Daily Manna · Day 311 · November 7
Drawing Near with Assurance
“Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.”
You have been waiting until you are in better shape. Not consciously, and you would not put it that way, but you have missed twice, and snapped at someone, and lost to the same habit again, and the plan is to come back once things have settled a bit. The week you never meant to spend away from God is now most of a month.
The objection underneath that is more respectable than people admit. It is not laziness. It is a sense that walking in casually would cheapen the thing, and there is something right in that instinct, which is why the argument holds.
But look at the vocabulary the writer uses, because it is not the vocabulary of a visitor. Hearts sprinkled, bodies washed with pure water: that is the consecration of a priest, straight out of Exodus, blood applied and water poured, the ceremony that installed a man to serve inside the sanctuary. And three verses earlier he has said what makes it possible, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way. The holiest is not the courtyard where the crowds stood. It is the room nobody entered.
So the picture is not a person sidling back into a building hoping not to be noticed. It is a person being installed. And notice that both verbs are passive. Sprinkled, washed. Someone else did them, and neither of them was done by you on a better morning.
The door is open now rather than later. You are welcome to come in the state you are actually in, with the thing you are ashamed of named rather than implied. Nobody is asking you to arrive clean, and there is no version of you further down the calendar who would be more welcome than the one holding this.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 311 is Flesh and Blood (Ephesians 6:12).