Episode 372: I’m Talkin…White

I’m Talkin, episode 372, for June 1st, 2025.

This is Joel from the I’m Talkin microcast, where I share my thoughts on a topic that has piqued my interest this past week.

This week, we’re talking white.

So white seems like kind of a generic word, and kind of, I don’t know, seems like a weird word to maybe talk about.

But I think there are lots of uses for it.

I’m going to stay on the positive side of them, and some of the things that I’ve used in my lifetime.

But I think a lot of times we think of white, we think of things that are kind of pure, and I’ll talk about that a little more later.

But I was thinking of things like, I grew up in Alaska, so we would have what we call a whiteout, and that’s when it snowed so hard that you really just couldn’t see anything.

And if you were trying to drive, it was just the headlights reflecting white right back to you.

We talk about as pure as the driven snow.

We think of white laundry where it needs to be washed a certain way so that it maintains its brilliance, its cleanliness.

And often undergarments that we might wear are white in color.

There’s just something about the cleanness, the aspect of nothingness even sometimes that comes with the word white.

And then we think of a bright white light.

There’s just a lot of purity in the word and in just the world in general as we use it.

And therein lies the challenge for those of us who call ourselves Christians.

So this week’s word comes from Isaiah 1 verse 18 that says, Come now, let’s settle this, says the Lord.

Your sins are like scarlet, but I will make them as white as snow.

They are red like crimson, but I will make them as white as wool.

So there’s the word white.

It’s like turning you into purity.

So we are not pure because of anything that we do or any character that we hold as Christians.

We understand that.

We’ve read the verses in Romans, the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

We understand that sin has consequences and that Jesus bore those consequences for us on the cross so that we have the purity of Christ in us through his Holy Spirit.

Not of our own doing, but of everything that he did.

And so we have that promise from Isaiah that says, I will remove the stain of sin from you and make you pure.

And that is pure white is the color is the word that God used in scripture.

And so it changes who we are.

It changes how we live.

And we are not proud because we’re white or because we’re pure.

And that color of whiteness comes from God’s purity, not from us.

But we are blessed and humbled that he has chosen to change our sin into the purest white of snow and the purest white of wool.

Until next week, this is Joel from the I’m Talking Microcast.