It was a dread disease over a hundred years ago. When you heard “yellow fever” you could almost taste the fear, the kind that comes when your heart starts beating in your throat, close to your tongue. Over a hundred years ago, they “knew” what caused it-it was contagious, passing from one human being to another. It never occurred to them that the mosquito pumped it into human flesh. That knowledge would come later. Until then, every one “knew” that human beings caught it, carried it, and then died from it in huge numbers. Washington D. C. was a giant yellow fever incubator in the summertime a hundred and forty years ago.

In the last year of the War Between the States, they could see that the southern cause was being lost. Desperate times called for desperate measures. They decided to launch biological warfare against the North. It would be easy-get the clothes of those who had just died from yellow fever, box them up, and send them into the North to be worn by Yankee civilian and soldier alike. The plot expanded to include the premier Yankee of them all, Abraham Lincoln. They packed a special box of three shirts, all almost new, each worn by a victim of yellow fever. Get that special box into the North and through a series of couriers, get them to the White House, and present them as a special gift to Lincoln himself.

The sick shirts do get into the North, but along the line, a courier loses his nerve and Lincoln never gets the gift. It all proved harmless, but the biological intent was there. (So much for the idea, “The War Between the States was the last war fought by gentlemen.”)

For the Christian, there’s a sick shirt war going on: the world wants him to change into its clothes. The world wants to cut us into its cloth, conforming us to its standards, making us the men in its gray flannel suits. Dressing us in its sick shirts of “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy…” (Gal. 5:20).

The believer’s fashion statement is found in Colossians 3:12: “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” The Christian fashion turns into armor in Ephesians 6:13-18, with its belts, breastplates, helmets, and shoes.

As with everything else, we have a choice everyday-the sick shirts of the world or the vibrant, attractive fashion of the Christian life. The world’s shirts will bring the spiritual sicknesses of anger, bitterness, factions, dissension, and discord. The Bible presents a whole new wardrobe, one which dresses the believer in the character of Christ. …..Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

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