Most of you know that great country comedian from McComb, Mississippi, named Jerry Clower. He is a former fertilizer salesman and a devoted Baptist layman. Jerry tells about a lady he knew down in Amite County. She lived near a construction site where workers were putting a tar roof on a building. This lady had sixteen children--or "young'uns," as Jerry called them. One day she lost one of her children. She hunted around and found that he had fallen into a fifty-gallon drum of black roofing tar at the construction site. She reached down, hauled him up, took a look at him, and said, "Boy, it'd be a lot easier to have another one than to clean you up."

I'm so glad that God doesn't feel that way about us. God is in the business of taking the most soiled, unlikely characters and transforming th…