Prepping for workday in a church is like prepping for doomsday.  You never know what your going to get.  One of the projects in queue was the carpet in the pastor’s office.  We had just finished tearing up the carpet in the entire downstairs and it took like 7 minutes to rip it up and find wood floors.  So, we got brave and went upstairs.  Come to find the carpet was laid on top of 1970’s yellow carpet with orange and green sprinkles.  We rip that up to find a plastic pad that is glued to the wood floor.  No big deal, right?  NO.  Big Deal!  We had to scrape that stuff off with a scraper tool thingy that looked like you needed it to pull rocks out of the pasture.  Wow, I never knew how hard scraping could be.  And then when we scraped it off it really never fully came off because of the glue stuck to the floor.  It was supposed to be a 5 minute job. All this made me think this is kind of like sin.  When we are convicted of sin we tend to peel that layer back.  When we step back at look under the surface we realize there is a problem.  But that problem is probably linked to another problem.  Whatever the sin may be pornography, drugs, alcohol, fits of rage, sexual immorality, or profanity it probably has an underlining factor.  That is just the surface layer. There is a lot more going on underneath.  What we try to do is say you know what I’m going to stop doing drugs.  Well that’s nice that you took off the carpet with ripples in it but what about the other two layers?  What about the glue that is stuck to the wood?  It is really not going to fix the problem that you began with.  The problem is much larger than that one layer.  The problem is much larger than ripping off the easy sin layer.  The problem goes back to being glued to the world.  The problem is we attached ourself to sin in such a way is that it became who we are.  We need a restart button.  We need to go back and be made new.  That is where the Gospel comes in.  Jesus is the restart button that can start to sand away at those layers of filth.  The Holy Spirit convicts us to look what’s under the carpet and the gospel is that which gives us the ability to once again see who God created us to be.