Normal people don’t mean to let things get messy or fall apart. It just happens.
When we moved into a brand-spankin’ new house three years ago, I resolved to keep the garage very tidy.
“If I just keep up with it, it’ll look as good as new for … well, forever. So that’s what I’ll do,” I thought.
But then I didn’t.
Life got busy and like Scarlet O’Hara, I kept saying, “I’ll think about that garage tomorrow.”
Then tomorrow came, life happened again, and grit, grime and dust slowly settled on tools, rags, buckets, toys, lawn chairs, paint cans, golf clubs, lawn care paraphernalia, and all manner of other stuff out there.
Spiders spun their webs, bugs died and mice dared to poo all around my once-pristine garage.
The other day I decided it was time to take on the mess. I arose and declared, “Today’s the day,” and proceeded to clean like a crazy woman, determined to restore that garage to its new-house state.
I dragged everything out and hosed it off. I cleaned the floor, woodwork, walls and windows.
I sneezed, sweated, coughed, ached, groaned and gagged.
It took me all day. Several times I was tempted to stop for the day, but I kept going because I had a rare kind of cleaning juju on me, and that kind of lightning can’t be depended upon to strike two days in a row.
After about seven hours, I finally crawled across the finish line.
I wasn’t good for anything else the rest of that day or the next. My hair was the only part of my body that wasn’t screaming at me.
It was worth it, though, because at the end of the day, my garage was mostly very clean.
But that’s the thing—after all that work, the garage was just mostly clean. The sad truth is that there was no way I could get it as clean as it was the day the builder handed over the keys to us.
Too much of life had happened to and in that garage to make it all brand new.
Many of us reach a point when we get as tired of our messy lives as I got with my garage.
We declare, “I’m gonna clean up my act. I’ll stop doing this and start doing that.”
Replacing bad habits with good ones is a great idea, but the truth is, there’s no way we can clean ourselves up enough to be as good as we need to be to live in relationship with a perfect God now and forever in heaven. Too much of life has happened to and in us.
No amount of human scrubbing can clean the sin from our hearts. We’re born with sinful, selfish natures, separated from God, and it doesn’t take long for the grit and grime of this fallen world to settle upon our souls.
There’s only one fix: to go to God and ask Him to forgive, save and clean us up, based on the mercy He offers through faith in our sin-bearer, Jesus Christ.
From that moment on, God sees us, spiritually, as spotless as His Son. He declares us to be holy and then helps us gradually conform our behavior and thinking to that new spiritual reality.
As bad as my garage looked before I cleaned it, it was immaculate compared to my heart when I first handed it to Jesus.
I’m so thankful He didn’t require me to try to clean myself up before I came to Him.
“… He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit.”—Titus 3:5