Cleaning House

I finally realized why I hate cleaning my house so much.  It’s not the actual work involved.  It’s not even gathering up all the materials I need or moving objects out of the way so I can get to all the surfaces that I need to sweep or mop or dust or scrub.  It’s the fact that no matter how hard I work to get each area clean, I can never get it perfectly spotless.

This major revelation came to me yesterday as I was doing my “you’re on summer vacation from school so you have no excuse” cleaning. I had swept and mopped a floor and still, I kept finding small blades of grass and bits of dust in corners and next to baseboards and thresholds.  No matter how many fancy cleaning tools and products I buy, my house will never, ever, be perfectly clean.

Our lives are like houses.  We want to “straighten up” our lives – for them to be beautiful and clean. We make promises to ourselves to start doing certain things or stop doing others, but our willpower isn’t enough to make all those necessary changes in our lives.  The sin that is in our lives is like those pesky blades of grass and dust bunnies.  No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to eradicate all of them.  The good news is that God knows that we don’t have the power to be perfect and He has made provision to wash our sin away through the blood of Jesus. We all know that our own righteousness is “as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) and we are thankful for a Savior who gave His all to make us clean.

I’m thankful for that as well, but this “clean house/clean life” analogy got me thinking.  Just because I can never clean this house to perfection doesn’t mean that I should put down the brooms and mops and dust rags and just declare defeat.  Not having the ability to make my home spotless does not give me a license to just let the filth pile up around me.  I am responsible to do what I can, to the best of my ability, to care for this house that God has given me – to make it a clean, attractive, and healthy place for my family to spend time together.

In the same way, we should not just throw up our hands at the state of our lives and say, “I can never be perfect in this life, so I’ll just live any way I want because Jesus is the one that makes my life clean anyway”.  We are responsible to live lives that are pleasing to God to the best of our ability – to make our “house” a place where His love and life are shown to others. I know there are two extremes of doctrine in the Christian world.  One says, “anything goes because grace covers sin” and the other says “one little slip and God will send you straight to hell”.  I believe it’s a balance.  We don’t have to walk around constantly in fear that we are on the edge of slipping up, but we need to go after God in such a way that our moral lives reflect who we are serving.  Living lives free of sin is not a matter of picking up tools to clean up after ourselves but is a natural outgrowth of letting God change us from the inside out.