Cleaning Your Gutters (Friday Devotional)

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth.

- Colossians 3:5-8

This past weekend, I did a chore I hadn’t had to worry about since I was a teenager: cleaning the gutters. With my trusty 3-year old assistant at my side, I propped my ladder against all sides of the house to see how much junk had accumulated over the fall and winter. Having never done this as a homeowner, I prepared myself for the worst.

But to my delight, I found that most of them were spotless—our front lawn doesn’t have a tree to shed leaves into the gutters, the pecan tree in the backyard is far enough away from the house to keep them clean, and the side of the house doesn’t have gutters at all. But when I got to the corner of the front yard, I finally found one 5-foot stretch where dirt, leaves, and sticks had built up over the preceding months. So handful by handful, I reached in and removed all the muck that was clogging them up. It wasn’t enough to have most of the gutters clean—one dirty stretch was one stretch too many.

Most believers’ spiritual lives are like those gutters—we could proudly stand before Christ himself and say that we’re guiltless of murder and theft, that adultery and bigotry and blasphemy aren’t things we struggle with. Most of our gutters, we’d say, are spotless. But there’s almost certainly one area of your life where temptation is an ever-present companion, one sin that beckons to you constantly. Like my gutters, one stretch of your life probably needs cleaning.

Scripture reminds us that Christ doesn’t just seek to sanctify most of our life, but all of it—salvation is not something we can compartmentalize or apply only to certain sections of ourselves. In Christ we are an entirely new creation, conformed to the image of God instead of to our passions and desires. So as you reflect upon your walk with Christ, take a look at your gutters—what areas need to be cleaned up?