Feeling Clean Or Being Clean

Diagnosing personal motivations is more difficult that most think.

In his work Start with Why, Simon Sinek discusses the importance of our motivation. And in Chapter 4, under the heading “It’s What You Can’t See That Matters”, the author reveals that sometimes we think we want one thing while pursuing another.

Detergent advertisers once promoted their product with statements like “Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter.” It was the value proposition for many years. That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. But was it really? Sinek explains:

The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different. The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights. Not such a remarkable finding, if you think about it, that people doing laundry wanted their detergent to help get their clothes not just clean, but very clean. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. Protein, said one brand. Color enhancers, said another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean. 

Later, a group of anthropologists discovered that this approach wasn’t really driving buying decisions. They observed that when people took their laundry out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white and bright it was. The first thing people did was to smell it. “This was an amazing discovery,” then Sinek concludes, “Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.”

What these marketing departments discovered was that having clothes smell fresh and clean “mattered much more than the nuanced differences between which detergent actually made clothes measurably cleaner.”

This same attitude extends out of the laundry room deep into the recesses of our hearts. We are much more interested in the illusion of clean than the reality of clean. God, on the other hand, is concerned about our actual purity. 

Doing good deeds might help us “feel” clean. But it’s not a real clean. Isaiah confesses, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” Authentic cleanness comes only through faith alone in Jesus Christ. This is why the author of Hebrews invites us to “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:22).

References:
Psalm 51:10-17; Isaiah 1:16; Matthew 23:26; John 7:24; 2 Corinthians 7:1; Hebrews 10:22; 1 John 1:7, 9