House Cleaning

“I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord. – Zephaniah 1:2

There are times when we can fix things and reform things.  We can renovate.  It has been several years since we were interviewing contractors to build our house but I still remember talking to one man who related that he had learned his trade while working on his childhood home.  It seemed to him that his father had them constantly remodeling, ripping out and rebuilding some part of the old house for most of the years he was growing up.  He concluded his story, saying, “When we were finally done, do you know what we had?  An old house.”

Most of us approach change in our lives with a remodeling mentality.  There are just, we think, a few little rough places we need to smooth out, a few neglected corners we need to clean.  It may turn into a bigger job than we imagined, and, when we are done, as often as not, we end up with the same old Adam.  Nothing is really changed, most of the time, by our New Year’s resolutions because they do not get to the core of who we are.  In effect, all we do is put on a fresh paint job or put down new carpet or perhaps get a new roof.  The foundation is still as uncertain, as shaky, as prone to collapse as it ever was. 

God takes a different approach.  He says, before you can plant, you must plow and uproot the old weedy and unproductive life.  Before you can build, you must tear down.  Before you can live, you have to die.  We will never have a good, solid, square house until we go down to the bare ground and return to the Lord’s perfect Cornerstone as the starting point for our foundation.  God does not “sweep away” out of His anger but out of His mercy.  It is His grace that breaks our dependencies on the old structure, His grace that sustains and encourages us when we look at the bare ground where our rickety old lives used to stand. 

Many of us may have seen this happen in the last several years, and we may see more of it in the years ahead.  Things that seemed such solid elements of our lives may be overthrown and blown away like dead leaves on the wind.  I believe God is in the process of sweeping away false anchors, misplaced trusts, distractions, wrong relationships, and wrong understandings.  Too many have placed trust in the transient and the temporal.  The tempest will carry away these false hopes and allow us to anchor our lives to the eternal and unchanging. 

Even those of us who have a right foundation and have built our lives upon Christ the Chief Cornerstone must look to how we have built.  Paul warns us (1 Corinthians 3:9-15) that it is possible to build upon the True Foundation carnal lives that consist of only “wood, hay, or straw.”  The quality of our building, as partners with God, does not match the quality of our foundation.  When the winds come, our shanty efforts are swept away down to the foundation, allowing us to reconstruct an abode suitable for the eternal Truth and Life upon which we build.  We can build again with “gold, silver, [and] costly stones” a structure that will last throughout time and eternity, one that remains unshaken, unmarred by the storms and upheavals that ravage the world system.   

It is, again, the grace and mercy of the Lord that these old-nature buildings are swept away before it is too late.  Let us see these acts of God for the divine wisdom that they are.  Let us turn from slapping together temporary structures that please or impress the world and build, instead, for the everlasting kingdom.