesn’t merely change what we eat or do, but makes us new from the inside.

Create in us a clean heart, O God.