Kissing The Bathroom Mirror!

By Glen Young

The story is told of a principal of a small middle school who had a problem with a few of the older girls starting to use lipstick. When applying it in the bathroom, they would then press their lips to the mirror and leave lip prints.

Before it got out of hand, he thought of a way to stop it. He gathered all the girls together that wore lipstick and told them he wanted to meet with them in the ladies’ room at 2 PM. The time came and they found the principal with the school custodian waiting for them.

The principal explained that it was becoming a problem for the custodian to clean the mirror every night. He said he felt the ladies did not fully understand just how much work it was and he wanted them to witness just how hard it was to clean the lipstick from the mirror.

The custodian then demonstrated. He took a brush with a long handle out of a box. He then dipped the brush in the nearest toilet, moved to the mirror and proceeded to remove the lipstick.

That was the last day the girls pressed their lips on the mirror!!!

Disgusting, isn’t it! And yet, sometimes it takes something disgusting for us to recognize the seriousness of a thing. Take sin for example. We often fail to be adequately disgusted by the sin around us, especially, when committed by Christians. The prevailing attitude seems to be that sin is not so bad any more. We minimize sin by giving it inoffensive names. Drunkenness has become alcoholism, which in turn is considered a disease. Fornication has become having an affair. Lying has become putting the best possible face on the situation. It is also called ‘spin’ by newscasters. Abortion has become the woman’s right to choose. And on it goes.

Sin is disgusting to the Almighty Father. When the Christian returns to participating in the defilement of the world (2 Peter 2:20), it makes God sick. God views such a life as disgusting? Consider Peter’s description of such a life. “It has happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog turning to his own vomit again, …” 2 Peter 2:22.

There is nothing more disgusting than to see a dog return to eat that which he has just disgorged from his stomach. Makes me sick just thinking about it. Well, that is the way God feels when He observes a Christian departing from a faithful walk with Him.

Have you ever taken a bite of something and found it to be spoiled? Did it cause you to vomit? Jesus said to the church at Laodicea, “So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” Revelation 3:16. A local church that is lukewarm makes the Lord sick to His stomach. Disgusting, isn’t it!

As long as sin is considered to be ‘not so bad,’ we will be lulled into accepting it in the lives of others and even in our own lives. We need to view sin through the eyes of God. Like the young ladies in our story, then and only then will we stop ‘kissing the bathroom mirror’!