Letting Jesus Have The Broom

The past several weeks I’ve been enjoying a personal study in the book of Ephesians.  I love it that, every time we read the Word of God, there is always something fresh to discover and consider.  Such was the case when I came across Ephesians 3:17, “Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him.  Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.”  It was while reading this verse that God spoke to me about my broom.

Do you ever get frustrated that your house isn’t as neat as you would like it to be?  It seems there’s always dusting to be done, vacuuming that’s waiting, and often things get scattered about that need to be put away.  It gnaws at us as we walk in the door and we tell ourselves that we must clean up a bit, but maybe we don’t.  We’re tired or busy or just not motivated, so the dust thickens, the carpet screams to be vacuumed, and more things get scattered here and there.  We want it neat and tidy, but we turn blind eyes and make excuses as to why we’ll clean the house tomorrow.

It’s the same in our spiritual world.  I imagine it like this:  When we first become a Christian, we invite Jesus to come into our house.  We ask Him to forgive us for the mess we’ve made and to please come in and make our house clean.  He does that very thing.  The house is immaculate.  However, time goes by and we let the house become cluttered again.  Jesus comes to visit us but we only allow Him into the living room.  We keep things generally tidy, for appearances sake, in the living room, but Jesus asks to go into all of our rooms.  He wants to make a difference throughout every room of our heart.

We panic at the thought and quickly run to our bedroom to hurriedly push things under the bed so Jesus won’t see.  We then let Him come in.  The first thing He does is go right to the bed, kneel down and begin to pull out everything that we hid away from Him.  He opens the closet too and sees that it’s a mess.  We stand there in shame, exposed before Him, but He comes to us and wraps His arms around us.  He tells us not to be embarrassed that we let the rooms of our heart become so full of this world’s junk.  He whispers words of love and encouragements to us and reminds us that we cant’ keep our house clean by ourselves.  We need Him and only He can clean perfectly.

Then, with new understanding and with joy, we give Jesus the broom and ask Him to please keep it clean all the days of our lives and to forgive us for ever letting it become so cluttered.  Jesus smiles, hugs us again, forgives even the biggest of all messes, and happily begins sweeping day after day.

“He removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west.”  Psalm 103:12