Full of Dead Men's Bones

“Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness…”  Matthew 23:26-28 (KJV).

Do you ever walk around with that empty feeling?  I do.  Sometimes it’s because I’m hungry…need a pizza.  Sometimes it’s because work has drained me, or I haven’t slept enough.  The last few days it’s because I’ve had that sense of being hounded.  No blood hounds, no posse.  My boss isn’t on my back, and the tax man remains at bay.  No…this time it’s different.  Scripture is bugging me.  You know how you come across something and it just sticks with you?  Wake up – it’s there.  Go to work – it’s there.  No matter what you’re doing or where you go – there it is.

Ultimately it’s a good thing, but when you’re in the midst of this kind of thing it’s rather troublesome.  Maybe I’m just one of those over-sensitive guys.  I think too much, feel too much, worry too much.  Well, for the last several days…

Here’s the problem:  I struggle sometimes with knowledge of things about Christ and knowing Jesus.  I know a bit about religion and the Bible.  I have studied philosophy, theology and even learned a little bit about house repair.  But, of late, and certainly after reading this verse the other day, I just feel like one of those big concrete sepulchers you see in pictures of a creepy looking cemetery in New Orleans.  Full of dead men’s bones.  It’s an empty feeling.

I have ventured into a life of faith (more like stuck my toe into the ocean), and it’s knocked me for a loop.  I am quickly coming to realize that I know about Jesus but I really don’t know Him.  I want to know Jesus.  I have no desire for that Joel Osteen, kind of Christianity.  I don’t want to sing hymns and spiritual songs…expressing my desire to know some sanitized, shallow, Sunday morning glad-handing Jesus.  At the same time I have absolutely no desire for a spiritual maturity measured by the number of consecutive Sundays of church attendance I can tick off the calendar, or the number of fellow-Christians I can alienate simply because they don’t match up to my understanding of theology.  I simply want to work out my own salvation, to know what it means to know Jesus. 

I want to be more than a white sepulcher, no more dead men’s bones.