Digging in, purging, washing, dusting, refinishing, reorganizing, and airing out the house… It’s all a part of spring cleaning. When we don’t clean house, it becomes dirty, dusty, worn, disorganized, and the air becomes stagnant; all these things are unhealthy for us to live in.
These same things are true of our spiritual life as well. When we turned our lives over to Christ, our bodies become temples for the Holy Spirit to dwell in.
“Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; NKJV)
After truly getting my heart right with God I surrounded myself with faithful Christians, and took a huge step in faith physically cleaning my apartment. I told the Lord I wanted His guidance in getting rid of anything in my home that would hinder my walk with Him. I would be totally lying if I said this was easy to do! I didn’t have trouble so much getting rid of books; it was much of my CD collection that was difficult. I was able to justify selling them to a new/used music store, but it didn’t make it easier because most of those bands I really enjoyed. I truly love God more, and if the music was going to curse my Lord and Savior, it wasn’t going to stay in my home. My TV stayed (I was really not into much TV anyway) and my radio got programmed to stations that were edifying.
My act of material purging was really just sweeping off the doorstep of my home—spiritually speaking. Without the outside influence temping me, I could work on spiritual restoration, filling myself with the goodness of the Lord.
From time to time, I need a spring cleaning in my life because my Christian walk is living and growing; there’s still dust that that settles and grime that builds up. But just like with a home that’s well kept and cleaned often, the painful deep cleaning is required less frequently.
I think it would be awesome if there could be a spiritual edition of The Learning Channel’s show Clean Sweep. As hard as it was in a fleshly sense to purge unwholesome things from my life, I really felt that, “well done” from the Lord in my heart. I knew God was pleased. I encourage anyone considering doing this in their own life to take a step in faith and do it! God really helped me look past all the money I’d spent on material items and realize there were truly bigger things happening that day than just cleaning house.