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James 4:8
When
I was a freshman in college, my roommates and I had an unspoken rule regarding
whose job it was to take out the trash. We would allow our one wastebasket,
situated for some reason by the door, to fill up to its brim and then overflow to
the floor, where the pizza boxes and empty 2-liter bottles would then pile up
to precarious heights. Eventually, when we’d crossed the line from the expected
slovenliness of college guys to just being disgusting slobs, one of the three
of us would gather all that garbage in his arms and make the long trek(s) to
the dumpster outside. When that brave soul had completed his task, the baton
was passed off to the next roommate, and the cycle would begin again, this time
with him in charge of the next garbage collection.
In
theory, it was a perfect system—when it was time to take out the trash, we
rotated the responsibility evenly. But after a few weeks, I noticed a problem
with our silent agreement: we each had different definitions of when that time
was. I was the neat freak of the group; I wanted to be able to carry everything
in one trip. One of my roommates would let it get a little worse than that; he
didn’t mind some clutter if it meant he could wait another day to make his
dumpster trip. But my other roommate…
When
it was his turn, we knew we were going to spend a few weeks staring at a
growing accumulation of floor trash. If we mentioned the pile to him passive-aggressively
(the only language college roommates know), he’d assure us he was going to get
to it. And in the meantime, the pile of trash on the floor would grow to
impressive heights. But on numerous occasions, my cleanliness overwhelmed my sense
of fairness—when the trash started spilling over into the doorway, when I had
to leap over the heap of Gatorade bottles and Ramen noodle boxes just to get in
my own room, I would override our agreement and gather all the trash up myself,
making the 3, 4, sometimes 5 trips to the dumpster, cursing my roommate under
my breath the whole way. The trash had always bothered me, but when it was
blocking my access, that was the last straw.
Sometimes your relationship with God works the same way. You want access to Him, you want to feel His presence, but your path is cluttered with junk. Sins from the past, struggles of the present, and worries about the future all accumulate into such a mess that your attempts at worship are muddied; your prayers are distracted and unfocused. You want to enter into God’s presence, but it’s hard to first get past the mess you’ve made.
Scripture offers a simple prescription for this: repentance. Rather than trying to maneuver your way around your sins into God’s presence, content to leave them where they are for now, the Bible calls you to remove them altogether, to cleanse your hands and purify your heart so that you can better draw near to God. Instead of being double-minded, compartmentalizing your faith and separating it from areas you’d rather not change, you are called to fix your eyes on Jesus, knowing that if you will repent of your sinfulness, the Lord will welcome you into His presence with open arms.
Lent, which began Wednesday, offers an occasion to examine yourself and seek repentance. In this season when as Christians we prepare our hearts for the journey to the cross and the joy of the resurrection, take some time to reflect on what messes are blocking your way and whether they are worth the separation they create. The sooner you seek God’s forgiveness, the sooner you will find restoration in His presence—don’t wait; that mess isn’t going to clean itself up.
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