Cleaning and Tossing and Trashing and Regrouping

Whew! What a day!!! I spent the majority of today at our church here in Borger with Joel. Well, let me set up some background info for those of you that that aren't familiar with our new minsitry.

First Baptist Borger is a 3 story building and has lots and lots and lots of rooms. Most of the rooms are used for Sunday School, Missions, Music, Children's Church, etc. However...there are a good number of rooms that are used to store stuff and I mean A LOT OF STUFF! There is every kind of decoration you can think of, a costume closet, games, VBS stuff, props closet, music, etc. When Joel first started at the church we knew that we would need to go through the closets and organize them, throw out some things, etc. Today was the day we would start this process...

So, thus the reason that I spent the day working at the church with Joel. As we began the process of cleaning out some of the closets we realized that there were A LOT of things that just needed to be thrown out - they were out of date, broken, just taking up needless space - they needed to be trashed.

As I was taking the last load (well for the day anyway) out to the dumpster, I started to think of this in terms of our lives. You know, through the years we gather a lot of "junk" in our lives. There are things that are out of date, broken, no longer necessary, taking up needless "space" in our lives - they need to be tossed out and trashed! I am not talking about material items (although that is often the case too) but more in terms of things like - hurt feelings, bitterness, unforgiveness, doubt, anger, grudges, negativity, guilt, fear, etc. There is really no space in the life of the Christian for these things! We are called to live in freedom and liberty through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection.

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith." Hebrews 12:1-2a

These things I listed above are things that hinder us, they entangle us, and cause us to take our eyes off of Jesus. We need to THROW them OUT! Get rid of them! Once we have done this, we can persevere through the race to the time we are with Christ! So, today...take some time and clean out the "closets" of your life. Maybe you need to let go of a grudge that has been carried far too long, maybe it is forgiveness that needs to take over the bitterness, perhaps there is a negative relationship that needs to be ended, could it be there is guilt that you are carrying that isn't yours to bear - whatever it is is TRASH IT, clean it out, clear out some space and let the SON shine in the closets of your heart!