Clean House

People's perceptions of what it means to clean house are not identical. Some people would be content with simply cleaning the surface without removing deep layers of grime. Others would feel things were clean if clutter was removed from sight even if it was shoved into a drawer. Then there are those who will devote hours of scrubbing, sorting, and disinfecting and still won't be satisfied with the results. It's our definitions of "clean" that vary and can cause conflict and confusion.

Submitting ourselves to God and asking Him to cleanse us doesn't involve a negotiable definition. We don't get to ask God to extricate us from messy situations, but leave us alone in the sinful habits we are comfortable holding on to. We cannot reserve the right to ask God to pull back on His personality and purification process. We either fully submit to Him or we don't submit at all. If all of God does all that God does, we can't surrender any less. This means that we have to be willing to surrender our mental focus, habits, words, relationships, attitude, aspirations, and behaviors.

If we're going to clean house for God we've got to deep clean the whole house by His standards and not our own.

Continuing to Chisel

God has been working on me lately-more so than usual-as He preps me for what is next in His great plan for my family and His church. Dana and I both have had some tough personal times lately as God has revealed through His Holy Spirit where we need His transforming power to work. We have had to humble ourselves to receive the healing power that God offers. It is not easy, but we can taste the sweetness of what He is doing and see that it is necessary.

I am nearing the end of reading Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life, and it has been a challenging and rewarding book as God has used it as part of the chiseling process. I read this passage today and feel that it stands on its own without any clarification needed from me.

"Light has one law: it shines wherever it is admitted. That is the only requirement. We may shut it out of ourselves; it fears nothing else. If we throw ourselves open to God, he will reveal. The trouble comes when we have closed areas, locked and barred places in our hearts, where we think with pride that we are right. Our defeat the lies less in our being wrong than in our not knowing that we are wrong.Wrong may be a question of natural strength; ignorance of it is a question of light....God is light, and we cannot live in his light and be without understanding."