A few years ago, Anna and I were living in an apartment close to downtown San Diego. It was our first apartment as a married couple, and we loved it -- until about nine months in. We were doing some deep cleaning and pulled out one of our couches, and that's when we saw it: black mold on the walls. We started going around the apartment, and sure enough, we saw it in our bedroom and the closets. We, of course, cleaned the walls, but after talking to a couple of friends who were familiar with mold remediation, we feared it was growing behind the drywall. The landlord was only willing to do a touch-up on the exterior walls. We would have had to pay thousands of dollars to have a mold remediation company come to do the cleaning needed. So we decided to move.
Sin is like that mold, except far worse. It runs deep and has made a mess of our lives. We might try to clean ourselves to make ourselves look presentable and acceptable, but really we're just cleaning the exterior walls. The problem is much deeper than we know how to fix.