A Fresh Start For Your Homes // Spring Cleaning Your Life, Part 1

So often – we can be looking for a miracle – and yet we forget to manage the mundane.  We want God to bless our lives – yet the house is a pig sty and we wonder why we’re depressed.

It's just great to catch up with you again, this year. There is something intensely satisfying about being clean. You know, you come home you’re hot and you’re and you’re sweaty and you get in the shower, clean. Fantastic. Or your hair is growing so long. It’s just driving you nuts. And when you get it cut you feel a million dollars. You with me?

And I guess the same is true of your homes. When they are a mess it’s kind of depressing. But when you put in the effort, clean the place up. Well, it makes a difference to how we feel about ourselves. So what about your place right now. How messy, or tidy or clean or dirty is it? Hmm …

My wife Jacqui, my daughter Melissa and I, live in a small semi detached terrace house, right in one of the inner city suburbs of Sydney. Now it’s a lovely suburb. But the house is very small, the block of land is very small, there is no off street car parking so we have to park our car on the street.

When we bought it, it was a nasty little place. It was built in 1876 and had a very small, very plain layout, and the kitchen was just the most disgusting place. But since then we have renovated the house, and now we live in a well designed, nicely finished home.

It’s not big, but it is very comfortable and it's lovely. It’s a pleasure to live in. And when the renovation was done, there was fresh paint, and clean surfaces and new floorboards, and it was really nice. But even after the renovation as time goes by, as we live life in a house, it gets messy and dirty.

Have you ever notice that? I call it the pollution principle. Life causes waste and mess. It’s true in a whole bunch of different parts of our lives. It’s true with our bodies, we breathe in oxygen and we breathe out the waste product carbon dioxide. We perspire, we urinate. We, you know, produce waste products.

It’s true in our home…that bottom draw in the fridge, under the fridge, the washing machine, the dust on the side of the side board. The garbage bins, the toilets, if we don’t get rid of the waste and clean up, it just builds up. And ruin our lives.

Imagine if we never threw the rubbish out. It’s true with cities and the pollution, and the smog and the congestion. It’s true in our relationships, even in good relationships. There is static sometimes, there is a by-product of something that really is rubbish, in a lot of relationships.

So there is this type of pollution principle that applies throughout our lives. That normal, everyday lives, even good living creates rubbish, it creates waste it creates by products that we have to get rid of.

So why are we talking about rubbish. Well this week on A Different Perspective we are looking at “Spring cleaning our lives. ”I know, I know it’s not spring. But here we are the beginning of the year, and I just wonder if it isn’t time to look at our lives, at different parts of our lives. And think about leaving the rubbish behind.

So this week on a different perspective we are going to be looking at spring cleaning our home, our finances, our priorities, our relationships and on Friday our souls. This whole pollution principle, how do we get rid of the pollution, how do we get rid of the rubbish. And I think a good place to start is the home because it makes a difference to the quality of our lives.

Having a nice home, is something that we all really aspire to. Whether we live in a really big expensive suburb or whether we live in a more modest place. We still like to make our surroundings as nice as we can. But the reality is that so many people live in a mess.

I don’t know if you remember that comedy, that sit com in the 1970’s called “The odd couple”. But it was about two men who were living together. Felix Unger played by Tony Randall, and Oscar Madison played by Jack Klugman. And Felix was obsessively tidy; he was so clean and so tidy. And Oscar, well he was the slob.

And the whole comedy was how these two men shared an apartment. Now look, Felix lived at one extreme of cleanliness, a Oscar lived right at the other extreme of being a slob. And when I talk about spring cleaning our homes, I am not talking about being a Felix Unger. I am not talking about being obsessive.

I love one of the things that Joyce Meyer, a wonderful preacher from the US once said, “Some people, well they want to take authority over the devil in their lives, but frankly they don’t even have the authority over a sink full of dirty dishes.” It can be true can’t it. The environment we live in has an impact on the way we feel.

My wife Jacqui and I, as I have said, live in this terrace house, and even after we renovated we left a cellar under the lounge room pretty much unrenovated. It is the only place we have to store all those large suite cases, you now the stuff you have to find somewhere that often people put in their garage. We don’t have one of those, so we have the cellar under the house.

You open the door of the kitchen and you walk into this sort of cellar. Well since the renovation, we have been using the cellar as sort of a dumping ground. But you know little bit after little bit this goes in the cellar, that goes in the cellar, this goes in the cellar. And we turned around one day and said “You can’t even move down there. You just cant use the place.”

It was really driving us nuts. And so there we went into this basement and into this cellar and we spent a whole Saturday cleaning up. Getting rid of all the rubbish and tidying it up and storing things efficiently. You know something, afterwards we were tired and we were dirty and I had to move big boxes of heavy tiles, but it felt so good to have that mess cleaned up.

Life often looks and feels like a prison like a trap, as though we are in a rut at home and work and marriage. And we look forward to another year and.. there is nothing much to look forward to.

I think some of us need to get out of the rut and a big part of getting out of a rut is ditching the rubbish.

There is an intriguing story in the Bible in Acts 12 about Peter when he was in prison, let me read it to you:

The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance.

Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. Quick, get up! he said, and the chains fell off Peter's wrists.

Then the angel said to him, Put on your clothes and sandals. And Peter did so. Wrap your cloak around you and follow me, the angel told him.

Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.

They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself, and they went through it. When they had walked the length of one street.”

It’s a great story. But there are two parts to that story.

There is the miracle and there is the mundane. The miracle is that the Angel arrived. The miracle is that the chains fell off Peter. The miracle is that the guards fell asleep and they just walked out. But did you notice what the angel said to Peter.

He said, “Get up, put on your belt. Put on your sandals, put on your cloak. Follow me. There was some mundane things, some very ordinary everyday things that Peter could do for himself. And that the angel told him to do for himself. Some people want to live life completely in the mundane. And deny that God does wonderful, wonderful miracles in our lives.

Other people live in the mundane and think I will not do anything in the mundane, “I am just going to believe in God for a miracle. I am going to believe I am going to wake up one day, and that cellar under the house will be clean.”

But the reality here, the little story about Peter in prison, is that God works through both. God works through miracles and God works through the mundane. I wonder as we look forward to the year ahead, whether if we don’t just deal with the mundane, to deal with the mess around our house that is driving us insane and believe in God for a miracle or three. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a different year.

I am believing for you. I am believing for you to have an amazing year. That the chains that are holding you back, are going to fall off. That the things that are pulling you back, well, got is going to take them and set you free. I am going to believe that, and I am going to be praying that for you.

But at the same time, I think you and I, need to start with the mundane. To clean up, to feel better and to do the things we can do to work ourselves out of a hole. To bring us to a place where we can accept miracles. What do you think?

So, how is your place looking?