Cleaning The House

Cleaning The House

It was a common complaint that I heard while I was growing up; “Clean up your mess.”  “Straighten up your room.”  “Put your clothes away.”  “Put your dishes in the washer.”  My mother was in the Marines after WWII and she brought those standards into her home and instilled them in her children.  I wondered if we would ever get a break; just a moment’s rest from cleaning so that I could give my life to more important things – TV, or model cars and airplanes, or baseball and football.  But no such luck.  “Work before play” was our family motto.

            You know what?  This is what I have tried to instill in my children as well – though I don’t believe that I was as good as my mother was.  I have learned in my few short years under the sun that cleaning never ends.  It is a constant battle; in the house, at the office, with the car, in every part of my life.  And may I never forget that this is so with my spiritual life.

            Whenever I read the gospel accounts of Jesus cleansing the temple, I am reminded about God’s desire to keep His house clean.  The apostle Paul states that our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).  We are a holy place in which God lives.  And He refuses, as we would, to live in a place that is dirty, ugly, broken-down, smelly and unsafe.

            “And just what do you mean by dirty, ugly and smelly?” you may ask.

            To which God answers, “Your sins have made you an unfit dwelling.”

            Our sins pile up like dirty clothes or dirty dishes that constantly need to be washed and put away.  Bad attitudes and selfish lusts have caused “raw sewage” to back up into our spiritual house.  Now, really; would you want to take up residence in that kind of place?  And how do we clean it up?  Nothing made by man can do as much as even smear the mess into a bigger and smellier mess. 

Thankfully, like the song says, “What can wash away my sins?  Nothing but the blood of Jesus.  What can make me whole (clean) again?  Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”  Those of us in Christ have the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice that scours these messes away (1 John 1:7); the only remedy for the sin-mess of our lives.  And with the help of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, we also have the means available to keep our spiritual houses clean – as God designed us to be. 

            When we committed our lives to Christ, what we were in effect promising was to be continual custodians / janitors of God’s house.  All of the sin that dirties, clutters, stinks and messes us up must be cleaned and taken out with the trash (Hebrews 12:1).  If we are not willing to do it, the owner of the house may take drastic measures in hand as Jesus did, to drive out the greed, and anger, and lack of love and forgiveness, etc.  His house (our body) is not to be a den of robbers and thieves.  It is to be a house of prayer.

Doug