My family’s pantry has been horribly cluttered for as long as I can remember; it's not dirty, really, just horribly cluttered. Because the pantry doubles as our laundry room, it has always been filled with food and clothes (obviously), but it also became home to all of the random stuff we just did not know what to do with, including old school supplies for my mom’s classes, papers dating back to when I was in kindergarten,old home décor and suitcases. If you could think of it, we had it in our pantry. Now, on its own, none of this stuff was necessarily bad, but together they formed a giant mess which filled our pantry and made walking to the back of the room nearly impossible.
The pantry had been like that for my whole life so I had never thought anything about it — until last night, when our washing machine broke, overflowed and flooded our entire pantry with one to three inches of water. For two hours, I vacuumed water off of our pantry floor, while my sister and mother removed box after box of junk from the room. All the clutter and junk that dominated our pantry, things we had tolerated in the past became a horrible nuisance and an awful and predicament. Everything on the floor, both things we did not care about and things we loved, got soaked and ruined. When confronted with the water from our washing machine, it all had to go, leaving an empty space for us to clean.
That cleaning made me think of our spiritual walk as Christians. How often do we let clutter into our lives because we do not see anything wrong with it until something comes along and forces us to remove the junk? See, our lives are like my pantry; we are pulled a hundred different directions and made to do multiple tasks and suddenly instead of focusing on our original purpose and being filled with Christ and his Spirit, we wind up being filled with things that do not matter and just take up space in our heart where Christ should be. We do not think of these fillers as bad at first; friends, significant other, grades, extracurricular activities, or whatever else fills our lives often is not a bad thing, but then it takes over until we can no longer move or even see where Christ is, and we cannot remember our original purpose was.
We need spiritual floods, whether hardships or highs, because floods do not care what stand in their way, they get rid of it. Water seeps into every crevice and soaks whatever it finds until the obstructing object is removed. God is the same way. He sees our hearts – the filth, the clutter and the grime that has taken up residence where He belongs, and He comes in, sometimes through hard times and sometimes in joy, and He removes everything that stands in the way of his complete control.
God does not care if you do not see the harm in what has filled your life, He only cares that it is blocking his way. You may think that the things which reside in your heart are good, maybe they were given to you by God or you use them to serve Him, but if a good thing has taken the place of Christ in your life, it has become a bad thing. For this reason, we have to pray the prayer of David: "Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,and cleanse me from my sin!" (Psalm 51:2 ESV); God knows when something is keeping us from Him, and He knows exactly what it will take to remove it from our lives.
The best part about spiritual floods, however, is God does not just remove the junk from our lives; He cleans us up so our lives can become filled with Him. As I vacuumed the floor, all the dirt and grime that had been lurking below the surface came out; leaving our pantry empty and spotless. It would be ridiculous to go put all the filth back in what is now clean.
We face the same thing in our spiritual lives, Christ comes in like a rushing flood and sweeps out the filth and makes us clean. It’s our responsibility to not put the same trash which once filled our lives back in our heart. The filth is gone forever, not just for a few days or weeks or until the spiritual high dies down. It is gone, and Christ expects us to take our clean house and now fill it with Him, because He is the only person worthy to take residence there. How beautiful it is that God does not come in and merely sit among the filth, but removes it and cleanses us so that only He reigns.
Recently, I’ve had some floods in my own life. Christ came and seeped into my heart, a heart I had filled with dirt and dust for too long because I thought what I had was what God wanted me to have. I had filled my heart with trash and Christ had to come and remind me with a violent wave that He is still God and He is still in control.
And when the wave had passed, He cleansed me and set himself back on His throne where He belongs. Maybe you need a spiritual flood today because you, like my nasty pantry, have become cluttered with things; let the rain come. Let the flood waters rush down and break into your dryness and clean your heart then fill that empty space with Christ.
