Image from Monarch Reality
A year or so ago, my wife and I painting our bedroom. That would normally not be a big deal, it was in this case because the bedroom walls are covered with waves of teal and emerald with black German poetry following with the ebb and flow of the wave crests. You see the previous owners were very artist, unfortunately their style of art is not ours. Anyway, before we could painted over this masterpiece we had to prepare the room.
That meant taping the wood, taking down the drapes, taking down the fan, and pulling all the switch and outlet plates. Even with all of that done we still had to clean the walls before we could put on the primer. We had to do that where the primer and paint would lie smoothly. Once the room was fully prepped we then had to put four coats of primer on the walls to cover the "masterpiece" below. We also had to paint the ceiling where it would look fresh and clean.
While thinking through this process it came to me that God does the same thing in our lives when He comes into them. He preps us by cleaning our lives of sin. He wipes all the dirt out of our lives, and then makes sure that we are perfectly clean where His ways will adhere to the walls and surfaces of our lives. Once that is done, Christ uses His own blood to cover the "masterpiece" of a life that we lived before He entered our lives. What an amazing God that completely cleans and covers the work of our past with the most precious thing He has, His own son's blood.
Just like our bedroom, the really key to the post cleaning situation is what you do with newly cleaned room. A new and clean room is nothing until you begin to do something with it. The walls have to take on their new character. The room has to be filled with its new contents. If our response to this new situation is just to fill it up with junk again then the cleaning and renewing was nothing more then a whitewash of our room / lives. The most important thing we can do is to replace the contents of our room / life with contents that represents the new room / life and what it stands for. Some of the things we put in the room may be old (the never failing never wrong teachings of the Bible being the best example), but the old unclean things should not be replaced. The new things we add should be not new for the sake of being new, but new for what they represent. The new look, the new path, and the new direction of the life/room should be represented by all we add into it.
This may have rambled a bit, and if it did I am sorry. Simply put, this cleaning and reviving process of God should not just be a thing that takes our lives back to a fresh start that we only junk up again with the same things that we junked our life up with in the past. We should rebuild our lives with the things of God, both the ageless flawless teachings of God and Christ found in the Bible, the timeless wisdom that is revealed to us through teaching, study and prayer, and with the new ways, directions, paths and purposes that our relationship with Christ brings into our lives. The following scriptures says it better then I ever will - no surprise I know.
Matthew 12:43 "When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it oes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, `I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation."
Have a great day and rejoice in the new and clean life that God provides for us when He enters our world. Stay strong, be courageous, and serve God only.
