Spring Cleaning

It's about that time of year, time to go through our houses and start cleaning. I hate spring cleaning, I remember growing up and my mom would make us deep clean our bedrooms. We had to organize, throw the garbage and tidbits that had been shoved in our drawers and scrub the walls. Last year we began preparing to move and so we started going through some of our storage rooms. What we found is that my wife is a little like her grandmother, she had a bit of a hoarding problem. She is not anywhere near the level of Grandma's hoarding, she has an entire 20' shed in the back full of her things. However there were still lots of stuff that had been kept that we didn't need to have.

I have been reading through 1 & 2 Chronicles about the kings of Judah and I came to the story of Hezekiah. In the history of the kings of Judah they would go back and forth between kings that served God and kings that would set up idol worship in the land. When the kings would serve idols and promote evil in the land they would experience much turmoil in their kingdom, be defeated by their enemy and most times their reign would be shortened.

Even the kings that would serve the Lord there were varying degrees, some would follow him and then turn. Some would walk in the ways of God but not deal with idol worship in the land. Then there were others, unfortunately they were few in number, that would serve the Lord with all their heart and take action to restore Judah to worshipping only God. Hezekiah was one of the kings who dealt with the idol worship, and this passage talks about the cleansing that he initiated.

The priests went into the sanctuary of the LORD to purify it. They brought out to the courtyard of the LORD’s temple everything unclean that they found in the temple of the LORD. The Levites took it and carried it out to the Kidron Valley. 2 Chronicles 29:16

The priests were cleaning out are things in the temple that ranged from things that were worshipped as idols to things that were determined unclean from the Levitical law. Hezekiah even had them get rid of the 900 year old bronze serpent that Moses made in the wilderness when the plague went through the camp. Why? Because they began to worship it, thinking it was the source of the miracle. This snake was associated with one miracle in 900 years and they worshiped it. God worked miracle after miracle for the Israelite people and they still wanted to follow the gods f other nations. People amaze me sometimes! But then as I read these stories about the Jewish people I begin to see patterns in my own life or the Holy Spirit will highlight something that is similar to what I have done, and I get knocked off my high horse. The new testament says that we are the temple of God (1 Cor. 3) and we can look at the temple here as a picture of our own lives.

The question is: what is the state of our temple?

We need to assess the state of our temples consistently, here are a few points on how to do that:

Make it a Priority - Hezekiah opened the temple on the first day of the first month of his reign. That means his first act as king was to open the temple, because it had been nailed shut by his father. When was the last time you asked the Holy Spirit to reveal things in your life that you have allowed to replace God? Consistency is key because there are little things that can creep in and begin take up your time and focus that we may not see right away.

Deal with what you find - The priests as they went through the temple they had to bring the things they found out of the temple and throw them away. If there is something that God is showing us needs to go we must remove it. I love sports, but there have been times where they have taken up too much of my focus. I had to clean house remove a lot of the sources of sports in my life. Somethings may have started out good, like the bronze snake, but because our focus shifted to it replacing God in our lives it becomes an idol and must be removed.

It takes time - It took 16 days for the temple to cleaned out and consecrated when the priests went to do this. I couldn't handle the one day of cleaning that my mom would make us do growing up, could you imagine 16 days' worth! Cleaning out our temple takes time and requires us to invest that time. Searching for the things that are hidden in our lives that draw us away from God is a task that takes patience. When gold is purified it takes multiple passes of removing the impurities to produce what is desired.

Let's make cleaning our temple a priority this week and remove from our hearts and lives what is hindering us from walking with the Lord.