Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. Our reading titled,

Cleanzed Completely, was written by Adam R. Holes.

Recently, my wife and I were cleaning our house before having guests over.

I noticed some dark stains on our white kitchen

tile floor, the kind that required getting on my knees to scrub. But I soon had a sinking

realization. The more I scrubbed, the more I noticed other stains. Each stain I eliminated only made

the others that much more obvious. Our kitchen floor

suddenly seemed impossibly dirty, and with each moment, I realized, no matter how hard I work,

I can never get this floor completely clean. Scripture says something similar about self-cleansing. Our best efforts at

dealing with sin on our own always falls short. Seeming to despair of God's people, the Israelites,

ever experiencing his salvation, the prophet Isaiah wrote,

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy

rags.

But Isaiah knew there is always hope through God's goodness.

So he prayed, You Lord are our Father.

We are the clay.

You are the potter.

He knew that God alone can cleanse what we cannot until the deepest stains are white as snow.

We can't scrub away the smudges and smears of sin on our souls.

Thankfully, we can receive salvation in the one whose sacrifice allows us to be cleansed completely.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Isaiah chapter 64, verses 1 through 8.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you,

...