There Was A Mental Hospital That Devised A Very ...

There was a mental hospital that devised a very unusual test to determine whether their patients were ready to go back into the real world. They took the mental patients who looked like they were making progress into a room where they had a water faucet that was turned on, and water was draining onto the floor. They handed the patient a mop, and the patient was told to clean the floor. The essence of the test was to see how long it would take the patient to turn off the water faucet, as to indicate whether they understood the source of the problem. You can imagine what it would be like to be one of those patients who perpetually mopped the floor, but who never turned of the tap. They never got around to solving their dilemma—all they did was mop all day long.

Unfortunately, a lot of Christians are like those mental patients. They spend years trying to mop up the junk in their life, not understanding that they have to turn off the tap. It really doesn’t matter how hard you mop, how hard you mop, how much help you get to help you mop. If you don’t get around to turning off the source of your problem to begin with, you can spend the rest of your life mopping.

A lot of us have things in our lives that don’t belong there. We know it, and we spend a lot of time trying to mop it up. We spend money trying to fix it. We go to counseling and seek professional help to get it fixed, we talk to friends to get it fixed, we take medication to get it fixed, but like the patients in the mental hospital, it just gets messier and messier.