It didn’t take long in my marriage to realize that my wife and I had two vastly different approaches as to what we did with our dishes after using them.

My wife opts for the leave-it-now-clean-it-later approach, whereas I’m more of a give-it-a-rinse-right-away kind-of guy. Despite explaining to her time and time again that leaving chili, or peanut butter, or melted cheese on her dish for days on end just makes it ten times harder to clean, not much has changed.

Through my years of being a Christian, I’ve realized these approaches to cleaning dishes have a direct parallel to how we look at sin and repentance.

Life in a Sinful World

Because we live in fallen world, sin is always an inevitability. Romans 7 is the cry of the Christian heart. The Apostle Paul laments:

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am!

As Christians, we recognize that we are sinful, and though — as I see it — it only takes a one-time confession that Jesus is Lord to inherit eternal life, we are still called to live a life of continual repentance.

Repentance is simply a turning away from sin. It is always accompanied by confession to God, and should be accompanied by confession to other Christians as well. Confession and repentance are a part of the Christian life. But this isn’t a once a year kind of event, this is a lifestyle; continual repentance is true repentance.

Leaving The Dirty Dishes

Like my wife’s approach to her dirty dishes, some choose the I’ll-take-care-of-it-later approach to repentance. The problem is that this makes the work of repentance a lot harder in the end. Instead of a gentle rinsing of your sin, you have to take out the steel wool, dish soap, and elbow grease to wash off the sin that’s caked on to your soul. It’s a messy process, and often it comes with consequences.

After King David committed adultery, he let his sin fester and things got pretty ugly. He cries:

3 When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
4 For day and night your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.

We’ve all been there. We mess up, and then seek cover. But after days, weeks, or months of stuffing down our sin, it feels like our insides are going to explode (or our bones are going to waste away, as David says). As Christians we weren’t created to hide our nastiness like that (though we’ve been trying to do since Genesis 3), we were created to humbly come before our holy God and admit that we need him.

Cleaning the Dirty Dishes

Continual, immediate repentance is the only way to live the Christian life. David realized this himself; he says:

5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

The beauty of the Gospel is that you are already forgiven in Christ. That junk you did ten years ago, clean. The crap you’re doing right now, clean. The mess you’re going to wade around in tomorrow, clean. You have been washed with the blood of the Lamb.

But even though it’s already taken care of, you are still called to confess and repent of your sins. Why? Because it shows your dependence on the perfect righteousness of Christ. It reminds you of your need for the sacrifice that Jesus made. All the while displaying to the watching world that your works don’t save you, but that the blood of Jesus does.

A life of continual repentance is not easy, but it is life-giving. When you sin, confess it to God. Tell him you’re sorry and ask him, by his power, to help you not do that again. Then, turn away from your sin and behold the glory of God.

The glory He reveals to you is better than anything this world has to offer. As C.S. Lewis says,

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

God’s grace is bigger than all of your sin. It is only because of this reality that we can live lives of continual repentance, constantly confessing our sins to the One who’s already forgiven them.

So instead of leaving your old, dirty, crusty sin in the kitchen sink, rinse it off now and experience the joy of being washed whiter than snow.