Monday, March 31, 2014

Spring Cleaning

A Good DEEP Cleaning:

It is SPRING and it FINALLY feels like it. The weather people predict sunshine and beautiful weather. It is time to open the doors and windows, blow out the winter cobwebs and let the sun shine in. Usually our energy is high and it is time to spring clean! That means, toss out the old and warn out, and sparkle the house up for those great cookouts and fun times that spring and summer bring. I am itching to get to this. I have a “flower bed” in the front of my house that looks pathetic and is overgrown with weeds, and a twin mattress laying against the wall in my dining room because I just can’t figure out where to put it. But, the strange thing is, the longer the flower bed sits there looking icky and the twin bed leans against the wall, the less I notice it. Isn’t that weird? It becomes a part of the landscape and bothers me less and less- kinda like the mess on the kitchen desk; I just don’t see it.  When we live with the mess it becomes the normal; we just don’t recognize it. I often think about the Old Covenant laws in which there were SOOO many ways for the Israelites to become “unclean.” They had to constantly consider what they touched, what they ate, where they sat…there was a constant issue with remaining clean. I realize the laws were to protect their physical health as well as their spiritual. But, why did we stop with that? I get it that it was the Old Law and we are no compelled to keep it (2 Cor 5:17) but, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea sometimes. I mean, aren’t we sometimes living in a mess and have just become so used to it that we don’t even see it- what we touch, what we see, what we wear, where we sit….you get it.  It is spring….time to do some cleaning up, sisters; some good deep- soul cleaning. "Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." 2 Cor 7:1. God asks us to do some cleaning of the spiritual kind:  "cleans ourselves from....and perfect holiness....in fear."  “There is also an antitype which now saves us—baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God), through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” I Pet 3:21.
~Tracy Frederick

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