Clean Through the Word

“Clean” is a word every child learns early. Here the Lord Jesus uses the Greek word katharos, which means pure, cleansed, free from what defiles. It is the same word He used in Matthew 5:8: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” Just one verse earlier, the Father “purgeth” the fruitful branch, and that word comes from the same root.

So the cleansing the Father does on the branch was already at work in these men, and Jesus said so: “now ye are clean.” Judas had just gone out into the night, and the eleven who remained were the ones who had received Christ’s teaching. For three years His word had been working on them, cutting away pride and worldly thinking a little at a time. They were not clean because they were better men. They were clean because they believed what He said.

That kind of cleansing reminds me of the filter in our fridge, which I had to replace not long ago. A filter does a simple job. Everything passes through it, and what does not belong gets caught. God’s Word works the same way. When we run our plans, our words, and our motives through the Bible, it shows us what pleases the Lord and catches what does not. The psalmist asked how a young man could cleanse his way, and the answer was “by taking heed thereto according to thy word” (Psalm 119:9).

But a filter sitting in the box cleans nothing, because the water has to go through it. In the same way, a Bible on the shelf will not purify a heart that never brings its choices to it. Let His Word do in you what it did in those eleven men.