"Cleaning Out"

"Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me." Psalm 51:10

I am looking at my office this morning thinking, "What a mess!" Last night I had to go through boxes of business papers and receipts looking for some important documents from a particular year. I discovered that much of the paper work that was taking up space was unnecessary and needs to be discarded. So the first opportunity I get I will take time to sort, re-file and discard this endless stack of papers.

When I do some cleaning out in my house, I discard things that are no longer needed, things that have become just clutter, things that aren't valuable, things that are unproductive and take up space needed for something else, and things I never use. "Cleaning out" isn't just confined to my physical house, I have to do it spiritually as well.

There are so many unnecessary, unuseful things, space wasting things that we hold on to in our lives that need to be discarded. Bitterness, for one, takes up space that is needed for love. Jealousy needs to be cleaned out and discarded. Grudges that have set in your heart for years and years stop you from being productive. It's time to stop holding on to past failures- there is nothing productive about them, they just waste space. Are you getting the picture?

Many of us need to do some cleaning out. We are holding on to things that should have been discarded a long time ago. We are holding on to things that are unnecessary. We are holding on to things that are wasters- wasters of our time, our peace, God's plan, our talents and gifts. We are long overdue a cleaning out. That's the difference between cleaning out my physical house and my spiritual one. I clean out the physical when the mood hits me. The spiritual should be done on a regular basis-- daily. If it were, we would not have so much spiritual clutter weighing us down and hindering us from making the best use of the "space".

Have a great day. How long has it been since you have done a "spiritual cleaning out", and what are you holding on to that should be discarded?