Spring cleaning . . .
June 5, 2008
Twelve cubic yards of trash have been removed from our garage. And there’s still more. Last fall we did some renovations and decided to store all the waste in our garage, and then in the spring get a dumpster and clean it up. Way too much work, but it’s almost done.
But I got to thinking about all the trash in our lives, about how we go through a process of storing up all this junk and then time comes to get rid of it all. Emotional, maybe some material, personal junk.
I have a friend who’s spiritual life seems to always be marked by junk. By this, I mean that when you ask them how they’re doing they typically respond with something like, “I am really feeling the weight of my sin,” or, “God is showing me what a sinful person I am.”
Yes, sin is heavy and we are sinful. But is that all that God is telling you?
I like to call that kind of faith the “college faith.” I don’t have the statistics to back this up, but I am guessing a majority of Christ-followers really dedicated their lives in college. They either really heard Jesus’s teachings for the first time, or maybe they grew up in a Christian home or became a Christian in middle-school or high-school, but then life happens in college and they finally really commit to pursuing a life in Christ.
Typically, college faith is marked by brokenness, lament, mourning, and a few emotional bruises. We begin to realize who Jesus really is, who we have been, and the stark contrast between the two. Our paradigms shatter, all that was comfortable we begin to tear away. It’s a hard and sometimes painful deconstruction of our lives in order to build it back up in Jesus Christ.
It’s a critical time. I think most of us Christians have been there.
But then there is a time of maturity, when you realize that you can’t just feel like a piece of crap all the time. God is trying to show you there is something better, that you don’t have to be weighed down by who you are. God is giving you the opportunity to become what He intended you to be.
What I hear from my friend’s faith is, “God is teaching me that I’m a horrible person. I can’t do anything right and it is pretty much crushing me daily. I can’t do anything to make God happy.”
Week after week. I don’t think that’s right. Sure, those things are true about all of us, but after understanding what Jesus did for us we are free from all of those things. God has removed the weight of sin. He has adopted us into His family. He has made us a new creation. We understood brokenness and mourned when we accepted Christ, but I don’t think we need to be in a constant state of mourning.
See, there’s a time for mourning and lament, but our lives are now to be a celebration of what God has done and is doing. Back in the day, Israel mourning and lamented all the time, but God always told them to celebrate His goodness and faithfulness after the fact. Okay, so you feel the weight of your sin, but what is that teaching you about God? It’s not just about our sin anymore.
It’s time to clean house, and move on.
