closet cleaning

You know... there are some days when you just wake up and you know there's some cleaning up that's gotta get done. Well, today was one of those days for me. My office, is pretty clean and if you were in it, you wouldn't think that there was a mess, but behind the door of my closet, you would have found a different story.

I had been putting it off for months...I knew it had to be cleaned up, stuff needed to be thrown out, and things needed to be reorganized. For some reason, today was the day that all of that happened! Now at the end of the day, it is such a good feeling to be on this side of it....the side where alot has been discarded, and alot has been organized.

Cleaning messy closets is sort of like what we have to do with our lives. There are those parts of our lives that we know we need to clean up...those areas that just aren't pleasing to the Lord and God honoring. We know it, but we sure don't feel like doing the work of cleaning up the nooks and crannies of our lives. It's those areas that are really holding us back from intimacy with Jesus.

Just as I now look at my cleaned up closet, and wonder, "Why in the world didn't I do this sooner?" Once we clean up those areas of our lives, that the Holy Spirit is speaking to us about, we'll look back on it, and say "Why did I wait to clean house?" It's so worth it.

Through a few different conversations that I had today, the Lord just seemed to be saying, "Folks, there some areas of your lives that you've gotta clean up." Just as Paul stated to the Colossians ... "live like who you now are in Christ, don't live like you used to live" (my paraphrase).

Holy Spirit, convict us of our sin ... devastate us...ruin us ... so that we might see that it's "CLEAN UP TIME."