Spiritual Housekeeping…

Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash

Confession time…every once in a while I watch the TV show “Hoarders: Buried Alive”. It’s awful and ALWAYS gets me up and motivated to clean house and find a few things to put in their place, give away, or throw away! I’ve seen enough of these shows that when I heard a quick sentence in a bible study that I was in the other day about spiritual housekeeping, immediately I saw a rapid-fire vision of mental images of hoarder households.

Those images are disgusting and beyond sorrowful!

So what do we do with this? I’ll tell you what.

We’ve got to clean the rooms of our spiritual home so the Holy Spirit can roam freely to do His will!

Just as the person in the hoarder tv-stories, there is always some kind of traumatic event that has occurred in their life. It always centers around tremendous loss. So many times these people know on some level that they hoard because of this loss. But they gave in to it and didn’t, or felt they couldn’t stop the devastating behavior.

In the house of a hoarder, neither the homeowner nor any visitor can safely navigate the home with stepping on trash and other discarded items. The creation of the hoard stems from an incredibly false sense of providing comfort and protection.

The people who hoarded mostly trash and stray animals were usually the ones who had been left by a parent as a child through death or divorce. Or they had been in an abusive relationship that ended in death or divorce. The stories the hoarder shares would be heartbreaking as they recalled moments where their abusive spouse would refer to them as trash. They felt they had been thrown away by that person who was supposed to love them. So instead of throwing things away that are truly trash, they just keep it. They don’t want to hurt anyone or anything by determining what is trash or not.

And the piles grow.

I noticed that the people who are hoarders of things are ones who used the high of purchasing items and “collecting” things to replace feeling unloved. They loved their things and the higher the piles became, the more they felt surrounded by love; by things that wouldn’t leave them.

We do this same thing on a spiritual level and if we are not careful, we will have a spiritual house that is filled to the brim with trash and unnecessary stuff.

Is any of this resonating with you today?

Have you been made to feel as though you were no more important than a bin of rubbish? Or a pile of insignificant things?

My friends, that is the job of the enemy. He wants your spiritual home cluttered about with the unclean and the unnecessary so that you don’t have room for Jesus to do the beautiful work in your life He intends.

I know this may be hard to take in because it is something that the Lord has been working intently on my heart as well – as to the task of cleaning the house of my own soul.

Are you feeling a bit uncomfortable right about now? It’s okay if you are – that’s the glory of the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart to face the things in your life that you have just been piling up in the corner hoping they would go away on their own.

As you know, it won’t.

It’s going to take hard work but here’s the blessing of it all ~ we don’t have to do this alone. We have the gift of the Comforter in the form of the Holy Spirit and He is ready and more than able to clean out the junk and the trash of your life. The Lord is so gracious to be passionate about showing us the joy and peace He wants to bless us with.

But just like the hoarders on TV, they have to come to a final point where they say out loud, “I want your help. I don’t want to live like this anymore. Let’s throw it all out.” We too have to say the same thing to the Lord – OUT LOUD – that we want and need His help. He will walk alongside us to accomplish this arduous task.

Getting rid of the hoard is full of emotional pain, but the ones who stay committed to the clean up thrive in orderly freedom!

Whether the hoard is physical or spiritual, we have the tools that we need to win the battle!

2 Corinthians 10:4-6 is so encouraging,

“The weapons of our warfare are not physical [weapons of flesh and blood]. Our weapons are divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying sophisticated arguments and every exalted and proud thing that sets itself up against the [true] knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought and purpose captive to the obedience of Christ, being ready to punish every act of disobedience, when your own obedience [as a church] is complete.”

The rooms of our mind and corridors of our soul can be lush soil where we plant God’s Word and what grows is the fruit that can nourish our life and the lives of those around us. Or it can be a vacant plot of land that is unkempt without any growth.

Think about times in your life where you have agreed with the lies of the enemy to make you feel unimportant and unloved, and how that transferred into bringing discontent and darkness into our hearts and our homes.

Now think about moments in your life where you have walked with a friend through a difficult time in their life, pointing them to the One who can heal their hurts. It’s a beautiful gift that we can give to one another when Christ is present in our life. When we are filled with God’s presence we can pour out His joy and peace. We have contentment and grace leads our actions. We are strong to move through this life with the power of the God who created the Universe because our spiritual home is filled with His light and salvation!

One of my favorite scripture verses is Zephaniah 3:17,

“The Lord your God is in your midst, A Warrior who saves. He will rejoice over you with joy; He will be quiet in His love [making no mention of your past sins], He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.”

Is this not incredible! Every bit of condemnation is from the enemy. Just as every decree of goodness and love is from the Lord. God’s Word promises us that when the Lord looks upon our face, the person He created us to be is what He sees. He delights in the creation of YOU! The Lord has phenomenal purposes for your life and there are things that only you can do.

When you are having moments of doubt, remember that He is fighting for you! The Lord is singing over you and rejoicing in your life!

So get that dustbuster out. Bring a trash bag or three. Clear out the cobwebs of your soul and open the window so the light of Jesus can shine through.

Keep up with your spiritual housekeeping so the Holy Spirit is free to roam!

Blessings,

René